“I’m glad I have a badge,” Hicks said, watching the crime scene techs systematically raking through the inches-deep muck of mud and feces and pig urine. “My granddad up in Sacramento used to raise hogs. When I was a kid, in the summers, I used to have to help him move them from one pen to another. You don’t shake that smell fast.”

Dixon motioned them over to a table set up along the back of a shed. The findings had been washed and laid out on a tarp: what appeared to be a human femur and several rib bones.

“What do we do now?” Mendez asked. “We have no way of knowing who these belonged to. Unless they can find a pelvis, we don’t even know if we’re looking at a male or a female.”

“The BFS team will take them,” Dixon said. “They’ll call in an anthropologist to have a look.”

Mendez picked up the femur and looked at it more closely. What appeared to be knife marks scarred both ends of the bone. “Whoever it was, Sells cut them up before he threw them out there.”

“And he did a neat job of it,” Hicks observed. “That was severed at the joint.”

“Let’s hope the victim was dead when he did it,” Dixon said. “He may not fit Leone’s profile, but we’ve definitely got ourselves a killer.”

“A killer,” Mendez said. “But is he the killer?”

“We’ve got the cars here. Now we’ve got remains here.”

“We don’t have Sells’s fingerprints on those cars yet, do we?” Mendez asked.

“The comparisons are being made,” Dixon said. “We’ll know this afternoon.”

He shook his head as he looked out at the crime scene techs raking through the shit. “The bastard has no respect for human life at all. Kills someone, cuts them up, throws them out like trash. In a hog yard.”

“You know why, right?” Hicks said.

Dixon just looked at him.

“Hogs will eat anything.”

Mendez put the femur down and walked away.

A call came from the crime scene techs. “We’ve got a skull!”

Vince avoided the scene at Sells’s junkyard. They didn’t need him there to look at bones. They certainly didn’t need him there to be recognized by the media.

Dixon would have his hands full now as it was. His case had just taken on Hollywood movie status: a creepy convicted pedophile living in a creepy junkyard on the outskirts of the idyllic college town, murdering people and throwing their corpses out to be devoured by farm animals.

All he needed was to have a top profiler step in from the FBI and he would have a blockbuster on his hands.

And all Vince needed was for the powers at the Bureau to see his face on the nightly news in the middle of it.