Sheriff Kick found a stick. She squatted on the slope of the ditch and pushed a toxic parsnip stem aside so she could see the body more clearly. As Fanta watched, she seemed to become stuck there, as if too deeply in lost thought or too affected by the death to move.

Meanwhile, Deputy Luck had stewed her way to a conclusion. “It’s possible that someone else located that beer.”

Fanta gravely told her, “Beer vultures.” Then he winked.

“Oh, cheese,” she whispered to herself and looked away.

At last the sheriff stood with a scowl, pushed TALK on her radio handset, and began telling Denise Halverson what she needed to happen. She needed any relevant missing person reports analyzed. She needed a team of deputies to search a mile of Liberty Hill Road in both directions. If there was a shell casing, a scrap of clothing, a left boot, a beer can, anything, she wanted it mapped and taken into evidence. She wanted Vernon County’s K-9 team here on mutual-aid loan ASAP to see if the man had died at the end of any kind of trail.

“I’ll do chain-of-custody with the body to the morgue. Dr. Kleekamp can give us a picture with his face cleaned up. We’ll send it around, maybe somebody will recognize him. Meanwhile, we’ll run his fingerprints through CrimeNet. One way or another, maybe we can get a name and talk to his… his next of kin.”

As the sheriff said next of kin, Fanta heard a slight waver in her voice. He could guess why. The dead man had a mother. Motherhood was hard enough without your boy turning up dead in a ditch.

“Be nice to print his picture in a newspaper,” she growled at Fanta as she passed him, as if to cover up the emotion he had seen.

He picked up the stick she had dropped and went painfully to one knee, feeling his swollen organs squish around, scooting as close to the body as he could without tumbling down the ditch on top of it.

He pushed the parsnip stem aside. On the dead man’s shoulder was a crude tattoo, a faded red heart around one word: MOM.

When Leroy “Grape” Fanta arrived at the two-story brick building, circa 1908, that had been his daily wheelhouse for forty-three years—204 Second Street, Farmstead, Wisconsin—he could hear his desk phone ringing through the old glass door. But his key wouldn’t work in the lock.

He pulled the key out and studied it.

The phone stopped ringing, then immediately started again.