“That’s mighty generous,” Grigg said, impressed.

“That include investigators?” Ring grinned.

“I don’t care who solves it.” Kitchen wasn’t smiling as he turned to me. “Now you tell me what I can do to help you, ma’am.”

“I understand you use a satellite tracking system,” I said. “Is that what these diagrams are?”

“I was just explaining them,” Kitchen said.

He slid several of them to me. Their patterns of wavy lines looked like cross sections of geode, and they were marked with coordinates.

“This is a picture of the landfill face,” Kitchen explained. “We can take it hourly, daily, weekly, whenever we want, to figure out where waste originated and where it was deposited. Locations on the map can be pinpointed by using these coordinates.” He tapped the paper. “Sort of similar to how you plot a graph in geometry or algebra.” Looking up at me, he added, “I reckon you suffered through some of that in school.”

“Suffer is the operative word.” I smiled at him. “Then the point is you can compare these pictures to see how the landfill’s face changes from load to load.”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“And what have you determined?”

He placed eight maps side by side. The wavy lines in each were different, like different wrinkles on the face of the same person.

“Each line, basically, is a depth,” he said. “So we can pretty much know which truck is responsible for which depth.”

Ring emptied his Coke can and tossed it in the trash. He flipped through his notepad as if looking for something.

“This body could not have been buried deep,” I said. “It’s very clean, considering the circumstances. There are no postmortem injuries, and based on what I observed out there, the Cats grab bales off the trucks, smash them open. They spread the trash on the ground so the compactor can doze it with the straight blade, chopping and compressing.”

“That’s pretty much it.” Kitchen eyed me with interest. “You want a job?”

I was preoccupied with images of earth-moving machines that looked like robotic dinosaurs, claws biting into plastic-shrouded bales on trucks. I was intimately acquainted with the injuries in the earlier cases, with human remains crushed and mauled. Except for what the killer had done, this victim was intact.

“Hard to find good women,” Kitchen was saying.

“You ain’t kidding, brother,” Ring said as Grigg watched him with growing disgust.

“Seems like a good point,” Grigg said. “If that body had been on the ground for any time at all, it would be pretty chewed up.”

“The first four were,” Ring said. “Mangled like cube steak.” He eyed me. “This one look compacted?”

“The body doesn’t appear crushed,” I replied.

“Now that’s interesting, too,” he mused. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“It didn’t start out at a transfer station where it was compacted and baled,” Kitchen said. “It started in a Dumpster that was emptied by the packer.”

“And the packer doesn’t pack?” Ring dramatically asked. “Thought that’s why they were called packers.” He shrugged and grinned at me.