The street in front is empty. Rain-filled puddles are still rippling from the drizzle. Across from us are a few more buildings like this one and a trailer park several blocks over that we passed on the way in.

The wail of squad cars grows louder as they try to cordon off the area. I think we’re too late. I holster my gun and look up at the ladder. The rungs are rusty. It’s doubtful they’ll get a print off of it. But I decide not to climb up. I don’t want to chance it. Besides, they might get something from the metal sidings on the top.

Gimbal holsters his gun too. “You sure you saw someone?” he asks us.

Shannon nods.

“I know, I’m positive,” I reply. “I saw the shape and watched it move.”

Gimbal scratches his chin. “Could it have been a bird?”

Shannon and I ignore the question. His eyes scan the ground and come to a stop. Almost invisible in the darkness, it’s little more than a triangle.

Shannon squats, takes a pair of tweezers from his pocket and holds the object up to the street light. Blue cardboard, torn at the edge. He gives me a look. We both recognize it. I use the same brand.

“What?” asks a confused Gimbal.

“Memory card packaging,” I explain. “Everything was being recorded.”

Gimbal finally understands. “Reporter?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe our perp. Maybe a gawker.”

Shannon stands up and takes another suspicious glance across the street. “We need to check with all the drugstores around here. If they needed to get a card, it means they probably filled up the other one.”

A cold wind blows down the street as a police car races by. The rain has soaked through my sweatshirt. My FBI jacket is somewhere in the cemetery, a pile of ashes on a corpse.

Shannon makes a gesture to give me his jacket. I wave him off. I’ve dealt with worse. Cold doesn’t bother me. It’s only a sense. When Grandfather and Father first refused to teach me how to perform escapes, telling me that I was too young and that it wasn’t appropriate for a girl, they found me later that night in a motel bathtub, half frozen from all the ice cubes I’d packed in there to practice an endurance stunt.

“We either teach her, or we have to come up with a convenient explanation for her suicide,” Grandfather had remarked after they dragged me out of the tub.

I look back at the roof and think about the fact that we were being watched the whole time. Our reactions, everything. Somebody was studying us.

I hope there’s enough evidence in the body to tell us if it was a timed fire or something remotely activated. If it was done by remote, then I’d bet everything on our voyeur being the Warlock.

The problem is that he would be cutting things very close. He’s seemed smart so far, why would he risk being this near to us? One of the first things investigators do is scan the scene for potential suspects.