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“I think it was Johnson,” Junie said to Rich “I saw a sign e got off the highway”

“Jackson?” I asked “Was it Jackson?”

“Yes That’s right”

“You’re sure about that? I thought you said you drove up the coast”

“I’ to reet”

Chapter 14

THE TOWN OF JACKSON was known for its cowboy cookouts and craft fairs It also had a sizable du as the sun cooked the refuse Gulls and buzzards circled the trash dunes that filled our view out to the foothills

Sheriff Oren Braun pointed out the square acre of landfill he’d had cordoned off — the approximate section where waste had been unloaded at the end of January

“Soon as I got the call froovernor I had my boys on it,” Braun told me and Conklin “ ‘Pull out the stops,’ that’s what he said”

We were looking for eight black plastic garbage bags in a sea of black plastic garbage bags A hundred yards uphill, a dozenvery slowly through the three thousand tons of refuse piled twenty feet high, and the du handler, who followed behind his two cadaver dogs as they trotted over the site

I was trying to rim landscape I mumbled to Rich, “After three months out here, all that’ll be left of Michael’s corpse will be ligaments and bones”

And then, as if I’d telepathically cued thes alerted

Conklin and I joined the sheriff in stepping cautiously toward the frenzied, singing hounds

“There’s so,” their handler said

The hounds had located a plastic shopping bag, the thin supermarket kind I stooped down, saw that the plastic had been ripped, that the contents rapped in newspaper I parted the newspaper wrapper Saw the deco rereenish, the soft tissues eaten by rats, so that it was no longer possible to tell if it was a boy or a girl The date on the newspaper was only a week old