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but he didn’t need to read it. Mrs. Sheila Swegg, twice divorced, no children, thirty-two years of age, of number 40A Whispering Meadows Trailer Estate, Bromide, Oklahoma.
    White fucking trash.
    There she was lying on the steel table, butterflied like a pork chop, organs neatly stacked beside her. The top of her head was off and her brain sat in a nearby pan. The smell of putrefaction was overwhelming; she’d been lying in that hot cornfield for a good twenty-four hours before he’d gotten there. The M.E., a bright, bushy-tailed young fellow named McHyde, was bent over her, cheerfully slicing and dicing away and talking up a storm of medical jargon into an overhanging mike. Give him five more years, thought Hazen, and the biting acids of reality will strip off some of that cheerful polish.
    McHyde had moved from her torso up to her throat and was cutting away with little zipping motions of his right hand. Some of the cuts made a crackling sound that Hazen did not like at all. He fished in his pocket for a cigarette, remembered the no smoking sign, grabbed a nearby jar of Mentholatum instead and dabbed some beneath each nostril, and focused his mind elsewhere: Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It, polka night at the Deeper Elks Lodge, Sundays with a six-pack fishing at Hamilton Lake State Park. Anything but the remains of Sheila Swegg.
    “Hmm,” said the M.E. “Will you look at that.”
    As quickly as they had come, the pleasant thoughts went away. “What?” Hazen asked.
    “As I suspected. Broken hyoid bone. Make that shattered hyoid bone. There were very faint bruises on her neck and this confirms it.”
    “Strangled?”
    “Not exactly. Neck grasped and broken with a single twist. She died of a severed spinal column before she could strangle.”
    Cut, cut, cut.
    “The force was tremendous. Look at this. The cricoid cartilage is completely separated from both the thyroid cartilage and the lamina. I’ve never seen anything like it. The tracheal rings are crushed. The cervical vertebrae are broken in, let me see, four places. Five places.”
    “I believe you, Doc,” Hazen said, his eyes averted.
    The doctor looked up, smiled. “First autopsy, eh?”
    Hazen felt a swell of irritation. “Of course not,” he lied.
    “Hard to get used to, I know. Especially when they start to get a little ripe. Summertime’s not good. Not good at all.”
    As the doctor returned to his work, Hazen became aware of a presence behind him. He turned and jumped: there was Pendergast, materialized out of nowhere.
    The doctor looked up, surprised. “Sir? Excuse me, we’re—”
    “He’s okay,” said Hazen. “He’s FBI, working on the case under me. Special Agent Pendergast.”
    “Special Agent Pendergast,” the M.E. said, with a new edge to his voice, “would you mind identifying yourself for the tape recorder? And throw on some scrubs and a mask, if you don’t mind. You can find them over there.”
    “Of course.”
    Hazen wondered how the hell Pendergast had managed it, without a car and all. But he wasn’t sorry to see him. It occurred to Sheriff Hazen, not for the first time, that having Pendergast on the case could be useful. As long as the man kept with the program.
    Pendergast returned a moment later, having expertly slid into the scrubs. The doctor was now working on the victim’s face, peeling it away in thick rubbery flaps and clamping them back. It had been bad enough before, when just the nose, lips, and ears had been missing. Hazen stared at the bands of muscle, the white of the ligaments, the slender yellow lines of fat. God, it was gruesome.
    “May I?” Pendergast asked.
    The doctor stepped back and Pendergast leaned over, not three inches from the stinking, swollen, featureless face. He stared at the places, torn and bloody, where the nose and lips had once been. The scalp had been peeled back but Hazen could still see the bleached-blonde hair with its black roots. Then Pendergast stepped back.