around the locks on her front door and ran her fingers over tiny chips in the doorjamb’s paint. Unlocking the door slowly, with barely a sound, she drew her gun and held it out in the defensive position, then slowly eased the front door open with her foot. She entered, gun drawn, moving quickly from room to room, ready to fire. I don’t think she took a breath for two minutes. After checking each of the six rooms and all of her closets, she double-checked that the front door had been bolted behind her and, finally, relaxed. Stripping down to her jeans and a pale blue bra, she began a more thorough search of her house, checking drawers, running her hands over bookcases, hoping to find a clue that might tell her who had broken in or what was missing. A spot on the top shelf of a cabinet in the dining area interested her. There, a small dust-free rectangle of oak gleamed where something had once stood. She ran her fingers over it, looked perplexed, then continued her search.
Me? I did not need to search to know who had been there. It was Danny. His odors lingered, no more real than memories to the living, but discernible by me: stale sweat, stale alcohol, and a dark emotion that snaked through the air in pencil-thin currents. It wasn’t evil, like the essence poisoning the Hayes house, but something sadder, something that weighed even more heavily on my soul.
I crossed a patch of it and it came to me: fear so persistent it had taken on a life of its own. Danny had come here out of an overwhelming, desperate fear.
What was he so afraid of?
As Maggie scrutinized every surface in her house—it was as Spartan as a hotel room, devoid of distractions and excess possessions—I followed close behind her, running my hands over pillows, touching chairs, the couch, tables, doorknobs, anything I could reach as I tried to decipher Danny’s intentions.
Why was he so frightened of Maggie? What could she do to him? What did he fear she might find out? I focused my memory on the original investigation into the murder of Alissa Hayes, searching for some action by Danny that had been out of character. I could remember nothing out of the ordinary, just that he had been deep in the throes of an alcoholic haze by then and growing angrier at the world by the moment.
In the end, neither Maggie nor I had any luck with our search. All I knew was that Danny had been there. All Maggie knew was that her home was not safe.
As she showered, bathroom door wide open and her gun within reach on a counter nearby, I waited in her living room, trying to figure out a way to let her know that it was Danny who had been in her house. Not Hayes, but Danny.
The only thing I could think of was to activate thoughts of Danny in her mind. I concentrated on recent memories: Danny at dinner with her, Danny standing too close to her desk, Danny looking over her shoulder to see what she was reading. I was trying to inspire some spark of intuition on her part.
It worked. She was barely dry from her shower and still wrapped in a towel—her amazing biceps on magnificent display—when she abruptly stopped brushing her hair to call a colleague in records and ask for Danny’s current home address. She jotted it down on a pad by the telephone and I scrutinized it while I waited for her to dress.
My god, Danny really was going down in the world. If that really was his latest address, he’d moved into the warehouse district where the local whores openly plied their trade. That was not a good sign at all. You only lived in that neighborhood if you had to—or if you were trying to prove to yourself that you didn’t deserve anything better.
I could have been there in minutes, but I waited to ride along with Maggie. I wanted to pretend to be her partner for a little while longer. I had such few indulgences left. I could feel her resolve wavering as she drove down the wide, deserted block of Danny’s neighborhood, gray and grimy in the bright morning light. Her detective’s eyes missed nothing. The sidewalk was littered with used condoms, cigarette butts, and blobs of spit hocked up the night before. Oddly enough, they quivered and glittered in the