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turned out to be plated but he got ten bucks for it, anyway, at a pawnshop on South Vermont.
    He’d
seen the body right away — how could you not from up close, all pale in the moonlight, the sour smell, the way the poor girl’s legs had been bent and spread — and his gorge had risen immediately and soon his franks-and-beans dinner was coming back the wrong way.
    Jacquette had the good sense to run a good fifteen feet from the body before vomiting. When the uniforms arrived, he pointed out the emetic mound, apologizing. Not wanting to annoy anyone. He was sixty-eight years old, hadn’t served state time since fifteen years ago, wasn’t going to annoy the police, no way.
    Yessir, nossir.
    They’d kept him around, waiting for the detectives to arrive. Now, the men in suits were finally here and Jacquette stood over by one of the police cars as someone pointed him out and they approached him, stepping into the glare of those harsh lights the cops had put all over the place.
    Two suits. A skinny white-haired redneck type in an old-fashioned gray sharkskin suit and a dark-haired, pasty-faced heavyset kid whose green jacket and brown pants and ugly red-brown tie made Elmer wonder if nowadays
cops
were shopping at thrift shops.
    They stopped at the body first. The old one took one look, wrinkled his nose, got an annoyed look on his face. Like he’d been interrupted in the middle of doing something important.
    The fat kid was something else. Barely glanced at the body before whipping his head away. Bad skin, that one, and he’d gone white as a sheet, started rubbing his face with one hand, over and over.
    Tightening up that big heavy body of his like
he
was ready to lose his lunch.
    Elmer wondered how long the kid had been on the job, if he’d actually blow chunks. If the kid did heave, would he be smart enough to avoid the body, like Elmer had?
    ’Cause this kid didn’t look like no veteran.
     
CHAPTER 6
     
    T his was worse than Asia.
    No matter how brutal it got, war was impersonal, human chess pieces moving around the board, you fired at shadows, strafed huts you pretended were empty, lived every day hoping you wouldn’t be the pawn that flipped. Reduce someone to The Enemy, and you could blow off his legs or slice open his belly or napalm his kids without knowing his name. As bad as war got, there was always the chance for making nice sometime in the future — look at Germany and the rest of Europe. To his father, an Omaha Beach alumnus, buddying up to the krauts was an abomination. Dad curled his lip every time he saw a “hippie-faggot in one of those Hitler beetle-cars.” But Milo knew enough history to understand that peace was as inevitable as war and that as unlikely as it seemed, one day Americans might be vacationing in Hanoi.
    War wounds had a chance of healing
because
they weren’t personal. Not that the memory of guts slipping through his hands would fade, but maybe, somewhere off in the future…
    But
this
. This was nothing
but
personal. Reduction of human form to meat and juice and refuse. Creating the antiperson.
    He took a deep breath and buttoned his jacket and managed another look at the corpse. How old could she be, seventeen, eighteen? The hands, about the only parts of her not bloody, were smooth, pale, free of blemish. Long, tapering fingers, pink-polished nails. From what he could tell — and it was hard to tell anything because of the damage — she’d had delicate features, might’ve been pretty.
    No blood on the hands. No defense wounds…
    The girl was frozen in time, a heap of ruin. Aborted — like a shiny little wristwatch, stomped on, the crystal shattered.
    Manipulated after death, too. The killer spreading her legs, tenting them, pointing the feet at a slight outward angle.
    Leaving her out in the open, horrible statuary.
    Overkill,
the assistant coroner had pronounced, as if you needed a medical degree for
that
.
    Schwinn had told Milo to count wounds, but the task wasn’t