Elmer wondered how long the kid had been on the job, if he’d actually blow chunks. If the kid did heave, would he be smart enough to avoid the body, like Elmer had?

’Cause this kid didn’t look like no veteran.

CHAPTER

6

This was worse than Asia.

No matter how brutal it got, war was impersonal, human chess pieces moving around the board, you fired at shadows, strafed huts you pretended were empty, lived every day hoping you wouldn’t be the pawn that flipped. Reduce someone to The Enemy, and you could blow off his legs or slice open his belly or napalm his kids without knowing his name. As bad as war got, there was always the chance for making nice sometime in the future—look at Germany and the rest of Europe. To his father, an Omaha Beach alumnus, buddying up to the krauts was an abomination. Dad curled his lip every time he saw a “hippie-faggot in one of those Hitler beetle-cars.” But Milo knew enough history to understand that peace was as inevitable as war and that as unlikely as it seemed, one day Americans might be vacationing in Hanoi.

War wounds had a chance of healing because they weren’t personal. Not that the memory of guts slipping through his hands would fade, but maybe, somewhere off in the future . . .

But this. This was nothing but personal. Reduction of human form to meat and juice and refuse. Creating the antiperson.

He took a deep breath and buttoned his jacket and managed another look at the corpse. How old could she be, seventeen, eighteen? The hands, about the only parts of her not bloody, were smooth, pale, free of blemish. Long, tapering fingers, pink-polished nails. From what he could tell—and it was hard to tell anything because of the damage—she’d had delicate features, might’ve been pretty.

No blood on the hands. No defense wounds . . .

The girl was frozen in time, a heap of ruin. Aborted—like a shiny little wristwatch, stomped on, the crystal shattered.

Manipulated after death, too. The killer spreading her legs, tenting them, pointing the feet at a slight outward angle.

Leaving her out in the open, horrible statuary.

Overkill, the assistant coroner had pronounced, as if you needed a medical degree for that.

Schwinn had told Milo to count wounds, but the task wasn’t that simple. The slashes and cuts were straightforward, but did he count the ligature burns around both wrists and ankles as wounds? And what about the deep, angry red trench around her neck? Schwinn had gone off to get his Instamatic—always a shutterbug—and Milo didn’t want to ask him—loathed coming across uncertain, the rookie he was.