I started to turn away and caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked back over my shoulder and saw a woman kneeling right smack in the middle of the crime scene. Her blond hair was in a professional bun that contrasted with the jeans and tank top she wore. For a surreal moment, I thought it was Christy, and almost asked her what she thought she was doing. Then she moved and broke the illusion. It was just her hair and something in the sweep of her jawline that reminded me of Adam’s ex-wife.

The kneeling woman was petting the severed head of the German shepherd. She looked up, and her eyes met mine, just as Gary Laughingdog’s had. And then I realized what I was looking at and why no one else seemed to notice her. I see ghosts.

“Find the one who did this,” she told me sternly.

I gave her a little nod, and Willis caught my shoulder.

“What do you see?” he asked. “What made you turn back?”

“Only the dead,” I answered. “And I intend to help them as best I can.”

He wasn’t satisfied, but I thought he knew I was telling the truth.

6

The original crime scene had only one body, another woman. She lay in the middle of the hayfield in a section, roughly square, that had nothing at all growing in it. The soil was black, and it stained the bottom of my tennis shoes with soot. Someone had burned a chunk of field and put the dead woman in it like the bull’s-eye of a target.

“Staged,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Tony. “And we’ll let the scene experts have their way, but, like Willis, I’m reading the other bodies the same way. Arranged for maximum effect.”

Unlike the other women, this one had been partially eaten. The soft flesh of her abdomen was completely gone and most of the thigh muscles. Something with big, sharp teeth had gnawed on the bones exposed by the missing flesh.

I stopped about five feet from the body and smelled. A lot of people had been roaming around the area, and if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have scented the same magic I’d detected at the other site. Magic, death—the bare remnants of the pain and fear that had also been present with the other bodies. Over it all hung a pall of burnt grass and earth. I didn’t smell any kind of volatile compound, though maybe the circle had been burned a few days earlier. Some things—like alcohol—evaporate pretty fast.

“I think it’s the same killer,” I said.

“We don’t get so many murders around here—especially where the victims are partially eaten—that anyone is going to argue with you,” said Willis. “But what are you basing that on?”