“What’s this rash, I wonder?”

“We found him in wild parsnip.”

“Ah. No clothes on?”

“We found him just like that.”

Kleekamp began to circle the table, prodding the victim’s torso, lifting his limbs, looking beneath his filthy underpants.

“He’s about thirty. Uncut hair and nails, bad teeth, needle tracks, emaciated and malnourished, scabies all over his groin… I’m going to guess that he was homeless.”

The sheriff nodded grimly. She thought so too. She remembered the priest: Five homeless men missing, picked off the streets of La Crosse…

“Urban homeless, I mean,” Kleekamp continued, “not from around here, probably.”

She knew what he meant. Poverty existed in the Bad Axe—deep, and plenty of it—but no one panhandled or pushed a shopping cart or slept on the sidewalk. Her phone buzzed beneath her badge. “Excuse me,” she told Kleekamp. “This is Dispatch.” She answered with a finger tap. “Go ahead.”

“You’re in town, right?” Denise began. “Because everybody else is out on Liberty Hill Road or busy on a welfare visit.”

“I’m with the medical examiner. Go ahead.”

“ADT alarm is calling in an incident at the newspaper office. There’s been a break-in. Can you get there?”

“I can leave right now.”

“Ron Bellweather says he just sold Leroy Fanta a crowbar.”

“Got it.”

“Maybe you can beat Empress Rickreiner to the scene?”

“I will.”

“And Heidi?”

“Go ahead.”

“That priest from La Crosse is on my other line. His scanner is programmable by zip code. He heard our call and wants to talk to you. I said, ‘She’s kinda busy, Father.’ I took his number.”

“Thanks, Denise.”

She slipped her phone back behind her badge. Kleekamp had turned the body over. Powder burns around the entry wounds meant the two gunshots had been at point-blank range.

“I need a headshot and fingerprints,” she told him. “How soon until we have a cause of death?”

Kleekamp pushed the victim’s matted hair aside and used a penlight to look inside his ear. “Hmmm.” He shone the light up both nostrils. “Hmmm,” he said again. He straightened up and blinked through his goggles. His mask puffed out.

“A fair while, I think. From what I’m seeing here, I’m pretty sure I’m going to have get the saw and the scissors out—”

He swallowed hard. This was no dead deer.

“—and open up his lungs.”

“We meet again,” Grape Fanta managed to tell her over loud orchestral rock music, something she vaguely recognized. He had limped coughing to the glass front door of the newspaper office—it had been repainted: HAPPY VALLEY SHOPPER—and let the sheriff in. She saw that he had gathered his thin silver ponytail and zipped his cargo shorts since she had seen him an hour ago. The music fizzed from a dusty silver boom box that would have looked retro even when she was in grade school.