“That guy poking garbage with a stick is the detective for Sussex,” Pleasants said to me.

He was older, in shirtsleeves, wearing a revolver on his hip. I felt I’d seen him somewhere before.

“Grigg?” I guessed, referring to the detective I had spoken to on the phone.

“That’s right.” Sweat was rolling down Pleasants’ face, and he was getting more keyed up. “You know, I’ve never had any dealings with the sheriff’s department, never even got a speeding ticket around here.”

We slowed down to a halt, and I could barely see through the boiling dust. Pleasants grabbed his door handle.

“Sit tight just a minute,” I told him.

I waited for dust to settle, looking out the windshield and surveying as I always did when approaching a crime scene. The loader’s bucket was frozen midair, the packer beneath it almost full. All around, the landfill was busy and full of diesel sounds, work stopped only here. For a moment, I watched powerful white trucks roar uphill as Cats clawed and grabbed, and compactors crushed the ground with their chopper wheels.

The body would be transported by ambulance, and paramedics watched me through dusty windows as they sat in air-conditioning, waiting to see what I was going to do. When they saw me fix the surgical mask over my nose and mouth and open my door, they climbed out, too. Doors slammed shut. The detective immediately walked to meet me.

“Detective Grigg, Sussex Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “I’m the one who called.”

“Have you been out here the entire time?” I asked him.

“Since we were notified at approximately thirteen hundred hours. Yes, ma’am. I’ve been right here to make sure nothing was disturbed.”

“Excuse me,” one of the paramedics said to me. “You going to want us right now?”

“Maybe in fifteen. Someone will come get you,” I said as they wasted no time returning to their ambulance. “I’m going to need some room here,” I said to everybody else.

Feet crunched as people stepped out of the way, revealing what they had been guarding and gawking at. Flesh was unnaturally pale in the dying light of the autumn afternoon, the torso a hideous stub that had tumbled from a scoop of trash and landed on its back. I thought it was Caucasian, but was not sure, and maggots teeming in the genital area made it difficult for me to determine gender at a glance. I could not even say with certainty whether the victim was pre- or postpubescent. Body fat was abnormally low, ribs protruding beneath flat breasts that may or may not have been female.

I squatted close and opened my medical bag. With forceps, I collected maggots into a jar for the entomologist to examine later, and decided upon closer inspection that the victim was, in fact, a woman. She had been decapitated low on the cervical spine, arms and legs severed. Stumps were dry and dark with age, and I knew right away that there was a difference between this case and the others.