Karl and I made our way back around the side of the cottage to the front door and let ourselves in. There was beer in the fridge, all right, but it didn't appeal to either of us – for different reasons. Lacey was right about the TV, too. The old 19-inch portable had extendable rabbit ears that could pull in two of the local channels. We settled on one and watched stupid sitcoms. The reception wasn't all that good, but then I can't say that I paid real close attention. I kept waiting for screams to start issuing from the room underneath us, but all I could hear was the inane dialogue and canned laughter of the TV show. Finally, I asked Karl if his acute vampire hearing was picking up anything from below.

  "No screaming, if that's what you mean," he said. "I can sort of make out Lacey's voice, and sometimes the guy's, but I can't catch what they're saying."

  "Let's say we start hearing screams, thirty seconds from now. What do we do about it?"

  Karl scratched his chin. "What do you want to do about it?"

  "You could take that basement door down, couldn't you? Despite the fact that it's bolted shut?"

  "Yeah, that wouldn't be much of a problem," he said. "Assuming that's what we decide to do."

  "Why wouldn't we? The plan was to terrify him into talking, remember? We can't sit here and let her torture the guy, even if he is a fucking scumbag."

  "The dude's not under arrest," Karl said. "And Lacey's not acting in her official capacity as a cop, either."

  "He's in our custody, Karl. We brought him here, which makes him our responsibility. And torture, no matter what the motivation, is still a crime. We're supposed to uphold the law – we're the good guys, remember?"

  Karl looked at me. "You never bent the law a little, Stan? Here and there, out of necessity?"

  "Even if I did, what Lacey's doing down there is more than bending the fucking law – it's breaking it."

  "Not yet, it's not," he said. "No screaming, remember?"

  "What if she gagged him?" I asked.

  "He'd still be making sounds through his nose, and I'd hear it."

  I sat back and pretended to watch the TV. I was beginning to wish I'd never had the bright idea of trying to scare one of the Church's thugs into giving us information. I should have had Karl try Influence, even if he wasn't real good at it yet, and kept Lacey out of this entirely. Grief and rage had turned her into someone I didn't know anymore, and didn't like very much.

  What if Karl heard muffled screams from below and didn't tell me? Or what if I heard them, too? In theory, I was Karl's superior and could order him to tear that basement door down. Except the operation we were on had no official sanction. And what was I going to do if Karl refused – shoot him?

  I came up with answers for all those questions – trouble was, I kept changing them every couple of minutes. I was still trying to figure out what to do if it got bad down there when the front door opened and Lacey walked in.

  She was fully dressed, I was glad to see, except for the outer jacket she'd been wearing. She was perspiring freely.

  I guess she'd familiarized herself with the place during her first visit, because she went without hesitation to a door and opened it to reveal a sparsely stocked linen closet. She found a tattered blue bath towel, looped it around her neck, and began to dry her face and hair.

  I was waiting for her to say something. When she didn't, the best I could come up with was, "Done for the night, Lacey?"

  She stopped mopping her face and looked at me, her expression hard to read. "Yes, Stan, I'm all finished."

  When she didn't elaborate, I said, quietly, "Did you kill him?"

  "No, he's very much alive."

  "Has he still got all his parts intact?"

  She gave me a half smile. "If he didn't, I'm sure you would have heard the screams. Or if you couldn't, Karl would have." She looked at Karl. "Right?"

  He just nodded.

  "So what did you do to him?" I said.

  "I broke his spirit," she said. "Through a combination of terror and sexual excitement, I put so much stress on his psyche that he couldn't stand it, and he broke."

  Karl and I looked at each other.

  "Sexual excitement?" he said to Lacey.

  "Oh, yes," she said. "It can be an important component in an effective interrogation. That's why I was naked. The Gestapo used the technique sometimes, with prisoners they thought wouldn't respond to the more direct approach. Certain prisoners would be questioned by an attractive woman, who would slowly build sexual tension in them, but deny release until she got the information she wanted."

  "How come you know all about the Gestapo?" I asked.

  "I've been doing a lot of reading, Stan, ever since you told me I might have the chance to question one of these people. God bless the Internet."

  "You studied torture, you mean."

  "No, I studied methods of interrogation – which sometimes included torture, I admit. Some of the stuff I read grossed me out – or would have, under other circumstances. But I just viewed it as data that might prove useful."

  "And was it?" I said. "Useful, I mean?"

  "Oh, did I forget to mention that part?" The grin that blossomed on her face reminded me of the old Lacey, someone I hadn't been sure I'd ever see again.

  "The next snuff video is scheduled to be filmed two nights from now, in a warehouse at 1634 Stansfield Avenue. Festivities are due to start at midnight, I believe."

  "Holy shit," Karl said.

  I jumped up, ran over to Lacey and hugged her. "Lacey, that's fantastic! It's all we need to bust these motherfuckers, once and for all."

  The grin was still in place when she said, "Well, it's good to know that my little efforts do not go unappreciated."

  "They don't – believe me," I told her.

  "Did you get anything else out of him?" Karl asked.

  "Just a couple of things," Lacey said. "One is that they've been using Drac's List to identify likely victims."