No response. I watched the empty screen for a while, then typed:

  Supecop1: You still there?

  Still no answer. I was starting to wonder whether the connection had been broken, when this appeared:

  Vollwiz: Are you absolutely certain?

  Supecop1: Certain that's the guy? Hell, no. Certain that's what my informant told me? Yeah, I'm sure, since I don't have wax in my ears, oranything.

  Karl appeared over my shoulder, holding a thumb drive. I attached it to the computer, downloaded the file, then sent it to Vollman's email address as an attachment.

  Supecop1: I just sent the file with the symbols I copied from our latest vic. It's pretty accurate, I think.

  I waited. Nothing, for maybe two minutes, then this appeared:

  VollWiz: I will be in touch with you later.

  Then the chat connection was broken.

"Motherfucker," I heard Karl mutter from behind me.

  "Yeah, I know," I said. "But at least he's given us a way to find out where he hangs his cloak, and that's something we've been wanting to know."

  I looked up the customer service number for AOL and called them. It took the better part of an hour to find a supervisor with the authority to look up a customer's mailing address, and to convince her that I had the authority to ask for it.

  Finally, I heard her say, "Very well, Sergeant. What is the email address you have?"

  "It's V-o-l-l-m-a-n-e-x at aol.com."

  I heard her keyboard clacking in the background. Then silence. Then more clacking, followed by another stretch of silence.

  "I'm sorry, Sergeant," the supervisor said, "but we have no account listed under that address."

  "Has it been cancelled recently? Say, within the last hour or so?"

  "No, sir. We have never had an account under that name. It simply doesn't exist."

I hung up the phone and said to Karl, "Fuck Vollman and the hearse he rode in on. I'm getting tired of that old bastard and the way he keeps jerking us around. It's time we started acting like goddamn detectives, for a change."

  "Sounds good to me," Karl said. "You got any particular kind of detecting in mind?"

  "Yeah, I do. Sligo, or whoever the perp is, has offed two guys so far, right? Why those two? Were they picked at random, or–"

  "Or is there a common factor?" Karl said. "Some pattern he's following."

  "Exactly. Why don't you get on that, see if you can find anything about the vics that stands out."

  "Okay. What are you gonna be doing?"

  "See if I can find out more about this forbidden book," I told him. "Vollman said there were only four copies in existence. Let's see if he was right."

  Karl went over to his own desk, and I turned back to my computer and brought up Google. I typed in Opus and Mago and clicked "Search."

  A few seconds later I was looking at the first hundred of my 28,343 hits. A lot of them involved classical music, although several seemed to refer to some penguin in a comic strip.

  Realizing where I went wrong, I went back to the search screen. This time, I put quotation marks around Opus Mago so the search engine would read it as a phrase.

  Eight hits. That was more like it.

  Seven of the references were duds. Five of them lumped the Opus Mago in with fictional works like the Necronomicon, the Lemegeton of Solomon, and the Grimorium Verum. Shows what they know. Two other hits brought me to bogus black magic sites, constructed by obvious wannabees who'd probably run screaming for their mothers if they ever got close to the real thing. It didn't take me long to figure out that these morons didn't know the Opus Mago from the Kama Sutra.

  The one hit left was a news item saying that a prossor at Georgetown University had translated some fragments of the Opus Mago, which the article said was one of the oldest and most obscure works in the black arts. Dr Benjamin Prescott was described as "one of the foremost authorities on the ancient grimoires." Then I read that Prescott had refused to allow his translation to be published. Anywhere. Ever.

Georgetown University, I found out, is a big place – especially if you're trying to find your way around by using their website. I finally learned that Professor Prescott's office was located in the Department of Theosophy, and even persuaded a campus operator to connect me to his direct line.

  That's where my luck ran out. I'd been hoping against hope that I'd find Prescott working late in his office, but all I got was an answering machine.

  I left a message saying who I was, but not what I wanted. I asked him to call me back the next night, anytime after 9:00. Then I got his email address from the campus directory, and sent him the same message that way.

  The professor could read the email at any time – whenever he felt like checking his account. And if he was one of those people who didn't do that regularly, he'd probably get my phone message tomorrow. Assuming he wasn't off on a research trip to Transylvania, or someplace.

The rest of the evening was typical of a night shift for the Supe Squad, if you'd want to call anything we deal with "typical."

  A ghost was haunting one of the girls' dorms at Marywood University. Marywood's coed now, but it used to bill itself as the Largest Catholic Women's College in America. Some guys at the U (a Jesuit school that used to be all-male, back in the day) used to say "Mary would if Mary could, but Mary goes to Marywood."

  I hear that Marywood girls are a little different, these days.

  A haunting isn't necessarily a big deal, but the pesky spirit was hanging around the bathrooms and ogling the young lovelies as they stepped out of the shower. Some of the girls were terrified; others were downright offended, since the ghost liked to make comments about their attributes. Not all of his observations were kindly.

  Turned out the spook was the spirit of an old guy who'd been a janitor at the school for years. He'd come back to live out some of his fantasies.

  We sent for an exorcist. Several Jesuits at the U are qualified and on call. Father Martino compelled the old guy's ghost to depart the premises, and imposed a geas on him against returning. Before he was expelled, I suggested he start haunting one of the city's strip clubs, where nobody would much care how much skin he looked at. He seemed to think that was an idea with some merit.