Jenner glanced up at the autopsy room clock. Three p.m. He’d better get moving.

He’d picked up a battered twenty-five-gallon stockpot and a large heating ring from the Used section of the Southland Mall restaurant-supply shop. It was now installed at the far end of the morgue, under the principal exhaust vent. Half-filled with water, meat tenderizer, and hand soap, the pot had been sitting on the heating ring for almost a half hour, and was now steaming nicely.

Jenner cleaned the skeleton, carefully dissecting off the soft tissue, expertly exposing the underlying ribs and spine. He slowed: scalpel nicks in bone were finer and shallower than the sort of knife cuts he was expecting in the ribs, but he didn’t want to give the experts any room to accuse him of creating the injuries himself.

The reek had eased—his nose was now burned out on it. He leaned over the autopsy table, squinting as he stripped the muscles and ligaments from the junction of ribs and spine.

“Ha! Doc! You should see your face! You look like you just found roaches in your eggs…”

He looked up to see Flanagan grinning at him from the doorway, Rudge behind him.

“I told the detective maybe he oughta wait until you came up, but he wanted to come down anyway.” The morgue supervisor winked at Rudge. “Told ya!”

Jenner nodded at Rudge as he approached the table. “You okay with this, detective?”

Rudge shrugged. “The sweet smell of job security, doc. I’ve worked Major Crimes in this hot-ass county for five years, and was a deputy for another ten before that; not that I love it, but this shit doesn’t throw me.”

He gestured at Jenner’s black eye. “So, how’s your head, Rocky? You okay after yesterday? That shiner makes you look pretty damn hard…”

Concentrating on the table, Jenner muttered, “I’m fine. Just give me a second, will you…”

He’d severed the spinal column below the ribs, and cut the ligaments attaching the shoulder girdle to the chest on each side. Rudge watched Jenner open the joint at the top of the spine using short strokes with the tip of his scalpel, then cut around the top vertebrae to separate off the cranium and jaw.

Jenner straightened, placed the skull on the table, and put down his scalpel.

“Done!” he said brightly.

He lifted the headless upper-torso skeleton from the body bag, and carefully carried it down to the stockpot, Rudge following with a look of faint distaste. Jenner checked the thermometer in the pot, turned down the hot plate a little, then lowered the truncated skeleton carefully into the foaming water. The greasy bones slipped under the surface.

“Thanks for coming down.” Jenner put the lid on the stockpot, then looked over at Rudge. “Do me a favor—for Christ’s sake, spare me the ‘let’s get ribs’ jokes…”

“Not me, doc. That’s more the kind of crap you’d hear from Detective Bartley, or maybe the guys in Highway. I’m more about the subtle puns, the slightly uncomfortable race-based observational humor.”

Jenner led Rudge to the dictating room. He pulled open the desk drawer, fished out the small drug packet and put it on the desk.

Rudge said, “No thanks—I just had coffee.” He picked up the packet and looked it over. “What is this?”

“I found it in Marty’s car—he had one of those boxes where you stash spare keys hidden on the steering column deep under the dashboard.” Jenner hesitated a second. “To tell the truth, I didn’t know if I was going to hand it over.”

“I feel you, doc.” Rudge nodded. “But you had to—it’s the right thing to do. I have to say, I don’t figure Roburn for a drug user—I’ve seen that man at death scenes all hours of the day and night, and he’s always been a hundred percent. Anyone else have access to his car?”

“No clue. As far as I know, it was just him and his wife, and I doubt Bobbie even knew the hiding place was there—I’m pretty sure this is Marty’s. But I have no idea what he was doing with it. I mean, if it was from a case, why didn’t he log it into evidence?”

They stood looking at the packet.

Jenner said, “What do you think?”

“Powder cocaine or meth, probably. Maybe heroin.”

“It’s whiter than most heroin I’ve seen.” Jenner picked up the bag. “I’ll take it over to the Evidence Unit now and get it vouchered.”

Rudge shook his head slowly. “Tell the truth, I’ve been figuring that’s what this is all about—the Roburns, the bodies from the Glades. When people act out like this, it’s most always drugs.”

Jenner nodded. “So, that kid who called in the bodies said they were farm workers—you talked to him?”

“Adam Weiss? Bobby Bartley interviewed him. I’d like to talk with him myself, except now he’s in the wind. But we’ll find him.”

“You got people actively looking?”

“We’re stretched pretty thin, but we’re doing our best.”

He stepped out into the autopsy room, looked around, then turned back to Jenner. “Sheriff Anders told me to bring you up to speed on the investigation into Doc Roburn’s death.” He paused. “Such as it is.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Jenner sealed the shrink-wrapped packet in a clear Ziploc biohazard bag. He looked Rudge in the eye. “Marty’s not going to get lost in the shuffle, right?”

Rudge shook his head. “No shuffle. But there’s just five of us, and there’s a lot of shit to do. We’re tracking the Roburns’ whereabouts on the days leading up to their departure, we’re canvassing the farms for missing field hands, we’ve put up posters in Bel Arbre with rough descriptions of the clothing—you know that hardly anyone in the sheriff’s office speaks Spanish? But there’s not much news coming out on the hanged men, so now the press is finally waking up to the Roburns.”

He grinned. “I heard Mayor Reynolds tell the sheriff he doesn’t want to see some ‘Resort Town of Death’ segment on CNN—his actual words, ‘Resort Town of Death.’ Anders has authorized maximum overtime, and we got Highway pitching in to look for Weiss.”

“You think you’ll get something from Weiss that Bartley didn’t?”

“Maybe—Bartley’s good, I’m better. But maybe there’s not much to get. Guy doesn’t know much, I don’t think—doesn’t know the men who came to him, doesn’t know anything about them, says he couldn’t pick ’em out of a lineup. He’s a city kid, completely lost down on the farm. He’s trying to do the right thing, has a bunch of wild theories, but no definite information.”

“Like what?”

“Well, he thinks they were killed by other farm workers. Apparently, yesterday, kid was going around to the different estates, trying to interview workers—which doesn’t go down real well around here. You don’t want to piss too many people off up in Bel Arbre: the field hands may be second-class, but those farms are all either part of major agribusiness, or vanity projects for Port Fontaine’s richest citizens. Lot of old money up there in those drained swamps, son.

“Anyway, Bartley told him to calm down and let us do the work. I doubt we’ll get very far with the farms—the owners don’t want us on their property, the workers know it and won’t talk—particularly if they think they’ll get killed for talking.”

“And what do you think?”

Rudge shrugged. “He could be right. These people…they call them migrant workers, which sounds like some romantic Depression-era shit, but they’re really just cattle. They pay to get smuggled into the country like animals, work like dogs, make just enough money to cover their bed and their food and their beer, a few leftover bucks to send home…Call it what it is: it’s slavery, Jenner. Pure and simple.

“And do I think farm overseers could be handing out a little intimidation? Sure. It’s happened before, I’m sure it’s happening now. Even murder. But I figure there’s a lot more to it than that, here.”

Jenner nodded. “Particularly if Marty Roburn’s involved.”

Rudge scratched the back of his head. “Shit. You really think he’s involved?”

“It’s no coincidence he has the same injuries as one of the hanged men. More than one, I think—we’ll see once the ribs are clean.”

Rudge said, “The Roburns’ house is a wreck—looks like they were packing to leave, but someone’s tossed the place. It looks like they were looking for something but trying to make it look like a burglary—money and jewelry’s gone, but they left a laptop untouched on the bedroom dresser.”

“Had Marty done any cases from the farms recently?”

“Yeah, I thought of that. I went through the morgue logs with Flanagan—nothing sticks out. This winter we had a stabbing in one of the worker huts in Bel Arbre, and a guy got run over by a backhoe while they were digging a new septic. I’ll make it up to the farms in question to check it out, but it doesn’t sound promising.”

“Had he been on any scenes up there? Maybe he saw something.”

Rudge shook his head. “Nope. The stabbing guy died at the clinic in Bel Arbre, and Roburn didn’t respond to the backhoe thing.”

The door swung open, and the sheriff strode in, followed by a thick, hirsute man in a Highway Patrol uniform. Both wore white paper masks and moved gingerly, as if worried about being contaminated by touching something unclean.

Over the mask, the sheriff’s eyes were piggy little beads. “What’re you two gossiping about?”

Rudge shook his head and said, “Just catching the doctor up, sheriff.” He nodded at the Highway Patrol officer. “Gordie.”

Anders grunted. “Well, it’s my turn to catch you both up…”

He looked past Rudge to the stockpot. “What the hell is that?”

Gordie Cooper took a paper towel and lifted up the lid, grimaced at the stale reek of the steam. He picked up a ladle from the autopsy table and reached into the pot, pale bone billowing up in the gray water.

“Tommy, check it out—ribs!”

“Jesus! That’s disgusting…”

Anders stared at Jenner, then looked back at the stockpot; Cooper was standing next to it pretending to be a chef, waving his hand over the water as if wafting the scent to his nose. He nodded to Rudge.

“You making gumbo, Fudgie?”

Anders snapped, “Let’s talk in the hallway.”

Jenner and Rudge followed him out of the autopsy room, Cooper behind them. Anders pulled off his mask; Jenner saw the glisten of Vicks VapoRub on the sheriff’s upper lip before he caught the whiff of menthol.

Anders said, “What are you doing? I never saw Roburn do that.”

“That’s because they did it for him in Tallahassee. I need to see if there’s any marks on the bone. This is the safest way to clean them.” He shrugged. “I know Dr. Roburn never did it—I had to buy the pot and the heating ring.”

When he heard those words, the sheriff’s face reset, bulging into something ominously smug, lips pursing and cheeks puffed, like a sphinx with a terrible secret.

He began, “Well…”

Behind him, Cooper was smirking.

Anders said, “Well, Bobby Bartley just found out something pretty interesting: turns out that no South Florida cruise line has ever heard of Marty Roburn. No reservations, no tickets, nothing. It looks like Dr. Roburn was planning to get out of Port Fontaine alright—just not on a cruise…”