little four-legged softshoe. "I cut quite a rug myself."
"I'll just bet. Do I get anything for the pain? This headache would be killing me if I wasn't so distracted by my rib."
Finn took a pad out of his pocket and scrawled a prescription. "Here," he said, ripping off the top sheet and handing it to Jay. "This ought to help."
"Thanks." Jay hopped down off the examination table. It was a mistake, and the broken rib let him know that right away. "Oh shit," he said, gritting his teeth.
"Don't want to go around jarring yourself that way," Finn said, altogether too cheerfully for Jay's taste. "I wouldn't drive in your condition either. Do you have a ride home?"
"I'll take a cab," Jay said. Charles Dutton had taken him to the clinic, after he'd satisfied himself that Jay had nothing more of value to tell him, but he didn't imagine that the joker had hung around in the waiting room. Even if he had, Jay figured he'd had more than enough of Dutton and the Oddity for today. "You did the autopsy on Chrysalis, didn't you?" he asked.
"Yes," Finn replied. "The police always call us in on joker autopsies. The coroner doesn't feel qualified to deal with our unique joker physiology." The little centaur looked away and shuffled his feet uncomfortably. "A terrible thing. We see a lot of murder victims here in the clinic and it's never pretty, but the way her body was mutilated..." Finn shook his head.
"Yeah." Jay touched his bruised and swollen face, thinking that he knew just how she must have felt.
5:00 P.M.
Brennan awoke still soaked with sweat and numb from a half-remembered dream in which all of his friends and lovers were killed slowly and excruciatingly by some unseen agency he was powerless to stop. He was reassured somewhat when he spotted Jennifer sitting in the room's only chair, listening distractedly to the transmitter they'd planted on Quasiman. She heard Brennan stir, turned to watch him sit up and run his hands through his hair.
"About time you woke up," she said. "I'm suffering from terminal boredom listening to Quasiman stumble through his day."
"Nothing to link him to the murder?"
She shook her head. "Either he's incredibly clever, which frankly I doubt, or he has no connection with Barnett's crowd."
"What'd he do today?" Brennan asked.
"Got up early. It took him a while to figure out how to use the mop, then he washed the church's floors. Went up on the roof for a coffee break and forgot to come down. Father Squid called up to him to remind him to mow the lawn in the graveyard. That was a tough one. By the time he figured out the lawn mower, it was lunch. He spent the afternoon mowing and trimming. Once the transmitter stopped sending for forty-five minutes. I think it accompanied Quasiman into whatever alien dimension it is that he slips into."
"You ask me, he's just what he appears to be. A sweet, terribly afflicted church handyman."
"Figures." Brennan picked his jeans up off the floor and slid into them, then rummaged through the bureau for a fresh T-shirt. "I got a possible line on Sascha this morning from Tripod. It seems he has a girlfriend-"
He stopped and stared at the plain white envelope that was lying on the worn carpet just inside the door to the hotel room.
"How long has that been there?" he asked Jennifer. She turned, looked at the envelope, and frowned. "I don't know. I didn't notice it before."
Brennan crossed the room and picked up the envelope. It was unsealed and unaddressed. He opened it and took out the single piece of paper it held with a message scrawled in a familiar childish hand.
"Sorry how things turned out befour," it read. "I only want to help you. If you want to find a reel rap-head, go to Chickadee's."
"Damn," Brennan muttered to himself. "Just what the hell is going on here?"
6:00 P.M.
"Jesus," Digger said. "What's wrong with your face?" Jay closed the office door behind him and looked down at the reporter. Digger was almost eight inches tall now. In a couple more days he might be able to pass for a dwarf. "I'm disguised as a guy who got the shit beat out of him," he said. He moved slowly across the office and sat down. The radio was babbling something about the convention. It made his head hurt even more. He turned it off.
"God, it hurts just to look at you," Digger said.