“Not so you’d notice.” Special Agent Quentin Hayes shook his head, then frowned and pulled a twig from his rather shaggy blond hair. “Though I’ve seldom searched an area with undergrowth this dense, so I can’t say I couldn’t have missed something.”

Duncan spoke up to say, “Our county medical examiner hasn’t had to deal with any but accidental deaths since he got the job, but he said he was sure this man wasn’t killed here.”

Miranda Bishop nodded. “Your M.E. is right. If the victim had been killed here, the ground would be soaked with blood—at the very least. This man was probably alive twenty-four hours ago and dumped here sometime around dawn today.”

Duncan didn’t ask how she’d arrived at that conclusion; his M.E. had made the same guesstimate.

“No signs of a struggle,” Quentin added. “And unless this guy was drugged or otherwise unconscious or dead, I would imagine he struggled.”

With a grimace, Duncan said, “Personally, I’m hoping he was already dead when… that… was done to him.”

“We’re all hoping the same thing,” Quentin assured him. “In the meantime, knowing who the victim was would at least give us a place to start. Any word on the prints your people took?”

“When I checked in an hour ago, no. I’ll go back to my Jeep and check again; like I told you, cell service is lousy up here, and our portable radios next to useless. We have to use a specially designed booster antenna on our police vehicles to get any kind of signal at all, and even that tends to be spotty.”

“Appreciate it, Sheriff.” Quentin watched the older man cautiously make his way down the steep trail toward the road and their cars, then turned his head and looked at Miranda with lifted brows.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Quentin lowered his voice even though the nearest sheriff’s deputies—Duncan’s chief deputy, Neil Scanlon, and his partner, Nadine Twain—were yards away, crouched over a map of the area spread out on the ground. “The M.O. is close. Torture on the inhuman side of brutal.”