"But what's left?" Lacey asked. "If it's not the wizard, or a fucking vampire slayer...?"

  I looked over at Karl and raised my eyebrows. He saw me, and nodded slowly.

  "Lacey, listen: far be it from me to tell the great Michael Twardzik, Lieutenant, Pennsylvania State Police Criminal Investigation Division, how to run one of his cases."

  "Apart from the fact that he'd tell you to fuck off as soon as you opened your mouth," Karl said.

  "There's that too," I said. "But he seems to like you, Lacey. Kind of."

  "He's got fantasies about getting in my pants," she said, "which should be filed under G for 'Good fucking luck.'"

  "Whatever the reason, he at least lets you talk to him," I said. "Which is more than Karl and I can say."

  "I know about you and the academy thing," Lacey said, "but what did Karl do to piss him off?"

  "Guilt by association," Karl said, with a grin.

  "Anyway," I said, "the next time you have the lieutenant's ear, you might whisper in it that he should take a good hard look at the kid's parents."

  Lacey just stared at me.

  I said, "If it were me, I'd want to know where both parents were at the kid's time of death, whenever the coroner says that was," I said. "I might also check trash cans and storm drains in a ten-block radius, looking for some bloody clothing that somebody might have tried to get rid of. And check the sink traps in the house for blood residue – you know the routine."

  "'Course I do," she said, "and I'm aware that in most murder investigations you look at family first. But why...?"

  "When we were in there, I counted six nails sticking out from the walls with nothing hanging from them, and those people are too neat just to leave nails there for no reason. That's where they hung the crucifixes, the paintings of the Sacred Heart, the little frescoes of the Virgin Mary, all that. If you looked, you'd most likely find all that stuff stashed in a bureau drawer. And I'll bet that all of it will be back on the wall tomorrow, or the next day."

  Lacey shook her head again, but not as if she was disagreeing with me. "I can imagine how hard it is to deal with someone in your family who's been changed," she said. "But to off your own kid in cold blood..."

  "You're Catholic, aren't you, Lacey?" I asked her.

  "I was raised that way, but I'm in recovery," she said with a tiny smile, which is all that old joke deserved.

  Karl turned and looked at her. "You're shittin' me," he said. "How can anybody do this kind of work and not believe in God?"

  "I didn't say I don't believe in God, Karl," Lacey said. "Although, if you ask me, all supes prove is the existence of the devil. I just walked away from all the Catholic bullshit. No offense, if that's your thing."

  "Even so," I said, "you know the Church's views about supes – vamps, weres, goblins, the whole crew."

  "Anathema," Karl said. "The pope says they're cursed by God, all of them."

  "Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I took a hike," Lacey said. "Give some old man a tall hat, and all of a sudden he speaks for God? I don't think so."

  "You may not be with the program any more, Lacey," I said, "but I'm betting the Dwyers were. From all indications, they were hard-core Irish, and, especially in this area, that means hard-core Catholic."

  "You think they drove a stake through their own kid because some fucking priest told them to?"

  "Possible, but it didn't have to happen that way. If they figured the Church would have wanted him dead, that might have been enough. It would be, for some people I grew up with. They probably told themselves they were saving his soul." I turned my head and looked at the night as it pressed against the car windows. "Who knows? Maybe they were."

We were approaching the on-ramp for 81-North when I whacked the steering wheel with one hand and said, "Damn!"

  Karl was bent forward, fiddling with the radio. "What? What's wrong?"

  "Just remembered something else the Staties ought to be doing: check the computer in the kid's room."

  "For what – to see if he was downloading vamp porn?" I couldn't see Karl's smile in the dark, but I knew it was there.

  You can find porn catering to every taste on the Internet – most of it legal, some not. Where there's a niche market, somebody will come up with product to fill it: gay, straight, bi, gimp, albino, human, nonhuman. It's all there someplace, and I guess vampire porn's been around the Internet as long as all the other kinds. I once had to check some of it out for a case I was working. I hope never to have to look at it again.

  "No," I said, "I'd be more interested in finding out whether any Google searches had been done for those symbols we found carved on our first vic. If it was Mom or Dad, or both, who carved them in the kid, they had to find them first."

  "Yeah, that could be useful," Karl said, "although there's no way to tell who was doing the search, if there is one. Hell, the kid could have done it."

  "Not if it took place during daytime, he didn't. Anyway, it's kind of a reach for the kid to be researching symbols that later end up carved on his own corpse, isn't it? I'm pretty sure he didn't carve himself."

  "You got a point there." Karl found a radio station he liked and sat back. "But what you did back there with Twardzik was pure fucking genius, Stan."

  "Thanks. Too bad they don't give out Nobel Prizes for conniving."

  All I'd done was suggest to Lacey that she tell the lieutenant that I was convinced James Dwyer was the latest victim of the serial vamp slayer, and in my opinion the investigation should focus on that aspect of the case and exclude all others.

  Which guaranteed that Twardzik, while following the vamp slayer angle, would also spend plenty of man-hours treating the case like just another homicide. If there was any evidence of the parents' involvement, he'd find it. And then figure out a way to let me know about it, bless his little head. Both of them.