“First, I’m gonna agree with myself that he was homeless. Indications of liver disease, gum disease, lung infection, frostbite, brain contusions, basically the works. He was in real bad shape for at least several years.”

She waited, thinking of the priest from La Crosse and his concern about the vanishing homeless. But she knew Kleekamp hadn’t called just to reinforce his own guesswork.

“And?”

“Well,” he said, whooshing again, “I disagree with another thing I thought at first. I do not think someone brought him in and dumped him off dead in that ditch. I think he was alive in the Bad Axe, alive when he landed there. And I think you should have found his other boot somewhere nearby.”

“Why?”

“He walked around that terrain for a while. After he was shot.”

“Because?”

“I’ll stand to be corrected by a forensic botanist,” Kleekamp said, “but he’s got trefoil burrs in his underpants, and he’s got wild parsnip seeds all the way down in the toe of that boot. He’d been walking for a while.”

She glanced at her uniform: burrs everywhere. Her pant cuffs were full of seeds and other shreds of desiccated matter, and something prickled inside her socks.

Kleekamp said, “He was on the move, Sheriff. He had covered some ground. But with both boots on, because his left foot, the one without the boot, is in exactly the same condition as the right. From that, I conclude the other boot came off close to where he died in the ditch.”

“OK. That makes enough sense.”

“And then I’m gonna guess that your searchers found some disturbed ground close by. Maybe a large, shallow hole?”

Her breath caught. A grave? Touching her stomach, she stared down at the worn-out farm.

“Am I right?” Kleekamp persisted.

“No. No, actually not. The dog got no scent of him in the area, and we found pretty much nothing. Some empty beer cans. Did you find any alcohol in his system?”

“None. He had a meal in his stomach. All vegetable. No alcohol. You didn’t find a hole in the ground within a couple hundred yards away? He couldn’t have gone very far in his condition.”

“Which was what?”

“These two gunshots were from close range, but neither one hit anything immediately fatal. Still, with internal bleeding, he couldn’t have lasted more than thirty minutes to an hour, at the very best. Even if he hadn’t also been…”

Kleekamp’s voice faded. “Hang on!” At a distance, she heard him throwing up.

“OK,” he restarted, sounding embarrassed. “I just cut open his lungs, and I’m looking inside them one more time, and unless I don’t know what I’m looking at…”