"They should have put paper bags on her hands," she said. "I'll bag them when we're through." Carefully, overriding the automatic camera to bracket her exposures, Starling photographed the body.

The victim was a heavy-hipped young woman sixty-seven inches long by Starling's tape. The water had leached her gray where the skin was gone, but it had been cold water and she clearly hadn't been in it more than a few days. The body was flayed neatly from a clean line just below the breasts to the knees, about the area that would be covered by a bullfighter's pants and sash.

Her breasts were small and between them, over the sternum, was the apparent cause of death, a ragged, star-shaped wound a hand's breadth across.

Her round head was peeled to the skull from just above the eyebrows and ears to the nape.

"Dr. Lecter said he'd start scalping," Starling said.

Crawford stood with his arms folded while she took the pictures. "Get her ears with the Polaroid," was all he said.

He went so far as to purse his lips as he walked around the body. Starling peeled off her glove to trail her finger up the calf of the leg. A section of the trotline and treble fishhooks that had entangled and held the body in the moving river was still wrapped around the lower leg.

"What do you see, Starling?"

"Well, she's not a local-- her ears are pierced three times each, and she wore glitter polish. Looks like town to me. She's got maybe two weeks or so hair growth on her legs. And see how soft it's grown in? I think she got her legs waxed. Armpits too. Look how she bleached the fuzz on her upper lip. She was pretty careful about herself, but she hasn't been able to take care of it for a while."

"What about the wound?''

"I don't know," Starling said. "I would have said an exit gunshot wound, except that looks like part of an abrasion collar and a muzzle stamp at the top there."

"Good, Starling. It's a contact entrance wound over the sternum. The explosion gases expand between the bone and the skin and blow out the star around the hole."

On the other side of the wall a pipe organ wheezed as the service got under way in the front of the funeral home.

"Wrongful death," Dr. Akins contributed, nodding his head. "I've got to get in there for at least part of this service. The family always expects me to go the last mile. Lamar will be in here to help you as soon as he finishes playing the musical offering. I take you at your word on preserving evidence for the pathologist at Claxton, Mr. Crawford."

"She's got two nails broken off here on the left hand," Starling said when the doctor was gone. "They're broken back up in the quick and it looks like dirt or some hard particles driven up under some of the others. Can we take evidence?"

"Take samples of grit, take a couple of flakes of polish," Crawford said. "We'll tell 'em after we get the results."

Lamar, a lean funeral home assistant with a whiskey bloom in the middle of his face, came in while she was doing it. "You must of been a manicurist one time," he said.

They were glad to see the young woman had no fingernail marks in her palms-- an indication that, like the others, she had died before anything else was done to her.

"You want to print her facedown, Starling?" Crawford said.

"Be easier."

"Let's do teeth first, and then Lamar can help us turn her over."

"Just pictures, or a chart?" Starling attached the dental kit to the front of the fingerprint camera, privately relieved that all the parts were in the bag.

"Just pictures," Crawford said. "A chart can throw you off without X rays. We can eliminate a couple of missing women with the pictures."

Lamar was very gentle with his organist's hands, opening the young woman's mouth at Starling's direction and retracting her lips while Starling placed the one-to-one Polaroid against the face to get details of the front teeth. That part was easy, but she had to shit the molars with a palatal reflector, watching from the side for the glow through the cheek to be sure the strobe around the lens was lighting the inside of the mouth. She had only seen it done in a forensics class.

Starling watched the first Polaroid print of the molars develop, adjusted the lightness control and tried again. This print was better. This one was very good.

"She's got something in her throat," Starling said.

Crawford looked at the picture. It showed a dark cylindrical object just behind the soft palate. "Give me the flashlight."

"When a body comes out of the water, a lot of times there's like leaves and things in the mouth," Lamar said, helping Crawford to look.

Starling took some forceps out of her bag. She looked at Crawford across the body. He nodded. It only took her a second to get it.

"What is it, some kind of seed pod?" Crawford said.

"Nawsir, that's a bug cocoon," Lamar said. He was right.

Starling put it in a jar.

"You might want the county agent to look at that," Lamar said.

Facedown, the body was easy to fingerprint. Starling had been prepared for the worst-- but none of the tedious and delicate injection methods or finger stalls were necessary. She took the prints on thin card stock held in a device shaped like a shoehorn. She did a set of plantar prints as well, in case they had only baby footprints from a hospital for reference.

Two triangular pieces of skin were missing from high on the shoulders. Starling took pictures.

"Measure too," Crawford said. "He cut the girl from Akron when he slit her clothes off, not much more than a scratch, but it matched the cut up the back of her blouse when they found it beside the road. This is something new, though. I haven't seen this."

"Looks like a burn across the back of her calf," Starling said.

"Old people gets those a lot," Lamar said.

"What?" Crawford said.

"I SAID OLD PEOPLE GETS THOSE A LOT."

"I heard you fine, I want you to explain it. What about old people?"

"Old people pass away with a heating pad on them, and when they're dead it burns them, even when it's not all that hot. You burn under a heating pad when you're dead. No circulation under it."

"We'll ask the pathologist at Claxton to test it, and see if it's postmortem," Crawford said to Starling.

"Car muffler, most likely," Lamar said.

"What?"

"CAR MUFFL-- car muffler. One time Billy Petrie got shot to death and they dumped him in the trunk of his car? His wife drove the car around two or three days looking for him. When they brought him in here, the muffler had got hot under the car trunk and burned him just like that, only across his hip," Lamar said. "I can't put groceries in the trunk of my car for it melting the ice cream."

"That's a good thought, Lamar, I wish you worked for me," Crawford said. "Do you know the fellows that found her in the river?"

"Jabbo Franklin and his brother, Bubba."

"What do they do?"

"Fight at the Moose, make fun of people that's not bothering them-- someone just comes in the Moose after a simple drink, worn out from looking at the bereaved all day, and it's 'Set down there, Lamar, and play "Filipino Baby." ' Make a person play 'Filipino Baby' over and over on that sticky old bar piano. That's what Jabbo likes. 'Well, make up some damn words if you don't know it,' he says, 'and make the damn thing rhyme this time.' He gets a check from the Veterans and goes to dry out at the VA around Christmas. I been looking for him on this table for fifteen years."

"We'll need serotonin tests on the fishhook punctures," Crawford said. "I'm sending the pathologist a note."

"Them hooks are too close together," Lamar said.

"What did you say?"

"The Franklins was running a trotline with the hooks too close together. It's a violation. That's prob'ly why they didn't call it in until this morning."