“Notice the hands?”

“Right away. And the one shoe. And the head… or what used to be the head.” From what I could see, from about the ears on up was gone. Although nearly all the cranium seemed gone, lots of skin was left and had sort of flapped around back into the cavity. One ear, perfectly recognizable and still attached to the neck by a flap of flesh, seemed to be pretty well intact. Seeing things like that always has a sense of unreality to it. Guess that’s what keeps you sane.

“Uh, yeah,” said Gary. ‘“Used to be’ is right. I think I’m parked over top of some, uh, debris, from the head and stuff. I didn’t even see it until I was just about stopped.”

“Okay.” His car was about fifteen feet from the top of the body’s head, and still running. That was fine. We could have him move his car back when the crime lab got there.

Hester spoke to him. “Doesn’t leak oil, does it?”

He looked offended. “No.”

“Just checking.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t want oil all over the… debris. Just make sure your defroster or air conditioner’s off. It’s a lot easier if we don’t get condensed moisture on the stuff.”

“Right. Uh, you two better talk to the two old boys over there. Very interesting stuff.”

“Just a few seconds more,” I said. “Tell ‘em we’ll be right there.”

Hester and I just stood and looked at the scene for a short time. You only get one chance to see a scene in a relatively undisturbed state, and I’ve learned to take in as much as I can when I have the chance. An ambience sort of thing, you might say. You just try to see, smell, and hear as much as you can. It helps when you try to return to it in your imagination, later in the case.

A sound was the first thing that distinguished this scene from the hundreds of others I’d been at before. The Heinman brothers had some galvanized steel hog feeders near the roadway. Looking like huge metal mushrooms, they had spring-loaded covers on them, and every time a hog wanted to eat, all it had to do was press its snout into the mechanism and open it. When it was done, out came the snout, and that spring-loaded lid slammed down with a loud clank. Usually two or three clanks, in fact. One, a beat, and then two very close together. All the time we were at the crime scene, those hog feeders made a constant racket in the background.