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“Takes some industry.”
    “Broken fingernails,” Don Lee went on, “maybe from the struggle, maybe from before, hard to say. Splinters in his palms. Tried to pull the stake out, we figure.”
    “Or keep it from going in.”
    “We found him pinned against some latticework, trellis kind of thing. Arms crossed above his head, wrists turned out. He’d been fastened up there with picture wire.”
    “So the body was repositioned once he was dead.”
    “Way it looks. Doc said the stake missed his heart but nipped the vena cava.”
    “Meaning it took him a while to die. . . . Understand that I don’t mean any disrespect here, but what facilities do you have for processing a crime scene?”
    “State issues us kits. Back when I started, I got sent up to the capital for a couple of months, passed along what I could remember. Don Lee’s studied up some on his own. We did the best we could. But like I told you up front, we’re in over our heads here.”
    “I went back through the manual, did it all by the numbers,” Don Lee told me. “Multiple photographs of the scene and the body. Bagged clothes and belongings, including a notebook—kind of a diary, I guess. Cellotaped a half-footprint I found at the edge of the carport. Took scrapings, blood samples.”
    I looked at Bates. He shrugged. “What can I say? Me, I blundered into this. He’s meant for it.”
    “Thing is,” Don Lee said, “I can go on scraping, photographing and logging stuff in till kingdom come, but I still just have a bunch of bags with labels on them. All potatoes, no meat.”
    “Where’s the forensics kit now?”
    “Back at the station.”
    “You don’t usually send them through to State?”
    “No usually to it,” Bates said. “Never had occasion to use one of the things before. Fact is, we weren’t even sure where we’d put them.”
    “State said seal it, they’d pick it up when they got here.”
    “No identification on the body, I’m assuming.”
    Binaural nods.
    “And when you canvassed, showing a photo, no one knew him, no one had seen him. Just another of America’s invisible men.”
    Yep.
    I’d finished my salad and sandwich and drunk three or four cups of coffee—Thelma kept creeping up and refilling. Altogether too fine a waitress. Don Lee’s toast was crumbs on a plate and four empty jam containers with tops skinned back. Clots of yolk and a pool of runny ketchup competed on the sheriff’s plate.
    “What I have to ask is why you’re pursuing this at all. You’ve got a good town here. Clean, self-contained. Obviously this guy’s from outside, no one’s visible father, no visible mother’s son. Not a single city or PD I know, whatever size, would spend an hour on this. They’d write the report, skip it over the water into the files, move right along.”
    “Well, they’d be used to it, of course. We’re not.” Bates looked to the door, where an attractive, thirtyish woman in gray suit and lacy off-white blouse stood looking back. “Tell me that’s not our State guy.”
    “That’s not our State guy,” Don Lee said.
    “You know damn well it is.”
    As though to confirm, she strode towards us.
    “We don’t trip over bodies too often ’round here,” Don Lee said.
    “And when we do”—this from Bates—“they don’t usually have the mayor’s mail in their pocket.”

Chapter Six
    BASICALLY THEY DON’T get any more missing.
    It wasn’t a missing-persons case. In fact it was just about everything but a missing-persons case. Robbery, assault, murder. God knows what else. And that’s the way it got passed out to us: they don’t get any more missing.
    The Captain himself took roll call that day. Gentlemen, he said. Officers. Has there been a misunderstanding? When I asked that you pool your efforts and give your collective best, I had expected that you would understand this was to the end of finding the suspect. Instead you seem collectively to have lost him.
    There was laughter, uneasy laughter of a