“No, I just hate the word supernatural,” I said. “It implies some sort of otherworldly hoodie voodie and from my experience . . . the things I’ve confronted are very real­—flesh and blood and all that crap.”

She didn’t want to come out with it and I wasn’t about to make it easy. If she wanted to ask me about monsters, she was going to have to spit it out in plain English. I knew it was coming. It always did. These law enforcement types must run into more strange crap, but they always turn a blind eye. A man is found with giant holes in his neck and these pricks will call it a shooting. Who the hell shoots two perfectly placed shots into a guy’s throat and with no exit wounds? That’s what I call denial. It’s like they refuse to accept how dangerous the world really is.

Finally she sat back in her chair and tried to smile. Maybe she was about to ask me what she wanted to ask, but I cut her off at the pass.

“How long have you been a cop?” I asked.

She seemed startled by the question. “Seems like my whole life,” she said almost to herself more than me. “I come from a family of cops.”

“Are you the first to make Detective Lieutenant?”

“Um, no. I had a brother who made it. He was shot in the line of duty—”

“Sorry.”

“—and my grandfather made Captain.”

“So now that we got all of that out of the way,” I smiled again. “How about you tell me why you called me in here. I’m guessing it’s more than a shakedown.”

Now she grinned. Not much of one, but it was there. “You’re not what I expected.”

“Oh yeah,” I laughed. “What did you expect?”

“A drunken lout, I guess.”

“Wait until tonight.”

The air in the room was clear. She seemed relatively at ease. I didn’t know it but in about two minutes I was the one who would be on edge.

“We have a suspect we’re holding downstairs,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d take a look at him for us.”

I laughed. “Well, if you have a hold of him chances are he’s not my kind of freak.”

She stared at me. “He walked in here last night. He looked like, I don’t know, an accountant or something; glasses, sweater vest, the type of guy you see a thousand times a day and never think twice.”

I pretended to nod off.

“Except,” she went on, “this guy walked into the station drenched with blood.”

I opened my eyes. “Drenched?”

“Head to toe, like he’d swam in a vat of it.”

“Okay, you got my attention,” I said. “What else?”