“Did you see that?” Vaughn asked Bucky, his voice hoarse and raspy. He dragged his hand across his mouth, grimacing. “You saw it, didn’t you?”

Bucky nodded. He’d come around the curve, same as Vaughn must have done, and had almost driven through that… that horror… in the middle of the road. Bucky had managed just a peek at it, and at what stood in its center before he’d turned away, feeling his own guts revolting.

“What was that?” asked Vaughn and wiped his mouth. “Who made it?”

“Foxes?” offered Bucky. Thinking, No. Foxes killed, they even maimed, and cats, of course, would toy with their prey, and they would drag dead moles and mice and birds to your doorstep or even drop the gory trophies on your bed, but animals would not arrange corpses in the center of the road and paint a spiral of guts and blood around them. “Or kids. Teenagers messing around.”

“Kids,” Vaughn repeated, in a small, toneless voice. He hazarded a glance over his shoulder, at the mess in the road, then jerked his head back, as if he’d been slapped. “That’s Anheuser there. I saw… I saw…”

His head, Bucky thought as Vaughn bent over, put his hands on his knees, and heaved again. No half-digested food this time—none left, Bucky imagined—just strings of bile. Bucky had seen Anheuser’s head on top of that desecration. The jaw had been wrenched open, the bottom half tossed somewhere, the teeth of the top half planted in the pile of viscera.

“What’s it for?” Vaughn whispered. “What’s it mean?”

Bucky shook his head. “I don’t know. We should call Andy.” He put his hand on Vaughn’s upper arm and steered him toward his van. He didn’t want to risk Vaughn looking backward and seeing what else Bucky had seen, or what he thought he’d seen.

Maybe I was wrong, he told himself as he climbed into his truck and pulled his cell phone out of his holster. But he was 90 percent sure he’d seen a hand—a human one—somewhere near the top of the pile, stuck in next to the dog’s head, palm open and raised to the sky, beseeching. He wasn’t sure. And he knew there was nothing on God’s green earth that could make him turn around and look long enough to confirm it.

The phone rang once, then again, but it wasn’t until the third ring that Sarah raised her head from her laptop’s screen with a displeased grunt. WILL PRESSER was flashing across the screen. She scrabbled for the right button.

“Will?”

“Sarah!” He sounded perfectly calm, utterly relaxed. “You called?”