"Marino, you're not needed here;" Anderson said to him. "In fact, I don't think you want anyone to know you even thought about coming here."

"It's captain to you." He blew out his words on gusts of cigarette smoke. "You might want to watch your smart-ass mouth because I outrank you, babe."

Shaw watched the rude exchange without a word.

"I don't believe we call female officers babe anymore," Anderson said.

"I've got a body to look at," I said.

"We've got to go through the warehouse to get there," Shaw told me.

"Let's go;" I said.

He walked Marino and me to a warehouse door that faced the river. Inside was a huge, dimly lit, airless space that was sweet with the smell of tobacco. Thousands of bales of it were wrapped in burlap and stacked on wooden pallets, and there were tons of magfilled sand and orifet that I believed were used in processing steel, and machine parts bound for Trinidad, according to what was stamped on crates.

Several bays down, the container had been backed up to a loading dock. The closer we got to it, the stronger the odor. We stopped at the crime-scene tape draped across the container's open door. The stench was thick and hot, as if every molecule of oxygen had been replaced by it, and I willed my senses to have no opinion. Flies had begun to gather, their ominous noise reminding me of the highpitched buzzing of a remote-control toy plane.

"Were there flies when the container was first opened?" I asked Shaw.

"Not like this," he said.

"How close did you get?" I asked as Marino and Anderson caught up with us.

"Close enough," Shaw said.

"No one went inside it?" I wanted to make sure.

"I can guarantee you that, ma'am." The stench was getting to him.

Marino seemed unfazed. He shook out another cigarette and mumbled around it as he fired the lighter.

"So, Anderson," he said. "I don't guess it could be livestock, you know, since you didn't look. Hell, maybe a big dog that accidentally got locked up in there. Sure would be a shame to drag the doc here and get the media all in a lather and then find out it's just some poor of wharf dog rotted in there."