Prusik quickly paid the cabdriver and leaned into a headwind, squinting. A well-defined anvil—a cumulonimbus cloud—loomed several miles in the distance, topping out somewhere high above the cruising altitude of a commercial jetliner. It was oppressively muggy, and thunderstorms were forecast. She’d flown from Chicago to the small Blackie Airport on United Express—a commuter offshoot swallowed by the major carrier to service the spread-out tracts of farmland and huge hardwood forests that blanketed the middle of America for hundreds of miles, bounded by the Mississippi two hundred miles to the west and the Gulf of Mexico nearly five hundred miles to the south. She stepped inside the FBI’s rolling laboratory, base for Bruce Howard and the team responsible for collecting and identifying forensic material recovered from the site where the body had been found. “Stuart Brewster. Nice to meet you, ma’am.” The field agent stood up from his small desk, where a laptop computer displayed a series of plot lines on a topographical grid demarcating the crime scene.
