“All right. Basic info. I judged the deceased to be a midfifties male, thinning brown hair, a little paunchy around the middle but decent muscle tone. No, I’m not ogling the dead. I’m trying to figure out who this guy is. Identify the victim. One of the first steps in my investigation. There’s also a bunch of things I don’t see—for example, needle marks. No way this guy is using. For lack of a better word, he’s too healthy. He also has buffed nails, which indicates a level of income I don’t expect at an hourly motel. Guy is facedown, and we won’t roll him till the last minute. I can make out traces of blood around his neck and shoulders, but for now, the most obvious wound on him is the severed limb—right leg, amputated above the knee.

“Now, here’s where things get interesting. For one thing, there’s a tourniquet above the knee. And it appears to be a silk tie. My partner Neil does the honors of walking to the foot of the bed, where we can see a pile of clothes in plain sight. The stack includes a neatly folded pair of black slacks and a blue dress shirt. Neil reads off the labels. His best guess, he’s looking at a thousand-dollar ensemble. And yeah, the tie is missing.

“I know what you guys want me to do. My husband, Alex Wilson, is a blood spatter expert. He warned me all about you. You want the leg. You’re obsessed with the leg. Follow the blood trail back to the bathroom and the severed limb. Because, definitely, if you were writing this scene, some depraved psycho whacked off this guy’s leg, then left him to bleed out, at which point our DG—maybe a CIA operative, or corporate informant—valiantly tied off his own bleeding stump and crawled through a trail of his own blood, only to expire right in front of the door, inches from getting help.

“We don’t follow the blood trail. Sorry. But this is real-world policing, so I’m stuck with telling you the truth. Instead, we search the man’s clothes, then the bed, then the nightstand next to the bed. ID, people. Wallet, cell phone, car keys. We want to know who DG is.”

D.D. rolled her eyes, took another sip of coffee. Her audience was disappointed. They really did want the severed limb.

“Fine, you win. I’ll speed up. No wallet, no cell phone, no keys. So in addition to our DG being dismembered, we also assume he was robbed. And given the way the clothes are folded neatly on the bed, I already have some theories on that subject. But we’ll return to that. Because now, what you’ve all been waiting for. We follow the blood trail down the grimy carpet. We peer inside the tiny, freezing-cold, misty bathroom, where not one but two cockroaches are already making tracks through the blood.

“And we behold the severed leg. Packed in dry ice, in a plastic-lined tub.”