“What?” Boone frowned. “She called us about the body. And you told her she wasn’t in trouble.”

“Anything I said back there was to get her to talk. Don’t confuse interrogation with sincerity, even if the person we’re talking to takes it that way. The first rule of homicide is you don’t trust any witness, person of interest, or suspect until you have corroboration or evidence that proves their story to be true. No matter what someone looks like.”

“But why would she have called us if she were involved in the killing?”

“Not our problem at this point. We just need to stick to the facts.” Butch motioned over his shoulder. “That female phoned the emergency line the night our victim was strung up by the back of her skull like a side of beef with what probably was a meat hook. That is the only thing we know for sure about anything right now—”

“She didn’t do it.”

Butch shot over a spare-me-grasshopper look. “How do you know that? Because of the color of her hair? Or was it those eyes you kept trying to catch.”

As Boone stomped his boot in the snow and cursed, Butch shook his head. “Look, I’m not calling you out or anything. This is the first time you’ve been in this situation, so it’s not a surprise you require training. I just need you to keep your head in the right place. I’ve seen a lot more than you have when it comes to this kind of shit. I strongly urge you to take my advice—and if you can’t? It’s no harm, no foul, but you will not be involved in this investigation. Are we clear?”

Boone opened his mouth, intending to bring up how rattled Helania was. How she was clearly traumatized. How she . . .

. . . had beautiful citrine eyes and hair he wanted to run his fingers through.

Clamping his piehole shut, he kept a string of curses to himself.

“Hey,” Butch said, “losing focus happens to everyone. Especially if you’ve never done this before. I just need your game head on, okay?”

When Boone nodded, the two of them started walking again. And as he shoved his cold hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, he decided that he knew one other thing for certain about Helania. Aside from the fact that she was absolutely, positively, not the killer.

He was going to see her again.

One way or another.

* * *

The race’s medical facility was across the river, the sprawling subterranean maze of treatment units buried beneath a farmstead’s flat fields and forested perimeter. There were four entrances to the place; one in the actual old farmhouse—which formed a front for the operation to the human world—and then three other kiosks scattered throughout the acreage in the pine trees.

As Boone materialized in front of the western kiosk, he had no familiarity with the medical center. As an aristocrat, prior to his joining the Brotherhood’s training program, he’d been used to Havers coming to the house if anyone needed a healer. Now, as a trainee, he was treated by the Brothers’ private staff in their own clinic. Plus, if memory served, this was the new, improved facility that had just been opened after the raids.

Butch re-formed next to him and entered a code on a keypad next to a solid steel door. After the lock clicked free, the two of them entered a narrow room, the focal point of which was a set of closed elevator doors.

“You ready for this?” the Brother asked.

“Yes,” Boone answered, even though he wasn’t sure he was.

Butch hit the single button on the wall to summon the lift. As the doors opened, the two of them got in and then it was a case of the Jeopardy! theme as they descended. At the end of their little trip down into the earth, he and Butch stepped out into a sparkling-clean corridor. Looking left and right, Boone saw all kinds of signage, but none of it indicated where they needed to head.

“We’re going this way,” Butch said grimly. “It’s a haul.”

Boone fell into step with the Brother, and they were silent as they went along, taking corners and cruising down straightaways. There was no reason to ask how Butch knew where the morgue was, and the fact that that particular part of the facility was out of the way seemed appropriate given that Havers and his staff were all about preserving life. It also made sense that there was no signage for it. Unlike the various directives and arrows that were posted about Radiology, Outpatient Surgery, Emergency Services and the ilk, there was not a thing about where the dead were taken and stored.

You had to imagine that discretion was on purpose. No reason to remind patients and families that sometimes people didn’t leave through the front door, so to speak.

And on that note . . . his father’s remains had been taken here.

Had been cremated here. At Boone’s request as next of kin.

After about five more minutes of heel-toeing it, Butch took them around a final left-hand turn, and that was when the faint, fake-sweet aroma of formaldehyde bloomed in the air. Sure enough, up ahead, a set of unmarked double doors appeared, and Boone knew they’d found their destination.

As they came up to the morgue’s entrance, Butch jumped ahead and held open the way in. Boone, on the other hand, stopped short. And couldn’t go any farther.

“What’s up, son?” the Brother asked quietly. “You okay?”

It was hard to say the words out loud. Much less to a male he respected. “Is it . . . is it wrong that I didn’t ask to see his body?”

There was no reason to specify the “he” he was talking about.

“No, Boone. It’s not wrong. Some things are better if they aren’t seen.”

“I had him cremated here.” He focused on the Brother. “I just didn’t want him to come back again, you know? I didn’t want . . . that. Even though I’m only being paranoid, right? I mean, no one’s reanimated for a second time after . . .”

After they were popped in the frontal lobe at point-blank range by a bullet filled with water from the Scribe Virgin’s sacred fountain.

Somehow, he was not capable of putting all of that into words. The good news was that the Brother didn’t seem to need it spelled out for him.

“You did the right thing,” Butch said quietly. “Whatever makes it easier on you is the right thing.”

“None of this, as it turns out, is easy. Not while my sire was alive, and not now that he’s dead. My fantasy did not pan out the way I thought when I was being young and vindictive.”

“Grieving a complicated relationship can be even harder than one that worked for you. Do you want to wait out here while I—”

“No, I’m coming in with you.” Boone took a deep breath and braced himself. “I’m going to be a professional about this.”

Striding through the open door, he looked around at a carpeted room that was office-like rather than holy-fuck-dead-body clinical: There were desks with laptops, and floor-to-ceiling shelves of vertical, coded files, as well as a conference table that had some photographs laid out on its smooth surface. He didn’t want to look too closely at them.

On the far wall, there was another set of double doors—and the fact that they had no windows in them? That had to be where the corpses were kept.

“Does he do the autopsies himself?” he asked. “Havers, I mean?”

“Yes, I do.”

Boone turned around. The race’s longstanding healer was entering from the corridor outside, his tortoiseshell glasses, bow tie, and white coat like something out of an Ivy League medical school. Maybe from the turn of the previous century.

“Rexboone.” The male came forward and offered his palm. “My sincerest condolences with regard to your sire’s passing. I knew Altamere very well and always found him to be most enjoyable company. He will be sorely missed.”

Boone shook what was extended to him and made what he hoped were appropriate murmurings of thanks. The fact that Havers had a high opinion of Boone’s father made sense. The race’s healer was a member of the glymera, and right up Altamere’s alley: Wealthy, well educated, from a good bloodline. No wonder they had gotten along.

“If you are prepared to accept the urn,” Havers said, “I have it ready for you.”

Boone blinked. “Ah . . . yes. Thank you. I’ll take it.”

“Very good. After we have concluded our present sad business, then.”

Havers turned to Butch. There was some talk about the victim, and then Butch signed a form of some sort. Meanwhile, Boone was aware that his heart was pounding and his mouth was dry—although not about the murder.

But come on, like he expected Altamere’s ghost to pop the top off his tin can, come down the hall from whichever shelf he’d been put on, and be all pissed off at the whole cremation thing?

Ashes were so much better than a corpse in a tuxedo showing up at Last Meal and asking for another round of scotch—

With a silent curse, Boone forced himself to refocus as Havers opened one half of the inner set of double doors. The formaldehyde smell quintupled. As Butch entered the examination area with the doctor, Boone made himself follow along. He didn’t make it much farther than just inside the doorjamb.

There were four workstations in the floor-to-ceiling tiled room, each of them dominated by a waist-high, stainless steel slab that had a fauceted sink at one end, a drainage hole at the other, and a system of metal tubing and electrical wires underneath. Rolling tables were in place for what he guessed were instruments and tissue samples, and the hanging scales for weighing organs and wall-mounted light boxes for X-rays and imaging test results meant you could do everything in one place.

No expense had been spared. No efficiency underutilized.

No bodies out on the slabs, either. Thank God.

“She is over here,” Havers murmured.

“Over here” turned out to be a wall-sized refrigerator unit with two dozen three-by-four-foot doors stacked two high across its stainless steel face. And as Butch went forward, Boone hung waaaaay back while Havers unlatched a compartment on the top tier.

The physician pulled out a stainless steel slide, and Boone stopped breathing.