Carrie walks to the bed and pokes the machine gun’s barrel in Mister Pickle’s forlorn fuzzy face. His wide glassy eyes seem panicked, as if he knows he’s about to die, and I catch myself projecting emotions onto an inanimate object, onto a tiny toy bear.

“She’s a child, you know.” Carrie is in constant motion as she talks. “She may have an IQ that’s two hundred and beyond, well into the uncharted airspace of super genius, but she’s always had the emotional maturity of a toddler. Stunted. Lucy is hopelessly stunted. She has no idea what wizardry is in her room, covering every angle and completely out of sight.

“Imagine how I spend my spare time when she’s not around? I’m always watching.” She points two fingers at her eyes. “Like the billboard in The Great Gatsby. Dr. T. J. Eckleburg peering through glasses, watching over the Valley of Ashes, the moral wasteland of American society with its blind, greedy, lying government.”

I glance up from my phone at Harold and Rusty. They look like Ghostbusters in hooded white Tyvek coveralls, their hands gloved in blue nitrile, respirators over their noses and mouths. They’re debating with Marino how best to get the dead woman inside the pouch and whether it would be a good idea to place a bag over her head. Maybe there’s important trace evidence in her hair. Brain tissue is oozing out of an open fracture in her skull. Some of her teeth may be loose. One was knocked out, a front tooth I recovered from blood on the floor.

“We don’t want to displace anything. No telling what’s sticking to the blood, especially in her hair,” Marino is saying as Carrie’s voice sounds in my ear.

“ONCE UPON A TIME there was a dorm room that was tiny and tidy,” she reads from her script as Marino unfolds a stretcher and the aluminum legs clack. “It was dimly lit by a gooseneck lamp on the desk, which like the matching chair, the wardrobe, the dresser and twin bed was cheaply built of plywood with a fake wood-grain veneer.”

Carrie walks around the room giving a tour, and I don’t look up from my phone as I tell Marino, Rusty and Harold to bag Chanel Gilbert’s head and also her hands and her feet. After that, wrap disposable sheets round her. I’m fairly certain I’ve collected everything that might not survive the trip to my office but let’s be meticulous. Nothing left behind. Nothing lost. Not a hair. Not a tooth.