“You sure as hell don’t send a jacket to the dry cleaner’s if it’s got a thousand dollars’ worth of antique buttons on it.” He won’t stop talking about it. “But it’s not the money.”

“Moderate mummification, skin wet but hard and dried with faint remnants of patchy white mold on her face and neck,” I dictate, and Marino scribes. “Eyes sunken and collapsed.” I pry open her mouth. “Cheeks are sunken.” I swab the inside of them. “No lip, tongue, or dental injuries,” I say, as I check with a light. “Neck is free of any discrete discolorations.” I look up at the clock.

It’s eleven minutes past two. I move down and find more signs of moderate mummification but no injuries, and I open her legs. I ask Marino to bring me a Physical Evidence Recovery Kit, a PERK, or what a lot of cops call a rape kit, and I glance curiously at him as he walks to a cabinet, his face disgruntled and offended, as if there’s something about this dead woman he takes personally.

“We’ll definitely e-mail photos of the buttons and her jewelry to NamUs,” I say. “These details seem unique enough to be significant. Especially if it’s unusual to sew valuable antique buttons on clothing.”

“It’s damn disrespectful as hell.”

He hands me a plastic speculum and opens the PERK’s white cardboard box.

“When you find stuff like this, usually it’s because the person got killed in battle and their body was left out there in a field or the woods.”

He places bags, swabs, and a comb on a clean sheet.

“A hundred and fifty years later someone comes along with a metal detector and digs up their uniform buttons, their belt buckle, and when you find things like that you treat it like you’ve disturbed a grave, because you have.”

I glance up at the clock again as I rehearse what I’ll say to Dan Steward and Jill Donoghue when I see them, an apologetic explanation that I’ll expect one or both of them to relay to the judge. My choice was to lose possibly critical evidence or be late for court, and I’ll be very contrite.

“Even if the stuff comes from the attic,” Marino says, “it’s about respect, because it belonged to someone who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

He begins filling out forms with what scant information we have, and he rants on and on.

“You don’t sew buttons or shoulder epaulets on a jacket or put a dead soldier’s cap box on your damn belt or wear his friggin’ bloodstained socks. You don’t cut up old uniforms that still have the soldiers’ nametapes on them and make them into quilts.”

He hands me envelopes for swabs.