Excerpt: working title -- Small Worlds

Sharlyse emptied the man's pockets into a pile next to the body and checked his face and hands. There were no tells around his mouth or on his nails. She opened his gray button down shirt and felt for suspicious softness of bumps: nothing. So far, not good. She unzipped his pants and hesitated. Connor's soft bark of laugh moved her forward. It was the small details that made the lie, not the big ones. There was nothing suspicious in the flesh but there was a faint crackle that turned out to be actual paper on the inside leg of the dead man's khaki pants. The folded paper, papers, were inside a plastic pocket that kept them safe from creases or sweat staining.
A spike of adrenaline hit the backs of Sharlyse's eye sockets. Not an official courrier then. "Let's put him in the kiln and be done with it."
"It's not fired up until the day after tomorrow."
"I was joking."
"I wasn't."