“I…” Dez’s voice faltered on the first word as she saw the gore that was splattered on her legs and gun hand. She saw the squirming larvae and went into a hysterical fit, slapping the stuff off her clothes. “God!”

“Are you hurt?”

“No—help me the fuck up!”

JT hooked a hand under her armpit and pulled her out from under the corpse. Dez’s heels scrabbled at the blood-soaked floor as she backpedaled into JT. He lost his grip on her ten feet from the corpse, and Dez fell hard on her ass and sat there, staring, mouth open, shaking her head. Her gun fell from her hand and she made no move to pick it up; so JT did.

“What happened?”

His question seemed to be coming from another room; it was tinny and distant and Dez wasn’t sure if he was really there. JT came around and squatted down in front of her. His face twisted into a frown of doubt and he snapped his fingers the same way she had done to him—God, was it only a few minutes ago? On some remote level Dez understood that she was in shock, just as she was aware that she was thinking about being in shock. Her mind was fragmented as it tried to crawl away from the precise reality of what just happened.

“I…” Dez began again, but didn’t know where to go with it. She shook her head.

JT rose and helped Dez carefully to her feet, took her by the elbow and guided her across the room to a niche filled with filing cabinets. He still held her Glock in his other hand.

“Dez,” he said softly, “what happened?”

“She attacked me,” gasped Dez.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Listen to me, Dez … the chief and the forensics people are going to be here soon. We need to have a story. We need to tell them something they’re going to believe, so I need you to tell me what really happened. Why did you discharge your weapon? Was it accidental? No,” he corrected himself, “I heard four shots. We can’t sell that as accidental. Dez—did you see the perp? Did he come back? Is that what happened—you saw him and fired?”

Dez kept shaking her head. She pushed a strand of hair from her eyes with trembling fingers.

“Give me something, Dez,” pleaded JT, his eyes clouding with the beginnings of panic. “We have to make sense of—”

“She fucking attacked me!” snarled Dez.

JT took a step backward. He looked at her, his eyes searching hers, then he turned and looked at the woman. When he turned back, his eyes kept meeting hers and darting away.

“Dez…”

“No, goddamn it. That Russian bitch attacked me.”

“Okay, okay, I hear you. She attacked you. But … how?”

“What do you mean, ‘how’?”

“Come on, Dez … She was dead. She—”

“Of course she wasn’t dead, dumb-ass!”

“Dez, her whole throat was torn open. We both saw it—”

“Then we saw it wrong.” Dez took a steadying breath. “Look, JT, I did not imagine that woman tackling me, and I sure as hell didn’t put four rounds into her for shits and giggles. She. Came. After. Me.” She spaced the words, slow and loud.

JT raised his head into an attitude of listening. Dez heard it, too. Sirens. “Look, Dez, you know I have your back, right? That’s unquestioned. I’ll tell any story you want me to tell. Screw the chief and screw everyone else … but you got to give me something to work with. We can’t spin a fairy tale.”

“JT…”

“They’re going to blood test you,” he said. He dropped the magazine and ejected the round from the chamber, then thumbed the round back into the magazine and slid it back into the receiver. He didn’t return her weapon, however. “What’s your blood alcohol—”

“Fuck you.”

“No,” he said firmly. “Don’t close me out. I’m on your side, remember? How many ways do I have to say it? But you have to tell me what happened here.”

Dez pointed a finger at the corpse.

“She could not have been dead, JT. No way. I don’t care how it looked. We made a bad call on that. You want a story, then that’s the story, and it’s the truth. She tried to fucking bite me.”

“Bite you,” JT repeated without inflection. He crossed to the corpse, squatted down and touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek, her forearm, the inside of her wrist. As he rose he flicked back toward the prep room where Doc Hartnup lay. He walked back slowly to Dez, his dark features lined with concern and doubt.

“Yes, she tried to bite me. Guess biting’s a frigging theme around here.”

“Her skin’s pretty cold, Dez.”

“I don’t care if she’s packed in ice, JT. She had me pinned down and I punched the shit out of her and told her to back down and I might as well have been pissing up a rope. She came after me and tried to tear my throat out.”

“So you shot her.”

“Yes, I fucking shot her.”

“An unarmed woman.”

“Yes,” Dez snapped.

“A seriously injured unarmed woman.”

“Ah—Christ, JT.”

The sirens were close. Turning off of the highway onto the access road.

“You shot her four times, Dez. How many shots does it take to—”

Dez suddenly shoved him, and JT staggered backward into the row of filing cabinets. A vase of gardenias fell off and smashed on the edge of a secretary’s desk. Before he could recover his balance, Dez snatched her Glock out of his hands and shoved it into her holster.

“I never thought you’d turn on me, JT,” she said bitterly. She wanted to punch him, to knock him down and stomp on him. She wanted to cry, too, but she would eat her own gun before she’d do that on the job. Even after what just happened.

JT got slowly to his feet, his eyes flicking from her face to her gun hand. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Dez. You’re acting irrational here and—”

“I’m perfectly rational. I didn’t lose it and I’m not drunk. Or hopped up on anything. You want to Breathalyze me? Fine, and when it comes up clean I’m going to shove it up your ass.”

“Calm down, Dez. I didn’t say—”

The sirens were right outside now, the wails filling the room with implications. Dez closed her eyes for a moment as she heard car doors open and feet crunch on the gravel. Voices began yelling as the front and back doors banged open and officers from Stebbins and two neighboring towns flooded into the mortuary.

“Dez,” JT said slowly, “you know what they’re going to say. They’re going to look at the body. They’re going to take her temperature and test lividity and do the science that’s going to show how long she’s been dead. And then they’re going to match that against our response time on the call logs. Then they’re going to look at those bullet wounds.”

“So what? Let them look!”

“Come on, Dez.… You shot her four times. How come none of the wounds bled?”

Dez took an involuntary step back as if JT had punched her. “What?”

JT pointed. “Corpses don’t bleed. Either you killed her on the first shot, in which case they’re going to want to know why you kept shooting—and from different angles and distances—or you killed her with the head shots and they’re going to ask you to explain why the perpetrator you shot in the chest didn’t bleed.” He shook his head, and his voice had a pleading note to it. “What do we tell them, Dez?”

There didn’t seem to be enough air to breathe, and Dez could not answer his questions. Her chest was tight with tension, her heart hammered with fear. She looked down at the dead woman, following the line of gaze of the arriving officers, seeing the extremity of the violence. Seeing the blood and pieces of human debris as if through their eyes.

Jesus Christ, she thought, this is it for me. If JT doesn’t believe me, then no one will.

Wild panic flared in her, and she looked around as if hoping to see a door marked “EXIT.” But one door led back to the charnel house of the prep room and the other was the route a killer had used to flee this insane crime scene.

Then that door suddenly opened and Chief Martin Goss waddled through the door from the prep room and into the office. He was a short, fat man with boiled red skin that was permanently coated with hypertensive sweat.

Goss’s eyes went from JT to Dez to the corpse and back again. He looked at the gore splattered on Dez’s uniform.

“Holy Jesus jumped-up Christ,” he said. “Dez—are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she mumbled.

“You sure? We have paramedics inbound—”

She nodded. “I’m good, Chief. Just shook up.”

“JT?”

“I’m fine. I was outside when this went down.”

Goss licked his lips. “Your call-in said that there was a suspect on foot?”

JT showed him the tracks of the bloody bare feet. “Prints disappear near the edge of the lawn. Looks like the suspect was heading west, but that’s a guess.”

Goss nodded curtly, clicked his shoulder mike and relayed the information to the rest of the team, ordering a search and advising extreme caution. He also called the state police and requested their assistance. The staties had more men and they had choppers. Other officers, including Paul Scott, the county’s forensics officer, flooded into the place. Scott flicked a brief glance at JT and Dez and then went into the other room, his evidence collection bag in hand.

Then Goss turned back to JT and Dez. “Okay … now tell me everything that happened.”

Dez started to speak, but her words came out in a jumble. She could hear the panic in her own voice.

JT stepped in and took a swing at it. Despite his earlier reactions, he appeared to have reclaimed his calm, and he gave the report in quick, clinical police jargon, from the moment they parked the car, to the handprint in the utility room, to finding Doc Hartnup’s body. Goss’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but he didn’t interrupt; Dez watched his face, trying to read him.