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probably in his late twenties, with a strong upper torso and only the faint beginnings of a soft waistline. His hair had been carefully barbered, his fingernails were neat and evenly clipped, and, as I’d suspected at the gravesite, he was clean under his earth-soiled clothes, as a man might be who showered every day. The silver ring on his right hand was matched by a thin silver chain around his neck.
    Twenty-five minutes after we’d begun, Gould muttered a small “huh.” The body was on its side, and Gould was peering closely at something near the dorsal side of the right shoulder, out of my line of sight. While Gould had conducted his examination, I’d been noting details I thought might come in handy later, like the pale outline of a watch across the body’s left wrist—a watch now missing—and the labels from his clothing, from L.L. Bean and Land’s End, both upwardly mobile catalog stores. I’d also noted the bloodless dime-sized puncture Ernie Wallers’s soil-boring tool had left on the corpse’s right forearm.
    I raised my eyebrows at Gould from across the body. “What?”
    He smiled. “I appreciate your self-restraint, Joe. One of these days, I’m going to walk out of the room without saying a word, just to see if you’ll wait a few days for the written report.”
    “I’d shoot you in the foot first. What did you find?”
    He straightened and motioned to me to come around the table and look. What I found was a small reddish patch of skin on the shoulder, a perfect circle about a half-inch in diameter.
    “Bee sting?”
    “I’d say an injection site; it’s called a ‘wheal.’”
    I looked up at him. “So he OD’d on something?”
    He shook his head. “My guess is that he died of acute cerebral ischemia.” He smiled at my expression. “Which means the blood flow to his brain was shut off suddenly.”
    “Strangled.” I had noticed two bruises on either side of the body’s windpipe, but none of the standard transverse markings common to hanging, garroting, or throttling. Also, his face was pale and normal-looking, rather than bloated and flushed, as I’d come to expect in day-old strangulations.
    “Not in the sense you mean. He didn’t die of asphyxiation. The way I read it, his assailant placed a thumb on either side of his larynx and applied sudden pressure, completely blocking off both carotid arteries. He might also have hit the carotid sinuses and triggered what you’d call a heart attack. Either way, it was a pretty painful way to go, and slow, too. The face looks normal because the carotid veins weren’t cut off at the same time, so no blood built up in the head to make his features discolor.”
    Gould had placed his hands gently on my throat to demonstrate. I removed them, feeling slightly squeamish. “So the murderer was facing him.”
    “Presumably.”
    “Wouldn’t this guy have put up a fight?”
    “He may have tried. That may be where the injection fits in. Its location makes it all but impossible that the victim injected himself.” Gould lifted one of the lifeless arms and turned it stiffly so I could see the inside of the wrist. “Also, there’s a slight red band here, and a corroborating one on the outside of the other wrist, both of which suggest they were bound together at one point, probably just prior to death.”
    I bent over and studied the mark on the other arm. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I noticed a neat rectangular pattern of hair had been removed from the back of the wrist, just where the watch had once been. “Tape?”
    “I think so. I’ve made a note to Hillstrom to have the skin at those points analyzed for residual adhesive.”
    I straightened and looked thoughtfully at the body for a minute. Tyler had yet to carefully examine the dirt he’d gathered at the grave site, but I already knew he’d found nothing as obvious as a piece of torn tape.
    “There’s something else,” Gould added. “Normally, if a body were laid flat on its