“ Crowley!” the sheriff barked. “You coming or what?”

Justin looked over the top of Cameryn’s head as the sun lit a tiny scar, like a silver thread, on his chin. “On my way, sir.” Then, to Cameryn, “I’ve got to go.”

She gave his retreating figure a halfhearted wave as the three men disappeared into the woods. Alone with the wreckage, she tried not to listen to the garbled holiday tunes that thrummed from the radio. As quickly as she could, she turned it off, gingerly reaching past Benjamin’s blood-soaked chest.

But she wasn’t able to concentrate. Her motions, done by rote, couldn’t silence the words that played through her in an endless loop. Hannah promised to stay away and I promised to stay quiet. What had her father meant? The question spun through her mind as she photographed, bagged, sealed, and signed, collecting bits of life, bits of death. Another car, this one with a woman behind the wheel, slowed on the Million Dollar Highway. Cameryn, in a perfect reflection of her father, waved the woman on with her own gloved hand, glad she’d already draped Benjamin’s body, propping the cloth as much as she could to keep the blood from seeping through.

She was just finishing up when she heard her father’s cry, less than a hundred yards away.

“I got it. Good Lord, I almost stepped on the thing. John, Justin, over here!”

Sheriff Jacobs darted through the trees with Justin close behind, the branches snapping underfoot. Straining to see, Cameryn stood on her toes, but the limbs were too thick. She heard the sheriff say, “You got the bag, Deputy?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

Her father replied, “Let’s do this right.”

Cautious, she crept between the pines, careful to keep her body low. No one looked her way. She watched as her father gently lifted Benjamin’s severed head by the ears to place it inside a garbage bag Sheriff Jacobs held taut between his hands. Benjamin’s skin was milk-white and the mouth gaped, and even from her distance she could make out the eyes, wide and scared. A ring of snow, soaked with blood and tissue, encircled the base of his neck like a red chain.