"May, as well," I said, staring toward the container's opening.

Someone was looking in. He was backlit by bright sunlight and a blue sky and I could not make out who it was.

"Where are the crime-scene techs?" I asked Marino.

"Got no idea.” !”Goddamn it!" I said.

"Tell me about it," Marino said.

"We had two homicides last week and things weren't like this."

"You didn't go to the scenes, either, so you don't know what they were like," he said, and he was right.

"Someone from my office did. I would know if there was a problem..:' "Not if the problem wasn't obvious, you wouldn't," he told me. "And the problem sure as hell wasn't obvious because this is Anderson's first case. Now it's obvious."

"What?"

"Brand spanking new detective. Hell, maybe she stashed this body in here herself so she'd have something to do."

"She says you told her to call me."

"Right. Like I can't bother, so I dis you, and then you get pissed off at me. She's a fucking liar," he said.

An hour later we were done. We walked out of the foulsmelling dark, returning to the warehouse. Anderson stood in the open bay next to ours, talking to a man I recognized as Deputy Chief A1 Carson, head of investigations. I realized it was he whom I had seen at the mouth of the container earlier. I moved past her without a word and greeted him as I looked out to see if the removal service had shown up yet. I was relieved to see two men in jumpsuits standing by their dark blue van. They were talking to Shaw.

"How are you, Al?" I said to Deputy Chief Carson.

He'd been around as long as I had. He was a gentle, quiet man who had grown up on a farm.

"Hangin' in, Doc" he said. "Looks like we got a mess on our hands."

"Looks like it," I agreed.

"I was out and thought I'd drop by to make sure everything's all right."

Carson didn't just "drop by" scenes. He was uptight and looked depressed. Most important, he paid no more attention to Anderson than the rest of us did.