Living your whole life in the city, you forget how dark it gets beyond the edge. Even when I was sleeping on the streets, there was always light around. A fizzing streetlight here, the glow of a gas station there. No trees to block the moonlight. Out here, there’s nothing but the smell of earth and the buzz of insects. An eastern screech owl trills somewhere above me. I fumble through the foliage, using the flashlight app to find a good spot.

Then something stops me. The smell of meat.

I’ve always had a good sense of smell. Starvation does that to you. I turn around, slowly. Taking rapid, sharp sniffs, like a dog. It’s not cooked meat, but it’s also not a dead animal. There’s none of that farmy, furry odour. And it’s … this way.

Curiosity has taken my mind off the stomach cramps. I push through the brush, branches scratching at my legs and arms, until I reach the source of the smell.

It’s a dead body.

The man is naked. Thin, short—not Elliott. Facedown, with one arm outstretched, as though he’s swimming. His other hand is trapped under his torso.

I sweep the phone over him. The glow illuminates his face. He’s white, mid-forties, with a short beard and grey-flecked hair. His eyes are wide, his teeth bared. Pained, enraged or terrified—can’t tell.

People with hypothermia sometimes take their clothes off right before they die. Their body temperature gets so low that the air feels hot around them, and they start shedding layers. But even in winter, it would take at least an hour to die of exposure, and he’s barely fifty feet from the road.

In the dark, it’s impossible to know which direction he came from. But there’s nothing out here—that’s why Warner picked this spot—so I assume a car dropped him off. Sometimes the police do that. Take your clothes and kick you out of the car, miles from anywhere in the freezing cold. Murder by weather.

But in that scenario, he would have stayed on the road in case a car came by. He wouldn’t have run into the woods.

So he was trying to escape from the driver. Maybe he even threw himself from a moving vehicle, although I don’t see any grazes on his palms or his knees. His skin is pristine. I touch it. Soft, too. He hasn’t been dead long. A day at the most.

Don’t do it. It’s the voice of Agent Reese Thistle, my old FBI handler. I haven’t seen her in months, but I still hear her in my head. She’s what I have instead of a conscience.

Walk away, she says.