Jenner straightened. “You guys got a camera?”

Nash, now somber, said, “No, sir, just the dashboard video.” Deb Putnam shook her head.

Jenner found his T-shirt and pulled out his cell phone. He stood over the body and took photos to document its condition.

Norris said, “You think he was killed, doc?”

Jenner ignored the question. He stepped back to get an overall sense of the victim. The swelling made the body look like every other badly decomposed body, the bloated features round and generic, like a pumpkin.

The victim was male, probably heavyset, maybe five nine, five ten. Caucasian—at least, nothing left to suggest he was any other race. Whatever hair he’d had on his head had slipped off; the chin still had clumps of short white beard. An older man, then. The eyes were bulging and leathery, the irises ruddy brown—who knew what color his eyes had been in life?

Jenner flapped the man’s shirt closed onto the torso. At first he’d assumed the man had lost a knife fight, but the shirt had no holes—it would have been open when the man was cut.

There were a dozen or so roughly parallel, raking cuts on the chest, vertical to oblique, each about eight to ten inches. During their time underwater, they’d flared open, and the bases of the wounds were bloodless and pale, filmy like some weird white algae. The incisions were very clean, obviously made with a sharp blade; since they were of different lengths, it was clear they’d been inflicted by multiple separate cuts of a single-bladed weapon. None of the cuts looked deep.

The rightmost wound was different: it descended along the victim’s flank as a straight line, but just above his hip it curved off abruptly toward his back, a pattern of broad scrapes interrupted by finer parallel lines. A big knife, then, with a regular blade, and alternating serrated and smooth edges on the back. It had to be some kind of Rambo weapon, but the wounds were unusual, even for a survival knife. One thing was certain: if Jenner ever saw the blade, he’d recognize it instantly.

Jenner tipped the head back; it moved freely, as if hinged, exposing a yawning hole across the upper throat.

He heard Deb Putnam murmur, “Oh my God…”

He turned to her. “You okay?”

She nodded quickly, slightly annoyed. “I’m fine.”

Jenner looked down at the neck. “The poor bastard—it looks like they tortured him, then cut his throat.”

Norris called over to Nash, who was by the patrol car, talking on the radio. “What’s the ETA on Crime Scene?”

“At least an hour—they’re all the way over by Dade, processing a burglary.”

“Tell them to move it—they know it’s a Signal 7?”

Jenner turned out the victim’s shorts pockets—empty, no wallet, no ID. No defensive injuries on the hands—most likely he’d been incapacitated somehow, bound or restrained in some other way. The legs and feet were also unremarkable.

Jenner felt a fleck of water against his cheek, and looked up. It had darkened, and the breeze was picking up. Across the canal, out over the Glades, the sky was a bruised purple-black, and the bare trunks of battered cypress trees, lit by the western sun, were bone-white over the brilliant green saw grass.

“Nash, tell Crime Scene they can just do the basics out here—we’ll take the whole car back to the ME office, and examine it there.”

The rain wouldn’t destroy anything the river hadn’t already taken care of. Fishermen were using the feeder road constantly and, because it was summer, it rained every afternoon; judging from the body’s condition, the vehicle had been in the water a couple of weeks, so any tire-mark evidence was long gone.

A look inside the car told Jenner nothing. A coffee cup and some pieces of white paper floated in the flooded foot wells, but there was no weapon, no bindings, no blood stains, nothing but the dank odor of decay and oily river mud.

He peered into the backseat; nothing there other than a broad sheet of sloughed skin stuck to the driver’s headrest, curling like used carbon paper.

Jenner started toward the cruiser, then stopped and leaned into the driver’s compartment to press the trunk lock.

The first spatters of warm rain were tapping the roof and trunk as he popped it open.

The body of a woman was stuffed inside. An older woman, white or Hispanic, with straight white hair, her dark, bloated flesh straining against the now taut clothes and loops of duct tape that bound her. Jenner caught a glint and looked closer; spilling out of her filthy brown shirt was a fine necklace. He reached into the trunk and lifted the chain. A pendant hung from it, and he turned it to see an elegant platinum fish hook, a gleaming diamond hiding the barb.

Jenner stepped back and sank to his heels, hands to his face, oblivious to the staring deputies and the ranger, oblivious to the sheeting rain.