It was a long drive back to our part of town. I watched out the window and Billy kept quiet, both of us stuck with what I bet were similar ruminations. Ravenna Park wasn't a real outdoors getaway place, not like some of the other areas we'd found bodies. It was also the first time a victim had turned up within the North Precinct boundaries. That meant we were moving back into our own jurisdiction, but it also meant any kind of pattern we might have established had been obliterated. I considered hoping it was a separate case, and then cringed at the thought. We really didn't need two cannibalistic killers.

We came down Brooklyn Avenue, a block to the west of my apartment building. Gary, leaning on the hood of his cab like a gargoyle protecting the crime scene, waved as we drove by. He was outside a police perimeter— the North Precinct building was only half a mile away, and Billy and I were far from the first cops to arrive— but didn't look like he minded at all. Billy pulled up and we got out, me shaking my head. "It's a quarter after five in the morning, Gary. You're not supposed to be hanging out at crime scenes looking like somebody gave you a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas."

He put on a convincingly innocent expression and gestured to another cabbie, whose face looked green in the sallow amber lights as he talked with a couple of other cops. "Henley was all shook up. Thought it'd be only right to come down and give him some moral support."

"Uh-huh. Morrison's going to kill you, you know that, right?" I slipped up against the big old man and gave him a brief hug anyway. Gray-eyed, white-haired, and still sporting the linebacker build he'd had as a young man, Gary was essentially the kind of person I wanted to grow old to be. As far as I could tell, he'd never lost his sense of wonder. For a girl with shamanic potential lurking under her surface, I'd managed to thoroughly quench my own. Gary'd done his best to unquench it in the months we'd known each other, and I loved him for it.

He kissed my forehead. "Sure, darlin', but some things are worth getting killed for. Hugs from pretty girls, f'rex."

I grinned. "Did you really just say 'f'rex'? I didn't think people really said that."

"You don't think people call girls doll, either." He let me go with a vocally solemn, "Captain," that made no attempt at hiding the sparkle in his eyes. I turned to watch Morrison's approach and tried to judge the integrity behind his scowl. It looked pretty credible.

"Good morning, Mr. Muldoon," Morrison said with unexpected politeness. Possibly he didn't blame Gary for me telling tales about work. More likely there was some kind of strange male ritual of respect or tolerance that had been passed when they'd fought together against an army of zombies. Billy and I had been there, too, but apparently we hadn't earned the same free pass, as Morrison turned his scowl on us. "Walker, Holliday, quit screwing around and get to work."

I flicked a salute that my boss would no doubt take as sardonic, and ducked under the police tape. "Yes, sir."

Heather Fagan, the no-nonsense head of the North Precinct's forensics team, told me exactly where I was allowed to place my feet, forbade either of us to so much as breathe on the corpse, and walked away grousing about contaminated crime scenes. Billy and I exchanged rueful glances and tip-toed to the body, both teasing and completely serious in our attempts to not pollute her working area.

For once I didn't wait on Billy's conversation with a ghost, and just let the Sight filter over my normal vision. The world brightened again, night and streetlights fading to inconsequentiality. I could navigate mazes and mountain passes blindfolded, as long as I could call on the Sight: it poured its own brilliance all around me, and even its shadows were places of light.

Still-warm or not, the dead woman coiled on her side in the snow didn't have the slightest hint of color to her. Death wasn't black: it was empty, a space of nothingness surrounded by the living world. Even that was an illusion, as all the little bacteria that helped a body decompose had life of their own. But as long as I didn't look too deeply, I only saw a patch of cool gray nothing where she rested.

All around her, though, the earth was scoured with ridges of darkness. I called for a flashlight, tilting it down to illuminate the ground. Tall blades of dead grass stuck up and cast thin shadows, but there were no visible ripples in the snow to echo the lumps beneath it, nor any pressure from footsteps around her body. "Heather? How'd she get here?"

I could feel Heather's glare from fifteen feet away. "She lives in the building across the street."

Electricity shot down my spine and I jerked upward, staring first at Heather, then at the eight-story apartment building a couple hundred feet away. "That one?"

Heather turned to look at it. "Yeah. That's what her driver's license says, anyway. I don't think she wandered out here to die. There aren't any footprints, so somebody must have dumped her, but yeah, she died two hundred feet from her home. Her name was Karin Newcomb. University ID. I guess most of the tenants there are students."

"Most of them." My heartbeat rabbited hard enough I was surprised my voice didn't shake. "Heather, that's where I live."

"Jesus Christ. Did you know her?"

I shook my head even as I tried to draw some hint of recognition from her profile. "I don't remember ever seeing her, but there are forty apartments in that building. People are always moving in and out. God, how horrible." Her death hit me harder, all at once, than any of the others had. Not because I was afraid it could've been me, but because I might have known her. The fact that I hadn't was irrelevant. I found myself making a silent promise that we'd find her killer, like I'd been previously lacking motivation and only just now really meant it.

I said, "Shit," under my breath and tried to pull my thoughts back to what Heather'd been saying before ID'ing the girl to me. That was the only way I was going to keep the stupid little promise I'd just made. "How did they dump her? There's no skid marks, so she wasn't thrown out of a vehicle. She looks like she was placed here, but there aren't any footprints."

Heather stalked back to my side. With her winter hat and boots on, she came up to my eyebrow, which made her taller than most of the women I knew. "I know. It's been the same thing all over the city. No matter where we find the body, no matter how long we think it might've been there, there's no indication that anybody carried it there. She hasn't been dropped, either." A circling finger encompassed Karin Newcomb's form. "No spray of snow, and since neither rigor mortis nor the cold has set in, there should be some displacement of limbs if she had been. Instead she's nestled up perfectly. It's like—" She bit her tongue on the last word: magic. "Yeah," I said, willing to go where she wasn't. "It is."

I crouched, flashlight bouncing a long oval off the snow as I examined the scene with the Sight again. Individual flakes, loosely packed, turned into a river of blue glitter under my gaze, but even then I didn't see footprints. Not in the snow, at least. The ridges beneath it, though, resolved into ten long narrow strips, five and five with a few inches of space between them. Roundish marks cupped the bases of both sets of ridges. I rocked forward in my crouch so I could feel the balls of my feet press into my insoles. Snow creaked under my boots, warning me of the impressions I was leaving behind.

Impressions that the killer hadn't left. Somehow his weight had been transferred through the delicate crystals and into the earth below. "Heather, I need to scrape away some of the snow."

To her credit, she only said, "Where?" instead of arguing with me. Up until very recently, if I'd been in her shoes, I'd have argued. Not for the first time, I gave thanks that the people around me weren't as obstreperous as I was, then gestured to the curve of the dead woman's back. There were other marks beneath the snow, but the crouched set had the most weight to them, as if they might last longer and give more information about what had left them.