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He rewrote me, that pretty, prissy rookie. Got me sober. Made sure I stayed sober, those times it really mattered. There was a puzzle called human evil that needed solving, and he wanted me in on it. He made detective, made sergeant, took me along for the ride. My fitness reports went up for the first time in ten years.

He was a living rebuke: An effortlessly good cop. Not that he ever saw it that way. Or ever conceived that I could have.

It poisoned me, poisoned us—what happened at the Temple, with Mrs. Silas, just its most overt expression. This whispered curse from a beaten bride, this unlooked-for gift from a long-dead Goddess. This friendship I never wanted. This partnership I never prized. This . . .

. . . love, Detective.

Back in the here and now, I close my eyes, pound booze. Lee Earle at my elbow—somebody else wants the phone.

Beck’s wry/cold voice in my head, looping back on itself. Two versions, overlapped: Past and present; pre- vs. post-; before and after.

All my muscles knotting and humming just to hear it—my heart, my groin. This unkillable love still alive in every part of me, like cancer.

“I love you, Beck,” I told him for the first and worst time, that Valentine’s Day night, on the steps of his suburban house. “I’m you

rs, you’re mine. I could never hurt you. Never.”

Not ‘til a few minutes later, at least.

* * *

Last call. Out onto the street, booze-burned and fever-bright, glass in my lungs again. Down to check out the Jenner lot: Blurred chalk outline, yellow tape just left lying—homicide haiku.

Some of my sources still talk to me. I used them to dummy up my own case-jacket, following Beck’s semi-warm evidence trail.

The dead girl’s name: McLay, Monica Ellen. 26. Good tits, bad buck teeth. Good record down at the Quentin Street Safeway—two years, night-shift floor manager. Her boss said he’d seen this guy from the Temple checking her out.

Illiterate mash notes slipped under the back door. “Afrodytee sez yr da 1 fr me.” Met the guy on a bank run, told him to take a hike. Laughed hard about it later—as if.

Forensics: Cracked skull, blunt instrument; swelling and haematoma at the base of the brain—she was unconscious before it started, dead ten minutes in. Rape kit positive, post-mortem. Trauma to the outer genitalia, cauterization to the inner.

Hypothesis: Same stalker mofo from the bank approached her from behind, slugged her, dragged her to where they wouldn’t be disturbed. Got busy. Then stuck an iron up inside her (soldering or curling, battery-operated) and turned it on. An open letter to the general public, corpse-written.

Not enough, just to drop her and do her the once. This skell had ambitions—total ownership. Possession, inside and out.

I’m the best you ever had, the last you ever will. I love you so much I’d kill for you, die for you. I love you too much to let you live.

You leave me, mock me, turn me down, and I’ll eat your beating heart.

I knew the impulse, intimately.

Wished to—Christ Jesus, Aphrodite, who-fucking-ever—that I didn’t.

* * *

Back at my place, too drunk to sleep, too late for much else. Eyes closed: The Temple.

Mrs. Silas.

Beck.

Records had the Temple owned by one Adonis Herson, born Graham M. Knowlton. No priors, nothing outstanding. Beck favored the direct route; I agreed. More chances to get into something.

Long story short—she wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t make her.

“We don’t interfere,” Herson told us. “The heart wants what it wants.”

Beck shot me an eyebrow. Gently quizzical: “Didn’t I hear somebody else say that?”