He glanced down at the corpse of Marissa Fordham, two days into the decaying process, smelling like an open sewer on a hot summer day. “Too late for her.”

Chapter 3

3

Vince excused himself from the kitchen, made a beeline for the designated tree, and threw up. He had looked at every kind of horror during his career with the Bureau. His life’s work was the study of murderers. He had spent three years traveling the country from one maximum-security prison to the next, interviewing men who had committed some of the most horrific crimes in the history of mankind as the Bureau gathered information and ammunition to aid in the hunt of human predators. He had stood over crime scenes, one bloodier and more depraved than the next. He’d seen so many bodies in so many states of decay, he had learned long ago not to attach that visual to any emotion other than disgust for the crime.

It wasn’t the visual that got to him.

It was the bullet in his head.

He’d been living with it now for a year and a half, and had grown familiar with the tricks it liked to play on him. The pain ebbed and flowed. Sometimes it was like a thunderstorm contained in his skull. Sometimes it was a dragon sleeping just under the surface.

There were no medical texts in which a list could be found of side effects to having a .22 caliber bullet in one’s head. Seeing as the great majority of people didn’t survive the experience of being shot at nearly point-blank range, anecdotal information was hard to come by. Vince’s own doctors usually had only one thing to say when he would tell them about his symptoms: huh.

One of the stranger side effects was the sudden heightening of senses. Sometimes his vision would become so acute, color so saturated, the light so bright, his eyeballs would ache. Sometimes the smallest sounds would be so amplified in his head he would cringe. Sometimes—now—his sense of smell became so sensitive, every molecule of scent seemed swollen, so full he could literally taste them.

It wasn’t the visual that got to him today. It was the smell.

Like any dead creature, the body of Marissa Fordham had begun its inglorious process of decomposition. Nature was without mercy or modesty. There were no exceptions to the rules. The business of death was dealt with in a no-nonsense, practical matter. Once the heart ceased to pump blood, systems shut down and chemical changes began the process of reducing the highest being on the food chain to food for other creatures.