I took one of the red cloth strips I keep in my jacket pocket, and Tolliver took a whippy length of wire from a supply he kept stashed in a long pocket on his pants leg. I tied a strip to one end of the wire while Tolliver ran the other end into the ground. We’d walked maybe a quarter of a mile southwest from the fallen tree, and I jotted that down.

“Hunting accident,” Tolliver suggested. I nodded. I can’t always pin it down exactly, but the moment of death had that feel: panic, solitude. Long-suffering. I was certain he’d fallen out of his deer stand, breaking his back. He’d lain there until the elements claimed him. There were a few pieces of wood still nailed way up in the tree. Named Bright? Mark Bright? Something like that.

Well, he wasn’t part of my paycheck. This man was my second freebie for the town of Sarne. Time to earn some money.

We started off again. I began working my way to the east, but I felt uneasy. After we’d proceeded maybe sixty feet from the hunter’s bones, I got a welcome, sharp buzz from the north. Uphill, which was slightly odd. But then I realized that we had to go uphill to get to the road. The closer to the road I climbed, the closer I approached the remains of Teenie Hopkins—or some young white girl. The buzzing turned into a continuous drone, and I fell to my knees in the leaves. She was there. Not all of her, but enough. Some big branches had been thrown across her for concealment, but now they were dead and dry. Teenie Hopkins had spent a long, hot summer under those branches. But she still made more of a corpse than the hunter, despite insects, animals, and a few months of weather.

Tolliver knelt by me, one arm around me.

“Bad?” he asked. Though my eyes were closed, I could feel the movements of his body as his head turned, checking in all directions. Once we’d been surprised at the dumpsite by the killer returning with another body. Talk about your irony.

This was the hard part. This was the worst part. Normally, finding a corpse simply indicated I’d been successful. The manner of its becoming a corpse did not particularly affect me. This was my job. All people had to die somehow or other. But this rotting thing in the leaves . . . she’d been running, running, breath whistling in and out, reduced from a person to a panicked organism, and then the bullet had entered her back and then another one had . . .

I fainted.