"What have we got here?" I moved closer to bits of bone reminiscent of burned wood chips.

"A murdered woman. Her husband tried to burn her after he killed her, and did amazingly well. Better than any crematorium, really. But it was rather stupid. He built the fire in his own backyard."

"Yes, I would say that was rather stupid. But then so are rapists who drop their wallets as they leave the scene."

"I had a case like that once," said Katz.

"Got a fingerprint from her car and was so proud until I was told the guy left his wallet in the backseat. The print wasn't needed much after that."

"How's your contraption doing?" Dr. Shade asked Katz.

"I won't get rich from it."

"He got a great latent from a pair of panties," I said.

"He was a latent, all right. Any man who'd dress like that." Katz smiled. He could be corny now and then.

"Your experiment's ready, and I'm eager to take a look." Shade got up from his chair.

"You haven't looked yet?" I asked.

"No, not today. We wanted you here for the final unveiling."

"Of course, you always do that," I said.

"And I always will unless you don't want to be present. Some people don't."

"I will always want to be present. And if I don't, I think I should change careers," I said.

"The weather really cooperated," Katz added.

"It was perfect." Dr. Shade was pleased to announce.

"It was exactly what it must have been during the interval between when the girl vanished and her body was found. And we got lucky with the bodies because I needed two and thought that was never going to happen at the last minute. You know how it goes. "

I did.

"Sometimes we get more than we can handle. Then we don't get any," Dr. Shade went on.

"The two we got are a sad story," Katz said, and we were going up the stairs now.

"They're all a sad story," I said.

"So true. So true. He had cancer and called to see if he could donate his body to science. We said yes, so he filled out the paperwork. Then he went into the woods and shot himself in the head. The next morning, his wife, who wasn't well, either, took a bottle of Nembutal."

"And they're the ones?" My heart seemed to lose its rhythm for a moment the way it often did when I heard stories like this.

"It happened right after you told me what you wanted to do," Dr. Shade said.

"It was interesting timing, because I had no fresh bodies. And then the poor man calls. Well. The two of them have done some real good."

"Yes, they have." I wished I could somehow thank those poor sick people who had wanted to die because life was leaving in a way that was unbearably painful.

Outside we climbed into the big white truck with university seals and camper shell that Katz and Dr. Shade used to pick up donated or unclaimed bodies and bring them to where we were about to go. It was a clear, crisp morning, and had Calhoun's not taught me a lesson about the fierce loyalty of football fans, I would have called the sky Carolina blue.

Foothills rolled into the distant Smoky Mountains, trees around us blazed, and I thought of the shacks I had seen on that unpaved road near the Montreal gate. I thought of Deborah with her crossed eyes. I thought of Creed. At moments I could be overwhelmed by a world that was both so splendid and so horrible. Creed Lindsey would go to prison if I did not stop it from happening soon. I was afraid Marino would die, and I did not want my last vision of him to be like the one of Ferguson.

We chatted as we drove and soon passed farms for the veterinary school, and corn and wheat fields used for agricultural research. I wondered about Lucy at Edgehill and was afraid for her, too. I seemed to be afraid for anyone I loved. Yet I was so reserved, so logical. Perhaps my greatest shame was that I could not show what I should, and I worried no one would ever know how much I cared. Crows picked at the roadside, and sunlight breaking through the windshield made me blind.

"What did you think of the photographs I sent?" I asked.

"I've got them with me," said Dr. Shade.

"We put a number of things under his body to see what would happen."

"Nails and an iron drain," said Katz.

"A bottle cap. Coins and other metal things."

"Why metal?"

"I'm pretty sure of that."

"Did you have an opinion before your experiments?"

"Yes," said Dr. Shade.

"She lay on something that began to oxidize. Her body did. After she was dead. "

"Like what? What could have made that mark?"

"I really don't know. We'll know a lot more in a few minutes. But the discoloration that caused the strange mark on the little girl's buttock is from something oxidizing as she lay on top of it. That's what I think."

"I hope the press isn't here," said Katz.

"I have a real hard time with that. Especially this time of year."

"Because of Halloween," I said.

"You can imagine. I've had them hung up in the razor wire before and end up in the hospital. Last time it was law school students." We pulled into a parking lot that in warm months could be quite unpleasant for hospital employees assigned there. A tall unpainted wooden fence topped with coiled razor wire began where pavement ended, and beyond was The Farm.

A trace of a foul odor seemed to darken the sun as we got out, and no matter how often I had smelled that smell, I never really got used to it. I had learned to block it without ignoring it, and I never diminished it with cigars, perfume, or Vicks. Odors were as much a part of the language of the dead as scars and tattoos were.

"How many residents today?" I asked as Dr. Shade dialed the combination of a large padlock securing the gate.

"Forty-four," he said.

"They've all been here for a while, except for yours," Katz added.

"We've had the two of them exactly six days."

I followed the men inside their bizarre but necessary kingdom. The smell was not too bad because the air was refrigerator cold and most of the clients had been here long enough to have gone through their worst stages. Even so, the sights were abnormal enough that they always gave me pause. I saw a parked body sled, a gurney, and piles of red clay, and there were plastic-lined pits where bodies tethered to cinder blocks were submerged in water. Old rusting cars held foul surprises in their trunks or behind the wheel. A white Cadillac, for example, was being driven by a man's bare bones.

Of course, there were plenty of people on the ground, and they blended so well with their surroundings that I might have missed some of them were it not for a gold tooth glinting or mandibles gaping. Bones looked like sticks and stones, and words would never hurt anyone here again except for amputated limbs, whose donors, I hoped, were still among the living.

A skull grinned at me from beneath a mulberry tree, and the bullet hole between its orbits looked like a third eye. I saw a perfect case of pink teeth (probably caused by hemolysis, and still argued about at almost every forensic meeting). Walnuts were all around, but I would not have eaten one of them because death saturated the soil and body fluids streaked the hills. Death was in the water and the wind, and rose to the clouds. It rained death on the Farm, and the insects and animals were fed up with it. They did not always finish what they started, because the supply was too vast.

What Katz and Dr. Shade had done for me was to create two scenes. One was to simulate a body in a basement by monitoring the postmortem changes that take place in dark, refrigerated conditions. The other was to place a body outside in similar conditions for the same length of time.

The basement scene had been staged in the only building on the Farm, which was nothing more than a cinder-block shed. Our helper, the husband with cancer, had been placed on a cement slab inside, and a plyboard box had been built around him to protect him from predators and changes in the weather. Photographs had been taken daily, and Dr. Shade was showing them to me now. The first few days revealed virtually no change to the body. Then I began to note that the eyes and fingers were drying.