Milo said, “You keep spare duds on hand?”

“All the years of body fluids?” said Palmberg. “You don’t?”

Palmberg waited on the road, talking into his cell phone, as Milo and I climbed down, walking sideways but still slipping several times.

The flat area turned out to be a shallow crater, larger than I’d estimated, closer to twenty feet wide. The sky above huge, deep blue silked by cirrus. The earth was hard-pack, gray where it wasn’t brown, and carpeted with wild sage, mustard, wilting poppies, the odd struggling pine seedling.

Gorgeous spot, wide open and sunny. All that sweet air couldn’t conquer the decomp reek. We reached the body just as the coroner’s crew finished bagging.

Three techs, a woman and two men. They’d rolled down a snap-open gurney, looked unhappy about the prospect of getting it back up.

One of the men said, “Hey, Lieutenant.”

“Walt. Could I have a look at him before you take him?”

Walt unzipped the bag to waist level. An abstractly humanoid mass, part leather, part oozing headcheese, caught light from the glorious sky. The eyes were gone, canapés for resourceful birds. Some kind of carnivore had feasted on the neck, extruding blood vessels and muscle fibers and tendons. The white shirt was shredded, the black tie turned to bloody ribbon. Splintered ribs protruded from a massive exit wound. The rotted sponge of lung and the degraded rubber of heart littered the ravaged chest. Dead maggots dusted everything like a hideous toss of wedding rice.

Milo turned to me. “Any way that’s remotely recognizable?”

I said, “The hair’s the same. So are the clothes and the general size.”

Walt said, “You bring witnesses to scenes now, Lieutenant?”

“This witness is authorized.” He introduced me as a police consultant but didn’t explain my link to Muhrmann. All three techs were puzzled but no one said anything.

The woman said, “If he’s on record, we can verify the I.D. Printable left thumb and ring finger, the rest is gnawed to the bone.”

Walt said, “Anything else you need, Lieutenant?”

Milo said, “No, thanks. Zip him up.”

Walt did so without looking at the body.

The second man, younger, darker, said, “Now the fun part, shlepping him up there. We shouldn’t have to do it but the drivers are stuck in traffic and Detective Palmberg wants transport A-sap.”

Walt said, “This was TV, they’d send us a copter, do that flashy basket thing. A copter found him in the first place.”

“TV,” said the woman, “I’d get a makeup artist and fake boobs out to here and talk like an idiot.” She batted her lashes. “Cee Ess Eye at your disposable, let’s do an ultrasonic magnetic cross-section of the left lateral dorsal fibrio-filamental inclusion. Then we’ll know who his great-grandfather was, what he ate for Thanksgiving six years ago, and what his first cousin’s schnauzer thinks about kibble.”