I nodded and he squeezed between us, heading inside.

“The head’s over here.” George pointed to a dark hole in the snow not three feet from where I was standing. I instinctively looked down and saw a half-shadowed face staring at me, its eyes enormously wide. My stomach turned over.

“You’re getting a kick out of this, aren’t you?”

George smiled and shrugged. “You’re a tough guy.”

I took the flashlight he had hanging from his belt and shone it on the head. The shock over, it looked like a plastic fake.

“Al said the blast ‘atomized’ the guy’s neck-his word, not mine. He said it was kind of like pulling a tablecloth out from under a bunch of plates-it just sort of fell off when the body went sailing into the wild blue yonder.”

I handed the flashlight back and went down the steps to check out the body.

There wasn’t much blood visible. The ragged chunk between the man’s shoulders lay at the edge of a small black hole of melted snow. The whole thing had an almost tidy air about it. I realized then I was probably standing over an aquifer of blood spread out between the snow and the earth below. I dropped a nearby blanket over the stump and hole. Then I crouched by the body’s side and began to search.

Whoever this had been, he was no pauper. The blood-spattered scarf was cashmere, the long coat camel hair, the pants fineigne pants wool. Layer by layer, his clothes never dropped below $50 per item, including the tailored pale blue shirt with the monogram “J.P.” Inside his jacket, I found a leather wallet with, among the usual documents, ten new $100 notes.

A shadow fell across the body and I looked up to see State’s Attorney James-never Jim-Dunn. Vermont state’s attorneys, elsewhere called district attorneys, have to be at the scene of any “unattended death.” James Dunn had two assistants with whom he rotated being on call, but he hardly missed showing up personally at the dramatic ones, regardless of time or weather. He wasn’t married, which must have helped, and he was good at his job, so we didn’t complain. He never said much, certainly never touched anything, and generally stayed out of the way. In a few instances, he had even been a help, pointing out the occasional legal pothole. Still, I didn’t like him. He was a cold and snotty man.