Blout smirked. He thought he had one on me, as though the answer were so clear, so obvious. “Try opening your fucking eyes. You notice anything missing?”

I scanned the body again, stopping at the head. I leaned down and squinted into the open skull. Inside it was a clean white, as though the cavity had been scrubbed and bleached.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, and stood up straight.

“You see why I wanted you to come down.”

From the other side of the room, Mo’Lock emerged from the shadows.

“What is it?”

Blout and I spoke at the same time.

“No brain.”

The autopsy was conclusive: the skull was completely empty. There was no blood, no gray matter, and x-rays showed there were no breaks in the skull whatsoever. The brain stem was there, untouched, as though there had never been anything attached to it. The official coroner’s report called it brain death, but isn’t brain death when you’re still alive but a vegetable? How can something that isn’t there be the cause of death? I’d like someone to explain that one.

The strange thing was, I’d seen this before. Blout knew it.

“Remind you of anything, Cal?”

I nodded. This time Blout kept his mouth shut.

Mo’Lock walked right up to the table. He stood so close I could feel the cold of his flesh, his annoyance evident. “Excuse me, but I’d like to know what’s going on.”

I was staring at the floor, my head swimming in watery visions of distant memories.

4

It was one of my earliest cases, during a phase when I was doing some pretty hard drugs. I was still a mess from what had happened with my family. It had been only a few months since I’d been thrown off the force, but I decided to go into business for myself—what did I have to lose? The way I figured, if weird shit was constantly getting in my face, I might as well get paid for it. I managed to throw together enough cash to get the apartment that I use as an office, and soon after began getting a few cases.

Most of them were simple, basic demon possessions or hauntings. Other jobs were total fakes, people who thought their neighbors were Satan worshipers, vampires, and werewolves. Sometimes they were, but mostly they weren’t. I didn’t tell them that, though—I needed the cash. I had rent to pay and a bad habit to feed. Actually it was more difficult to cheat people than it was to deal with supernatural problems. I hated to lie, but cases involving the unnatural are pretty hard to find. It’s tough making a living off something people refuse to believe exists. Things have to get way out of hand before they seek help.

That’s what happened the day a guy named Edgar Cain developed a bizarre and dangerous ability. The police, at wit’s end, were forced to turn to me.

Edgar lived in a huge, four-hundred-unit apartment complex. He was a lonely man, keeping to himself and hiding in his apartment for weeks on end. He was employed as an accountant for a company that did telemarketing and was thus able to work from home. It cut him off completely from contact with others, insuring his solitude. All that loneliness right smack dab in the middle of a tower of humanity was the catalyst for Cain’s ability. Over the years I’ve found loneliness to be the source of many bizarre crimes and unnatural behavior.