was staring into a privy.

At one time chez toilette offered state-of-the-art comfort in human waste disposal technology: insect control, toilet paper, a spiffy one-seater with a flip-top lid.

All that was gone now. What remained were dried and shriveled pest strips, a rusted flyswatter, two nails driven into a board at sitting height, a pile of splintered wood, and a chipped and flaking wooden pink oval.

A pit approximately two feet square yawned through an opening in the floorboards at the far end of the shack.

The stench was familiar, bringing to mind privies in summer camps, national parks, and Third World villages. This one smelled sweeter, softer, somehow.

My mind added a string of expletives to those Ryan and I had floated during our walkabout with Boyd.

'Crap!' I said aloud for emphasis.

Not three months earlier I'd been up to my elbows investigating debris in a septic tank. I'd vowed never to slog through feces again.

Now this.

'Crap! Crap! Crap!'

'Not very ladylike.'

Larabee craned over my shoulder. I stepped aside. Behind us Boyd continued his frenzy and Ryan continued his attempts to calm him.

'But entirely apropos.' I slapped a mosquito that was lunching on my arm.

Larabee stuck his head into the privy, pulled it back quickly.

'Could be Boyd was just rocked by the smell.'

I scowled at Larabee's back.

'Could be. But you're going to want to check it out,' I said. 'Make sure no one's been pissing on Jimmy Hoffa.'

'No one's been pissing on anyone in here for some time.' Larabee let the door bang shut. 'The grand-finale whiz probably took place during the Eisenhower years.'

'Something's going bad in that pit.'

'Yep.'

'Suggestions?' I backhanded gnats from my face.

'Backhoe,' he said.

'Can we take a look in the house first, try to estimate when Farmer John splurged for the indoor pipes?'

'Find me one human bone, I'll have CSU shooting close-ups under the sink.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

A metacarpal came up with the seventh scoop. Joe Hawkins, Ryan, and I had been working the privy for three hours. Bucketful by bucketful, the pit was giving up its treasure.

That treasure consisted of shards of broken glass and china, scraps of paper, chunks of plastic, rusted utensils, animal bones, and gallons of deep, black organic matrix.

The backhoe operator would scoop, deposit, and wait. Hawkins would triage bones to one pile, household debris to another. Ryan would transport buckets of compost to my screen. I'd sieve and rummage.

We were growing optimistic. The skeletal part of the treasure looked strictly nonhuman and purely culinary. And, unlike Boyd's discovery at the McCranie hedge, the privy bones were devoid of tissue.

These animals had been dead a long time.

The metacarpal turned up at 3:07 P.M.

I stared at it, searching for something to allow me doubt.

There was no doubt. The bone had been part of a thumb. A thumb that could hitchhike, twirl spaghetti, play trumpet, write a sonnet.

I gave in and closed my eyes.

Hearing footsteps, I opened them. Larabee was circling the pile of wreckage that until hours earlier had been the outhouse.

'How's Boyd doing?' I asked.

'Enjoying a cool one on the front lawn. The chow's not bad company.'

Seeing my face his smile evaporated.

'Find something?'

I brought my hand up and positioned the metacarpal next to the base of my thumb.

'Damn.'

Ryan and Hawkins joined us at the screen.

'Damn.' Ryan echoed Larabee.

Hawkins said nothing.

The backhoe operator put a boot heel on the control panel, leaned back, and gulped bottled water.

'Now what?' Larabee asked.

'The digger's got a delicate touch,' I said. 'And the pit conforms pretty well to the shape of the shovel. I think we can keep going like this. Whatever's in there isn't likely to be damaged.'

'I thought you hated backhoes?'

'This guy's good.'

We all glanced at the operator. He looked like he could possibly be less interested. But only with the aid of serious pharmaceuticals.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The sky was now dark and menacing.

'How much longer?' Larabee asked.

'I've started seeing sterile subsoil in the last few scoops. We're close to the bottom.'

'OK,' Larabee said. 'I'll turn CSU loose on the house.'

He straightened.

'And Tim?' I said.

'Yeah?'

'This may be a good time to get homicide on board.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

We finished as drops began sputtering from the sky.

I raised my chin, thankful for the cool wetness on my face.

I was exhausted and incredulous. So much work, and just when I most wanted to be free.

Gran would have been unsympathetic. Born on the auld sod and educated by nuns, the old lady had a unique perspective on sex, particularly sex not sanctioned by the parish priest.

No marriage, no whoopie. In her eighty-nine years on earth, she'd never budged from that position, and to my knowledge, had never condoned exceptions.

Wrapping my arms around my waist, I watched Ryan bundle the animal bones into a Hefty bag.

I watched Hawkins seal the human remains in a plastic tub, pull a body tracking form from a zip valise, and start filling in data.

Address where decedent was picked up.

OK. We had that.

Decedent's name. Age. Race. Sex. Date of death.

All those lines remained blank.

Body condition.

Skeletal.

To be precise, a skull and mandible, three cervical vertebrae, and bones comprising the better part of a right and left hand.

We'd screened and rescreened, but that's all that turned up.

Hawkins matched the number on the tag to the number on the form, then dropped the tag into the plastic container.

I looked around. A human being had been killed in this place. The victim's head and hands had been severed and thrown into the privy, the body dumped elsewhere.

Or had the killing occurred at another location, the head and hands brought to the privy for disposal?

Either case was a common pattern. Ditch the head, ditch the hands. No dentals. No fingerprints.

But on a farm in rural Mecklenburg County?

I closed my eyes and let rain fall on my face.

Who was this victim?

How long had the body parts been in the privy?

Where was the rest of the corpse?

Why had two of the hand bones been buried with bears? Was the slaughter of the animals related to the killing of the human?

'Ready?'

Ryan's voice snapped me back.

'What?'

'Everything's loaded.'

When we circled to the front of the property, I could see that a white Taurus had joined the cars and vans on the shoulder. A large man was emerging from the driver's side, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

A tall, lanky man was unfolding from the passenger seat, feet splayed, long, bony fingers braced against the door frame.

Larabee exchanged a few words with the men as he and Hawkins passed them on the way to their vehicles.

'Great,' I muttered under my breath.

'What?' Ryan asked.

'You're about to meet Tweedledum and Tweedledee.'

'That's not very charitable.'

'Rinaldi's OK. Slidell wouldn't make the cut for Jerry Springer.'

Skinny Slidell exhaled a stream of smoke, flicked the butt, then he and his partner started toward us.

While Slidell lumbered, Rinaldi seemed to move by fits and starts. Standing six-foot-four and carrying just a little over 160, the man looked like a stilt walker dressed by Hugo Boss.

Skinny Slidell and Eddie Rinaldi had partnered for nineteen years. No one on the force could understand the attraction.

Slidell was sloppy. Rinaldi was neat. Slidell mainlined cholesterol. Rinaldi ate tofu. Slidell was beach music and rock-and-roll oldies. Rinaldi was strictly opera. Slidell's fashion sense ran toward the blue-light special. Rinaldi's suits were custom-made.

Go figure.

'Hey, Doc,' said Slidell, yanking a wadded hanky from his back pocket.

I returned the greeting.

'Ain't so much the heat as the humility, eh?' He ran the yellowed swatch across his brow, jammed it home with the backs of his fingers.

'The rain should cool things down.'

'Good Lord willin'.'

The skin on Slidell's face looked like it had been stretched forward hard then allowed to drop. It hung in crescents below his cheeks and eyes, and drooped from the border of his jaw.

'Dr. Brennan.' Rinaldi's hair was wiry thin on top, and stood out from his scalp like that of one of the characters in 'Peanuts.' I could never remember. Was that Linus or Pigpen? Though Rinaldi's jacket was off, his tie was meticulously knotted.

I introduced Ryan. As the men shook, Boyd ambled over and sniffed Slidell's crotch.

'Boyd!' Grabbing his collar, I yanked the dog back.

'Whoa, girl.' Slidell bent and roughed Boyd's ears. The back of his shirt was soaked in the shape of a T.

'His name's Boyd,' I said.

'No news on the Banks case,' Slidell said. 'Little mama's still AWOL.'

Slidell straightened.

'So you found yourself a stiff in the crapper.'

Slidell's face remained flaccid as I described the remains. At one point I thought I saw a flicker in Rinaldi's eyes, but it came and went so quickly, I couldn't be sure.

'Let me get this straight.' Slidell sounded skeptical. 'You think the bones you found in the grave come from one of the hands you found in the dumper.'

'I see no reason to think otherwise. Everything is consistent and there are no duplications.'

'How'd these bones get out of the dumper and in with the bears?'

'That sounds like a question for a detective.'

'Any clue when the vic was chucked in?' Slidell.

I shook my head.

'Any impression on gender?' Rinaldi asked.

I'd made a quick evaluation. Though the skull was large, all sex indicators were annoyingly intermediate. Nothing robust, nothing gracile.

'No.'

'Race?'

'White. But I'll have to verify that.'

'How confident do you feel?'

'Pretty confident. The nasal opening is narrow, the bridge steepled, the cheekbones tight to the face. The skull looks classically European.'

'Age?'

'Skeletal maturation is complete in the fingers, the teeth show little wear, the cranial sutures minimal closure.'

Rinaldi pulled a leather-bound notepad from his shirt pocket.

'Meaning?'

'Adult.'

Rinaldi jotted it down.

'There is one other little thing.'

Both men looked at me.

'There are two bullet holes in the back of the head. Small caliber. Probably a twenty-two.'

'Cute, saving that for last,' said Slidell. 'Don't suppose you found a smoking gun?'

'Nope. No gun. No bullets. Nothing for ballistics.'

'Why's Larabee cutting free?' Slidell tipped his head toward the parked cars.

'He's giving a talk tonight.'

Rinaldi underlined something in his notes and slid the pen into its slot.

'Shall we go inside?' he asked.

'I'll be there in a minute.'

I stood, listening to rain tick the magnolia leaves overhead, unconsciously putting off the inevitable. Though the scientist in me wanted to know whom we'd pulled from the privy, another part of me wanted to turn away, to take no part in the dissection of another murder.

Friends often ask, 'How can you constantly deal with the remains of death? Doesn't that debase life? Make brutal death commonplace?'

I shrug off the queries with a stock response about media. Everyone knows about violent death, I say. The public reads about the stabbings, the shootings, the airline disasters. People hear the statistics, watch the footage, follow the trials on Court TV. The only difference? I see the carnage closer up.

That's what I say. But the truth is, I think a lot about death. I can be fairly philosophical about the hard cases who do each other in as part of doing business. But I can never avoid the sense of pity for the young and the weak who simply happened to get in the way of some psychopath listening to voices from another planet, or some druggie in need of fifty dollars for a fix, or for the genuinely innocent who through no fault of their own happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were subsumed by events of which they had no understanding.

My friends interpret my reluctance to discuss my work as stoicism, or professional ethics, or even as a desire to spare their sensitivities. That's not it. It's more a concern for me than them. At the end of the day, I need to leave those cadavers cold and silent on their stainless steel. I need to not think about them. I need to read a book, or see a movie, or discuss politics or art. I need to reestablish perspective and remind myself that life offers much more than violence and mayhem.

But with certain cases, the emotional fire wall is harder to maintain. With certain cases, my mind loops back to the pure horror of it, no matter what rationalizations I make.

As I watched Slidell and Rinaldi walk toward the house, a tiny voice sounded in my head.

Be careful, it whispered. This may be one of the rough ones.

The wind kicked up, agitating the dried magnolia leaves and blossoms at our feet and whipping the kudzu into undulating green waves.

Boyd danced around my legs, looking from me to the house, then back again.

'What?'

The dog whined.

'You wimp.'

Boyd'll take on a rottweiler without batting an eye, but storms scare him silly.

'We going in?' Ryan asked.

'We're going in!' I replied in a Walter Mitty contralto.

I bolted for the house. Ryan followed. Boyd overtook us.

As I bounded onto the porch, the screen door opened and Slidell's face appeared in the gap. He'd abandoned the cigarette and was now chewing on a wooden toothpick. Before speaking, he rolled the toothpick with his thumb and index finger.

'You're gonna shit your Calvin Klein's when you see what's in here.'