I fought the urge to huddle in my Windbreaker with U.S. Marshal in big letters on it. It was fifty freaking degrees here. Whoever heard of fifty being the regular temperature in August? It was a hundred-plus with heat index at home in St. Louis. The stop before this one had been Alabama. Fifty degrees felt amazingly cold after all that heat and humidity. The light softened around us and I could see the body parts better. It didn’t make me like them any better.

“Is the body lying on its back, or its ass?” I asked.

“You mean because it’s bisected at midchest and the parts are about ten feet away?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Does it matter?” he asked. He pushed his hand toward a cowboy hat that he’d left in the car that brought us from the airport. Ted wore a well-loved, well-creased cowboy hat, and the fact that the hat gesture had become habitual said just how much time Edward was spending as his legal alter ego. He settled for running his hand through his short blond hair. He was five foot eight, which seemed tall to me at five-three.

“I guess not.” In my head I thought, Problems like that are what you think about when you stare down at a dismembered body, because otherwise you want to run screaming, or throw up. I hadn’t thrown up on a body in years, but the St. Louis police had never let me live it down.

“They can’t find the heart,” he said, voice as unemotional as his face. The light was strong enough that I could see that his eyes were blue rather than just pale. He had a summer tan, light gold, but better than I tanned. It seemed wrong that the blond, blue-eyed WASP tanned darker than I did with my mother’s black hair and brown eyes. I was half Hispanic—shouldn’t I tan darker than white-bread boy?

“Anita,” he said, and he moved so I couldn’t see the body. “Talk to me.”

I blinked at him. “They won’t find the heart. Just like they didn’t find the last three hearts. The killer, or killers, is taking the heart as a trophy, or proof of the kill. Like the woodsman in Snow White taking the heart back to the Wicked Queen in a box, or something.”