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Michael opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. “All good?” Faith asked.

"All good. The neighbor confirms that Penny was with her from seven in the evening until eleven in the evening. She walked home, and Tanya stayed up until one in the morning and didn't hear Penny's car start or Paul's car come home. What about you? Did you get a hold of the buddy?"

She shook his head. “I left a voicemail.”

“Do you want to ask Penny where the guy works?”

“Maybe. Not yet, though. I want to talk to the medical examiner first.”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have a problem with that, but I’m curious. I can see the wheels turning in your head. What’s on your mind?”

“I want to know a little more detail about the cause of death. We’ve got a good lead for the timeline of the murder, and we’re getting good information on the victim, but I want to learn about our killer.

I want to know what inspires him to kill a retired veteran and bury him in the middle of an archaeological dig. ”

"All right. I can't argue with that. We shouldn't keep Stan waiting for too long, though."

“We’ll visit him after we’re done talking to the medical examiner.”

“Sounds good. Where’s the ME?”

“Delhi. It’s a forty-five-minute drive north.”

Michael stared at her for a moment. "That's at least a two-hour trip, including the conversation. You're sure we don't need to talk to Stan first?"

Faith sighed. "You know, you can be really irritating when you're logical. How about this? We call state troopers and local PD and have them keep an eye out for Stan's vehicle. I can look his info up with the motor vehicle department."

“Damn. You’re really intent on this coroner visit.”

"It could just be another hunch," Faith said, "but I think the key to this case is the crime scene, not the victim.

I'm not saying Paul isn't important, but this crime scene is intriguing to me.

We have—as you pointed out—a mundane case in a lot of ways.

The guy gets stabbed, then buried in a national park at night when no one's there.

But then he's only placed in a shallow grave somewhere, and a lot of people are literally digging through the dirt.

I want to understand that contradiction.

If we understand that contradiction, or more specifically why it's not a contradiction to our killer, then we have our case. "

Michael shrugged. "Okay. You've convinced me again. Let's go talk to the doctor."

***

Delaware County had a population of forty-four thousand spread out over an area the size of Rhode Island.

Faith and Michael drove through a couple more villages the size of Hancock on their way to Delhi, but most of the land was empty space.

It was crazy to think that a place like this could exist only a few hours away from one of the largest metropolitan areas on Earth.

She wondered at the tendency of most people to cluster together in tightly packed communities that stretched the limits of the environment’s capacity.

Biologically, she knew that was an evolutionary tendency of all social creatures, but it was interesting to see such a stark visual representation, especially when that representation demonstrated the exception and not the rule.

But then, not everyone needed a crowd. Penny told them that they had a few friends here and that they liked their small village. As long as people had a few close companions to keep themselves sane, the desire for the presence of strangers seemed almost arbitrary.

But if you didn’t have those close companions, then it didn’t matter if you lived alone in the wilderness or in a high-rise apartment building with thousands of residents. Without a social web to center them, humans could very easily drift toward insanity.

The county building in Delhi was literally that.

A building. City Hall, the Sheriff's Office, the City Planner's Office, and the Office of the Medical Examiner were all in the same five-story red-brick structure.

The only free-standing entity was the Courthouse, which sat across the street from city hall.

Michael parked the SUV in the guest lot between the two buildings.

There were a dozen or so other people in view walking around the court and the hall.

A small population meant not much crime and not a lot of government meddling in people’s lives.

That was one of the great appeals of these not-metropolises.

A side benefit of that slowness was that the medical examiner was able to meet with them right away.

They took the elevator to the basement, and on the ride down, Faith pondered another human trait.

Where had the tendency to bury one’s dead come from, and why was it so prevalent in human culture?

Morgues were almost always underground, even if the bodies weren’t covered with dirt.

Was it a remnant of a long-dormant superstition that if the dead weren’t sequestered under the Earth, they’d rise again to haunt the living?

She put philosophical questions aside when she entered the ME’s office.

A barrel-chested man of about five-eight with a horseshoe of thick brown hair surrounding an utterly bald pate stood and extended his hand.

“Dr. Silas Ratner,” he announced, shaking Faith’s and Michael’s hands vigorously.

He waved at Turk. “Hello there. What’s your name, big guy? ”

Turk barked, and Faith translated for him. “He’s my K9 unit, Turk.”

“Love German Shepherds,” Silas replied. “Great dogs. My uncle had one, and it used to put up with a lot of crap from my sister and me when we’d come to visit.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “So. You’re here for Mr. Martinez.”

“Yes,” Faith said. “We’re investigating his murder. We wanted to get all of the details from you so we can have a more thorough understanding of our killer’s method.”

“Wonderful,” Ratner said. “Come with me.”

He led them out of the room, walking with a brisk, bouncy gait that suggested a much shorter man.

When they reached the morgue, Ratner whipped the drawer containing Paul’s body out with a flourish. “We don’t get a lot of these here in Delaware County,” he told them. “It’s a little exciting, I won’t lie.”

Faith was a bit put off by that statement, but she couldn’t blame the man for his excitement.

She felt the same excitement from time to time when working a case.

That sometimes made her feel guilty too.

Maybe it was better that Ratner—whose job was to look at the bodies of people who had died violently—was able to be more detached.

“Can you be more specific about the cause of death? The report we have only says that he was stabbed.”

“Of course, of course,” Ratner said, “Hancock PD compiled that report and sent it to everyone before they had any real answers. Not that I blame them. First forty-eight hours, and all that.”

Faith was about to tell him that the first forty-eight was a rule of thumb for missing persons, not murder investigations, but she stopped herself.

In most of her murder investigations, forty-eight hours was the average window of time before one of her unique brand of serial killers took another victim.

Ratner pulled the sheet back, revealing Paul’s body.

Rigor had released its hold on him, and instead of being stiff as a board, he was relaxed in the way only the dead could be.

Faith had seen numerous bodies disfigured beyond belief, but something about the deceptive peacefulness of this mostly whole man made the sight of his body even more disturbing.

“Cause of death, specifically,” Ratner said, “was a severed brainstem.”

Michael lifted an eyebrow. “A severed brainstem?”

"Exactly. Our killer sneaked up behind Mr. Martinez, clamped a strong leather-gloved male hand of average size around his mouth, and drove a single-edged blade into the back of his neck at the base of his skull. He then jerked the blade sideways to sever the brainstem."

He turned Paul onto his side, and Faith saw the red line of the entrance wound. It was barely a slit. No doubt it had bled copiously when he was killed, but now that Paul was free of blood and cleaned of any residue from the crime scene or the injury, it looked like little more than a papercut.

“Did he suffer?” she asked Ratner.

“Not at all. Probably didn’t even have time to register that he was being attacked. I’m not saying I want to be murdered, but if I was going to be murdered, this is how I’d want it to happen.”

Michael shifted uncomfortably. “Hey doc, we just got done talking to the victim’s wife. Can you lay off the humor a bit?”

Faith tilted her head. “Actually, I think you might be onto something, doctor.”

Both men looked surprised.

“I’ve been thinking about what burial signifies,” she explained.

“It could be that in the past there was a component of fear to it, maybe even superstition, but for most of history, burying the dead was a sign of respect. The swift death could be fear as well. The killer might have believed that he wasn’t a match for Paul in a fair fight.

Or it could be a desire to avoid making Paul suffer. ”

“Huh,” Ratner replied. “Well, you’re the detective, and I’m not going to try to be the ME who tells the detectives how to do their jobs. But since you bring up respect, I’ll share another detail I read on the CSI report. This guy wasn’t tossed into the grave. He was placed into it.”

Faith raised an eyebrow. “Can you expand on that?”

“Sure. When you toss a body into a hole, the body flops around and lands wherever it lands. Oftentimes, we’ll see postmortem injuries from that landing: bruises, tissue damage, torn ligaments, and even broken bones.

Here we see none of those injuries. In fact, CSI said his placement suggested that he was carefully lowered into the grave.

His legs were straightened, and they believe his hands were crossed over his chest. They don’t know that for sure, since the one hand was moved by the guy who discovered the body.

” He shook his head. “Poor kid. Talk about grade-A nightmare fuel. If you’re not used to dead bodies, anyway. ”

To be fair, Brad was used to dead bodies, just not as recently dead as Paul Martinez.

“Crossed over his chest like this?” Michael asked, making an X with his hands. “Like a vampire?”

“Well, yes, but that image of vampires comes from the way corpses were normally posed within the old hexagonal coffins. It was just how they managed to fit bodies into the smallest space possible. I guess what I’m saying is I don’t think this was a vampire fetish.

I think it was a sign of respect. Even the grave appeared to be dug with some care. ”

“How so?”

“The dirt was carefully tamped down. Not just tossed over the body. I gotta say, for a murderer, this guy seemed to care a lot about Paul Martinez.”

Faith and Michael shared a grim look. It looked like Michael might have been right about the urgency of speaking to Paul’s buddy Stan. “Thank you for your time, Dr. Ratner. This has been very helpful. If you think of anything else, please give us a call.”

“Will do. Good luck, agents. This guy might be nice as far as killers go, but it’s not really my kind of friendliness if you know what I mean.”

“Definitely not the kind of friend I’d like to have,” Michael agreed. “Have a good day, Doc.”

The agents hurried back to their car and hurried just as quickly onto the road back to Hancock Village. They had gained a lot of valuable information from this visit. Faith just hoped they hadn’t also given their killer a chance to escape.