“That’s me,” I replied. “And I’d have double-parked the damn thing if there’d been no spot. I ain’t pushing a body down to the end of the street!”

Laughing, he gave me a wink and a thumbs up before he headed into the backyard. I grinned, spirits absurdly buoyed by the silly little show of camaraderie. Yeah, I was pretty easy to please. I tugged the stretcher and body bag out of the back of the van, kicked the doors closed and headed to the backyard, whistling as I pushed the stretcher before me. Crime tape was strung across the entrance to the backyard, and I enjoyed a dorky little thrill as I signed my name on the crime scene log before ducking under the tape.

We were in the backyard of a two-story brick house in the sort of subdivision that desperately wanted to be considered upscale but couldn’t manage to break out of slightly above average. Surrounded by a white picket fence, the yard was expensively landscaped—decorative trees and artistically placed clumps of flowers, a koi pond in the corner complete with a cute wooden bridge over it that led to an equally cute gazebo, and expensive-looking paving stones forming twisty paths throughout the yard. I’d long ago accepted that I would never live in a house like this. My backyard was landscaped with a couple of decrepit cars on blocks and an old washtub that held mosquito larvae instead of fish.

My whistling stopped when I saw the body. “Son of a fucking bitch,” I muttered.

Detective Ben Roth glanced at me and grinned. “Bit of a shocker, isn’t it? You gonna be okay?”

I nodded and plastered on a grim smile. “Of course!” I said with a nonchalant shrug. “Less for me to have to pick up.”

Detective Roth let out a bark of laughter. “That’s one way of looking at it!”

As soon as he turned away, I let the grim smile shift to a sour scowl. I wasn’t upset at the sight of the body. Or rather, I was, but certainly not because my delicate sensibilities were shocked. No, it was obvious that, once again, the universe was back to fucking with me.

This body had no head.

The second in a month. I let out an uneven breath. Okay, this was a good thing, right? I mean, not that someone else got whacked, but at least I knew there was no way I could have killed this guy. I didn’t have any gaps in my memory this time. And if the two murders are connected, then that totally clears me of the first one. I winced at the thought. Great. I was hoping for a serial killer.

It looked like he’d been lying down when his head had been hacked off. Deep gouges in the grass by the stump of his neck helped support that theory. I wasn’t a detective but even I could figure that much out. White male, dressed in jeans and a faded Pizza Plaza T-shirt. It was tough to tell his approximate age with the head missing, but the skin on the hands and forearms made me think he was somewhere between teenager and old fart.

The cops and Derrel would surely find it all interesting and informative, but I really didn’t give a crap about any of that. Now that I was fairly sure that I wasn’t an axe-wielding murderer, what I gave a crap about was the fact that if the head was missing, so was the brain.

And I was hunnnnnngry, damn it!

They weren’t ready for me yet, so I found a spot by the fence out of everyone’s way. There were about half a dozen crime scene techs in the back yard, but none of them seemed to be doing anything more interesting than taking pictures and measurements. Three detectives were clustered by the fence on the other side of the yard, peering intently at smudges of dirt on the white paint. Beyond the fence a petite, dark-haired woman dressed in brown fatigue pants and a grey T-shirt had a German shepherd on a long lead. She didn’t look like a cop, but no one was chasing them off, so I figured they were a search dog team of some sort. They must be looking for the head, I decided. That was probably a cadaver dog—trained to find dead bodies. I’d heard of them but never seen one except on TV. I watched them for a few minutes, but they weren’t doing anything very interesting, and I finally gave up and returned my attention to what was going on in the yard.

I could hear a female voice rise briefly in hysterical tones from the house, cutting through the crackle of police radios. After a couple of minutes of listening to the various buzzes of conversation, I gathered that the lady who lived here had discovered the body early this morning when she let her dog out to pee. A car with a Pizza Plaza sign on it had been found parked in front of an unoccupied house a few blocks away, and apparently the driver had failed to return from a late delivery last night. The victim was tentatively identified as Peter Plescia, the missing driver, though this needed to be verified with fingerprints.

I scanned the area for the missing head but didn’t see it lying conveniently nearby. Or even not so nearby. There weren’t any bushes that could conceal a missing head, and I even snuck a quick glance in the koi pond, hoping to see a face peering back at me, but there was nothing but a bunch of oversized goldfish darting back and forth. Then again, if it had been anywhere in the yard, the dog would surely have found it by now.

A stab of hunger tightened my gut, and I chewed a fingernail as I waited. Even with the disappointment of no-brains it was still kinda exciting to be here for this—again, exciting in a weird, morbid way. The guy’s head had been chopped off. That sure as shit wasn’t an every day thing around here.

The cops were excited too, which made me feel a little less like a sick nutjob. There weren’t many murders in this area, and hardly anything as lurid and sensational as this—especially twice in barely over a month.

The entire fingernail abruptly came off in my teeth. Crap! I quickly spat the fingernail out and hid my nail-less finger by my side, then plastered a smile on my face as Derrel approached.

“It looks like it’s going to be a few more minutes while they take some pictures of some footprints by the fence,” Derrel said. “Sorry. I probably could have let you sleep another half an hour.”

“It’s cool,” I said. “It’s actually kinda neat seeing all the CSI stuff.”

He tilted his head. “This is your first murder scene, isn’t it?”

“Yep. Got my cherry popped with a good one,” I said with a nod toward the headless corpse.

“This is definitely more exciting than some I’ve been to.”

“So, um, do the crime scene people ever do anything more—?”

He grinned. “Interesting? Cool? Full of neon and whiz bang chrome?”

I gave him a rueful smile. “Yeah. Is it always this boring?”

“Oh, no, not at all.” Derrel gestured to where a red-haired man who didn’t look much older than me was crouched and peering at the grass. He had on a jacket with SEPSO Crime Scene emblazoned across the back, and a scowl on his face. I’d seen him on scenes before. Nice guy who didn’t have a problem helping me get the occasional body into a bag. I remembered that his name was Sean though I had no clue what his last name could be. This was the first time I’d ever seen him not smiling.

“See that guy?” Derrel continued. “Someone found a cigarette butt back here, and so the major has stated that he wants any cigarette butts to be collected as possible evidence.”

My gaze slid to the back porch of the house, and I winced. “Dude. That’s stupid. There are ashtrays on the table. The people who live here smoke. They probably smoke out here all the time. What, they think the guy was enjoying a smoke while he cut the pizza guy’s head off?”

Derrel gave an emphatic nod of agreement. “Could be worse. I worked a murder a couple of years ago—happened in front of a house where a big party was going on. The captain in charge told the crime scene guys to collect all the empty beer cans in case there was a chance to use DNA to put a suspect at the scene. It was a big party. There were hundreds of empties. It was completely moronic, because not only would it have taken forever to get all the cans tested, but it would have blown the crime scene budget for the year to pay for it all. But the techs went ahead and gritted their teeth and collected the damn beer cans, because the captain told them to do so. The damn things are probably still in the evidence locker, unprocessed.”

I let out a sigh. “You’re shattering all my cool illusions about forensics.”

Grinning, he clapped me on the shoulder. “That took less time than I expected!”

“Fucker. So, is that dog looking for the guy’s head?” I asked. I was still hoping that it had been found and someone had simply covered it up or something so that it didn’t look so gross. Then again, no one had covered the headless corpse.

“That’s right. No luck so far though,” he said with a shrug. “Guess whoever whacked him kept it as a souvenir.”

“Ew.” I frowned. “Is this one like the murder that happened out on Sweet Bayou Road? And was that guy’s head ever found?”

“Yes to your first question, and no to your second. The cops are already having a field day coming up with theories.” He swiped a hand over his scalp. “At least we have a head start on making an ID on the guy here. Makes my job a bit easier.”

“The cops don’t do the ID thing?” I asked.

“Nope, it’s our responsibility, as is contacting any next of kin. However, we work pretty closely with the cops since they have the fingerprint systems and stuff like that.”

Someone called Derrel’s name and he glanced that way. “Looks like we’re up.” His nose twitched and his expression turned puzzled as he looked back to me. “Have you been handling decomps?”

Crap. My smell was worse than I thought. I gave him a grimace, thinking furiously. “Um, a cat died under my house last week. My whole bedroom reeked, and I guess it got into my clothing. Sorry,” I said with a grimace. “I washed it, but the smell really clings to it. I didn’t notice until I was on my way here.”

To my relief he seemed to buy the story and merely shrugged and walked off. I exhaled as I grabbed the body bag and headed to the corpse. I sure as hell couldn’t tell him the real reason why I stank like a decomposing corpse.