She parks at an entrance called Blue Bell, a field of grass and flowers near a picnic pavilion, a public bathroom, and an opening into the woods marked WHITE TRAIL. She can just make out the house through the trees. It’s gray and low, with a sloping porch. A dense vine grows over the sides and roof, stitching in around the front door, like the woods are trying to take it back.

She would have guessed it was vacant. It doesn’t look livable. But a box fan runs in one window, a small, quiet sign of life.

Her first patrol cases were rural, calls where she went along with a senior partner, checked the welfare of children and animals. She’s seen suicides by hanging and by gunshot and her fair share of DWIs. When she moved to criminal investigation, she worked a rape and murder by the lake, a child rape case, and drugs. Drugs are everywhere.

A jogger enters the trail with a spray of pebbles, his feet hitting the ground with a hollow thud. He startles Kateri, and Kateri surprises him, standing there in her work clothes and belt. She sets her mouth and waves slightly at him while he picks up the pace, his brow furrowed and his cheeks puffed with exertion. He doesn’t stop, and Kateri watches the backs of his calves as he climbs the trail, his ankles paper-thin above his sneakers.

She thinks for a minute about Joel Hurt, the shape of him next to her in the squad car. She knows he runs out here as well, his body lean and working. He’s never completely still. He’s like a compressed spring.

Who didn’t come with her.

She draws her weapon and keeps it low, approaching the house with her head cocked and listening. The woods are loud with birdsong, chattering squirrels, the creak of branches, the crunch of her own feet, the sharp caw of crows.

She can smell it from the porch. The iron tang of blood and a warm, rotten smell underneath it. The house is dark inside, closed up, close, ripe. Slow, fat flies buzz in the windows.

Kateri pulls her sweater up over her nose and takes shoe covers and latex gloves from her pack. The air inside is too thick to breathe.

In the front room of the house, there’s the largest flat-screen TV Kateri has possibly ever seen. It must be six feet wide. The screen, turned on, shows nothing but the quad of security cameras, pointed into the woods, out at the road. One shows the chairs around a fire pit in the yard, another a sliver of light on the trail where Kateri appeared moments ago, the jogger rushing past her.

A large pool of blood collects in the kitchen, the edge smeared from the pull of the body. It drags over the linoleum and onto the wood but disappears. Someone has wiped the path to the doorway. Blood spatters the cupboards, the counter, up onto the ceiling in a particular pattern. Nothing but the floor has been wiped.