“Not much of a bush on her,” Fowley pointed out.

“Jesus, Fowley.”

“All I mean is, she’s just a kid,” he said, shaking his head as he scribbled in his notepad. The buzz of flies sounded like fluorescent lighting shorting out. “She could be fifteen.”

“Or twenty,” I said, and the bisected corpse strobed even whiter under the Speed Graphic’s flashbulb.

In the ten or eleven inches separating the two sections of her, green grass waved in the wind, except where her distended liver matted it down.

A sick feeling boiled in the pit of my stomach. I was not a novice to crime scenes; I had seen my share of grisly homicides. I was thirty-eight years old and an ex-cop and a combat veteran and it took a hell of a lot to make me sick.

But this was the worst, most brutal, as well as saddest homicide victim I’d ever seen-a once-lovely young woman, carved in two, then arranged with thumb-to-the-nose glee by the sick fuck responsible. Yet there was more to my reaction than the tragic loss of young life and the grotesque sadism that had caused it.

Memories were stirring in me. I had been part of an investigation in Cleveland, not quite ten years before, and had been at a similar crime scene, a rubble- and rubbish-infested dump in the middle of town, where the torso of a young woman had been found. In some respects that one had been even worse: the head, the arms, legs, and feet had been severed and scattered about the dump like so much garbage, making a puzzle out of a human being to be reassembled by the police. The murder had been one of thirteen torso slayings attributed to the same maniac.

And we had found that psychotic son of a bitch, my friend Eliot Ness and I, and we had given him a lifetime enrollment in an Ohio laughing academy-the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, the newshounds had called him. He was safely tucked away in a padded suite; nonetheless, the resemblance of this bisected torso slaying to the Butcher’s modus operandi stirred memories in me, and nausea.