Carrie Vaughn: Kitty's Greatest Hits

She found another entry, however—a wedge he himself provided: the meadow. A magnificent, beautiful scene she would not have thought his troubled mind capable of conjuring. He himself didn’t seem to recognize that the memory of the place was filled with sadness and regret, the safety of a world and home he believed he had lost forever.

She hadn’t been able to delve farther, to learn where this memory had come from or the circumstances that tainted the air of his refuge, that he didn’t even seem to notice or refused to acknowledge.

She must win him over. The rituals of thought had become second nature over the century. The focusing of the mind, visualizing action, making action real. When nothing was real, the world became nothing but thought. She focused on the single cell, the single bed, where a man lay and put himself to sleep with thoughts of a meadow. She became tendrils, thin lines of energy melding into the patterns of his mind. Think of the meadow, put herself there, approach the man sitting on the rock. Listen to the birds in the trees, the water of the brook tumbling over smooth stones—

But the meadow wasn’t there anymore. It had lain so close to the surface before, almost as if he could transform this prison into his mountain vista through force of will. Now, he’d managed to lock her out.

There she was again, back at the start, battering at the door.

Oddly, she found herself admiring him.

“You can’t keep me out forever!” she shouted. “I’ll drive you mad! I’ve done it before, to men better than you!”

A smug satisfaction barred the door. The emotion roiled off him.

Time for a different approach—send a quiet thought, so quiet he would think it was his own. A bit of intuition granted from the supernatural. Surely he believed in such things.

“I can help you.” She didn’t even imagine her voice, did not give the words form. Merely let the thought linger. “I know this murderer, this demon. I have hunted it. I can help you.”

Create the thought, set it drifting, let him find it. That was all. She felt one impression out of the thought snag him: hunted.

The request for a visit surprised Cormac; this wasn’t Ben and Kitty’s day for it. He wasn’t sure this was a visiting day at all, and he didn’t need another anomaly making him twitch.

He sat, looked through the glass, and saw Detective Jessi Hardin of the Denver Police Department sitting across from him.

“Christ,” he muttered, looking away, rubbing his cheek.

“Hello,” she said. “You look terrible, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“What do you want?”

“I have to be blunt, Mr. Bennett,” she said. “I’m here looking for advice.”

Cormac had picked up some bad habits when he was young. The way he looked at cops, for example. They were the bad guys. They wanted to take your guns, they put bugs on your phones, they followed you, they worked for a government that wanted to suck you dry. They were fucking Commies—never just “Commies,” it was always “fucking Commies.” That’s what he learned from his uncle when he was a teenager. That’s what he learned from his dad, before he died.

He had to remind himself that the outlook was paranoid. Cops were just doing their jobs like anyone else. They weren’t the bad guys—usually. He had to work to not think of Detective Hardin as an enemy. But she wouldn’t be here unless she wanted something from him, and he remained suspicious. What his family had taught him: Cops weren’t your friends, they weren’t going to help you, they’d take you down the minute you did something wrong—the way they defined wrong. He learned to avoid the cops; he definitely never learned to respect them. Especially not after they sent Uncle David to prison. He didn’t go to prison because he was wrong, but because he got caught. Same as Cormac.

Hardin didn’t have a whole lot of respect for Cormac, either, to be fair. She’d have locked him up herself if she’d had the chance. She came from the overworked and driven mold of detective, her suit jacket worn and comfortable rather than fashionable, her dark hair pulled back in a functional ponytail. She didn’t wear makeup, and the frown lines around her mouth were more prominent than the laugh lines around her eyes. The nicotine from cigarettes stained her fingers. She always seemed to be leaning forward, like she was listening hard.

“Not sure I can help you,” he said.

“You mean you’re not sure you will . Maybe you should let me know right now if I’m wasting my time. Save us both the trouble.”

“Did Kitty tell you to talk to me?”

“She said you might know things.”

“Kitty’s got a real big mouth,” Cormac said.

Hardin was still studying him, glaring through the glass in a way that was almost challenging. Maybe because she felt safe, because she knew he couldn’t get to her here. Except she’d looked at him like that outside the prison, the first time he’d run into her.

“How did you two even end up friends?” Hardin said. “You wanted to kill her.”

“It wasn’t personal.”

“Then, what? It got personal?”

He considered a moment, then said, “Kitty has a way of growing on you.”

That got Hardin to smile. At least, one corner of her lips turned up. “I have a body. Well, half a body. It’s pretty spectacular and it’s not in any of the books.” She pulled a manila folder out of an attaché case, and from there drew out a pair of eight-by-ten photo sheets. She held them up to the glass, and he leaned forward to see.

The first showed a crime scene, lots of yellow tape, numbered tent tags laid out on the ground, a ruler set out for scale. The place looked to be a small, unassuming backyard, maybe one of the older neighborhoods in Denver. The focus of the photo was a small toolshed, inside of which stood a set of human legs, standing upright. Just the legs, dressed in a pair of tailored feminine slacks and black pumps. He might have guessed that this was part of a mannequin, set up as a practical joke. But then there was the second photo.

This showed the top of the legs—which had clearly been separated from their owner. A wet vertebra emerged from a mass of red flesh, fat, and organs. The tissue all seemed scorched, blackened around the edges, bubbling toward the middle, as if someone had started cauterizing the epic wound and stopped when the job was half done. The wound, as wide as the body’s pelvis, was red and boiled.

He’d seen a lot of gory, horrific stuff in his time, but this made his stomach turn over. In spite of himself, he was intrigued. “What the hell? How are they even still standing? Are they attached to something?”

“No,” she said. “I have a set of free-standing legs attached to a pelvis, detached cleanly at the fifth lumbar vertebra. The wound is covered with a layer of table salt that appears to have caused the flesh to scorch. Try explaining that one to my captain.”

“No thanks,” he said. “That’s your job. I’m just the criminal reprobate.”

“So you’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Hell, no.”

“Have you ever heard of anything like this?”

“No.” She’d set the photos on the desk in front of her. He found himself leaning forward to get another, closer look at the body. The half a body. “You have any leads at all?”

“No. We’ve ID’d the body. She was Filipina, a recent immigrant. We’re still trying to find the other half of the body. There has to be another half somewhere, right?”

He sat back, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“You’re sure you don’t know anything? You’re not just yanking my chain out of spite?”

“I get nothing out of yanking your chain. Not here.”