“I can tell you everything,” Stickney said, wagging his finger at the body with each assertion. “What he ate. What he drank. If he smoked. If he done drugs. That he was probably homeless. How did he die. Plenny more.” Then he smiled, but grimly. “Only one thing. No name, as yet.”

“How did he die?”

“Not from the drugs, but he had drugs in his system. Cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the cervical and spine. Skull fracture. Internal bleeding. Say hemorrhage here on the report.”

“From the accident,” Olive said, and took Sharkey’s hand and held it, clutching his cold fingers.

“Hit by car,” Stickney said. He grinned at Sharkey. “Wait till I tell Wencil I seen you. Insane, brah. He gonna freak out.”

3

Kapu

In the distance a glowing canopy of high leafy boughs in a grove of brittle albizia trees, rising rags of oily smoke, the flare of a campfire, light without much illumination, the whole of it hidden by tall scrub and guinea grass, enclosed by evening shadows. At the edge of the road next to the guardrail a supermarket shopping cart lay on its side, with a rusted broken baby carriage, the limbless torso of a child’s plastic doll, a burst-open plastic bag of trash, its contents strewn and picked over, probably by feral cats or wild pigs. And painted on a board in the goop of what looked like peeling nail polish, the word KAPU.

“We should have come here sooner,” Olive said, but disgustedly turning aside. The junk pile had an aura of hostility and violence, and the sign meant go away.

“Probably weeks ago,” Sharkey said.

But they knew, standing there at the head of the path, why they hadn’t. The place looked forbidden, if not haunted. There was no road. The path was narrow and seemed to lead into the pinched darkness of an ambush.

It was almost six o’clock, an hour from sundown, the day after their visit to the medical examiner’s office. On the way home, passing this spot, Olive had said, “Homeless camp.”

“What do you think?” she said now, lingering at the roadside—the bypass road, cars flashing past. She kicked at the shadowy overgrown footpath, near a tulip tree in flower, its fallen blossoms littering the ground like red rags.

“It’s getting dark,” Sharkey said, in the insincere, too-emphatic tone of an excuse.

“Maybe come back,” Olive said, fumbling for a reason not to enter the path and stepping away. “Maybe earlier next time.”