I RAN MY BEAM OVER THE INKY MATRIX.

The white inclusion was unquestionably a human hand.

The fill was rock-hard but crumbling at the exposed edges. I suspected asphalt. The size of the drum suggested a thirty-five-gallon capacity.

Thirty seconds of discussion, and we had a plan.

Warner and Jackson would stand guard while the rest of us returned to the management office. Though Jackson’s look said he’d rather be elsewhere, he offered no protest.

The clouds burst as Hawkins, Molene, and I picked our way back. We arrived mud-coated and thoroughly soaked.

To my dismay, two vehicles waited a short distance down the dirt road, motors idling, wipers slapping. I recognized the driver of the Ford Focus.

“Sonofabitch,” I said.

“What?” Behind me, Molene was breathing hard.

“Reporters.” I waved a hand in the direction of the cars.

“I didn’t talk to no one. I swear.”

“Their scanners probably picked up the radio transmission from the cops to the ME.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It’s Race Week.” I made no attempt to hide my irritation. “A murder at the Speedway would make splashy headlines.”

Seeing us, the reporters emerged from their cars and slip-slid to the checkpoint. One was a mushroom-shaped man holding an umbrella. The other was a woman in a slicker and pink vinyl boots.

The guard looked a question in our direction. Molene gestured “no” with both hands.

Denied access, the pair shouted through the downpour.

“How long has the body been out there?”

“Is it the kid who went missing from Bar Carolina?”

“Any tie-in to the Speedway?”

“Dr. Brennan—”

“Is the ME planning to—”

Hawkins, Molene, and I hurried into the office. The door slammed, cutting off the barrage of questions.

“Any chance it could be the Leonitus kid?” Hawkins referred to a young woman who’d vanished two years earlier after a night of barhopping with friends.

“How old is that sector?” I asked Molene.

“I’ll have to check the records.”

“Ballpark.” I removed my hard hat and vest and held them at arm’s length. Not that it mattered. I was dripping as much as they were.

“We stopped dumping in that area in 2005. That layer, I’d say late nineties to maybe 2002.”

“Then the vic ain’t Leonitus,” Hawkins said.

Or parts of her, I thought.

While Hawkins and Molene drove a motorized cart back out to retrieve the drum, I phoned Larabee. He said what I expected: See you tomorrow.

So much for lounging with my cat.

Thirty minutes later Jackson’s prize sat on plastic sheeting in the ME van, oozing muddy water and flecks of rust. Five minutes after that, it was making its way to Charlotte along with the Cabarrus County sandpit teeth and bones.

Officer Warner escorted me back to the interstate. After that I was on my own.

Between the downpour, rush hour, and the Race Week frenzy, vehicles were backed up to Minneapolis. Fortunately, that was opposite to my direction of travel, though westbound traffic was also heavy. While lurching and braking my way toward home, I wondered about the person we’d just recovered.

A whole body? A tight fit for a thirty-five-gallon container, but not impossible. Dismembered parts? I hoped not. A partial corpse would mean a return to the landfill for a systematic search.

That prospect was decidedly unappealing.

Friday promised a repeat of Thursday. Hot and sticky with more afternoon storms.

Wouldn’t affect me. I’d be stuck in the lab all day.

After a quick breakfast of granola and yogurt, I drove downtown. Or uptown, as Charlotteans prefer.

The Mecklenburg County medical examiner occupies one end of a featureless brick box that spent its early years as a Sears Garden Center. The box’s other end houses satellite offices of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Devoid of architectural charm save a slight rounding of the edges, the building is located at College and Tenth, just a hair outside the fashionable heart of uptown. Though plans exist to develop the site and move the facility, so far the MCME has stayed put.

Works for me. The place is just ten minutes from my town house.

At 8:05 I parked in the small tentacle of lot facing the MCME entrance, gathered my purse, and headed for the double glass doors. Across College, a half-dozen men sat or leaned on a wall bordering a large vacant lot. All wore the hodgepodge of ratty clothing that is the uniform of the homeless.

Beyond them, a black woman was muscling a stroller along the sidewalk toward the county services building, struggling with the uneven pavement.

The woman stopped to tug upward on her tube top. Her eyes drifted in my direction. I waved. She didn’t wave back.

Entering the vestibule, I tapped on a window above a counter to my left. A chubby woman turned in her chair and peered through the glass. Her blouse was sharply pressed, her hair permed and fixed primly in place.

Eunice Flowers has worked for the MCME since sometime back in the eighties, when it moved from the basement of the old Law Enforcement Center to its present location. Monday through Friday, she screens visitors, blessing some with entry, turning others away. She also types reports, organizes documents, and keeps track of every shred of information generated throughout the analysis of the dead.

Smiling, Mrs. Flowers buzzed me in. “You were a busy lady yesterday.”

“Very,” I said. “Anyone else here?”

“Dr. Larabee will be in shortly. Dr. Siu is lecturing at the university. Dr. Hartigan is in Chapel Hill.”

“Joe?”

“Gone to collect some poor soul from a Dumpster. Bless his heart. It’s gonna be another hot one today.” Mrs. Flowers’s vowels could have landed her a role in Gone With the Wind.

“Is the landfill body getting any attention?”

“Made the Observer. Local section. I’ve answered a half-dozen calls already.”

Mrs. Flowers’s tidiness includes not just her person but everything around her. At her workstation, Post-it notes hang equidistant, paper stacks are squared, pens, staplers, and scissors are stowed when idle. It is an orderliness of which I am incapable. Unnecessarily, she adjusted a photo of her cocker spaniel.

“Do you still have the paper?”

“I’d like it back, please.” She handed me her neatly folded copy. “The Belk ad is good for twenty percent off on linens.”

“Of course.”

“The consult requests are on your desk. I believe Joe placed everything in the stinky room before he left.”

The facility has a pair of autopsy rooms, each with a single table. The smaller of the two has special ventilation to combat foul odors.

For decomps and floaters. My kind of cases.

Good choice, Hawkins. Though the sandpit bones would be relatively aroma-free, there was no telling about the landfill vic. And I was uncertain how best to free the remains from the asphalt. Depending on their condition, things could get messy.

Passing the cubicles used by the death investigators, I checked the erasable board on the back wall. Five new arrivals had been entered in black Magic Marker. A newborn found dead in her bed. A man washed ashore at Mountain Island Lake. A woman bludgeoned with a frying pan in her kitchen on Sugar Creek Road.

My sandpit recovery had been designated MCME 226-11. Though the bones and teeth were probably those of the missing housewife, that assumption could always prove false. Thus, a new case number was assigned.

The landfill remains had been designated MCME 227-11.

My office is in back, near those of the three pathologists. The square footage is such that, were I not on staff, the space might have been used for the storage of buckets and mops.

Unlocking the door, I tossed the newspaper onto my desk, dropped into the chair, and placed my purse in a drawer. Two consult requests lay on the blotter, both signed by Tim Larabee.

I started with the Observer. The article was on page three of the local section, just six lines of copy. The byline said Earl Byrne, the mushroom guy I’d spotted in the Focus.

My name was mentioned, and the fact that remains had been transported from the Morehead Road landfill to the ME office. I figured Byrne had seen Hawkins and Molene load the drum into the van. Combining that with the radio transmission from the Concord cops, he’d decided the story was solid.

Fair enough. Maybe exposure would help with an ID.

I pulled a pair of forms from plastic mini-shelving on a filing cabinet at my back, filled in the case numbers, and wrote brief descriptions of each set of remains and the circumstances surrounding their discoveries. Then I went to the locker room, changed to surgical scrubs, and crossed to the stinky room.

The sandpit bones were on the counter, in the brown evidence bag in which I’d placed them.

The landfill drum sat atop its mud-caked sheeting on a morgue gurney.

Since the missing housewife was higher up the queue, I decided to start there.

After assembling camera, calipers, clipboard, and a magnifying lens, I accessorized with a paper apron and mask and snapped on latex gloves. No match for the hard hat and vest, but the look was elegant in its own way.

By ten-fifteen I was done. x-rays, measurement, and gross and microscopic observation revealed that the bones and teeth were compatible with the rest of the sandpit skeleton. Dental analysis would confirm the finding, but I was confident the parts I’d recovered belonged to the missing housewife.

And that she had indeed been murdered.

The hyoid, a delicate U-shaped bone from her throat, showed fractures on each of its wings. Such trauma almost always results from manual strangulation.

I was finalizing my notes when the phone rang in a cadence that indicated the call was internal.

“I have a gentleman here who wishes to see you.” Mrs. Flowers sounded flustered.

“Can’t Joe deal with him?”

“He’s still out.”

“I’m trying to focus on these cases,” I said.

“The gentleman says he has information that is extremely important.”

“Information about what?”

“The body from the landfill.”

“I can’t discuss that yet.”

“He thinks he knows who it is.” Hushed but excited.

“D. B. Cooper has finally turned up?” Snarky, but I’d heard this line many times before.

There was a moment of prim silence.

“Dr. Brennan. This man is not a crackpot.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I’ve seen his picture in People magazine.”