It was best if I could walk with my eyes closed, but on this terrain that would be dangerous. The dark glasses helped, blocking out some of the color and life around me.

For the first thirty minutes of struggling across the steep slope, all I felt were the faint pings of ancient deaths. The world is sure full of dead people.

When I was convinced that no matter how stealthily he might be able to move, Paul Edwards could not have followed us, I paused at a rocky outcrop and took off my dark glasses. I looked at Tolliver.

“Bullshit,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“The gun’s missing, but it’s suicide? Shot twice, and it’s suicide? I could swallow one of those, but not both. And anyone who’s going to kill himself, he’s going to sit on the log and think about it. He’s not going to stand downhill of a landmark like that. Suicides go up.” We’d had experience.

“Besides,” I said, “he fell on the hand that would’ve been holding the gun. If by some weird chance that should have happened, I feel pretty confident that no one would be reaching under the corpse to steal the gun.”

“Only someone with a cast-iron stomach.”

“And through the eye! Have you ever heard of anyone shooting himself like that?”

Tolliver shook his head.

“Someone done killed that boy,” he said. Some days Tolliver is more country than others.

“Damn straight,” I said.

We thought about that for a minute. “But we better keep on looking for the girl,” I said. Tolliver would expect me to make up my own mind about that.

He nodded. “She’s out here, too,” he said, a little question in his voice.

“Most likely.” I cocked my head to one side while I considered. “Unless the boy was killed trying to stop someone from taking her.” We started walking again, and the ground became easier going; certainly not a flat surface, but not so steep.

There are worse ways to spend a fall day than walking through the woods while the leaves are brilliant, the sun dappling the ground from time to time when the clouds shifted. I felt out with all my senses. We tracked a ping that, upon attaining, proved too old by a decade to be the girl. When I was standing a foot from the site, I knew the body to be that of a black male who had died of exposure. He had become naturally buried under leaves, branches, and dirt that had washed downhill over the course of the past decade. What you could see was blackened ribs with tattered cloth and bits of muscle still clinging to the bones.