"I speak for myself."

"When you know the ground."

"These are my…corpses."

"Mine too. Shhh. Delilah." He whispers in my ear. Touches it with the tip of his tongue.

Well, that worked. I am pretty much speechless. How did he know my first name? How did he know how to shut me up?

The plainclothes man swaggers over, dripping dislike. I can see why. He is short, squat, vampire-pale without any of the mystique that goes with a professional bloodsucker.

"If it ain’t the Cadaver Kid again," he says to Ric. "I heard you were nosing around. Montoya." The voice is grating, egotistical, and, my very favorite thing to go after with a nail file, bullying.

"Detective Haskell." Ric's voice sounds icy but I can sense he is super hot under that cool white collar. I'm suddenly very attuned to what's under that cool white collar. "The captain likes me to eyeball these crime scenes. And I did call it in."

"You. Not your little casino luck-piece tootsie."

I stiffen as much as Ric had done on me yesterday. His hands clamp like handcuffs on my arms, a dislocated gag, but I get the message.

" Miss Street is a fellow professional," he says, smooth as variated tinted glass in a 24-carat gold-accented frame. "An associate."

"And what's your specialty, sister? Knee-work?"

I tear loose of Ric and round on the Lieutenant. He's middle-aged, middle-gutted, middling-haired; every position-loving, not-very-sharp man who likes to throw his considerable weight around instead of doing his job.

I draw on all the interviews I've done with women in law enforcement.

" Quantico didn't think so, Lieutenant, when I took their serial killer workshop with John Douglas. Granted this is all theoretical and speculative compared to what you might dig up from beat work, but you have male/ female vies here, you have major trauma to the remaining bones, which indicates an ultra-violent-and bizarrely controlled-end. You have coitus interruptus, which guarantees a textbook-sick perp, and you have very old bones, which means a very…cold…case."

The guy stands paralyzed.

"Remind me," Ric murmurs in my same damn oversensitive ear, "to forget about getting a pit bull."

"So you're FBI too," Detective Haskell says. "Ex-FBI like our Meskin friend here?"'

At first I don't get the word, "Meskin," but Ric's fingers digging into my upper arms allow me to translate it, pronto.

"Right," I say. Claiming to be ex-FBI gives me much more status than admitting to being a reporter. An ex-reporter. "And I didn't quite get what you just said."

Haskell doesn’t bother to translate. He just eyes Ric with an ugly smile. "Our Cadaver Kid here is one lucky bastard. Got a nose for dead bodies. Me, I think the whole thing stinks. Maybe he's really working for the Christophe syndicate or one of the other mob czars in town and just knows where all the bodies are buried."

Before this confrontation can deteriorate any more, it's interrupted by a cry from the gravesite.

"Most of the clothes are rotted to threads," a woman's voice calls from the pit, "but we've found some surviving artifacts."

She's right to call any finds "artifacts." This is almost an archeological site. I recall glimpses of cast-off clothes and am starting to date them. Quantico Girl? No. Retro Girl. Yes.

A quart-size plastic bag holding a heavy load of large silver dollar coins is passed up.

"Wanta bet there are thirty of them?" Ric murmurs in my ear.

Then a sandwich baggie holding something small and black is also passed up to Officer Buff, but Haskell snags it. He stares at it, then eyes me with mean triumph.

"A gambling chip," he says. Tells me. "From the Inferno. So much for your 'old' theory, babe. So, Montoya. You came, you saw, you bombed. Get yourself and Quantico Girl outahere."

We retreat a few yards. Once we're alone, I fight not to double over and barf. Because I re-feel their pain, this live-dead couple. Interlocked bones, loved to death. I've seen them at their best and at their worst. Vies. I know the lingo, but it makes them into pawns, not people who lived and breathed and loved at one time.

I think about how everything I own could be pawned. Achilles' urn. My own soul.

Ric is shaking me loose of my flashback. "You'll have to tell me what you saw later."

He's frowning behind the sunglasses. They prevent sun damage and don't hurt his looks at all. Does every woman fixate on him like this, or just me? What is going on?

"He called you-" I start to say.

"He lives to offend. Anyway, it's true."

"Well, yeah, but…hey, what's really bothering you?"

"Besides you?" The easy humor is back. And then the frown. "The Inferno is the hottest hotel-casino in town for the Pseudo-Goth-Hypehead-Decadent set."

"And?"

"It opened three years ago."

"Oh."

"That's okay. Silver dollars haven't been used for gambling in this city since the price-run on silver in the seventies. It's up to the coroner's office to determine the time of death. Those bones looked well seasoned to me."

"It's not only that. I…saw…shards of their clothes, jewelry. Particularly hers. Strictly late forties or early fifties."

He's smiling down at me. "They teach you that at ' Quantico '?'"

"No, but they should have, if I'd been there. I have worked as an investigative TV reporter. I covered ritual murders, although in Kansas they were cattle mutilations, most often. Are you really ex-FBI?"

"Yeah. What about it?"

"You're the best freaking dressed Fed I've ever seen."

"Maybe that's why I'm 'ex.' Hey, I appreciate your coming over here. I wanted to establish that we have a right to be on this case. I didn't expect it, but you cooked Haskell's goose."

We? This case? Maybe. But I've got my own cases to solve, my own bones to pick.

Bone number one is not who Ric is, but what. We walk away from the crime scene for a heart to heart.

Chapter Eleven

“Now that we're alone, Ric, tell me what happened here. This murder scene is what the dowsing rod targeted last night, and I saw it. Only I saw that couple alive, and being killed. I've never had daylight nightmares before. You must have had something to do with it. You're a water witch, aren't you?"

Ric winced at my last phrase. ''Water dowser. It's a respected…faculty among rural folk all over the world. I can do it a bit now, but it's not my particular gift. It's not any part of this Millennium Revelation upsurge in supernaturals and freaks at all. I'm not a freak. I'm not a witch or a wizard of anything. Just a guy with a quirky family gene."

"So what's your 'faculty,' if not finding water?"

He looked away, maybe appealing to the island god for inspiration so that I'd believe him.

"Most dowsers do find water. A very few find precious metals and stones. I'm unique, as far as I know. I see dead people. Underground. That's what I do. Know they're there."

"That's what you consult about?"

He nodded. "Law enforcement people are pig-headed and pride themselves on that. They just think I'm superbly educated and well-trained." He gave a self-effacing grin. "Which I was, no thanks to myself."

There was a story there, but I'd get it later. I can wait.

"A lot of them like to think I'm just lucky," he added. "I let them believe that I have a photographic memory for news stories. Most dead bodies in wrong places are MIAs. Someone's missing; somebody's reported something, if you look hard enough. Which I do. After the fact."

He met my eyes again. "You seem to have some folk faculty yourself."

"You didn't literally see them, the victims?"

"I don't see anything that specific. The dowsing rod draws me to the grave. I report it and the authorities always find a body. Or bodies. Sometimes they're more than human. Or less."