Out in the Everglades, Jenner ran along the old canal road, pounding the four-mile stretch in the early afternoon heat. He’d been doing it most days for almost three weeks; at first, each breath had ripped out of his chest, jagged and wet, but now his body had its own rhythm, and his feet steadily beat the ground, working the bellows of his lungs. He could feel his body tightening, distilling down to muscle, sinew, and bone, an increasingly elemental structure moving over the earth, through the air, by the water.

Jenner was healing—not physically, the way the knife slash across his left arm had become a smooth purple scar, but the other healing, his body fusing with whatever particular metaphysical energy powered it across the surface of the world. He was becoming whole again; he was getting better.

He had told the staff at the medical examiner’s office to reach him by cell if they needed him. But they wouldn’t need him—they never needed him. Douglas County was a place where old money went to die, a place where no one ever died violently. At least, so everyone kept telling him.

Jenner saw no one for two miles, not even a fisherman. The Faxahatchee Canal was a straight line carved across the Everglades to contain the wilderness, to mark the start of farmland and tract housing. But on the far side of the dark water, the canal bank was crumbling and overgrown, now barely recognizable as man-made. The Everglades had fought back against the imposition of order, spilling over the edges, forcing through the boundary of concrete and blacktop.

On his runs, Jenner would pass white herons hunting frogs in the shallows, and packs of cormorants posing in the branches, facing the sun immobile, black wings like widow’s weeds draped wide to dry. And occasionally, on the far side, where smaller tributaries trickled sluggishly through the undergrowth into the canal, he’d catch sight of a gator, half-hidden in the dark, glassy gaps in the pale green lace covering of water plants.

The path ahead fell into shadow as the sun slipped behind clouds. Jenner’s mood shifted with the light, and, once again, he found himself running blind, the path, the water, everything falling back until he could see nothing but the man he’d killed. He carried the dead man awkwardly, trailed him along like a sagging helium balloon, the cord somehow entangled around his neck.

He’d talked about it with Dr. Rother, the government-supplied therapist he started seeing after 9/11. Rother said it was a stress symptom, chatter from his unconscious about something being wrong.

But Jenner didn’t understand why—he wasn’t afraid of that man, nor did he feel guilty for killing him. The man had been a monster. He’d killed one of Jenner’s friends and carved up another; he’d done it while Jenner lay gasping in front of them. And he would’ve killed Ana de Jong too.

Ana. The man had kept her prisoner in the warehouse for days, then hunted her like an animal through the decaying space, stabbing at her with a big iron spike. Jenner remembered her lying there on the couch afterward, too weak to cry as he plucked nails from her filthy skin.

Jenner’s jaw tightened. Thinking about what the man had done to Ana made it easier for Jenner to remember how he’d killed him. How he’d driven that spike through his chest and held on as the man rattled out his last bloody breaths. The way the spike shuddered with his twitches as he died. The heat of the man’s blood coursing down the iron to slick Jenner’s fists, locked white-knuckled to the cold, rusted shaft.

And the thing that scared Jenner was that, sometimes, it actually felt good.

There was a feathery squeak, and Jenner turned to see a blue heron take off, swooping low over the water, the long legs ticking the surface to set spreading ripples in motion. Or was it an egret? No, a heron: the guide at the Everglades park said herons fly with their necks bent.

The world flooded back in. In the distance, Jenner could see the East Farm Road bridge. He’d stop there, catch his breath, look for alligators in the water below. Act like a tourist.

Something was happening up ahead. As the canal path rose up to East Farm, Jenner slowed to a walk.

A sheriff’s department Special Response van was parked on the far side, and beyond it an olive-green SUV with the Florida State Parks logo. A tow truck was backed up to the water’s edge; by the truck, a uniformed deputy was shouting down into the water.

Jenner walked up onto the bridge to get a better look.

In the canal, a diver was bobbing next to the tow truck cable. The cable disappeared into the water, plunging toward a pale, ghostly shape that billowed faintly beneath the surface.

They were recovering a car.

The diver attached the cable to the frame or axle, then swam to the other side of the sunken car, grabbed the line, and dragged it down into the dark green water.

The hoist motor howled, and the steel cable stiffened, but the car didn’t break the surface. The diver popped up again to yell to the deputy on the bank; the driver cut the hoist motor.

“Dr. Jenner! Doctor!”

The deputy was waving up at him, the diver looking up too, treading water as he floated over the pallid shadow of the drowned car.

“We got a body!”