Kitabı oku: «Demon Hunts»
Praise for
C.E. MURPHY
and her books
THE WALKER PAPERS
Urban Shaman
“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist, magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”
—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series
Thunderbird Falls
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—RT Book Reviews
Walking Dead
“Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping, well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—and stubborn—shaman.”
—RT Book Reviews
THE NEGOTIATOR
Heart of Stone
“An exciting series opener…Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives.”
—Publishers Weekly
House of Cards
“Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series.”
—LOCUS
Hands of Flame
“Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read…. Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit’s world behind, at least for the time being.”
—RT Book Reviews
Demon Hunts
C.E. Murphy
Author Note
By the time Demon Hunts comes out in June 2010, you’ll have just missed the Brenda Novak Diabetes Research auction, which she runs every May. In 2009 I offered a “Tuckerization”—an opportunity to have a character named after a reader—in the auction, and will very likely do the same in future auctions. Please keep an eye on my Web site, cemurphy.net, for information about such opportunities in the upcoming years!
—Catie
This one’s for Tara.
(I think that’s enough apologizing now, don’t you? :))
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday, December 20, 4:34 A.M.
Someone had been chewing on the body.
Not something. Something, in the grand scheme of life, seemed like it would be okay. Things—cats, dogs, raccoons: choose your omnivore, I wasn’t picky—were expected to chew on dead flesh. I was no forensics expert, but I’d learned a few basics at police academy. For example, a bear stripped of its skin and missing its skull can so easily be mistaken for a skinned human that the exposed meat has to be tested in order to ascertain what kind of animal it had been. For another example, humans have a very round, even cusp to their bite that most mammals don’t share. So I was pretty confident it was a someone, and not a something, who had eaten part of Charlie Groleski’s left arm.
This was really not how I wanted to start the holiday season.
My partner, a holiday himself—Billy Holliday—swung down beside me. The Christmas carol he was whistling turned into a low long warble of dismay. “Looks like somebody ate him.”
“I’d noticed.” I rocked back on my heels—a dangerous endeavor, since I was halfway up a low cliff, standing on a semi-sheer rock face. I was roped into a harness that was secured at the top of the cliff, but leaning back still felt like asking for trouble. “Tell me something, Billy. How come we get all the exciting cases?”
“We don’t.” Billy crouched beside the body, his own harness squeaking and rattling with the motion. I edged several inches to the side and squinted nervously at the drop immediately to my left. Harsh white searchlights stared back at me, the generators powering them shaking all quietude from the morning. The lights made sharp shadows of our narrow ledge, enhancing my awareness that there wasn’t really enough room for two people on the ledge, much less two people and a corpse. “Daniels, he gets exciting cases,” Billy said. “Drug murders, Mafia turncoats, revenge killings. We never get that stuff.”
“You don’t think half-eaten dead guys stuffed into crevasses are exciting?”
He shook his head. “No. I think they’re weird. We get the weird cases, not the exciting ones.” He pushed up and wrapped a hand around his rappelling line for balance. “Groleski must’ve been dead from the time they called in a missing persons report, maybe before. Too many days. I can’t get anything from him.”
I muttered, “Crap,” and let the Sight wash over me.
Billy was right, if you wanted to get technical about it. He and I constituted Seattle’s only paranormal detective team, a truth which slightly less than a year earlier I would have pulled my tongue out before believing, much less uttering. We got the weird cases, the ones that could potentially have a supernatural element to them.
He saw dead people. Murdered people, more specifically. Their ghosts tended to linger, and he was the man they could turn to, if he got there within two days of their brutal deaths. Unfortunately for Charlie Groleski, that was too short a window to allow him an opportunity to offer insight as to who’d chewed him up and spat him out.
I, thanks to an unpleasant experience which had left me with a choice between dying or life as a magic-user, was a shaman. Once upon a time, my long-term plans had involved maybe opening my own mechanic’s shop. Instead, I was a healer and a warrior up at four in the morning, exhaling steamy breath into an ice-cold Seattle morning, on a case that wasn’t actually in my jurisdiction.
The department—city-wide, not just the North Precinct where Billy and I worked—was being as goddamned quiet about this case as they could. Murders happened. They increased around the holidays. That was part and parcel of modern city life, and had probably been part of every civilization all the way back to Cain and Abel. As far as I could tell, it was one of the things that made humans human.
But there usually weren’t a half dozen bodies found over the course of several weeks, all of them looking like they’d been pre-Christmas-dinner appetizers. Charlie Groleski had been missing for sixteen days, though aside from the gnawed flesh, his body was in pretty good condition. The media had started calling global warming “climate change” instead, and the longer, colder winters Seattle had been experiencing the past few years ran with that appellation. We’d gotten our first solid freeze in mid-November, and nothing had fully thawed out since, including poor dead Charlie.
Billy had his way of looking at a crime scene: through the deceased’s words, if at all possible. Mine was different, and I’d learned early on not to contaminate what my normal vision could see by accessing the Sight right away. Once I saw the world that way, it lingered, influencing everything else.
Winter, viewed through eyes that saw the breath and life pulse of the world, was heart-achingly beautiful. The earth itself lay dormant, a dark forgiving depth scored by brilliant pulses of light that were the living things traveling on its surface. Billy stood out as a flare of fuchsia and orange, and I glanced at my own hands to see familiar silver and blue dancing over my skin. Everyone had an aura, and their well-being could be read through that burst of color.
Whatever colors Groleski had once sported, they were long gone, swallowed by death. I wasn’t looking for them, though. I was looking for marks in the earth: anything that would show me something of the madman who’d killed and eaten half a dozen people in the greater Seattle area over the past two months. It took a god to actively obscure himself from the Sight, but time and the winter season could wipe away the traces a killer might leave behind. I’d never tracked someone in summer, but I had the idea that the softened earth would hold an impression longer. Someday I would probably find out if I was right.
Today, though, all I saw was the calm deep brown of the earth. There were no stains to accompany Groleski’s frozen body; he’d apparently been killed and eaten elsewhere, and only removed to this location afterward. Why anyone would haul a body halfway up a cliff was beyond me, except it was in keeping with the other victims. They were all outdoorsy types. Only one or two had gone missing while hiking or trail-breaking, but they’d all been found in haunts like the ones they’d loved to spend their lives in. Groleski’d been a rock climber.
“Walker?” A man’s voice rose up from below, floodlights too bright to let me see the speaker when I glanced down.
Not that I needed to. I dropped my chin to my chest and took a moment before shouting a response. “Sorry, Captain. I’ve got nothing.”
I was too far away to hear his exasperated sigh, but I felt it ripple over my skin anyway. I was good at disappointing Captain Michael Morrison. Some days it seemed like my only stock in trade. I could have lived with that, but this was the third time in a row I’d failed to come through on this case. At least the other two times he hadn’t been awakened at oh-god-thirty to call a dud shaman to a crime scene: those bodies had been found in daylight. This one should’ve been, too. Nobody in their right mind would be scouring cliffs at three in the morning, but Groleski’s brother had found the body. I guessed a family missing a member wasn’t in its right mind.
Billy jerked his thumb, and I leaned back from my stabilizing rope, bouncing the ten or twelve yards down to the ground. The harness became a Gordian knot under my cold fingers and Morrison’s gimlet eye, but the rope began to draw up as soon as my weight stopped holding it taut. The forensics team would be taking our place with Groleski’s body, now that the esoteric detectives had completely failed to see anything untoward. Some good we were.
Morrison waited for me to regain my balance, then folded his arms over his chest in expectation. The searchlights did him no favors, turning his silvering hair white and making the lines of his face deeper and more haggard. Even his eyes were pale and hard, as though deep blue river water had frozen into ice. “Am I wasting time pulling you two out here, Walker?”
Steam clouded around my head as I breathed out, an excellent physical approximation of the exasperation shooting through me. “Not any more than it wastes the forensics team’s time, boss. They haven’t found jack shit, either, but nobody thinks they shouldn’t be here.” I winced, not exactly an apology for my tone, but at least recognition that I should modulate it. I wasn’t at my best at four-thirty in the morning, which didn’t excuse mouthing off to my captain.
Fortunately, almost half a decade of mutual antagonism mixed up with more recent emotional complications had, if not inured Morrison to my smart mouth, at least prepared him for it. He managed to both ignore and respond to me, which took some doing. “Forensics works in this world, Walker. You’re supposed to have some insight into another one.”
I honestly didn’t know which of us was more astounded that he’d be saying something like that. Billy had always been an I want to believe freak, but until recently, all Morrison and I had had in common was a sarcastic dismissal of all things paranormal. Truth was, my boss had come around faster than I had. Less than two months after my first encounter with the world of weird, Morrison had demanded I do what I could with the Sight to help solve a series of ritual murders. I’d kept dragging my feet for months after that, trying to make my magic go away, but the captain had chinned up and expected me to use all the talents at my disposal.
I stood there gazing at him and trying to squeeze that revelation into my rigid little world view. I’d known he was too good a cop to ignore my skills if they might be useful, but somehow I hadn’t quite grasped the idea that he’d accepted my power before I had. Every smart-ass comeback I had died on my lips. “I’m sorry, boss. Everything’s frozen, even what the Sight can see. I’m not some kind of mystical Indian tracker.”
Morrison gave me a sharp look that I accepted with a groan. Technically, I was some kind of mystical Indian tracker. My dad was Cherokee, and not even I was arguing about the mystical part anymore. The only part where the description fell down was in tracker, which I manifestly was not. I’d proven remarkably poor at hunting down mythical bad guys—at least, poor at hunting them down as quickly as I thought I should—and had no idea if that was because my schooling was incomplete, or if I was just inept. I muttered, “Shit,” and for some reason the faintest smile cracked Morrison’s glower.
Billy rappelled down beside us and got out of his harness with a great deal more grace than I’d shown. He’d lost a good twenty pounds in the last couple months—dropping the baby weight, he called it; his wife had just had their fifth child—and moved more lightly for it, even though he was still taller than both Morrison and myself. “We’ve got to find a way to catch up with this guy faster,” he said.
“Like before he kills anybody else,” Morrison said, so flatly Billy and I both looked at him a moment. I’d heard Morrison’s angry voice plenty of times—usually directed at me—but this wasn’t outrage. It was helplessness, and that wasn’t something Morrison indulged in often.
Billy recovered first, tugging his rappelling rope to let the guys at the top know he was out. The rope and harness rose into darkness as he spoke. “You know the chances are we’re already too late for that, Captain. We’ve got at least two more missing persons reported, and we’ll be damned lucky if they’re still alive. But what I’m talking about is where Walker and I can help. This guy cleans up after himself. We haven’t found any DNA to work with, so Forensics is at a loss, and unless we get to a body faster, Walker and I aren’t much good, either. Even my resources outside the department—”
Morrison lifted his hand. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
Billy hesitated, glancing at me, then nodded once. “Yeah. Okay. Look, I’m sorry, Captain. Right now we’re at a dead end.”
I breathed, “No pun intended,” and Billy gave me a dirty look. I mouthed, “Sorry,” then flinched as my hip pocket began to ring. Billy glanced at his watch and arched his eyebrows, and I shrugged, taking a few steps away from my companions to wrestle my phone out. The number was unfamiliar. “Yeah, this is Joanne Walker.”
“Hey, doll. Where are you?”
I pulled the phone away to give it a sideways look, though a smile threatened the corner of my mouth. There was one man on this earth who could get away with calling me doll. “It’s pushing five in the morning, Gary. What do you mean, where am I? Where do you think I am?”
“Well, you ain’t at home, ’cause I called that number twice. And you weren’t sleeping, ’cause you never answer that fast when you have been, and you never sound this awake. You on a hot date, Jo?”
The threatening smile broke and I laughed. “You should be the detective, not me. No, I wish. I’m at a crime scene. Morrison called me a couple hours ago. What’s up? Where are you calling from? I don’t know the number.”
“I’m at dispatch.” For anybody else I knew, that meant the precinct building, but Gary worked part-time as a cabbie. I’d climbed into his taxi almost a year ago, and my life had quite literally never been the same since. Still smiling, I listened to him rattling on, waiting for him to reach the eventual point: “I was gonna cover for Mickey’s shift ’cause his grandkids are coming in today from Tulsa, but one of the other cars just called in, Jo. He found a dead lady at Ravenna Park.”
CHAPTER TWO
I snapped my fingers and gestured Morrison and Holliday over to me before Gary stopped talking. Both men creaked through the snow toward me and I echoed Gary’s words, looking back and forth between my boss and my partner. “A driver at Tripoli Cabs just found a body across from my apartment building, in Ravenna Park. The guy’s freaked out, says the body is still warm and it looks like it’s been chewed on.”
“Who the hell’s calling to tell you th—” Morrison broke off mid-question and bared his teeth. “Muldoon. Walker, have you been spouting off about cases to your octogenarian boyfriend?”
“Septuagenarian,” I said with a sniff. “Gary’s only seventy-three.” The boyfriend part didn’t bear responding to. Half the people I knew were convinced I was dating a guy old enough to be my grandfather, and I’d given up arguing with them. On the other hand, being haughty about Gary’s age gave me an excuse to not answer the bit about whether I’d been discussing cases with people who weren’t members of the police force. Not that it mattered too much. As quiet as the department was trying to keep the killings, after six weeks of missing persons and murders, the media was starting to take notice. “Are we going, or what?”
The look Morrison gave me indicated I had in no way actually avoided the question of whether I’d been talking about the case off campus. Still, he made a sharp gesture toward the distant parking lot and got on his phone to invite the forensics team to join us. I slipped my way down the hill with Billy a few steps behind me. Five minutes later we were in his minivan, both of us hunched over the heater vents in hopes of thawing.
I caught a glimpse of Morrison’s gold Avalon pulling out of the lot, and felt vaguely self-conscious that I’d had to ask Billy to pick me up. My classic Mustang, Petite, was in the shop, though even if she hadn’t been, the increasingly snowy Seattle winters weren’t good for her low-riding purple self.
It was a long drive back to our part of town. I watched out the window and Billy kept quiet, both of us stuck with what I bet were similar ruminations. Ravenna Park wasn’t a real outdoors getaway place, not like some of the other areas we’d found bodies. It was also the first time a victim had turned up within the North Precinct boundaries. That meant we were moving back into our own jurisdiction, but it also meant any kind of pattern we might have established had been obliterated. I considered hoping it was a separate case, and then cringed at the thought. We really didn’t need two cannibalistic killers.
We came down Brooklyn Avenue, a block to the west of my apartment building. Gary, leaning on the hood of his cab like a gargoyle protecting the crime scene, waved as we drove by. He was outside a police perimeter—the North Precinct building was only half a mile away, and Billy and I were far from the first cops to arrive—but didn’t look like he minded at all. Billy pulled up and we got out, me shaking my head. “It’s a quarter after five in the morning, Gary. You’re not supposed to be hanging out at crime scenes looking like somebody gave you a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.”
He put on a convincingly innocent expression and gestured to another cabbie, whose face looked green in the sallow amber lights as he talked with a couple of other cops. “Henley was all shook up. Thought it’d be only right to come down and give him some moral support.”
“Uh-huh. Morrison’s going to kill you, you know that, right?” I slipped up against the big old man and gave him a brief hug anyway. Gray-eyed, white-haired, and still sporting the linebacker build he’d had as a young man, Gary was essentially the kind of person I wanted to grow old to be. As far as I could tell, he’d never lost his sense of wonder. For a girl with shamanic potential lurking under her surface, I’d managed to thoroughly quench my own. Gary’d done his best to unquench it in the months we’d known each other, and I loved him for it.
He kissed my forehead. “Sure, darlin’, but some things are worth getting killed for. Hugs from pretty girls, f’rex.”
I grinned. “Did you really just say ‘f’rex’? I didn’t think people really said that.”
“You don’t think people call girls doll, either.” He let me go with a vocally solemn, “Captain,” that made no attempt at hiding the sparkle in his eyes. I turned to watch Morrison’s approach and tried to judge the integrity behind his scowl. It looked pretty credible.
“Good morning, Mr. Muldoon,” Morrison said with unexpected politeness. Possibly he didn’t blame Gary for me telling tales about work. More likely there was some kind of strange male ritual of respect or tolerance that had been passed when they’d fought together against an army of zombies. Billy and I had been there, too, but apparently we hadn’t earned the same free pass, as Morrison turned his scowl on us. “Walker, Holliday, quit screwing around and get to work.”
I flicked a salute that my boss would no doubt take as sardonic, and ducked under the police tape. “Yes, sir.”
Heather Fagan, the no-nonsense head of the North Precinct’s forensics team, told me exactly where I was allowed to place my feet, forbade either of us to so much as breathe on the corpse, and walked away grousing about contaminated crime scenes. Billy and I exchanged rueful glances and tip-toed to the body, both teasing and completely serious in our attempts to not pollute her working area.
For once I didn’t wait on Billy’s conversation with a ghost, and just let the Sight filter over my normal vision. The world brightened again, night and streetlights fading to inconsequentiality. I could navigate mazes and mountain passes blindfolded, as long as I could call on the Sight: it poured its own brilliance all around me, and even its shadows were places of light.
Still-warm or not, the dead woman coiled on her side in the snow didn’t have the slightest hint of color to her. Death wasn’t black: it was empty, a space of nothingness surrounded by the living world. Even that was an illusion, as all the little bacteria that helped a body decompose had life of their own. But as long as I didn’t look too deeply, I only saw a patch of cool gray nothing where she rested.
All around her, though, the earth was scoured with ridges of darkness. I called for a flashlight, tilting it down to illuminate the ground. Tall blades of dead grass stuck up and cast thin shadows, but there were no visible ripples in the snow to echo the lumps beneath it, nor any pressure from footsteps around her body. “Heather? How’d she get here?”
I could feel Heather’s glare from fifteen feet away. “She lives in the building across the street.”
Electricity shot down my spine and I jerked upward, staring first at Heather, then at the eight-story apartment building a couple hundred feet away. “That one?”
Heather turned to look at it. “Yeah. That’s what her driver’s license says, anyway. I don’t think she wandered out here to die. There aren’t any footprints, so somebody must have dumped her, but yeah, she died two hundred feet from her home. Her name was Karin Newcomb. University ID. I guess most of the tenants there are students.”
“Most of them.” My heartbeat rabbited hard enough I was surprised my voice didn’t shake. “Heather, that’s where I live.”
“Jesus Christ. Did you know her?”
I shook my head even as I tried to draw some hint of recognition from her profile. “I don’t remember ever seeing her, but there are forty apartments in that building. People are always moving in and out. God, how horrible.” Her death hit me harder, all at once, than any of the others had. Not because I was afraid it could’ve been me, but because I might have known her. The fact that I hadn’t was irrelevant. I found myself making a silent promise that we’d find her killer, like I’d been previously lacking motivation and only just now really meant it.
I said, “Shit,” under my breath and tried to pull my thoughts back to what Heather’d been saying before ID’ing the girl to me. That was the only way I was going to keep the stupid little promise I’d just made. “How did they dump her? There’s no skid marks, so she wasn’t thrown out of a vehicle. She looks like she was placed here, but there aren’t any footprints.”
Heather stalked back to my side. With her winter hat and boots on, she came up to my eyebrow, which made her taller than most of the women I knew. “I know. It’s been the same thing all over the city. No matter where we find the body, no matter how long we think it might’ve been there, there’s no indication that anybody carried it there. She hasn’t been dropped, either.” A circling finger encompassed Karin Newcomb’s form. “No spray of snow, and since neither rigor mortis nor the cold has set in, there should be some displacement of limbs if she had been. Instead she’s nestled up perfectly. It’s like—”
She bit her tongue on the last word: magic. “Yeah,” I said, willing to go where she wasn’t. “It is.”
I crouched, flashlight bouncing a long oval off the snow as I examined the scene with the Sight again. Individual flakes, loosely packed, turned into a river of blue glitter under my gaze, but even then I didn’t see footprints. Not in the snow, at least. The ridges beneath it, though, resolved into ten long narrow strips, five and five with a few inches of space between them. Roundish marks cupped the bases of both sets of ridges. I rocked forward in my crouch so I could feel the balls of my feet press into my insoles. Snow creaked under my boots, warning me of the impressions I was leaving behind.
Impressions that the killer hadn’t left. Somehow his weight had been transferred through the delicate crystals and into the earth below. “Heather, I need to scrape away some of the snow.”
To her credit, she only said, “Where?” instead of arguing with me. Up until very recently, if I’d been in her shoes, I’d have argued. Not for the first time, I gave thanks that the people around me weren’t as obstreperous as I was, then gestured to the curve of the dead woman’s back. There were other marks beneath the snow, but the crouched set had the most weight to them, as if they might last longer and give more information about what had left them.
Heather stepped forward, her aura a brilliant, efficient red. I put the flashlight in her hand with an apologetic grimace. “I know this is your job, but I’m afraid someone else’s hands in there might contaminate what I’m seeing. If something comes up, there’ll be plenty for you to examine.”
Her aura leeched toward ice blue, a color that became audible in her tone, too. “If something comes up.”
I sighed. “Yeah. I might be imagining things.” It was a better answer than it’s magic. Even if she’d heard the rumors about my predilections—and she had, or she wouldn’t have bitten off her magic comment a minute ago—normal people didn’t want their police work done by psychics and shamans. I suspected someone with a degree in Forensic Sciences really, truly and deeply didn’t want it’s magic as an answer for anything.
Heather exhaled sharply. I took it as permission and began brushing snow back from the frozen earth, trying not to disturb anything more than the narrow strips where I saw footprints in one level of my double vision. After a minute I scraped my way down to the ground, verifying that my eyes couldn’t see what the Sight did. I breathed a curse and shook my head at Heather. “There’s not going to be anything here that’ll do you any good. I’m sorry.”
“Then you can get out of my crime scene, Detective, and let my people get back to work.”
“Yeah, in just…” I stripped my glove off and slid my hand into the hollow I’d dug. A hillock of snow collapsed over my fingers, sending cold shivering through me.
It had nothing on the black ice beneath my palm. It sucked away my body heat with a willful vengeance, like it wanted to drag me in and abandon me in the cold. I jerked back with an ingénue’s gasp and coiled my other hand around my fingers. The ridges in the earth had flattened, like I’d put pressure on them. The notion that cold was all they were made of, and that my warmth had negated their chill, lingered in my thoughts.
Still cradling my hand, I pushed to my feet and turned in a slow circle, scanning the nearby earth for more of the narrow-toed footprints. Nothing: not on the ground, and not scored into any nearby trees. “It couldn’t just disappear.”
Morrison, a few feet away, said, “It?” and Heather drew herself up more stiffly.
I uncradled my hand and pinched the bridge of my nose with those fingers, half surprised they were willing to bend without shattering. “It. Him. Whatever. Billy, have you got…?”
God, how I’d changed. Billy and I usually retreated to The Missing O, a coffee and doughnut shop near the precinct building, to discuss the more unusual aspects of our cases. A few months earlier if anybody had told me I’d ask him straight out, in public, if he was getting a read on a ghost, I’d have sent some nice young men in clean white coats after them. I still wasn’t quite bold enough to spell it out, but none of us—not me, not Billy, not Morrison, and probably not Heather, since Billy’s fondness for the paranormal was legendary in the precinct—needed me to. We all knew what I was asking.
