I pushed my head under the freezing water and left it there. Susan hadn't said they were together. Neither had he. I mean, that wouldn't be why she had broken off the kiss. She had a really good reason to do that, after all.

But then again, it wasn't like we were together. She'd been gone for better than a year.

A lot can change in a year.

Her mouth hadn't. Or her hands. Or the curve of her body. Or the smoldering sensuality of her eyes. Or the soft sounds she made as she arched against me, her body begging me to-

I looked down at myself, sighed, and turned the water to its coldest setting.

I came out of the shower shriveled and turning blue, dried off, and got into bed.

I had just managed to get the covers warm so that I could stop shivering when my phone rang.

I swore sulfurously, got out of bed into the freezing air, snatched up the phone, and growled, "What." Then, on the off chance it was Susan, I forced some calm into my voice and said, "I mean, hello?"

"Sorry to wake you, Harry," said Karrin Murphy, the head of Chicago PD's Special Investigations division. SI routinely handled any crime that fell between the cracks of the other departments, as well as being handed the really smelly cases no one else wanted. As a result, they wound up looking into all kinds of things that weren't easily explained. Their job was to make sure that things were taken care of, and that everything typed up neatly into the final report.

Murphy called me in as a consultant from time to time, when she had something weird that she didn't know how to handle. We'd been working together for a while, and Murphy had gotten to where she and SI could handle your average, everyday supernatural riffraff. But from time to time, she ran into something that stumped her. My phone number is on her quick dial.

"Murph," I said. "What's up?"

"Unofficial business," she said. "I'd like your take on something."

"Unofficial means not paid, I guess," I said.

"You up for any pro bono work?" She paused and then said, "This could be important to me."

What the hell. My night had pretty much been shot anyway. "Where do you want me?"

"Cook County Morgue," Murphy said. "I want to show you a corpse."

Chapter Five

They don't make morgues with windows. In fact, if the geography allows for it, they hardly ever make morgues above the ground. I guess it's partly because it must be easier to refrigerate a bunch of coffin-sized chambers in a room insulated by the earth. But that can't be all there is to it. Under the earth means a lot more than relative altitude. It's where dead things fit. Graves are under the earth. So are Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and a dozen other reported afterlives.