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gloved hand. “And this is a female hairstyle and clip.” She recorded the information on a form.
    Jin packaged the small piece of someone who only yesterday had been alive, labeled it, and put it on a trolley to be taken and stored in the refrigerated area of the trailer. He filed the hair root sample, then selected another small box containing body parts to be examined. It was the severed hand.
    “That’s odd,” said Jin. “It’s not even burned.”
    As if on some kind of psychic cue, Rankin looked up from an x-ray he was examining on a light table. “Did I hear you were carjacked last night?” he said.
    Diane cringed as everyone in hearing range stopped and stared at her. They had been working for three hours with little communication, other than task-oriented shoptalk—Lynn Webber commented that the victim she was working on died instantaneously, and Rankin said his might have died of smoke inhalation, he wasn’t sure. A little conversation was a welcome diversion and a rest.
    “Boss, you didn’t tell us about that?” said Jin.
    “I heard you locked him in your car,” continued Rankin. Allen Rankin was the ME for the city of Rosewood. He was younger than Pilgrim, more Webber’s age, and slim with brown hair, too even in color to be natural. He looked at Diane with interest, expecting the story.
    “Well, for heaven sake,” said Lynn, shaking her head. “What happened and how in the world did you lock him in your car?”
    “It happened when I was evacuating my apartment,” said Diane.
    “That’s right, you live near here,” said Rankin.
    “How did you find out about it?” asked Diane.
    “I have ears in the police department,” he said.
    They were all still staring at her, so Diane told the story about the kid with a gun and one hand.
    “He lost a hand,” exclaimed Jin looking down at the one lying on the table in front of him. “This hand?”
    “It would be my guess. He lost his right hand and this is the right hand of a male. I believe it was sheered off with a saw blade that came flying from the blast.” She retrieved a box from the long table containing unprocessed evidence that grew by the minute. She double-checked the label, initialed it, and opened the lid.
    “Ouch,” said Jin when he saw the bloody circular blade.
    “We’ll have to take a blood sample from it to be sure this is what did it. We can match the hand and blade with the blood in my car—and the kid.”
    “You think he was involved with the meth lab?” said Pilgrim. He and his assistant were making noise moving a cadaver to his table. Diane strained to hear over the rustling of the body bag. At least the body bags had arrived. At first they didn’t have enough and they had covered the victims with a clear plastic. Even the dieners thought it was creepy.
    “It seems likely,” she said. “If he was only a victim, what was he doing with a gun?”
    “Exactly,” said Rankin. “Ironic thing is that he has the least injuries. All the other survivors have critical internal or brain injuries. He may be the only one who can shed light on this and I understand he’s lawyered up.”
    Diane heard several grunts of disapproval from people in the tent. It sounded like too many people. A constant parade of personnel came and went—bringing in bodies and evidence from the site, or delivering antemortem information from relatives, or paperwork from the police department. Diane hoped one of them was a gatekeeper. She didn’t like the idea of a reporter listening in on their conversations, or worse. She watched for a moment—all present were MEs, technicians or police, all people she recognized, all doing a job. And there were guards at the door.
    Diane focused her attention back on the hand lying on the table, palm up in a half-curled position. The thing she noticed first was that the nails were professionally manicured.
    “Has his nails done,” said Jin. “Not your average student.”
    “I wonder what the palm could