Agent Holtz was standing by the back door. “Sir,” he said eagerly, his tone too bright for the early hour.

“Who called it in?” asked Stell.

“Good Samaritan called the cops. Cops called us.”

“That obvious?”

“Oh yeah,” said Holtz, holding open the door.

Agent Rios was already in the kitchen. Tall, tan, and keen-eyed, she’d been Stell’s second-in-command for nearly four years. She was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching a tech photograph a pile of . . . something . . . on the tile floor. A large diamond glinted amid the mess.

“Same profile as the hospital?” asked Stell.

“Looks like it,” said Rios. “Marcella Riggins. Age thirty-two. Spent the last thirteen days in a coma after her husband tried to burn down their house—with her inside. Can’t really blame her for being mad.”

“Mad is conceivable,” said Stell. “Murder is a problem.” He looked around. “How many dead?”

Rios straightened. “Four, we think. It’s kind of hard to tell.” She pointed at the kitchen floor. “One,” she counted, then turned and led

him down the hall to a room with a poker table, and a fairly grisly tableau. “Two,” she said, nodding down at a ruined body on the floor.

“Three,” she pointed at a withered form only vaguely human. “And four,” she said, gesturing to a pile of dust that coated the back of a chair and spilled onto the felt table. “Hell hath no fury . . .”

Stell counted the chairs. “Survivors?”

“If there were, they didn’t go to the cops. The house belongs to Sam McGuire,” said Rios. “Safe to assume he’s here . . . somewhere.”

Holtz whistled from the doorway. “You ever seen anything like this before?”

Stell considered. He had seen a lot since his first introduction to EOs a decade and a half before. Vale, with his ability to modulate pain; Cardale, with his ability to regenerate; Clarke, with her ability to control—and those were just the start. The tip of the iceberg. He’d since seen EOs who could bend time, move through walls, light themselves on fire, turn themselves to stone.

But this, Stell had to admit, was something new.

He ran his hand through the mess on the felt. “What is this? Ash?”

“As far as we can tell,” said Rios, “it’s Marcus Riggins. What’s left of him. Or maybe this is. Or this.”

“All right,” said Stell, brushing the dust from his palms. “Compile the record. I want records of everything. Everything from the hospital.

Everything from here. Shots and specs of every body, every room, every detail, even if you don’t think it matters. It goes in the file.”

Holtz raised his hand like a schoolboy. It was impossible to forget that he was new. “Who’s the file for?”

“Our analyst,” said Stell. But he knew how the agents and techs liked to talk. “You might have heard him called ‘the hunting dog.’”