on the summit. Two unmarked police cars and an ambulance awaited me up where the trouble was, and officers were small figures gathered near the tailgate of a truck smaller than the rest, Near it someone was poking the ground with a stick, and I got increasingly impatient to get to the body.

'Okay,' I said. 'Let's do it.'

Parking my car, I got my medical bag and scene clothes out of the trunk. The young man watched in curious silence as I sat in my driver's seat with the door open wide, and pulled on rubber boots, scarred and dull from years of wading in woods and rivers for people murdered and drowned. I covered myself with a big faded denim shirt that

I had appropriated from my ex-husband, Tony, during a marriage that now did not seem real. Then I climbed inside the Explorer and sheathed my hands in two layers of gloves. I pulled a surgical mask over my head and left it loose around my neck.

'I can't say that I blame you,' my driver said. 'The smell's pretty rough. I can tell you that.'

'It's not the smell,' I said. 'Microorganisms are what make me worry.

'Gee,' he said, anxiously. 'Maybe I should wear one of those things.'

'You shouldn't be getting close enough to have a problem.' He made no reply, and I had no doubt that he already had gotten that close. Looking was too much of a temptation for most people to resist. The more gruesome the case, the more this was true.

'I sure am sorry about the dust,' he said as we drove through tangled goldenrod on the rim of a small fire pond populated with ducks. 'You can see we put a layer of tire chips everywhere to keep things settled, and a street cleaner sprays it down. But nothing seems to help all that much.' He nervously paused before going on. 'We do three thousand tons of trash a day out here.'

'From where?' I asked.

'Littleton, North Carolina, to Chicago.'