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and when we reached the end of the road he surprised me by not parking but pulling up to drop me off.
    All around us, deputies, game wardens, search and rescue, EMTs, and crime scene techs from FDLE rushed around, strobed by the flashing lights from their vehicles.
    I could sense their urgency, feel the pull of the excitement and energy, but I didn’t move.
    We sat there a long moment, neither of us saying anything. After a while, he nodded. I looked over at him. When he looked back at me, I nodded, then got out.
    R emaining behind at the crime scene, Dad sent Jake to the landing to pick me up. When I stepped into the boat and saw how visibly shaken Jake was, I realized part of the reason Dad sent him was to get him away.
    “How bad is it?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever …”
    Since joining search and rescue, Jake had lost some weight and gotten some color, and he more closely resembled the handsome high school quarterback he had been a decade ago. His green deputy’s uniform no longer strained to hold in his gut and his face had regained some of its angularity.
    “Can you tell me about it?” I asked.
    “Be better if you see it. It’s just a few minutes away.”
    Along the banks of the river, campers and permanent residents had come out of their cabins, trailers, and campers and were standing on their docks straining to see what was happening.
    “Where’re we going?” I asked.
    “Close to where we were yesterday. Not far from where the inmate escaped.”
    “It’s not him, is it?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Could be.”
    “Whatta you mean could be? Did you look at him or not?”
    “The victim?” he asked. “Hell, I thought you meant the perpetrator. He ain’t the victim. The victim’s black.”
    “Got an ID on him yet?”
    “Not when I left. Hard to tell just by looking at him. He’s in bad shape.”
    We were in a different, smaller search and rescue boat that bounced over the wakes of the larger boats in the olive-green waters. The sun was low in the sky, just barely above the tree tops to the west, its light and heat less relentless now, and as we rounded the last bend and I could see the other emergency services boats tied to trees along the bank, I wondered how long we had until it would be too dark to see beneath the thick trees.
    Jake pulled up beside one the game warden’s boats, cut the engine, and I jumped out onto the damp sand with the bow line. The wake from our boat created large ripples that rolled in and receded like waves, slapping at the banks, tree bases, and the hulls of the boats. After securing the boat to the exposed roots of a cypress tree that would be under water if the river was higher, I looked over at Jake.
    “I’m gonna wait here a minute,” he said.
    I nodded. “You okay?”
    “Will be.”
    I hesitated a moment.
    “I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “Go on. I’m fine.”
    I nodded, then turned, climbed the bank, ducked beneath the crime scene tape strung around the trees, and walked toward the horror waiting for me in the woods beyond.
    I t was like so many old photographs I had seen—gray, lifeless body, elongated, stretched neck, unnaturally up-tilted head.
    A rope had been thrown over a large oak limb, then pulled around the trunk of the tree for leverage. Its noose held a naked black man high above the ground, his feet and hands bound, the ashen skin of his swollen body filled with cuts and gashes.
    It was one of the most horrific things I had ever seen.
    It wasn’t just the death but the degradation. Not only what had been done to the body but the way it was displayed. His nakedness in particular, the indecency of his indignity. The raw, exposed, unflattering way his soft belly and breasts hung, the way his long, hard, yellowish toenails protruded from his wide, flat feet, and most of all the way his flaccid phallus dangled lifelessly for all beneath him to see.
    Disquieting. Unsettling. Disturbing. Truly