They drove north on I-55 into a darkening sky. Rudge had pulled the highway mile marker location from the call sheet, but the precise accident site was harder to identify. The SUV driver had been traveling northbound, so they parked the car a tenth of a mile before the marker and walked up the highway. They rounded a slight turn and then the road dipped downward.

The shoulders of the road were well-tended; Jenner had seen convict labor from the county jail mowing the roadsides, mostly black and Hispanic men in cartoonish black-and-white striped uniforms watched over by equally cartoonish mirror shades–wearing guards with pump-action shotguns. Beyond the grass road border was a continuous fence, overgrown by bushes and shrubs, which separated the highway from the fields a couple feet below.

Jenner peered over the fence. An irrigation ditch ran between the fields and the highway. Long rows of pale green bushes stretched off into the distance, those to his left hidden by covers. Shimmering in the heat before his eyes, a dozen or so workers were scattered across the field, dark clumps of cloth with heads covered to protect them from the sun. They were pulling up metal hoops and plastic sheeting, leaving the plants open to the sky. He squinted: strawberry plants.

Jenner checked his cell phone; still no call from Maggie.

Rudge, about twenty feet ahead of him, called out, “Doc, got some EMS stuff here…”

He was pointing to a purple glove discarded on the roadside.

A few feet further on, there were more gloves and detritus from the resuscitation; the wrapper from a disposable defibrillator electrode flapped listlessly against the fence.

“This looks like it.” Jenner glanced back down the road. “They’d have been coming this way, hit him, shunted him maybe twenty feet up toward us as they ran him over. And look over there—tire marks from the skid.”

They walked toward the fence, scanning the grass, reaching it without finding anything.

Jenner looked out over the field. There was nothing out that way, just the strawberry fields stretching out under the gloomy sky. An access road ran along the far side of the field, after which the grid of orange groves resumed, continuing all the way out to the Everglades.

He glanced back at the road. They were thirty miles north of Port Fontaine, and a good ten south of Bel Arbre; it was more likely the victim had come from the fields than walked along the road.

Unless he’d hitchhiked.

“So, what do you think, Jenner?”

“I don’t know. I doubt he was walking along the highway—maybe he comes from the fields. But why would he be out here late at night?”

His eyes searched the field, the road beyond it. “Doesn’t look like he’s left a vehicle behind.”

Jenner leaned over the fence.

“We should have a look on the other side.”

Rudge tugged uneasily on the wire at the top of the fence, then turned to Jenner. “Doc, you get on over and have a look around, I’ll see what I can find up on the shoulder here, on this side of the wire.”

Jenner found a stretch relatively free of shrubs, pressed the fence down, straddled it, and climbed over.

He looked up and down the bank, felt himself starting to slip, and took a couple of quick steps down, his foot sinking into the soggy mud of the drainage ditch before he hastily stepped up onto the field.

Cursing, he shook the water off his foot, then straightened and walked on the edge of the field, adjusting to the squelch of water in his shoe. He looked back up at the fence and stopped: the area where he’d climbed over was bordered on both sides by pretty dense shrubs and grass, but the greenery toward the right of where he’d crossed had been trampled and crushed.

Someone had been there, had stood there.

Jenner moved along the field until he was level with the flattened area.

There was no question, this was the area where…where what? Where the victim had been…forced to drink insecticide-laced wine? The whole idea seemed like a stretch—who would do that in an attempt to kill?

Maybe this was not some big mystery after all. Maybe this was just a suicide: some poor bastard, drinking by the fence, finds the insecticide, decides to pull the trigger, can’t face the taste straight so he mixes it with the wine, chugs it down, staggers out onto the road, passes out, bang, that’s all she wrote. Maybe Jenner was overreaching with the blood spatter. Maybe Cooper and Martin were right.

So where’s the bottle? Organophosphates can kill within minutes: if the man had drunk it himself, the bottle should be nearby.

Jenner looked up the slope. Nothing up there.

Maybe the bottle was out here in the field. He looked over to the workers—perhaps one of them had found it. After all, they’d been stripping up the row covers and had already processed this part of the field, so if there was a bottle, they’d have come across it.

Unless he’d drunk it out in his car, out on the road.

But again, no car.

Chances were that he’d have originally come from the feeder road, walked across the field and up onto the highway.

Jenner scowled—any footprint evidence would’ve been tamped into the ground during the day as the workers had worked their way along the rows.

He turned to look at the slope again, and froze.

Not three feet in front of him, he could see visible blood spatter on the crushed leaves and vines at the bottom of the rise up to the highway.

“Rudge!” Jenner took out his camera and bent forward. There was a single clot of dark purple-brown blood, perhaps an inch across, gumming several leaves together. As he stared at it, his eyes gradually resolved a halo pattern of sparse, irregular droplet spatter on the stems and leaves around the clot.

He knew that, reduced to two dimensions in a photograph, the pattern would be too spread out and uneven to be visible, but he was sure it was real.

And at the very least, the DNA analysts would have a field day with that little puddled clot.

A raindrop hit his cheek, and he looked up in surprise.

Within seconds, the rain was pelting down from a suddenly black sky, thick, cool drops spraying down, spattering and ricocheting off the leaves and the grass; Jenner felt he could almost hear the strike of each separate raindrop as it crashed down and destroyed his evidence.

Before he could even react, the central blood droplet was soaked, the matted leaves springing apart, the blood dissolved and cast off.

Out in the field, the workers looked up at the sky, then back down to the earth, and went on with their work, pulling up the row cover hoops and bundling the plastic.