THE TOWN OF JACKSON was known for its cowboy cookouts and craft fairs. It also had a sizable dump. It was just after noon, and the smell of rot was rising 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 from the governor 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 dozen members of the sheriff’s department were picking very slowly through the three thousand tons of refuse piled twenty feet high, and the dump foreman was assisting the dog handler, who followed behind his two cadaver dogs as they trotted over the site.

  I was trying to maintain some optimism, but that was tough to do in this grim 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 them, the dogs alerted.

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

  “There’s something in this bag,” their handler said.

  The hou............