I didn't think Jamal had really been into the BDSM scene. Most likely he'd been using the rack and its associated activities as a tool. He'd been trying to tap more juice, learn to harness and control it. He'd wanted to get stronger, and he'd been working out. The bondage rack was his magical Bowflex.

There was quite a lot of juice in the rack, but none of it smelled like the murder. If this had been a ritual execution, the wood should have been dripping with the black magic of the spell used to kill Jamal. If I could have gotten a taste of that juice, I could have identified the ritual. Because magic is personal, I might have been able to identify the sorcerer who performed it. Failing that, I might have been able to use the juice to recreate the murder, just as Jamal had experienced it. It wouldn't have been pleasant, but I might have gotten a look at the killer, might have been able to learn something useful from the details of the ritual.

But I didn't get any of that, because the juice just wasn't there. The rack had been cleaned. Scrubbed. On the surface, what I got was mostly the pain and terror of the victim. I also got the brute fact of his death, which stained the wood like mildew on bathroom tile. Deeper still I found only the old juice that had soaked all the way into the wood and the natural juice that had been there since it was a sapling.

I found enough juice in the corpse to confirm that it was Jamal, but I didn't find nearly enough of it. A person's magic clung to the body after death, evaporating at a measured rate until there was nothing left. This was especially true with sorcerers. If you knew how old a sorcerer's corpse was, you could get a pretty accurate idea of how powerful he'd been by how much juice was left in the body. In the old days, graves and tombs were even violated to get at the juice trapped in the moldering corpses of powerful sorcerers.

Jamal hadn't been a powerful sorcerer, but even a civilian's corpse would have more juice than remained in the kid's body. The skinless corpse was like a desiccated husk, sucked almost dry of the magic that had made Jamal a valuable if limited member of our outfit. He had been squeezed.

Whoever had done the ritual was good. It was complex magic, and most sorcerers-guys like Jamal and Anton-didn't have the craft for it. But the really impressive part was the way the killer had scrubbed away the magic after the deed was done. It isn't easy to clean up magic with magic. It would have been simpler just to obscure it, contaminate it-stir in enough random juice that you couldn't get anything useful from it. Instead the murderer had wiped away every magical trace of the ritual spell that killed my guy.

I let my gaze pan around the small living room, and my luck turned. The carpet in front of the bondage rack was stained with black juice. I knelt by the stain and touched it. It was roughly circular, about two feet in diameter, cold to the touch, damp and sticky.

I dug my fingers into the stained carpet and reached out for the juice, tapping it, allowing it to flow into me. I leaned down and tasted it.

The juice began to resolve itself into a pattern in the part of my mind or soul that makes me a sorcerer. The black stain had been left by a small rectangular box. I didn't get any sense of exact dimensions-it just doesn't work that way-but it was about the size of a normal cookie jar, maybe a little smaller. From the taste and texture of the juice, it was probably made of clay or ceramic. It was very old and somewhat crudely formed. I could see symbols, like hieroglyphs, carved into its sides, though I had no sense of their meaning.

Mixed in with the box's juice, I tasted faint notes of living human magic. Most of it was very old, and there was no way I could identify it. Some of that juice was fresher, though. It was Jamal's.

I stood up and caught myself rubbing my hands on my jeans, as if it could somehow rid me of the black juice that had soaked into my skin. I let my gaze slip back to the mundane world.

"You find anything?" Anton asked.

"I'm not sure. The killer cleaned up after himself. It's definitely Jamal, and I think he was squeezed. I might have a line on the murder weapon."

"What do you do next?"

I thought about it a moment and shrugged. "I'm leaving. I can try to contact Jamal, but I'm not going to do it here."

Anton's eyes widened. Even guys who had been around the game a while got a little creeped out by necromancy. "Tell him I'm sorry about it, Domino. Tell him I wish I got here sooner." Anton crossed himself again. "Tell him goodbye."

"Well, I'll try to get Jamal to talk to me. Probably I won't be able to say anything to him at all. If I do, I'll tell him for you."

As touching as Anton's request might have been, I knew his real motivation wasn't just the bonds of friendship. He and Jamal hadn't been that close. He was mostly worried that Jamal would blame him and stick around to haunt his ass.

Anton gestured at the corpse. "What about…?"

"Get rid of it. Clean the place. It's dark and this is Crenshaw. Shouldn't be much trouble."

It wouldn't be real messy, either, given the complete lack of blood. I took one last look at the skinned corpse hanging on the rack, and I was still glad I didn't have to do it.

"And Anton," I added, "put the word out. Tell everyone to stay sharp."

In the underworld, you never find just one skinned and crucified corpse.

I can speak with the dead. It comes up in my business. Gangsters with interesting stories to tell are often deceased. Jamal's corpse didn't have much to say, but his shade might. Once you've killed a guy it's not easy to keep him from talking. It's not a foolproof spell-sometimes the dead don't want to talk-but I had decent odds to contact Jamal. He hadn't been dead long, and I didn't expect him to be happy about getting murdered.

Most spellcraft is just will and power. You tap into a source of juice and manipulate it using a pattern you've learned. The spell is the pattern, a kind of cookie-cutter template you channel the juice through so it does what you want it to. That doesn't mean it's easy. You have to be able to create and sustain a complex, multidimensional mental and spiritual pattern, and you have to be able to tap and channel enough juice to produce the result you want.

Most people don't have the will or the power. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Still, the words of the spell can be just about anything you can memorize. It doesn't have to be some cryptic verse in a dead language. You don't have to invoke the four corners or the forces of earth, air and fire, or any of that stuff. You just want something that makes sense to you, something that will help you stabilize the pattern and flow the juice.

I know dozens of spells, and each one is associated with a famous quotation I've memorized. Other sorcerers use nursery rhymes or hip-hop lyrics, dead languages, invoking the saints, or pagan mumbo-jumbo. Whatever works.

To contact Jamal in the Beyond, I needed some real craft, a spell backed by an easily repeated ritual. Again, the traditionalists use black candles, seances, Ouija boards, that kind of thing.

I use FriendTrace.com.

I sat down at my desk and brought up the Web browser on my laptop, then typed "Jamal" into the search box on the site. I tapped the ley line running under my condo and said, "In heaven all the interesting people are missing." Then I hit the search button and released the spell.

My laptop went crazy. Random windows opened and closed faster than I could follow, like pop-ups at a porn site. A disharmonic, cacophonous squall blared from the speakers. The screen went black and the sound died. Without the juice, you just get personal ads.

A few seconds passed and a Web page flared to life on the screen. It was one of those slick Flash sites, and I had to stop myself from clicking the Skip Intro option.