painted cream, a brass pineapple knocker on the front door. Inside, I was greeted by clean, chilled air that was a wonderful relief and I knew why Investigator Percy Ring had chosen to conduct his interviews here. I bet he had not even been to the scene. He was in the break room, sitting with an older man in shirtsleeves, drinking Diet Coke and looking at computer-printed diagrams.

'This is Dr Scarpetta. Sorry,' Pleasants said, adding to Ring, 'I don't know your first name.'

Ring gave me a big smile and a wink. 'The doc and I go way back.'

He was in a crisp blue suit, blond and exuding pure youthful innocence that was easy to believe. But he had never fooled me. He was a big-talking charmer who basically was lazy, and it had not escaped me that the moment he had become involved in these cases, we had been besieged by leaks to the press.

'And this is Mr Kitchen,' Pleasants was saying to me. 'The owner of the landfill.' Kitchen was simple in jeans and Timberland boots, his eyes gray and sad as he offered a big rough hand.

'Please sit down,' he said, pulling out a chair. 'This is a bad, bad day. Especially for whoever that is out there.'

'That person's bad day happened earlier,' Ring said. 'Right now, she's feeling no pain.'

'Have you been up there?' I asked him.

'I just got here about an hour ago. And this isn't the crime scene, just where the body ended up,' he said. 'Number five.' He peeled open a stick of Juicy Fruit. 'He's not waiting as long, only two months in between 'em this time.'

I felt the usual rush of irritation. Ring loved to jump to conclusions and voice them with the certainty of one who doesn't know enough to realize he could be wrong. In part this was because he wanted results without work.

'I haven't examined the body yet or verified gender,' I said, hoping he would remember there were other people in the room. 'This is not a good time to be making assumptions.'

'Well, I'll leave ya,' Pleasants said nervously, on his way out the door.

'I need you back in an hour so I can get your statement,' Ring loudly reminded him. Kitchen was quiet, looking at diagrams, and then Grigg walked in. He nodded at us and took a chair.

'I don't think it's an assumption to say that what we got here is a homicide,' Ring said to me.

'That you can safely say.' I held his gaze.

'And that it's just like the other ones.'

'That you can't safely say. I haven't examined the body yet,' I replied.

Kitchen shifted uncomfortably in his chair. 'Anybody want a soda. Maybe coffee?' he asked. 'We got rest rooms in the hall.'

'Same thing,' Ring said to me as if he knew. 'Another torso in a landfill.'

Grigg was watching with no expression, restlessly tapping his notebook. Clicking his pen twice, he said to Ring, 'I agree with Dr Scarpetta. Seems we shouldn't be connecting this case to anything yet. Especially not publicly.'

'Lord help me. I could do without that kind of publicity,' Kitchen said, blowing out a deep breath. 'You know, when you're in my business, you accept this can happen, especially when you're getting waste from places like New York, New Jersey, Chicago. But you never think it's going to land in your yard.' He looked at Grigg. 'I'd like to offer a reward to help catch whoever did this terrible thing. Ten thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest.'

'That's mighty generous,' Grigg said, impressed.

'That include investigators?' Ring grinned.

'I don't care who solves it.' Kitchen wasn't smiling as he turned to me. 'Now you tell me what I can do to help you, ma'am.'

'I understand you use a satellite tracking system,' I said. 'Is that what these diagrams are?'

'I was just explaining them,' Kitchen said.

He slid several of them to me. Their patterns of wavy lines looked like cross sections of geode, and they were marked with coordinates.

'This is a picture of the landfill face,' Kitchen explained. 'We can take it hourly, daily, weekly, whenever we want, to figure out where waste originated and where it was deposited. Locations on the map can be pinpointed by using these coordinates.' He tapped the paper. 'Sort of similar to how you plot a graph in geometry or algebra.' Looking up at me, he added, 'I reckon you suffered through some of that in school.'

'Suffer is the operative word.' I smiled at him. 'Then the point is you can compare these pictures to see how the landfill's face changes from load to load.'

He nodded. 'Yes, ma'am. That's it in a nutshell.'

'And what have you determined?'

He placed eight maps side by side. The wavy lines in each were different, like different wrinkles on the faces of the same person.

'Each line, basically, is a depth,' he said. 'So we can pretty much know which truck is responsible for which depth.'

Ring emptied his Coke can and tossed it in the trash. He flipped through his notepad as if looking for something.

'This body could not have been buried deep,' I said. 'It's very clean, considering the circumstances. There are no postmortem injuries, and based on what I observed out there, the Cats grab bales off the trucks, smash them open. They spread the trash on the ground so the compactor can doze it with the straight blade, chopping and compressing.'

'That's pretty much it.' Kitchen eyed me with interest. 'You want a job?'

I was preoccupied with images of earth-moving machines that looked like robotic dinosaurs, claws biting into plastic-shrouded bales on trucks. I was intimately acquainted with the injuries in the earlier cases, with human remains crushed and mauled. Except for what the killer had done, this victim was intact.

'Hard to find good women,' Kitchen was saying.

'You ain't kidding, brother,' Ring said as Grigg watched him with growing disgust.

'Seems like a good point,' Grigg said. 'If that body had been on the ground for any time at all, it would be pretty chewed up.'

'The first four were,' Ring said. 'Mangled like cube steak.' He eyed me. 'This one look compacted?'

'The body doesn't appear crushed,' I replied.

'Now that's interesting, too,' he mused. 'Why wouldn't it be?'

'It didn't start out at a transfer station where it was compacted and baled,' Kitchen said.

'It started in a Dumpster that was emptied by the packer.'

'And the packer doesn't pack?' Ring dramatically asked. 'Thought that's why they were called packers.' He shrugged and grinned at me.

'It depends on where the body was in relation to the other garbage when the compacting was done,' I said. 'It depends on a lot of things.'

'Or if it was compacted at all, depending on how full the truck was,' Kitchen said. 'I'm thinking it was the packer. Or at most, one of the two trucks before it, if we're talking about the exact coordinates where the body was found.'

'I guess I'm going to need the names of those trucks and where they're from,' Ring said. 'We gotta interview the drivers.'

'So you're looking at the drivers as suspects,' Grigg said, coolly, to him. 'Got to give you credit, that's original. The way I look at it, the trash didn't originate with them. It originated with the folks who pitched it. And I expect one of those folks is who we need to find.'

Ring stared at him, not the least bit perturbed. 'I'd just like to hear what the drivers have to say. You never know. It'd be a good way to stage something. You dump a body in a place that's on your route and make sure you deliver it yourself. Or, hell, you load it into your own truck. No one suspects you, right?'

Grigg pushed back his chair. He loosened his collar and worked his jaw as if it hurt. His neck popped, then his knuckles. Finally, he slapped his notebook down on the table and everybody looked at him as he glared at Ring.