His skin was pale, the month being April and Corde having been fishing only twice so far that season. He looked lean from a distance but his belt curled outward more than he would have liked; Corde's most strenuous sport these days was gentlemen's softball. This morning as always his New Lebanon Sheriffs Department shirt was clean and stiff as a sheet of new balsa wood and his beige slacks had razor creases.

Corde was by rank a lieutenant and by specialty a detective.

He remembered this place not twelve hours before – last night, lit only by the deputies' flashlights and the edgy illumination of a half-moon. He had sent his men to scour the ground. They were young and austere (the ones trained in the military) or young and arrogant (state police academy grads) but they were all earnest.

Although they were virtuosos at DUI arrests and joyridings and domestics, what the deputies knew about murder they had learned mostly from pulp thrillers and TV, just like they knew about guns from stubbly autumn fields, not from the state pistol range up in Higgins. Still they had been ordered to search the crime scene and they had, doggedly and with fervor.

But not one of them had found the piece of paper toward which Bill Corde now struggled through thick brush.

Oh, you poor girl…

… who lies at the foot of a ten-foot-high earth dam.

… who lies in this chill wet dish of mud and low grass and blue flowers.

… whose dark hair is side-parted, whose face is long, whose throat thick. Her round lips curl prominently. Each ear holds three wire-thin gold rings. Her toes are lanky and their nails dark with burgundy polish.

… who lies on her back, arms folded over her breasts, as if the mortician had already done her up. The pink floral blouse is buttoned high. Her skirt extends so modestly below her knees, tucked beneath her thighs.