“Stolen five days ago?” Joe asked. “No one traced its GPS? They should’ve found it within hours.”

Willy hitched one shoulder. “Beats me. Supposedly, they tried but got no signal. Who knows?”

Felony crime scene reconstructions tend to be oddly leisurely paced affairs. Perimeter and access avenues are established and roped off, vehicles come and go on assorted tasks, tents are set up, specialist teams delicately work around one another like dancers of a minuet, and quiet conversations occur in small clusters, with hands cupped around paper cardboard cups of hot coffee. In some instances, as here, the natural daylight gradually yields to a spindly forest of powerful LED lamps, a growling thrumming of generators adding to the already running car engines.

Thousands of images are taken throughout, by patrol officers, investigators, medical examiners, and a special crew manning a FARO 3D digital camera designed to preserve the whole scene as a form of hologram—this to be available long after the surrounding reality has been dispatched to the morgue, the wrecker’s yard, or fed into VBI computers for analysis, consolidation, and distribution.

At some point, state crime lab investigators arrive in a large truck and collect, bag, and inventory anything from cars to computers to footprints and finger smudges. Collectively named the CSST, or Crime Scene Search Team, they catalog and store bag after bag until, finally—many hours later—the ant-like activity slows and dissipates, the cruisers, vans, tow trucks, and SUVs thin out, and at last, the reopened road and surrounding bare trees get to witness once more the gentle creaking of cold branches in the quiet breeze, and the rare passage of a car whose driver has no idea of the theatrics preceding his appearance.

Having arrived long before that end point, indeed at the height of the activity, Joe stepped off the road and gingerly worked his way downslope, following one of the staked-out avenues to the rear of the thoroughly stuck four-door sedan. He ended up beside a slightly built but wiry, intense young woman who was aiming her camera at the interior of the car’s trunk.

“Hey,” he greeted her quietly.

“Hey back,” Sammie Martens replied, still shooting.

“We have an ID yet?”

“Course not. Can’t be that easy.” She lowered the camera to study the curled-up body before them, nestled like a sleeping stowaway resting on his side, one hand tucked under his cheek.

“The ME hasn’t moved him yet,” she added. “He might have a wallet.”

“Despite your having already checked.”

She cast him a look. “That would be a breach of protocol, boss. You know I’d never do that.”

Her voice lost its hint of playfulness as she indicated the young man’s blue-jeaned hip. “I’m betting it’s gone. You can see the faded outline of a billfold in his back pocket. He was probably relieved of it before getting shoved in here.”

“To steal his documents and money or to hide his identity?” Joe asked.

“Questions to be answered, for sure.”

“When you weren’t checking for an ID, did you also not notice how he might’ve died?”