I felt out with all my senses. We tracked a ping that, upon attaining, proved too old by a decade to be the girl. When I was standing a foot from the site, I knew the body to be that of a black male who had died of exposure. He had become naturally buried under leaves, branches, and dirt that had washed downhill over the course of the past decade. What you could see was blackened ribs with tattered cloth and bits of muscle still clinging to the bones.

I took one of the red cloth strips I keep in my jacket pocket, and Tolliver took a whippy length of wire from a supply he kept stashed in a long pocket on his pants leg. I tied a strip to one end of the wire while Tolliver ran the other end into the ground. We'd walked maybe a quarter of a mile southwest from the fallen tree, and I jotted that down.

"Hunting accident," Tolliver suggested. I nodded. I can't always pin it down exactly, but the moment of death had that feel: panic, solitude. Long-suffering. I was certain he'd fallen out of his deer stand, breaking his back. He'd lain there until the elements claimed him. There were a few pieces of wood still nailed way up in the tree. Named Bright? Mark Bright? Something like that.

Well, he wasn't part of my paycheck. This man was my second freebie for the town of Sarne. Time to earn some money.

We started off again. I began working my way to the east, but I felt uneasy. After we'd proceeded maybe sixty feet from the hunter's bones, I got a welcome, sharp buzz from the north. Uphill, which was slightly odd. But then I realized that we had to go uphill to get to the road. The closer to the road I climbed, the closer I approached the remains of Teenie Hopkins—or some young white girl. The buzzing turned into a continuous drone, and I fell to my knees in the leaves. She was there.