“Jeez, Coop. In or out,” he said, stooping as Bixby raised the woman’s left arm several inches away from her body. “Something there, Doc.”

I leaned over his shoulder as Mike used a pair of tweezers to lift what looked like a piece of blue silk fabric from the fold beneath the woman’s right arm. I gagged at the sight of her body and neck — closer up this time than I was before — and from the smell that intensified with the cold wind.

“Man up, Coop,” Mike said. “This is as ugly as it gets.”

He stood and offered the material around for the others to see.

Mercer motioned to me but I wasn’t moving. “I’m okay.”

“May be as close as we come to figuring what she was wearing before she was set on fire,” Mike said.

Dr. Bixby talked to me as he explained. “Even on the most badly charred bodies, fragments are protected in the flexures of the armpits or groins. Might help you later on.”

Russo asked everyone to step away from the sheet as he ran his flashlight across the section of the portico where the body had been. There was a glint of something sparkling on the ground.

“Mike,” I said, “see that?”

The men who were tending to the deceased looked around, too, as Russo’s beam fixed on the tiny object that caught the light.

“Coop could find a freaking nugget in a pile of manure, as long as it’s gold,” Mike said to Russo. “Take a picture of that, will you?”

“What is it?” I asked.

The flash went off several times before Mike lifted the paperthin object with the tips of his tweezers.

“It’s a star. A six-pointed gold star. One of yours, Coop,” he said. “A Jewish star.”

Bixby ordered the cops to hold up before folding the sheet over the deceased. He rolled her body gently to one side, examining the skin on her back.

“You can see the form of it here, Detective. And even the suggestion of a chain extending up from the star. The heat almost embedded it in her back. It may prove to be a chain she was wearing when — uh, before she was killed.”