"The ground," said the slim one. "I think something's buried here

… hell-oh!"

And he withdrew from the ground his harvest: a human head, which he grasped by its long dark hair. The eyes were half-lidded, staring at Curry blankly, out of a round, jug-eared face.

Curry didn't feel so good.

But he'd be all right; Christ knew there was nothing left in his stomach to puke up.

"Bingo," the stocky one said, and withdrew his hand from the sand and held up his palm; in it was what might have been a turnip but was in fact a severed human penis.

And Curry stumbled back to his bush and found that something had remained in his stomach, after all.

Merlo was in the process of dismissing the young boys; they had been helpful, but (Merlo told Curry, as the latter stumbled over, wiping his mouth) rounding up these body parts was nothing a kid should see. Curry couldn't have agreed more.

Meanwhile, back at the corpse, the railroad dicks were trying to put the puzzle together.

"I tell you it ain't his," the stocky one was saying.

"The dick?" the other dick asked.

"No, you moron. The head. The head belongs to a guy in his late forties, early fifties maybe. Looks like he'd be kinda heavyset. That body is a young guy's body."

Merlo joined them. The head had been placed on the ground above the neck of the corpse. The penis had been placed in the correct general area as well.

"The genitals don't match, either," Merlo said dispassionately. "Torso is white as snow, head and penis have a peculiar discoloration."

"So would yours," said the slim one skeptically, "if somebody hadda whacked 'em off without so much as a howdy-do."

"Yeah, and where's the goddamn blood?" asked the stocky one.

"Not here," Merlo admitted.

Curry approached, tentatively. "Detective Merlo… if that head doesn't match the body, doesn't that mean we have two homicides?"