Blood was beginning to coagulate, and Hammer could feel the heat of the throbbing lights and the night and the horror. She could smell death. Her nose had learned to pick it up the first year she was a cop. Blood broke down fast, got runny around the edges and thick inside, and the odor was weirdly sweet and putrid at the same time. The trail led to a Gothic tangle of overgrown vines and pines, with a lot of weeds.

The victim looked middle-aged and had been dressed in a khaki suit wrinkled from travel when someone had ruined his head with gunshots. Pants and jockey shorts were down around fleshy knees, the familiar hourglass painted bright orange, leaves and other plant debris clinging to blood.

Dr. Wayne Odom had been the medical examiner in the greater Charlotte-Mecklenburg area for more than twenty years. He could tell that the spray-painting had occurred right where the body had been found, because a breeze had carried a faint orange mist up to the underside of nearby poplar leaves. Dr. Odom was reloading a camera with bloody gloved hands, and was fairly certain he was dealing with homosexual serial murders. He was a deacon at Northside Baptist Church and believed that an angry God was punishing America for its perversions.

“Damn it!” Hammer muttered as crime-scene technicians scoured the area for evidence.

West was frustrated to the point of fear. “This is what? A hundred yards from the last one? I got people all over the place out here. Nobody saw anything. How can this happen?”

“We can’t watch the street every second of the day,” Hammer angrily said.

From a distance, Brazil watched a detective going through the victim’s wallet. Brazil could only imagine what West and Hammer were seeing as he impatiently waited by West’s car, taking notes. One thing he had learned while writing term papers was that even if he didn’t have all the information, he could create a mood. He studied the back of the abandoned brick building, and decided it had been some sort of warehouse once. Every window was shattered, and an eerie dark emptiness stared out. The fire escape was solid rust and broken off halfway down.

Emergency lights were diluted and weird by the time they got to the thicket where everyone was gathered. Fireflies flickered around the dinging rental car, and Brazil could hear the sounds of far-off traffic. Paramedics were coming through, sweating in jumpsuits, and carrying a stretcher and a folded black body bag. Brazil craned his neck, writing furiously, as the paramedics reached the scene. They unfolded the stretcher’s legs, and Hammer turned around when metal clacked. West and Brewster were studying the victim’s driver’s license. No one was interested in giving Brazil a quote.

“Carl Parsons,” Brewster read from a driver’s license. “Spartanburg, South Carolina. Forty-one years old. Cash gone, no jewelry if he had any.”

“Where was he staying?” Hammer asked him.

“Looks like we got a confirmation number for the Hyatt near Southpark.”