“ME still hasn’t gotten here. I don’t know what the holdup is, but I don’t think we should wait anymore.”

“I agree. What a way to start the day. Give me a hand here.”

We both took a deep breath and climbed up into the Dumpster. It was hard to maneuver with the shifting bags underfoot, much less try to maintain the scene. As quickly as we could, we got a grasp of the victim and gently turned her over.

What I saw there knocked me right back on my ass. I leaned over the edge of the Dumpster and, for the first time in a long while, nearly lost the contents of my stomach.

Sampson was right there with me. “Alex, you okay? What’s going on?”

The taste of metal filled my mouth; I felt dizzy from the rush of adrenaline, from being blindsided so badly.

“She’s an agent, John. At the Bureau. Remember her? The DCAK case? It’s Anjali Patel.”

Chapter 69

POOR ANJALI.

And goddamnit! How did this happen? How the hell could it?

There’s something inescapable about knowing the victim of a homicide, especially a killing as brutal as this. Unwelcome questions kept pushing to the surface: Did she see it coming? Did she suffer much? Was it over quickly for her?

I tried to remind myself that any precision knife work would have been postmortem, but that thought was cold comfort right now. Besides, the best I could do for Patel was to focus on my job and on this crime scene as objectively as possible under the messed-up circumstances.

Right away, I got on the phone to the ME’s office. I wanted to make sure Porter Henning was assigned to this one, and also to find out what the hell was taking them so long. They should have been here by now. Hell, I was.

Sampson took down the numbers we’d found on Anjali’s back and got on his BlackBerry to see what he could find out about them in the short term.

By the time I’d spoken with Porter, who was caught in traffic on the Eisenhower Freeway, John was waving me back over to see something.

“I don’t know, Alex. This is pretty random.” He turned the screen around to show me the map he’d pulled up.

“It’s an address in Overland Park, Kansas. This thing’s just getting weirder and weirder. Maybe it’s some kind of math formula after all.”

“What about a reverse search on the address?” I asked.

“Working on it.” It was slow going, though, with his man paws and that tiny keyboard. This is why Sampson almost never texts anyone.

“Here we go, I got it. It’s a restaurant,” he said. “KC Masterpiece Barbecue and Grill?”