Antsy, twitchy, nervous, crampy, she fussed around with the mouse, watching the little white arrow go in circles on the screen.

Man, she was still pretty angry at Butch. Even though she’d calmed down a lot, she remained hurt and—

She frowned and stopped her arrow from wandering.

At the bottom of the line-up of icons, there was a tiny picture, a little representation of what seemed like … the back of her hellren’s head?

But that couldn’t be right.

Double-clicking on the image, a sign-in popped up. The username slot was already filled in with BUTCH DHES, and the password was blank.

There was no title anywhere, nothing to let her know what kind of file it was. And it made her sad, but given where they were at, she was suspicious of whatever it was.

Then again, when you kept certain things from your mate, the other party was likely to start questioning pretty much everything.

Putting her fingertips back to the keyboard, she entered the password he usually used: 1MARISSA1!

Sure enough, it got her into …

It was a video image, frozen and ready to be played, of Butch sitting at the desk, with the camera behind his head.

Hitting the play arrow, she triggered the mechanism and watched as her mate stared at that black key with the red tassel. There was no sound, so she couldn’t hear anything, but she imagined the plopping noise the thing made every time it dropped on the blotter.

A young male came in the room.

Had to be one of the trainees.

And the pair of them started talking. Clearly, this had to be an interview with regard to the program—and it was not going well, if the other male’s face was anything to go by.

When Butch held up the key, it became obvious they were talking about it.

Time for sound, she thought, fumbling around with various buttons. Talk about nowhere fast. After all kinds of F-whatevers not doing the job, she discovered that the speakers themselves required a turn-on—and still she got nothing. It took her for-frickin’-ever before she discovered that someone had unplugged the speakers from the tower for some reason.

“…what is it like?” the male asked.

Straightening, she focused on Butch’s head, and he took a moment to answer the question. “Depends on how old it is and how it happened. The new stuff … especially if it was violent … can be messy.”

“What are you talking about?” she said out loud.

“Body parts really don’t like to be cut, stabbed or hacked into sections, and they express their anger by leaking all over the fuck. Jesus, we’re, like, seventy percent water or something? And you learn that’s so fucking true when you go to a fresh scene. Pools of it. Drips of it. Speckles of it. Then you got the stained clothes, rugs, bedsheets, walls, flooring—or if it’s outside, the ground cover, the concrete, the asphalt. And then there’s the smell…”

Dear … God, she thought as a wave of sadness overtook her.

Butch continued. “The older cases … the smell is worse than the mess. Water deaths, with the bloating, are just ugly-looking—and if that gas that’s built up gets out? The stench will knock you on your ass. And I wasn’t too crazy for the burn deaths, either.” There was another pause. “You want to know what I always hated the most?” He motioned over his head. “The hair. The hair … God, the fucking hair, especially if it was a woman. Matted with blood, dirt, little rocks … tangled and twisted … laying on gray skin. When I can’t sleep at night, that’s what I see. I see the hair.” He began to rub his hands together. “You always wore these gloves, you know … so you didn’t get fingerprints on anything, didn’t leave any of yourself behind. Early days they used to be latex—later they were nitrile. And sometimes, when I’d handle a body, the hair would get on the gloves … and it was like it wanted to get into me? Like … you could catch death by murder somehow.” Butch shook his head. “Those gloves were so fucking thin. And they didn’t work.”

The trainee frowned. “Why did you have to wear them then?”

“No, no, they worked with fingerprints, you know. But I left something of myself behind in those dead bodies. Every one of them … has a piece of me in them.”

Marissa turned off the sound. Stopped the video.

Put her head in her hands.

“You’ll be good as new in the morning.”

As Doc Jane handed over a mirror, Paradise braced herself for her reflection—but actually, it wasn’t that bad. “How many stitches is that?”

“Twelve. But you’ll heal with no scar whatsoever.”

Reaching up, she touched just under the line of tiny black knots that was next to her eyebrow. “I bled so much, you would have sworn I needed a hundred.”

Doc Jane put a little white bandage over her handi-work and then the snapping sound of examination gloves being taken off echoed in the tiled room. “That area has a high degree of vascularization. You might want to feed if it’s been a while—it’s not an emergency at all, but you did lose some blood and you guys are working awfully hard in there.”

Or, in her case, losing her concentration and making an ass out of herself.

“You can wait for the bus to take you back, or if you don’t want to hang around, I can have one of the doggen take you out to a secure place to dematerialize from.”

Dropping the mirror, Paradise tried to imagine what her father would say if he saw her face. “Can I stay here for the day? I can’t … I don’t want to go home looking like this.”