She has encountered these two before—Tom and Lance—but can’t remember which man belongs to which name. Two balding white hipsters in their late twenties with oiled beards and sleeve tats. She considers them incompetent and lazy and said as much when it took four months for them to sign off on a death certificate on one case and three months for them to deliver blood results on another. Their labs are constantly backlogged. She knows the two of them always share a vape, leaning their weight against the bumper of their van and puffing purple and green smoke, before driving a body off to the King County office, and she imagines their lungs are shellacked with a grape-flavored chemical sheen.

“I believe it takes seven minutes to smoke a cigarette,” Nora says. “I don’t know what the equivalent is for a vape pen. How about you go find out?”

They mutter and snap off their gloves and tromp away to the edge of the clearing.

Somewhere in the night an owl calls. The spring burbles, heat coming off it. A rain shower quits before it can really get started. She pulls on a set of latex gloves, clicks on her Maglite, and crouches close to the vic. He appears to have died from a single deep stab to the heart. She quickly checks his hands for signs of struggle and finds the palms dirty and callused but uncut.

One of his eyes has been gouged out, and saw-like gashes edge the socket. He has been roughly shaved. His scalp and cheeks and chest and groin are scraped down to bare skin. She spots nearby the remains of what must have been a long head of hair and a bushy, brown beard. Tossed aside, it looks now like a damp bird’s nest.

It is difficult to tell beneath all the blood, but she can see a curious series of lacerations, a kind of cross-hatching on his body. The cuts begin at his chest and spiral outward. The gray skin of his leg, cooked clean by the hot spring, looks like old paper with cursive writing from another language scrawled on it. Intricate lines and loops and swirls.