She got in, and there was another big man in the back, with rolled-up shirtsleeves and his tie pulled loose and awry. He gave her an unfriendly look as Gym Bro Cop slid into the front seat. Then the car started by some remote magic not involving keys.

They moved away from the kerb, and Lee glanced backwards to see two other identical cars fall in behind them. A motorcade of sinister black vehicles, for the sole purpose of taking one harmless young woman to make a perfectly routine statement at a police station.

“Um…” she said. The man beside her didn’t even look round, but she met Gym Bro Cop’s eyes in the rear-view mirror.

“Can I see that ID again?” she asked timidly.

II

Lucas May was cautiously pleased with how smoothly things were going. He was, he knew, a passably convincing policeman when he needed to be. He’d judged that this Pryor girl fell into a certain cosseted section of the populace for whom cooperating with the authorities was a knee-jerk reaction—no matter how much they considered themselves counterculture. Sure enough, here she was in the back of the car, and only now questioning who he was. She’d find the doors locked, obviously, if she tried them. And any funny business would have Dominic back there keeping her in line.

It might have gone another way if not for the App. Entirely possible that Lucas could have turned up at her door, asked a few questions for form’s sake and then gone away again. Except boss man Rove had downloaded it onto his phone. Lucas didn’t much like the App. He especially didn’t like the way it only appeared when Rove wanted him to have it, and vanished just as readily. It used no storage nor battery—and when it wasn’t around, his phone would not admit to ever having it installed. And it was simple to use: you held your device near something or someone and it gave you a reading. Precisely what it was detecting, Lucas had no idea, and in his head the thing measured Weirdness. Things and people that had been in contact with Weird Shit gave off some kind of radiation, something the App could detect. And while he’d far rather have been on the side of the business that didn’t need such tools, it was a useful thing to have.

Lisa Pryor was definitely flicking his Weirdness Geiger counter. Not the highest readings he’d seen, but she’d been in contact with something. That same “something” had killed three men and mauled a fourth. The girl implicated in Billy White’s death was an old friend of Pryor’s and, given the readings, they’d renewed their friendship recently. The spectral fingerprints were all over her, according to the App.