Not breaching that aura, Joe merely sidled up beside her, barely bumped her with his hip, and softly said, “Very sneaky, Doctor. You going to claim this as a happy coincidence?”

She kept watching the proceedings and replied in kind. “Not in the slightest, Agent Gunther. I have spies documenting your every move.”

The body, stiffened by time and low temperature, was awkwardly removed like a life-sized mannequin and placed onto the tarp. Beverly stepped closer, but let her local investigator actually disrobe the remains and study them, section by section, alongside one of the search techs. Sammie Martens, befitting her driven personality, eavesdropped on their comments, asking questions as they went.

By the time the body had been almost stripped nude, Joe asked Beverly, “We were thinking a blow to the head. You agree?”

Reflective of her scientific approach, she responded cautiously, “I agree that’s what we can see, and it appears to be a fracture, but who knows what’s going on inside? The autopsy will tell us more in a few hours, and I’ll rush the toxicology. I overheard someone saying you’d found child pornography among the contents of the car?”

“Unfortunately,” he admitted.

“There’s barely any blood in the trunk,” Lester Spinney announced generally, having joined them unobtrusively ten minutes earlier. The only member of Joe’s small unit not dating back to the Brattleboro Police Department days the rest of them had in common, Lester was an ex–state trooper, once a member of their Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Lofty, alarmingly skinny, and with a disarming manner, he was Joe’s dependable Everyman—steady, constant, hardworking. He was a family man with a son in law enforcement, a daughter in college, and a wife who worked as a nurse.

“Anything else?” Joe asked from the other side of the tarp.

Spinney’s lanky body was half-consumed by the trunk. He was holding a flashlight. “Not visibly,” he reported in a muffled voice.

Jim Collins appeared and motioned to one of his folks to ease Lester out of the way—a telling sign of the continual if subtle competition between agencies.

Joe spoke to Beverly again. “The theory is that the car was abandoned here after crossing over from New Hampshire, where it was stolen a week ago. Now it looks like the body was dumped, too, having been killed elsewhere and transported here. That sound reasonable?”

She agreed. “Based on the wound and the little blood Lester just mentioned, yes.” She raised her voice slightly so her own investigator could hear. “Ted, you’ve ruled out as best you can that the damage to the temple didn’t come from a bullet or some other penetrating object?”

Ted looked up quickly over his shoulder. “It looks like more of a crushing blow, spread out and spongy. I can’t see an actual hole. Course, there might be one. Hard to tell here and now.”

“Still nothing identifying him?” Joe asked Sam.

As she shook her head in response, Jim Collins said, “I wouldn’t mind running a little experiment that might help.” He held up a zippered back pouch, adding, “This is on loan from a sales rep. It’s supposed to lift fingerprints electronically and make ’em readable for comparison with what we’ve got on file, in state. I have to relay the image through the truck’s computer, but it should be quick enough.”