“I can’t say that I blame you,” my driver said. “The smell’s pretty rough. I can tell you that.”

“It’s not the smell,” I said. “Microorganisms are what make me worry.”

“Gee,” he said, anxiously. “Maybe I should wear one of those things.”

“You shouldn’t be getting close enough to have a problem.”

He made no reply, and I had no doubt that he already had gotten that close. Looking was too much of a temptation for most people to resist. The more gruesome the case, the more this was true.

“I sure am sorry about the dust,” he said as we drove through tangled goldenrod on the rim of a small fire pond populated with ducks. “You can see we put a layer of tire chips everywhere to keep things settled, and a street cleaner sprays it down. But nothing seems to help all that much.” He nervously paused before going on. “We do three thousand tons of trash a day out here.”

“From where?” I asked.

“Littleton, North Carolina, to Chicago.”

“What about Boston?” I asked, for the first four cases were believed to be from as far away as that.

“No, ma’am.” He shook his head. “Maybe one of these days. We’re so much less per ton down here. Twenty-five dollars compared to sixty-nine in New Jersey or eighty in New York. Plus, we recycle, test for hazardous waste, collect methane gas from decomposing trash.”

“What about your hours?”

“Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” he said with pride.

“And you have a way to track where the trucks come from?”

“A satellite system that uses a grid. We can at least tell you which trucks would have dumped trash during a certain time period in the area where the body was found.”

We splashed through a deep puddle near Porta-Johns, and rocked by a powerwash where trucks were being hosed off on their way back out to life’s roads and highways.

“I can’t say we’ve ever had anything like this,” he said. “Now, they’ve had body parts at the Shoosmith dump. Or at least, that’s the rumor.”

He glanced at me, assuming I would know if such a rumor were true. But I did not verify what he had just said as the Explorer sloshed through mud strewn with rubber chips, the sour stench of decomposing garbage drifting in. My attention was riveted to the small truck I had been watching since I had gotten here, thoughts racing along a thousand different tracks.

“By the way, my name’s Keith Pleasants.” He wiped a hand on his pants and held it out to me. “Pleased to meet you.”

My gloved hand shook his at an awkward angle as men holding handkerchiefs and rags over their noses watched us pull up. There were four of them, gathered around the back of what I now could see was a hydraulic packer, used for emptying Dumpsters and compressing the trash. Cole’s Trucking Co. was painted on the doors.