"Right," she murmured in a sleepy-sounding drawl. "Details. She…" Molly shook her head. "She felt good. Really, really good."
"I gathered that much," I said. "What else?"
Molly kept shaking her head slowly. "Nothing else. Just that. It was all sensation. Ecstasy." She frowned a little, as if struggling to order her thoughts. "As if the rest of her senses had been blinded by it, somehow. I don't think there was anything else. Not sight nor sound nor thought nor memory. Nothing. She didn't even know it when she died."
"Think about it," I said quietly. "Absolutely anything you can remember could be important."
Butters came back in just then, carrying a bottle of water beaded with drops of condensation. He tossed it to me, and I passed the cold drink to Molly. "Here," I told her. "Drink up."
"Thanks." She opened the bottle, turned on her side, and started guzzling it without even sitting up. The pose did a lot to make her clothing look tighter.
Butters stared for a second, then sighed and quite evidently forced himself to go over to his desk and start sharpening pencils. "So what do we know?"
"Looks like she died happy," I said. "Did you run a toxicology check on her?"
"Yeah. Some residual THC, but she could have gotten that from the contact high at a concert. Otherwise she was clean."
"Damn," I said. "Can you think of anything else that would do… that to a victim?"
"Nothing pharmacological," Butters said. "Maybe if someone ran a wire into the pleasure centers of her brain and kept stimulating them. But, uh, there's no evidence of open-skull surgery. I would have noticed something like that."
"Uh-huh," I said.
"So it must be something from the spooky side," Butters said.
"Could be." I consulted my packet again. "What did she do?"
"No one knew," Butters said. "No one seemed to know anything about her. No one came to claim the body. We couldn't find any relations. It's why she's still here."
"No local address, either," I said.
"No, just the one on an Indiana driver's license, but it dead-ended. Not much else in her purse."
"And the killer took her clothes."
"Apparently," Butters said. "But why?"
I shrugged. "Must have been something on them he didn't want found." I pursed my lips. "Or something on them he didn't want me to find."
Molly abruptly sat up straight. "Harry, I remember something."
"Yeah?"
"Sensation," she said, resting one hand over her belly button. "It was like… I don't know, like hearing twenty different bands playing at the same time, only tactile. But there was a prickling sort of sensation over her stomach. Like one of those medical pinwheel things."
"A Wartenberg Pinwheel," Butters supplied.
"Eh?" I said.
"Like the one I use to test the nerves on your hand, Harry," Butters supplied.
"Oh, ow, right." I frowned at Molly. "How the hell do you know what one of those feels like?"
Molly gave me a lazy, wicked smile. "This is one of those things you don't want me to explain."
Butters let out a delicate cough. "They are sometimes used recreationally, Harry."
My cheeks felt warm. "Ah. Right. Butters, you got a felt-tip marker?"
He got one out of his desk and tossed it to me. I passed it to Molly. "Show me where."
She nodded, lay back down on her back, and pulled her shirt up from her stomach. Then she closed her eyes, took the lid off the marker, and traced it slowly over the skin of her abdomen, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration.
When she was finished, the black ink spelled out clear, large letters:
EX 22:18.
Exodus again.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said quietly. "We have a serial killer."
* * *
CHAPTER
Four
Molly said little on the way back. She just leaned against the window with half-closed eyes, probably basking in the afterglow.
"Molly," I told her in my gentlest voice. "Heroin feels good, too, Ask Rosy and Nelson."
The little smile of pleasure faded into blankness, and she stared at me for a while. By degrees, her expression changed to a frown of consideration, and then to a nauseated grimace.
"It killed her," she said finally. "It killed her. I mean, it felt so good… but it wasn't."
I nodded.
"She never knew it. She never had a chance." Molly looked queasy for a minute. "It was a vampire, right? From the White Court? I mean, they use sex to feed on life energy, right?"
"That's one of the things it could be," I said quietly. "There are plenty of demonic creatures in the Nevernever that groove on the succubus routine, though."