Anette accepted the two white bundles and handed one of them to Jeppe. They normally wore protective suits to avoid contaminating the discovery site, but today it was the other way around, to protect themselves from being contaminated by the discovery site. While she was pulling on the suit she wondered whether she had ever been in such a horrifying place before. A set of massive double doors before them led into the waste silo, to the plateau between the ovens that normally burned at a thousand degrees. Even out here the heat was intolerable. The thought of walking into an even hotter, dark, contaminated room to inspect a dead body was more than unappealing. Good thing she wasn’t sensitive.

She pulled her face mask into place and checked to make sure that Jeppe was ready, then opened the door and stepped through the airlock and into the silo. Anette could hear Jeppe gasp as the wave of scorching hot putrefaction hit them, and she had to swallow a few times herself to keep it together. A world of garbage lay far below them, enclosed within the silo’s solid metal walls and with the crane operator’s window as the only eye. It was astonishingly quiet in here, but quiet in the way of a road paver who pauses to wipe the sweat from his brow before thundering onward.

The claw hovered over the plateau, hugging trash in its enormous embrace and forming its own round planet in a spooky universe. A bright work light was aimed at it, and next to that stood a tall, thin figure, whom Anette recognized as Professor Nyboe, the medical examiner, along with another figure who was taking pictures. They both wore protective gear like hers and were moving quickly and efficiently.

She and Jeppe walked closer to the light. Sweat was already trickling down her spine and forming a little puddle above her butt. She resisted the impulse to yank off her face mask so she could breathe properly and focused on the trash in front of her. Between a wad of cardboard and some cans, a slim, white-skinned human leg stuck out. Portions of the trash had been dug away from around the leg, and a body could vaguely be made out, a neck, and a head.

“Can’t we just open the claw?”

Nyboe turned around.

“Ah, there you are! Horrible this place, horrible. The claw contains five and a half tons of trash, so we have to dig the body out very carefully. If we open the claw, it’ll simply vanish in the muck.”

“Is it a man or a woman?” Jeppe’s voice sounded far away, even though he was standing right next to her.

“We don’t know anything yet.” Nyboe removed a chunk of plastic with a pair of long-handled pliers. “Except that it is a human being.”