He pointed at the ball-like object.

By then, the skull was only a few meters away. Gilda could see both of the eye sockets, but the mandible was still buried in the earth.

Fernando and Geraldo put down their burdens. Fernando lifted the lid on the box and started unloading tools. Geraldo unpacked a camera and started loading film. Gilda knelt down for a closer look at the corpse. The bones were free of flesh. There was no smell of corruption. Some wisps of black hair still clung to the cranium. She took a pair of latex gloves out of the pocket of her jeans, blinked at the flash from Geraldo’s first shot and selected a medium-sized brush.

Tanaka rubbed his hands together to warm them and said something to Hans that Gilda couldn’t hear. Whatever it was set Hans to talking all over again. Most people become silent, almost reverent, in the presence of death, but not Hans. Hans was a talker.

He’d first missed The Mop, he said, just before lunchtime. He didn’t have any idea how long the animal had been gone because it was a big yard, with bushes and shrubs where The Mop liked to hide. Besides, there were a lot of things that Senhor Manfredo expected him to do around the house, like washing the cars and cleaning the swimming pool. He couldn’t be expected to keep an eye on the damned dog all of the time.

“And then I saw another hole under the fence. Every time he digs his way out I drive stakes into the ground so he can’t crawl through the same place again. But then he goes and digs somewhere else. I’ve got stakes all over the place. The back of the yard is starting to look like one of the forts you see in those old American movies, the ones about cowboys and Indians.”

“Dog never came back on his own?” Tanaka asked.

“Never. He likes wandering around, pissing on other peo-ple’s fences, sticking his nose into other dogs’ assholes-uh, sorry, Senhora.”

“Senhorita,” Gilda corrected him without looking up.