nonthreatening, expensive potpourri scent of the apartment. "This is really starting to piss me off. Nothing runs my life like this. Nothing!" Returning to the desk, she slapped the creased file folder down on the polished wood. "I am going to beat this... "
She trapped the tag behind her teeth. Under the circumstances, adding "if it kills me" seemed a little too much like tempting fate.
Down the hall, Henry stood staring out at the West End, rubbing his throbbing temples. It could have been much worse-he'd expected it to have been much worse. Neither of them had actually attacked, and their conversation, while short, had been essen?tially civil. It was beginning to look as though Vicki had been right all along. Perhaps the old rules could be changed.
After all, coyotes had been solitary hunters for centuries and they were learning to hunt in packs. One corner of his mouth quirked up as he remembered a recent news report of coyotes eating household pets in North Vancouver.
"On second thought, perhaps that's not the most flattering of comparisons," he murmured to the night.
Vicki's strength had surprised him, although he sup?posed it shouldn't-her strength came from who she was, not what. After he worked past the jealousy, he found a tenuous faith in that strength beginning to push aside his expectations, beginning to allow him to have faith in himself.
The desire to throw her out of his territory in bleed?ing chunks persisted, but, for the first time, he realized the feeling didn't necessarily have to be acted upon.
Suddenly hopeful, he headed for the shower to wash off the lingering stink of the hospital.
"Mike, wake up. We need to talk before sunrise." Only experience allowed her to translate his mumbled response as "I'm awake," but since his eyes remained closed and his breathing had barely changed, she chose not to believe it.
Rather than use borrowed bedding, he'd rolled his sleeping bag out in the center of the king-sized bed but hadn't bothered to zip it up. Kneeling by his side, Vicki reached through the gap and wrapped her fin?gers around the warmest part of his anatomy.
"Jesus H. Christ, Vicki! Your hands are freezing!"
She grinned, having jerked back too quickly for his wild swing to connect. "Now you're awake."
"No shit." Squinting past her, he managed to focus on the clock beside the bed. "4:03. That's just great. Whatever we need to talk about had better be fuck?ing important."
"You actually heard me say we needed to talk?"
"I told you I was awake." He yawned and dragged in another pillow to prop up his head. "So what is it?"
"If it's our case, then we should discuss it."
"You couldn't have left me a note?"
"What, and let you sleep?" Picking up the file folder from the end of the bed, she crossed her legs and started to read. "Henry's ghost was a male Caucasian between twenty and twenty-five, a smoker who proba?bly died of a beating he'd received sometime before he went into the water, who'd had a kidney surgically removed within the last month which was not, by the way, what killed him. After death, his hands, wrists, and about two inches of forearm were removed, prob?ably with an ax. His body was later found in Vancou?ver Harbor." She frowned down at the photocopy of the autopsy pictures. "We can assume, since he's still lying unnamed in the morgue, the police scanned his picture into the system and didn't find a match. At this point, there're three things they should be doing."
Brows raised at her phrasing-he'd just bet the Vancouver police would love to hear what they should be doing-he indicated she should continue.
"They should be showing the photographs around at different hospitals, hoping someone can ID him from the kidney perspective."
"And I'm sure they've thought of that," Celluci muttered. "Can't be a lot of places around that take out kidneys."
"Depends on what you're calling around," Vicki re?minded him. "This guy could've been anywhere in the world just hours before he came to Vancouver and got killed." Grinning, she smacked him on the chest with the file folder. "Fortunately, we know something the police don't. The body was naked when they pulled it out of the water, but according to Henry's description, his ghost is wearing a T-shirt advertising a local band. We can ignore everything outside this immediate area."
"Then shouldn't we tell the police this guy's local?
In case you've forgotten, withholding evidence is a crime."
"Okay. Let's tell them." She mimed dialing a phone. "Hello? Violent crimes? You