We centered the body on the backboard. I covered it as best I could with the sheets and fastened it snugly with straps. Our steps were small and hesitant as we felt our way through water that no longer came over our boots. The Prosser pumps and generator were a constant humming throb that we scarcely noticed as we ferried our morbid cargo closer to the empty space that once had been a door. I smelled cooked flesh and death, and the acrid rotting odor of fabric, food, furniture, and all that had burned in Kenneth Sparkes’s home. I was breathless and numb with stress and cold as I emerged into the pale light of the fast-retreating day.

We lowered the body to the ground, and I kept watch over it as the rest of the team continued their excavation. I opened the sheets and took a close long look at this pitifully disfigured human being, and got a flashlight and lens out of my aluminum case. Glass had melted around the head at the bridge of the nose, and bits of pinkish material and ash were snared in her hair. I used light and magnification to study areas of flesh that had been spared, and wondered if it was my imagination when I discovered hemorrhage in charred tissue in the left temporal area, about an inch from the eye.

Lucy suddenly was by my side, and Wiser Funeral Home was pulling up in a shiny dark blue van.

“Find something?” Lucy asked.

“Don’t know with certainty, but this looks like hemorrhage, versus the drying you find with skin splitting.”

“Skin splitting from fire, you mean.”

“Yes. Flesh cooks and expands, splitting the skin.”

“Same thing that happens when you cook chicken in the oven.”

“You got it,” I said.

Damage to skin, muscle, and bone is easily mistaken for injuries caused by violence if one is not familiar with the artifacts of fire. Lucy squatted closer to me. She looked on.

“Anything else turning up in there?” I asked her. “No other bodies, I hope.”

“Not so far,” she said. “It will be dark soon, and all we can do is keep the scene secured until we can start again in the morning.”

I looked up as a man in a pinstripe suit climbed out of the funeral home van and worked on latex gloves. He loudly pulled a stretcher out from the back and metal clacked as he unfolded the legs.

“You gonna get started tonight, Doc?” he asked me, and I knew I’d seen him somewhere before.

“Let’s get her to Richmond and I’ll start in the morning,” I said.

“Last time I saw you was the Moser shooting. That young girl they was fighting over’s still causing trouble round here.”

“Oh yes.” I vaguely remembered, for there were so many shootings and so many people who caused trouble. “Thank you for your help,” I said to him.