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of the road.
    “Actually, we came in along the stream.” Cass motioned behind her, indicating the direction.
    “That explains your wet jeans.” Tasha approached the body slowly, then turned and looked at Cass, who held a camera in her right hand. “Start from here, this angle, and work your way around that way . . .”
    Tasha pointed to Spencer and said, “Either smile for the camera or move.”
    Spencer moved.
    “Blood on the inside of her thighs,” Cass noted as she snapped another shot.
    “She’s probably been raped. And grass stains on the backs of her heels, Burke.” Tasha pointed to the victim.
    “Which means she most likely was dragged for at least part of the way,” Cass said as she aimed the lens again. “Should be easy enough to find a drag trail if he came in from the road. Go take a look, Spencer, while I finish up here.”
    “You want to start on the road up there?” Spencer pointed to the area where the shoulder was widest.
    “I want to start all along this area. Go tell Helms and the others to space themselves out and begin looking for depressions in the weeds. Remind them to tread lightly, though. We don’t want to lose any evidence by stomping on it.”
    “They should know that,” Spencer said over his shoulder.
    “Yeah, they should. Remind them anyway. If there’s anything here, I’d like to find it before it’s obliterated by someone else’s footprints or by the rain they’re calling for this afternoon.”
    Cass continued to photograph the body for another ten minutes before turning her attention to the growth of cattails off to the right of the body. They stood as tall as cornstalks and as thick as blades of grass. Anyone coming through there would have left an obvious trail. She stood quietly and surveyed the terrain. Up there, off the shoulder of the road, was a stand of bamboo that could have provided some cover. She’d start there.
    There were tire marks from a dozen cars—possibly even from the cruisers—on the soft sandy shoulder, but she stepped carefully around them anyway. The bamboo ran for about twelve feet along the roadside, then dropped off into marshland where only rushes grew. They had yet to reach their full height, and to Cass’s mind, the logical place to walk if one was carrying or dragging a body would be right there at the point where the bamboo and the marsh met.
    Predictably, about ten feet in from the road at the point where the bamboo ended, the grasses were slightly tamped down into a narrow path, which continued for another twenty-five feet into the marsh and ended in a larger, more haphazard depression. Cass looked over her shoulder, up to the point where the path actually began, and could almost envision the scene as it had happened.
    He carried her from the car through the bamboo,
Cass thought,
then she must have become heavy, and he let her down back there, right where the weeds begin to bend. He dragged her down this far; the dragging of her body made the path, such as it is. Then he dropped her here.
    Why had he dropped her here?
    She stood for several long moments, listening to the light breeze set the rushes in motion. The body was fresh, the young woman hadn’t been there for long. Late last night, Cass surmised. She squatted down near the depression and studied it, looking for something that would help her to see what had happened here. It took her almost ten minutes, but she found it: two sections of reeds, bunched and broken, spaced almost two feet apart, at either side of the top of the depression.
    Cass could see the woman now, facedown in the marsh, her arms outstretched, hands grabbing on to the only things she could reach . . .
    She stood and walked back up the path to the road, snapping shots of everything she felt relevant, then she caught Spencer’s eye.
    “Got something, Burke?” Spencer called, and she responded by waving him over to where she stood.
    “I think I found the path the killer took into the marsh,” she said