There was a profound silence. Miranda sat up and stared at Chance, who kept his gaze on the papers before him. “And now you’re going to tell me time doesn’t work that way,” she said.

“It doesn’t, but that’s not the point,” he mumbled. “I don’t want to lie to you, Miranda . . . like you lied to that woman.”

“What?”

“You told her you could help her,” Chance reminded her. “Is it really your job to help people? Or is it your job to get at the truth? What does a forensic therapist really do?”

He glared at her until she understood that he was expecting an answer to the question. She took a defensive, pedantic tone. “Witnesses of traumatic events can be unreliable. It’s the job of a forensic therapist to separate memory from nightmare. That sometimes means helping a victim who can’t or won’t speak to articulate what really happened to them. But it can also mean stopping a hysterical plaintiff from turning their inner psychoses into a witch hunt of innocents.”

She paused. “I didn’t lie to her. I was going to help her—perhaps not with therapy, but with justice. There’s a kind of healing in that too.”

“If she had lived, what would have happened to her?” Chance asked, a deliberate softness to his tone.

Miranda shrugged. “I don’t know.” It was an obvious lie, so she followed up quickly with the truth. “Deported, probably.”

“And deported means . . . ?”

“It means set outside the City gates and barred from future entry, as you well know,” Miranda snapped. “The City has always had walls, one way or another. We have plenty of workers and visitors to look after without—”

“Don’t get angry at me, Miranda,” Chance said mildly. “I just want to make you think. Who was the man in your nightmare, the pathologist’s assistant?”

She grew even angrier. “You know who it was! Walther Grey, the killer, the Butcher of the City!”

“Is he a Freeman of the City?”

“No, a worker, a tenant. Not an owner of any property.”

“The City protects its own, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose, but . . . Oh please, Chance, what’s your point?”

“My point is. . . .” He paused for a sigh and began again. “My hypothesis is that someone killed the Mermaid, drowned her in that pool, and it was not Walther Grey. Miranda, have you . . . has anyone imagined that the murderer might be a Freeman?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Miranda gave him an incredulous look. “You do admit that he killed all the others?”

“Well, of course; that’s utterly clear from the evidence you have. But there’s something different about this case that you must understand. I have been reliably informed—by the angel of the dead, no less—that the last seven victims were not supposed to have died when they did, and Grey may not have been the only person involved.”