Craig got out of the car, knowing what he was going to see, and knowing that however prepared for it he was, he would not be prepared enough. He never was. A constable from the Edmonton team hurried past him with a roll of incident tape. Craig stuck out an arm to stop him.

‘Where are you going to put that, constable?’

‘Foot of the drive, sir.’

‘Uh-huh? Why don’t you just phone up CNN and ask them to bring a bottle?’

‘Sir?’

‘Leave the tape until we got ourselves an audience. Don’t go looking for one.’

‘Sir.’

The constable wandered back into Hawk’s house, no longer hurrying since his task was cancelled, and he would have to work hard to find a new and useful one in the standing around that always accompanies a murder. The big log house was ablaze with light, and figures moved back and forth across the beaming windows.

He put his hands in his pockets and went straight in. It was in the kitchen. The men at the door instinctively stood aside when McGee entered, and he stepped past them into the mess.

The World’s Greatest Dad lay belly-up by the ice-box. A gaping black hole leered at them from Daniel Hawk’s crotch, and what had been there was now in his face. At least what was left of his face. It was ripped and pounded like a tough steak. Please God, don’t let them make Tess identify him.

The split down the front of the chest was exactly like Joe’s, and Craig didn’t need to have the body turned over to know where the contents of that empty cavity were. Bags of trash made islands in the thick dried blood that coated the floor and Craig watched one of the Edmonton boys pick up a tortilla chip carton with rubber-gloved fingers and drop it in a plastic bag. Yeah, sure, that would hold the answer. Dangerous things, tortilla chips. Watch out for the extra chili, folks. It rips your pecker off and stuffs your heart up your ass. He lamented internally at the idiocy of the man with the rubber gloves and spoke to the constable at his right without taking his eyes off the body.

‘Where did the son of a bitch get in?’

‘We can’t say, sir. There’s no prints from the back door here, ’cept for a coyote. And it’s a dead coyote.’

Craig looked up at him sharply. ‘Where is it?’

The constable pointed through the kitchen window. ‘In the woods there.’