I glanced down at the thick black phone in my hand. “Considering these are the coordinates of the phone call Gina made to me and that the phone is the same brand as the one the call came from, I’d say the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.”

Vern bit his lip and shook his head.

I knew what he was thinking, and to be completely honest, I was thinking the same thing: This is where Gina died.

I quickly quarantined this thought and stuffed it in a folder marked 2003 Taxes, then I said, “I need everybody out of here.”

Diego might be a world-class tracker, but this was my world.

Without a word, Diego, Carlos, and Vern retreated into the sunlight and to where Juan Pablo was holding Camila.

Once they were gone, I went to work.

The first thing I did was try to turn the phone on, but nothing happened. I wasn’t sure if it was simply out of juice or if it was busted. Useless for the time being, I returned the phone to the rectangular depression in the dirt where I’d found it.

Then I started taking mental snapshots of the entire crime scene.

On the table was the white paste that was probably the cocaine base Vern had spoken of. There were a few spatters of blood on the paste, turning it a heavy pink in spots. To the right of the drugs were large sprays of dried scarlet. Above the table, the tarp roof was heavily speckled.

I ran my hand over the blood droplets on the plywood, then I crouched down and ran my hands over the blood spray on the blue plastic drum. There was two feet of space between the drums.

A perfect place to hide.

I stood and gazed upward at the tarp. I followed the blood spatter in a clockwise semicircle. I took three steps to my right and glanced down at a nine-inch diameter of darkened earth. To the naked eye, it looked as if someone had poured a bottle of water on the dirt. But had there been a jungle crime scene tech available, they would have sprayed the area with luminol—which reacts with the hemoglobin in blood—and under an ultraviolet light, the dark patch would have been a glowing pool of white.

After snapping more than sixty mental photographs, I fed them into the TPSD—Thomas Prescott Super Detective—database. The results came back a few seconds later.

The carotid.

There was a considerable amount of blood, but that alone didn’t say a whole lot. Whether it’s a knife wound, bullet hole, or tractor accident, a lot of the four to five liters of blood in the human body is going to drain out.

At least until the heart stops pumping.

But the pattern of the blood—which was more spray than spatter—narrowed down the cause of death considerably. It could only have come from a severed artery.