He took a breath. "Okay, what have you got so far?"

Rettig stepped a little closer. "Well, he was drinking last night at that bar down on the corner."

Slaughter squinted down the street. The Railhead. Where the stockyard workers went for lunch and after five. He nodded.

"He was drinking quite a bit. He stayed till closing, bitched a lot because they wouldn't serve him. Then he left."

"Was he alone?"

"That's what the bartender says."

"No one saw him after that?"

"Nobody I can find."

Slaughter glanced once more at the wallet in his hand, searching through it. "Two fives and a one. We know he wasn't robbed, at least." He brooded and turned to the medical examiner. "So tell me what your guess is."

"I won't know until I get him on the table."

"Hell, it's obvious," a man nearby them said.

Slaughter turned. He saw a young policeman. Red-haired, bothered by what he was staring at. His name was Hammel. Slaughter had hired him several months before, and now he guessed he'd have to start to teach him. "No, it isn't obvious. There are just three ways this could have happened. One: he was already dead when something came and ripped at him. Two: he fell unconscious, and it happened. Three: he got attacked while he was walking. Now if he'd been dead already, then we have to know what killed him. Someone might have slit his throat, and then an animal came by and smelled the blood." Slaughter kept staring at the young policeman who was red-faced, blinking, looking one way, then the other. Slaughter knew that he had shamed him, that he shouldn't press it anymore, but he was powerless to stop. "In case you haven't noticed, there's a difference between a dog attack and homicide. If that's what kind of animal to blame." He turned toward the medical examiner again. "Is that what you think did this?"

"I don't know. I'll have to measure all those lacerations. You can see there aren't any claw marks on the body. That rules out a cat or something like that."

"Cat? You mean a cougar?"

"That's right. Sometimes mountain lions come down here to the stockpens where the cattle are. But not too often. And certainly not lately. Not in twenty years. There aren't many cats around here anymore."

"You think it was a dog then?"

"That's my guess. I'll have to check to see, though, as I said. One thing that I want to look at are those pant cuffs. You can see where they've been torn. It could be something nipped at him and brought him down."

"Could be. On the other hand, they could be old pants that he didn't bother changing when he left the house. I'll send them to the state-police lab and in the meantime go around and see his wife about them." Slaughter was thinking that he'd have to go and see her anyhow, and then he didn't feel like talking anymore. He turned and saw the young policeman who continued to look flustered, his cheeks red, blinking.

"-never saw a thing to beat it."

"I did," Slaughter told him, trying to make up for how he'd spoken to him. "Back in Detroit, working homicide. Bodies one and two days old, bite marks all over their arms and legs, their faces and their necks. Rats in tenements. We got so we expected them. If we weren't out there fast enough, we sometimes didn't find too much. Just take it easy. A thing like this can throw you. Come to think of it, a thing like this can throw me too."

The young man nodded.

Slaughter nodded back. He turned to Rettig. "Go down to those houses on the corner. See what people know. Screams. A dog that's loose. Any thing they might have noticed."

"Right." Rettig hurried away.

Slaughter faced the medical examiner again. "We'd better call and have the ambulance brought out." He paused and watched as Rettig moved across the barren lot. "You know what I've been thinking?"

"I'm not sure."

"I'm thinking of that chewed-up steer we found by old Doc Markle."

"Some connection?"

"I don't know. But I can't shake the feeling something's wrong."

His name was warren. he was nine, old enough to sneak out from the house when it was night, but too young for the trouble he might get in. Now he waited for his mother and his father to stop talking in their bedroom. He crouched beside his partly open door, watching for the light to go off underneath the door across the hall. Once he almost panicked when his father came out toward the bathroom, walking back and stopping as if he might look in and check on him. Warren knew he couldn't make it to the bed in time. He crouched and trembled, but his father shrugged and went in to his mother, and the light went off, and Warren was fine.

He waited quite a while, or so it seemed to him, at least. He heard no noises in the room across there, and he guessed that they were both asleep. Cramped from crouching, he gently closed the door and straightened, his legs stiff, groping through the darkness toward the window. It was open, crickets sounding out there in the grass and among the bushes. He was just about to free the catches on the screen and set it to one side when he remembered. Here he'd gone to all the trouble making up a plan, and now he'd almost climbed out and forgotten. He turned to the right to touch his bed and pull the covers back and slip a pillow under there to make it look as if he was sleeping. He'd seen that trick several times on TV, and it seemed a good idea in case his mother or father peered in to check on him. Then he reached beneath the bed and felt around to grab the sack of crackers. He moved toward the window, took off the screen, and crawled out, his legs still feeling cramped as he eased down onto the porch and put the screen back in the window.

But it kept falling off, and he was forced to tilt it so the bottom angled out, the top part leaning on the frame. He studied it a moment. Then he turned and walked across the porch, climbing onto the rail and hanging down, fearful that his parents might still find him, letting loose and dropping, his stomach scraping against the wood that stuck out from the porch. He huddled in the bushes, rubbing his stomach. He wore the pirate top his mother had slipped on him when she brought him in to bed, him waiting until she left, then taking off the pirate bottoms, putting on his jeans and running shoes. He felt beneath the top and touched the welted skin across his stomach, tensing from the sharp, biting pain. That's all he would need is for his mother to see marks across his stomach in the morning. Well, he couldn't do a thing about it. He was out, and he might just as well keep going.

All the same, he crouched among the bushes several moments longer. He groped for the sack where he had dropped it when he'd slipped down from the rail. Then he had it, paper crackling beneath his fingers, and he froze. He glanced around to see if any lights came on inside the house, but nothing changed in there, and he was certain he was being foolish. If they hadn't heard him climbing off the rail and landing in the bushes, then they surely wouldn't have heard the noise when he touched his sack of crackers. What had really bothered him, he knew now, were the crickets. They had stopped their squeaking. That was how his mother had explained their noises to him.

Crickets made that sound by squeaking one leg across the other, and they'd stopped as soon as he had landed. In the darkness, every noise seemed extra loud, and now the silence frightened him. Well, if that was how this expedition would turn out, then maybe he should go back in the house. He'd been brave enough when he was planning this. Now that he was outside in the dark, he started getting scared. Maybe he should go back. No, he told himself. He mustered his resolve and straightened, the sack bunched in his hand as he stepped from the bushes.