“Well, I think he may have given us some clues.”

“My God, Susan. Should you be working on this case? He knows who you are.”

“True.”

“I don’t think this is good for you at all. Especially not now. You need out.”

“I need work.”

“I’m talking to your doctor.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Susan, it’s for your own good. I’m just trying to help.”

My blood burned. “I don’t need help!”

“You do.” Despite my nastiness, she hugged me all the tighter. “I love you, Susan. I’m not going to let you kill yourself. I’m not.”

“May I come in?”

We had left the front door ajar, and Darcy was standing just outside, peeking through. Lisa still had her arms around me, and I could see he was confused. “Is that one your girlfriend?” Darcy asked.

I cleared my throat. “Well, yes…”

“Did you know that four percent of all women prefer other women to do sex with?”

“Darcy…”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, do you? But my dad says it’s bad.”

“Darcy…”

“But the weird thing is he loves his videos where women are with other women and-”

“Darcy!” He fell silent. I had to remind myself-he doesn’t see faces; he can’t read facial expressions. He’s not going to get any nonverbal cues. You want him to be quiet, you gotta say so. “What are you doing here?”

He looked nervously at Lisa, fidgeted with his hands, then started again. “I think maybe Mr. Granger figured out what that ‘neon’ remark meant. He called my dad. The killer wanted us to go to this place where they store old neon signs.”

“Why would he want us to go there?” But I was certain of the answer before I had finished asking the question. “Let’s go.”

The usual rant against Vegas is that it isn’t really a city, just an oversized vacation destination. After all, there’s no urban blight, like cooler-than-cool New York. There are no high-rises, other than the hotels. How can that be a city? What some of these geniuses don’t get-Hunter S. Thompson, for one-is that this is a Western city. It’s out in the fertile desert plains. It’s meant to be flat. The houses were designed to go out, not up, in the traditional hacienda style. It was built for the automobile, not the pedestrian. No one wants to walk in Vegas. It’s too hot. You don’t walk home from work. You don’t walk to the store for a loaf of bread. That doesn’t make it any less of a city.

I got to see a lot of that flat landscape on my way to the Vegas Neon Graveyard. We parked and walked down a lovely pine-bordered alameda till we arrived at the main lot. A lot of memories were stored there, especially for someone like me who’d lived in Vegas all my life. Remember Sassy Sally’s, on Fremont? That huge neon marquee was here, in all its glory. Or the gigantic guy in the leisure suit who used to shoot pool on the marquee for Binion’s? Also here. Some of this stuff went back to the very earliest days of postwar Vegas. Remember the crown that used to sit atop the Royal Nevada? Well, neither did I. I’m not that old, for God’s sake. But one of the lab techs pointed it out to me.

Apparently the guy who owned this place was a collector who just couldn’t bear to see these Vegas icons destroyed. So whenever one of the casinos or hotels replaced their signage, he bought it, usually dirt cheap. He’d had to move his collection three times, on each occasion to a larger tract of land. He was outside the city now-probably too far from the Strip to attract much tourism, not that the average Vegas visitor was all that interested in historical memorabilia. He sold new signs, too, but I got the impression that was mostly a front to finance the acquisition and upkeep of this gaudy but sentimental collection.

It must’ve seemed like a unique and harmless specialty field. Until the headless corpse turned up.

The other half, the head, was hanging separately.

“Half off,” I muttered, wishing to God I had something to drink. “I guess that’s a joke.”

Darcy looked at me, puzzled. “Is it funny?”

“No, but-” How was I going to explain this? His father had warned me that most humor passed Darcy by, and given all the language oddities associated with autism, he was less likely to get wordplay than anything. “Never mind.”

Darcy turned away, staring at what looked like the old frontispiece from the Horseshoe. Poor kid. I remembered what a gentle spirit he had-how he wouldn’t even hurt a spider. And here I was dragging him around to see decapitated corpses. Well, technically, he’d dragged me, but still. Maybe Granger was right.

Speaking of whom: “Glad you could make it, Lieutenant Pulaski. Hope you don’t mind us taking your clue and running with it.”

Just had to rub it in, didn’t he? “Not at all. Give my congratulations to your team. How’d you figure out what it meant?”

Granger gave me the sort of smile that makes you desperate to erase it with the flat of your hand. “That’s why we’re called detectives.”

“Of course.”

“What were you doing last night after we left your place?”

Was there something about my face? Clothes? Smell? Had that brute from the bar gone to the press? “I was a little shaken up, actually. After that phone call.”

I brushed him off and scouted around for Darcy. He’d been here a good two minutes. More than enough time for the Boy Wonder to start making his bizarre and brilliant deductions.

“So what Poe story are we in now?” I asked. Darcy was staring at the ground. “I’ve read several that involved decapitations.”

“ ‘The Black Cat,’ ” he said flatly.

“I kind of remember that one. Similar to ‘The Tell-tale Heart,’ right? Guy tries to kill a cat, and when this woman rushes in to saveit, he kills the woman instead. What makes you think that’s the one?”

I could tell this poor gentle soul didn’t want to talk about it. But he did. For me. “He used an axe.”

Eww. “Did you get that from the coroner?”

He shook his head.

“Then how?”

“I looked.”

Double eww. ’Course, I looked, too, but apparently I lacked Darcy’s eye for detail. Or maybe it was that I hadn’t read Carston’s twelve-volume History of Criminology cover to cover and memorized each page. “Did you have a chance to look at the note?”

He nodded, then recited it for me-without looking. “ ‘From the one Particle, as a center, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically-in all directions-to immeasurable but still definite distances in the previously vacant space-a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.’ ”

“That’s kind of different. Is that Poe? I don’t recognize it.” Not that my brain came equipped with photographic memory. “Do you?”

Darcy shook his head. It bothered him. I could see that.

“Maybe our killer has begun composing original works? In the style of the master?”

Again he didn’t answer and I didn’t blame him. Even as I suggested it, it didn’t sound right. The psycho was still using Poe for his blueprint. There was no indication that he had broken free of that particular part of his psychosis. So where did this bizarre and cryptic message come from? Evidently I needed to know more about Poe than was contained in his complete works. I resolved to stop by the city library on my way home from work and see what I could learn about the man himself.

I saw Tony Crenshaw near the spot where the torso still dangled. His body was stiff, almost rigid. Only his mouth moved. He reminded me of one of those talking statues at Caesar’s Palace.

“Got anything for me, Tony? More of those rug fibers?”

“Not a one.”

“Anything at all?”

“Not much. No prints, that’s for damn sure. Nothing we can get DNA from. A few almost microscopic traces of clothing.”

“Can you tell what it is?”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “I’d like to get it under a microscope before I make any definite pronouncements. But it looks as if it might be lace. Red lace.”