“This contains the personal effects of one of my patients,” Sister Anselm explained. “I’d like you to go through the items one by one and then tell me your thoughts. You’ll want to wear these,” she added, picking up the gloves. “In the meantime, I’ll go check on my patients. I have their vitals on my iPad, but I like to check on them in person all the same.” With that, she vanished out the door, leaving Ali alone.

Puzzled, Ali donned the gloves, removed the lid, and reached inside. First to emerge was a clear Ziploc bag. Inside were a pair of bloodstained blond braids, coiled around and around to make them fit inside the bag. Ali had worn braids until sixth grade when she had insisted on cutting hers off. Noting the circumference of the many coils, Ali estimated that the braids themselves had to be three to four feet long. Without the braids the hair would most likely be waist length or longer. Whoever had worn the braids had probably gone for over a decade without having a haircut.

Next up came a pair of shoes. Ali set them side by side on the table to examine them. They were cheap, off-brand men’s oxfords, not the kind of shoes a young woman of childbearing age would be eager to wear. They were ugly, dusty, badly worn, and desperately in need of a coat of polish. The laces were threadbare. There were several knots in each of them where they had been broken and tied back together rather than replaced. Picking up one of the shoes, Ali noticed that the sole had been worn through in more than one place and then inexpertly patched.

Holding the shoe in the air, Ali realized how smelly it was. This was footwear that had seen long, hard use without the benefit of socks. She guessed they were probably the same as a woman’s size eight, although the part of the shoe where the size might have been inked into the leather had been worn away long ago. There was no visible sign of blood on the shoes. Ali remembered that, as Sister Anselm was leaving the house, she had mentioned something about a traffic incident, so perhaps the shoes had been knocked off the victim’s feet by some kind of impact.

The next item in the layered collection of belongings was a carefully folded Navajo blanket, which Ali lifted out of the box. Hefting it in her hand, she found it to be surprisingly heavy. The weight alone hinted that it was of the genuine handmade variety. Here and there on the blanket ugly stains had turned the vivid reds and whites of the patterns to a rusty brown. Ali didn’t need a spray of luminol to tell her that the brown stains indicated where blood had soaked into fibers of the closely woven fabric.

She studied the blanket as she set it on the table next to the braids and the shoes. The three items told surprisingly contradictory stories. The shoes said that whoever had worn them was poor—too poor for new shoes or even new shoelaces; too poor for socks. The blanket, on the other hand, if it was genuine, was probably quite valuable. It indicated that the victim might have had some kind of connection to the Navajo nation, but the blond braids suggested otherwise—an Anglo victim rather than an Indian one.

Next came a bag—a homemade drawstring pouch, made of faded gingham and worn enough for the threads to be frayed at the bottom. Long ago Ali had made one just like it in Girl Scouts. Since the bag evidently functioned as a purse, Ali pulled it open and peered inside, expecting to find some kind of ID. That expectation was met with disappointment. The purse contained none of the usual jumble one would expect in a woman’s purse—no lipstick tubes, compact, wallet, or wad of tissues. It contained only three items—a Bible, a small pair of scissors, and a spool of white thread with a single threaded needle poked into the side. Returning the contents to the bag, Ali focused once again on the box.

The next item out was a jacket—a lightweight, single-layer denim jacket, not the kind of heavy-duty outerwear yesterday’s weather would have warranted. There were bloodstains on the jacket as well, especially at the back of the neck. It looked as though whoever had been wearing the jacket had lain in a pool of blood until the jacket was saturated through. There were also some stains on the front of the jacket, especially on the lower right-hand side. So perhaps the woman had suffered two separate wounds, a head wound and some kind of damage to her body as well.

As Ali refolded the jacket, she heard a small rustle that seemed to come from one of the side pockets. Reaching into it, she pulled out a piece of crumpled waxed paper. Then her searching fingers encountered something else. A tiny scrap of paper had been stuck so deep in the bottom seam of the pocket that it might easily have been overlooked. There was writing on the paper. Something barely legible had been scribbled with a dull number two pencil. Holding it up to the light, Ali saw a telephone number and a single name—Irene.

Ali suspected that the injured woman had yet to be identified. Had her loved ones been notified, no doubt they would have arrived at the hospital by now. Realizing that the scrap of paper might be a vital clue in the identification process, Ali set it aside. It was not her place to make the call. That would have to be up to law enforcement or else to Sister Anselm.

The next item to surface was a set of underwear, or at least what was left of them. A jagged cut ran down from the elastic top and then came to a T from leg to leg. Ali knew that drill. An EMT wielding a pair of scissors had made the cut to remove the victim’s clothing and get it out of the way.

Closer examination revealed that the garment resembled men’s boxers more than it did any kind of women’s underwear. The legs were loose rather than tightened with elastic, and the elastic waistband had been stretched to the limit, most likely to accommodate the growing baby.

The material itself was stained and stiff. It looked as though it had been soaked through with some kind of a yellowish liquid and then laid out flat to dry. There was no manufacturer’s tag saying “Made in China” sewn into any of the seams. In fact, there was no tag at all, and the jagged stitching around the thick elastic top told Ali that the panties were most likely homemade and sewn on a machine that was close to giving up the ghost. So, Ali asked herself, who in her right mind makes her own underwear?

The item that came next passed for a full-length slip, but it was really more of a simple, shapeless shift made of some lightweight cotton material. The shift, like the underwear, had been cut straight up the middle, from bottom to top, again most likely by an EMT. This item of clothing might have started out as white sometime in the distant past, but it was now a grimy gray and smelled as though whoever wore it had little access to soap and water, bleach, or even deodorant.

Ali stood up and held the shift in front of her. Whoever wore it was fairly tall—about Ali’s height, perhaps. Then her eyes were drawn to the bottom of the shift. It had been cut off in a careless, ragged fashion. The small, jagged cuts indicated that scissors used for this had been much smaller and not nearly as sharp as the pair used to cut through the underwear and shift. Not only that, the way the cuts came together, with the back much shorter than the front, made Ali wonder if the person doing the cutting hadn’t been wearing the garment at the time it was shortened.

Finally she removed the last item from the box and shook it out. It was an old-fashioned shirtwaist dress with buttons and buttonholes up and down the front, and with a billowy, gathered skirt. The EMTs had hacked their way through all that, too. The buttons were all still buttoned. The material was a faded check that might have been blue and white at one time but was now more of a dim shade of lavender and white. The buttons were the serviceable white kind that might have been snipped off a man’s shirt and reused on something else. Like the other clothing, the dress was bloodstained, especially on the back of the fold-down collar, and stiffened with yellow on the skirt.