from her shoulders, yet she made no effort to rearrange it. Slowly, inexorably, she stepped closer until she stood only inches from me.
She stared into my eyes and I felt a darkness rise within me. It was an internal river so black and so deep and so terrible it threatened to flood my very soul with overwhelming hopelessness.
Somehow it came from her.
I was stunned at her closeness after so many months of solitude. Her eyes were unreadable, lost among the bruises. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. She turned her head to look up at the sky—and that was when I saw the scar: a half-moon-shaped sliver of white at the corner of her right eye.
Alissa Hayes.
An almost electric shock ran through me as a wave of fear pulled me deep into the river of blackness. Alissa Hayes had been one of my rare successes in the last years of my fading career. One of the few cases I had actually solved.
Why was she here now, with me?
“Alissa,” I whispered.
She turned back to me, examining my face with an intensity I could not read. Then she took my hand and I actually felt her touch, the first physical sensation I’d had in months. Her hand wasn’t quite tangible, it was cold and without true substance, but it was undeniably there.
She pulled me forward and I followed as she led me, her hand in my hand, through yards and woods, parks and thoroughfares, fences and ponds. Barriers that stopped the living were nothing at all to us, for Alissa, too, had moved beyond the physical world. I knew because I had seen her sprawled among the weeds, body broken and drained of blood. I had seen her displayed on the cold steel of the coroner’s table, body reduced to meat. And I had been at her funeral, scanning the rows of the mourners with my partner, halfheartedly hoping that her killer might be discovered among them, thus granting us a rare victory.
And, indeed, we had solved her murder within a week.
So why was she here with me, now?
I had not failed her, not like I had failed the others. What could she want from me?
I kept following her, unwilling to relinquish the touch of another. Within minutes, without ever seeming to hurry, we were miles away, just beyond the small college whose campus encircled the north end of my town. We passed a pile of boulders and made our way up a hill that crowned the northern half of the county. It overlooked an abandoned canyon gouged into existence a hundred years before by quarrymen seeking granite. She led me still further up the hill, to a deserted field several hundred yards below the crest. A thick tangle of bushes gave way to forest above it. Few people ventured beyond the field.
I saw why we had come.
There, discarded among the weeds, a young woman was sprawled faceup, still and naked. Her slender body was as pale as bone in the moonlight; her delicate face bruised by both man and shadow. Her long brown hair had been arranged around her head in thick strands so that it flowed through the grass like seaweed undulating in a current. One of her arms was outstretched, as if in supplication, but her blue eyes were lifeless, reflecting the moon above her with a dull patina. The lower half of her body curved gracefully in a single arc, the feet bound together by a rope of twisted weeds, as if she were a mermaid caught in dry dock, left behind when the seas receded.
The air about the body was thick with a miasma I had never felt before, not in life and not in death. Whatever beauty had prevailed in this hidden spot was gone—and something ugly lived in its place.
Alissa and I stood staring down at the body. Welts had been cut into the pale skin of the young woman’s stomach and thighs, as parallel and precise as gills. Alissa did not need to tell me what I now knew: I had been wrong about her death. I had been wrong about her killer. I had failed Alissa Hayes, after all. I had failed the young man in jail for her murder, too. And I had failed the brown-haired girl sprawled in the weeds before me.
Chapter 3
I stood by the body as night deepened. Alissa had disappeared, but I was unwilling to leave the dead girl alone. I could feel no sense of