running out of the newsroom and throwing up by the back door in the parking lot.
“You were saying?” She sat up taller in her crappy chair. “About where the body was found?”
Bill crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his own chair across the aisle. At twenty-nine, and having been married for a year and a half, he straddled the divide between hipster and adult, his shaggy black hair and black-rimmed glass and skinny jeans more the former, the seriousness with which he took his job and his wife the latter.
“Seven blocks away from that techno club, Ten,” he said.
“What the hell . . . happened to him.” As Jo looked at the next picture in line, she willed her stomach contents to stay put. “I mean, his skin . . .”
“Gone. Taken off of him like someone had stripped a cow. A deer.”
“This is . . . impossible.” She looked up. “And this would have taken time—security cameras. There have to be—”
“CPD is on it. I have a contact. He’s going to get back to us.”
“Us?”
Bill rolled over on his chair and tapped the stack of horror. “I want us to write this together.”
Jo looked around at the empty desks. “You and me?”
“I need help.” He checked his watch. “Where the hell is Dick. He said he’d be here by now.”
“Wait, you and me. Writing an article together. For publication in the real paper.”
“Yes.” Bill checked his phone and frowned. “It’s not like we haven’t been working with each other already on you-know-what.”
She met his eyes. “You don’t think this has anything to do with . . .”
“Not officially, I don’t, and neither do you. We start talking about our little side project trying to find vampires and Dick’s going to think we’re crazy.”
As a sharpshooter went through Jo’s frontal lobe, she had the sense that she needed to ask Bill about something . . . something about the last night . . .
When nothing came to her, and the pain just got worse, she shook her head and looked back down at the photograph of the full body. The tangled, glistening mess was nothing but muscle and sinew over glimpses of shockingly white bone. Veins, like purple wires, added fine-line accents to the crumpled anatomy. And the bed upon which the corpse lay? Skin.
Well, to be fair, there seemed to be some clothes—
The familiar headache rippled through her skull, playing the piano keys of her pain receptors. As she winced, the newsroom’s back door was thrown wide. Dick Peters, as editor-in-chief of the CCJ, walked in like he owned the place, his lumbering footfalls the advance of all that was arrogant and arbitrary, as only the truly below-average could be. Fifty years old, fifty pounds over Dad-bod weight, and retrenched in the sexism of the fifties, the fat folds padding his once-handsome fratboy face were a harbinger of the atherosclerosis that would claim him early.
But not soon enough. Not in the next fifteen feet.
“You wanted to see me,” Dick announced to Bill. “Well, let’s do this.”
The boss man didn’t slow down, and as he passed by like a semi on the highway, Bill got up and motioned for Jo to follow with the pictures.
Stuffing them back into their folder, she strode after the men. As subscriptions and advertisers fell off, everything had been downsized so it was only another twenty feet to the paper-thin door of Dick’s fragile, declining temple of power.
But his authority was undiminished as he dumped his Columbo coat in a threadbare chair—and realized she was Bill’s plus-one.
“What,” he snapped at her as he took a suck on his Starbucks venti latte.
Bill shut the door. “We’re here together.”
Dick looked back and forth. Then focused on Bill. “Your wife is pregnant.”
As if the infidelity was excusable when Lydia wasn’t knocked up, but tacky for those nine particular months.
“We’re reporting this together,” Jo said, dropping the photographs on Dick’s desk.
They landed cockeyed on the clutter of paperwork, the glossies peeking out of the folder, presenting themselves for precisely the close-up Dick gave them.
“Holy . . . shit.”
“This is nothing that anyone’s ever seen in Caldwell before. Or anywhere else.” Bill checked his Apple Watch again. “Jo and I are going to investigate this together—”
Dick turned his head without straightening his upper half, his jowls on the down side hanging loose off his jawline. “Says who.”
“Tony’s still out from the gastric bypass.” Bill motioned to the closed door. “Pete’s only part-time and he’s covering the