“You okay, Anita?” Zerbrowski asked.

I nodded. “Sure, just thinking too hard.”

He grinned. “Thinking about your tall, pale, and handsome fiancé?”

“No, why would you even ask that?”

“Because you only overthink your personal life; crime busting makes you kind of peaceful.”

I let my face show exactly how unpeaceful I felt about this case. “This case isn’t going to make me feel peaceful, Zerbrowski.”

“I’m sorry, you’re right. This one’s going to hurt.”

“What do you mean by that?” Manning asked.

He looked at her, and his brown eyes showed that there was a shrewd thinker behind all the messy clothes and teasing. “Some cases leave a mark on your soul even after you solve it.”

She studied his face and nodded. “As long as we solve it.”

“You’re afraid we won’t,” I said.

“We’re here because our own resident animator Kirkland, and the most revered voodoo, vaudun, priest in the country, plus all the witches and psychics working with and for the FBI couldn’t help us find these guys.”

“What do your computer techs say?” Zerbrowski asked.

She nodded again. “They say that whoever is doing the tech for these creeps is really, really good.”

Brent added, “They are still working on tracing to a location, but the ability to hide the computer trail is always just a little ahead of our ability to trace it, until we catch up.”

“And then the bad techies figure out a new way to pull ahead of the good guys,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Our tech people will crack this, or trace it, eventually,” Manning said, “but I don’t understand their part of the investigation enough to help, so I’m here trying an angle that I can understand more. I can look at you, talk to you, ask you questions. I don’t speak enough computer to do the same for that part of the investigation.”

“I just recently learned how to change the ring tones on my smart phone, so I hear you on the whole mysterious-computer thing,” I said.

She gave me a weak smile. “Thank you for that, but there’s usually an age line about such things. You’re young to be on the wrong side of it.”

“Hey, I love my smart phone,” Zerbrowski said. “The wife and kids send me pics and texts all day. Helps me keep in touch when the hours are long.”

“And you’re over the age line, of course.” Manning looked from one to the other of us. “The two of you balance each other somehow like good partners do.”

We looked at each other, then both shrugged almost in unison and said, “We try.”

She narrowed her eyes at us. Brent laughed.

If civilians could have seen us laughing and smiling with that horror still frozen on the computer behind us, they’d have thought we were cold-blooded, or worse. But if you couldn’t keep your sense of humor in the midst of the nightmares you went crazy, or changed jobs, or ate your gun. We were all career cops, in it for the long haul, and that meant we whistled in the dark, sang on the way to our execution, joked at the door to hell—pick your metaphor. We did it. We survived. We didn’t go too crazy. We did our jobs. We caught the bad guys. I glanced behind at the frozen image on the screen. The zombie, person, whatever she was with her soul trapped in there, was staring out at the screen in a mute plea. We had to find her first, but when we did I’d find a way to free her soul and lay her to final rest. This would stop. We would make it stop. The people who’d raised the zombie and were abusing her hadn’t done anything to earn a warrant of execution, not legally, so I couldn’t just go in there with guns blazing like normal when I was chasing monsters. They hadn’t killed anyone, hell, I wasn’t even sure what laws they’d broken, but morally—they needed to suffer. Was that judgmental of me? Hell yes, but sometimes you just gotta go with that part of yourself that says, This is morally wrong and I will stop you. Judge not, lest ye be judged, but in this case I was pretty sure God would be on my side.

5

I HAD ONE person I trusted who had known Dominga Salvador well, but I couldn’t take Zerbrowski or the FBI with me, because my friend had done some really bad things when he’d been part of Dominga’s crew. I needed an excuse to ditch the other badges, without seeming like I was ditching them. My text tone went off on my phone and I had the perfect excuse.

Out loud I said, “Crap.”

“What’s wrong?” Manning asked.

Zerbrowski was watching me a little too closely, as if something about that “crap” hadn’t fooled him at all. Maybe I should have said “shit”?

“I have another appointment. Normally I’d ignore it, but do we actually have any leads to follow?”

“What appointment?” Zerbrowski asked, smiling, but his eyes let me know I wasn’t fooling him much.

I held the text up so he could read it. “Remember 8:00PM meeting with jeweler. Je t’aime, ma petite.” It had a tiny picture of Jean-Claude beside it.

“Jeweler, ooh, ooh, you’re trying on rings tonight.” He grinned, because he’d said too much out loud, and I was pretty sure why he’d done it. He wanted to see what Manning would do.

The grim-faced agent suddenly smiled at me. It was a good smile that seemed to erase the lines and years that the horrors on the screen had added. She was suddenly attractive, eyes all a-sparkle. Earlier I would have gotten grumpy again, but now I understood why she might have gone all girly about my engagement; she needed something to distract her from the job. As a police officer, or a first responder of any kind, you need things outside work that put the smile back on your face, because if you don’t have something you’ll either crawl into a bottle, burn out early, or decide to be too up close and friendly with your gun one dark night. Did Manning follow romances in the news? Did she enjoy tabloid relationship gossip? Read romance novels in her spare time? And here I was right in the middle of a public romance that seemed to fall right out of one of those books—how could she resist, and why would she want to?