"Not exactly. I'm thinking she died over there." Sam pulled back the brambles and nodded at a corner of the outer room. "We've got what looks like a fair-sized pool of blood. No way to be sure exactly how much--we'll see if the Bureau can help there--but if there's still plenty left after a night like this, I'd say there was a load of it to start with. She was probably sitting up against that wall--most of the blood is on the front of her top and on the lap and seat of her jeans. If she'd been lying down, it'd have seeped down her sides. See this?"

He pointed to the girl's top, and the penny dropped with a bang: not tie-dye. "She twisted up the top and pressed it against the wound, trying to stop the bleeding."

Huddled deep in that corner; rush of rain, blood seeping warm between her fingers. "So how'd she get over here?" I asked.

"Our boy caught up with her in the end," Frank said. "Or someone did, anyway."

He leaned over, lifted one of the girl's feet by the shoelace--it sent a fast twitch down the back of my neck, him touching her--and tilted his torch at the heel of her runner: scuffed and brown, grained deep with dirt. "She was dragged. After death, because there's no pooling under the body: by the time she got over here, she wasn't bleeding any more. The guy who found her swears he didn't touch, and I believe him. He looked like he was about to puke his guts up; no way he got closer than he had to. Anyway, she was moved not too long after she died. Cooper says rigor hadn't set in yet, and there's no secondary lividity--and she didn't spend much time out in that rain. She's barely damp. If she'd been in the open all night, she'd be drenched."

Slowly, as if my eyes were only just adjusting to the dim light, I realized that all the dark patches and stipples that I had taken for shadows and rainwater were actually blood. It was everywhere: streaked across the floor, soaking the girl's jeans, crusting her hands wrist-deep. I didn't want to look at her face, at anyone's face. I kept my eyes on her top and unfocused them so that the dark star swam and blurred. "Got footprints?"

"Zip," Frank said. "Not even hers. You'd think, with all this dirt; but, like Sam here said, the rain. All we've got in the other room is a shitload of mud, with prints matching the guy who called it in and his dog--that's one reason I wasn't too worried about walking you through there. Same thing out in the lane. And in here . . ." He moved the torch beam around the edges of the floor, nosed it into corners: wide, blank sweeps of dirt, way too smooth. "That's what it all looked like, when we got here. Those prints you're seeing around the body, those are us and Cooper and the uniforms. Whoever moved her stuck around to tidy up after himself. There's a broken branch of gorse in the middle of the field, probably came off that big bush by the door; I'm guessing he used it to sweep the floor clean as he left. We'll see if the Bureau pulls blood or prints off it. And to go with no footprints . . ."