'Looks like a man's watch to me,' Fielding observed.

'Women wear watches this big,' I said. 'I do. So I can see.'

'Some kind of sports watch, maybe?'

'Maybe.'

We rotated the C-arm here and there, continuing to excavate as radiation from the X-ray tube passed through the body and all the muck and charred material surrounding it. I spotted what looked like the shape of a ring located somewhere beneath the right buttock, but when I tried to grab it, nothing was there. Since the body had been on its back, much of the posterior regions had been spared, including clothing. I wedged my hands under the buttocks and worked my fingers into the back pockets of the jeans, recovering half a carrot and what appeared to be a plain wedding band that at first looked like steel. Then I realized it was platinum.

'That looks like a man's ring, too,' Fielding said. 'Unless she had really big fingers.'

He took the ring from me to examine it more closely. The stench of burned decaying flesh rose from the table as I discovered more strange signs pointing to what this woman may have done prior to dying. There were dark, coarse animal hairs adhering to wet filthy denim, and though I couldn't be certain, I was fairly sure their origin was equine.

'Nothing engraved in it,' he said, sealing the ring inside an evidence envelope.

'No,' I confirmed with growing curiosity.

'Wonder why she had it in her back pocket instead of wearing it.'

'Good question.'

'Unless she was doing something that might have caused her to take it off,' he continued to think aloud. 'You know, like people taking off their jewelry when they wash their hands.'

'She may have been feeding the horses.' I collected several hairs with forceps.

'Maybe the black foal that got away?' I supposed.

'Okay,' he said, and he sounded very dubious. 'And what? She's paying attention to the little guy, feeding him carrots, and then doesn't return him to his stall? A little later, everything burns, including the stables and the horses in them? But the foal gets away?'

He glanced at me across the table.

'Suicide?' he continued to speculate. 'And she couldn't bring herself to kill the colt? What's his name, Windsong?'

But there were no answers to any of these questions right now, and we continued to make X-rays of personal effects and pathology, to give us a permanent case record. But mostly we explored, in real time on screen, recovering grommets from jeans and an intrauterine device that suggested she had been sexually active with males.

Our findings included a zipper and a blackened lump the size of a baseball that turned out to be a steel bracelet with small links and a serpent silver ring that held three copper keys. Other than sinus configurations, which are as distinct as fingerprints in every human being, and a single porcelain crown on the right maxillary central incisor, we discovered nothing else obvious that might effect an identification.

At close to noon, we rolled her back across the corridor into the autopsy room and attached her table to a dissecting sink in the farthest corner, out of the main traffic. Other sinks were busy and loud as water drummed stainless steel, and stepladders were scooted as other doctors weighed and sectioned organs and dictated their findings into tiny mikes while various detectives looked on. The chatter was typically blunt with fractured sentences, our communication as random and disjointed as the lives of our cases.

'Excuse me, need to be right about where you are.'

'Darn, I need a battery.'

'What kind?'

'Whatever the hell goes in this camera.'

'Twenty dollars, right front pocket.'

'Probably not robbery.'

'Who's gonna count pills. Got a shitload.'

'Dr Scarpetta, we just got another case. Possible homicide,' a resident said loudly as he hung up a phone that was designated for clean hands.

'We may have to hold it until tomorrow,' I responded as our work load worsened.

'We've got the gun from the murder-suicide,' one of my assistant chiefs called out.

'Unloaded?' I answered back.

'Yeah.'

I walked over to make sure, for I never made assumptions when firearms came in with bodies. The dead man was big and still dressed in Faded Glory jeans, the pockets turned inside out by police. Potential gunshot residue on his hands was protected by brown paper bags, and blood trickled from his nose when a wooden block was placed beneath his head.

'Do you mind if I handle the gun?' I asked the detective, above the whine of a Stryker saw.

'Be my guest. I've already lifted prints.'

I picked up the Smith Wesson pistol and pulled back the slide to check for a cartridge, but the chamber was clear. I dabbed a towel over the bullet wound in the head, as my morgue supervisor, Chuck Ruffin, honed a knife with long sweeps over a sharpening stone.

'See the black around there and the muzzle imprint?' I said as the detective and a resident leaned close. 'You can see the sight here. It's contact right-handed. The exit's here, and you can see by the dripping he was lying on his right side.'

'That's how we found him,' the detective said as the saw whined on and a bony dust drifted through the air.

'Be sure to note the caliber, make, and model,' I said as I returned to my own sad chore. 'And is the ammunition ball versus hollow point?'

'Ball. Remington nine-mill.'

Fielding had parallel-parked another table nearby and covered it with a sheet that he had piled with the fire debris that we had already sifted through. I began measuring the lengths of her badly burned femurs in hopes I could make an estimate of height. The rest of her legs were gone from just above the knees to the ankles, but her feet had been spared by her boots. In addition, she had burn amputations of her forearms and hands. We collected fragments of fabric and drew diagrams and collected more animal hairs, doing all that we could before beginning the difficult task of removing the glass.

'Let's get the warm water going,' I said to Fielding. 'Maybe we can loosen without tearing skin.'

'It's like a damn roast stuck to the pan.'

'Why are you guys always making food analogies?' came a deep, sure voice I recognized.

Teun McGovern, in full morgue protective garb, was walking toward our table. Her eyes were intense behind her face shield, and for an instant we stared straight at each other. I was not the least bit surprised that ATF would have sent a fire investigator to watch the postmortem examination. But I had never expected McGovern to show up.

'How's it going in Warrenton?' I asked her.

'Working away,' she replied. 'We haven't found Sparkes's body, which is a good thing, since he's not dead.'

'Cute,' Fielding said.

McGovern positioned herself across from me, standing far enough back from the table to suggest to me that she had seen very few autopsies.

'So what exactly are you doing?' she asked as I picked up a hose.

'We're going to run warm water between the skin and the glass in hopes we can peel the two apart without further damage,' I replied.

'And what if that doesn't work?'

'Then we got a big fat mess,' Fielding said.

'Then we use a scalpel,' I explained.

But this was not necessary. After several minutes of a constant warm bath, I began to very slowly and gently separate the thick broken glass from the dead woman's face, the skin pulling and distorting as I peeled, making her all the more horrible to look at. Fielding and I worked in silence for a while, gently laying shards and sections of heat-stressed glass into a plastic tub. This took about an hour, and when we were done, the stench was stronger. What was left of the poor woman seemed more pitiful and small, and the damage to her head was even more striking.

'My God,' McGovern said as she stepped closer. 'That's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.'