visible only to its eyes, then across the street at a barroom called Charmaigne's. Only the first half of its neon sign was glowing, and even that was dim in the sunlight. A pair of police cars were parked askew in front of the place and across the street was a third car, this one with no police markings but with a blue light spinning behind the rear windshield.
No spectators had gathered on the sidewalk outside the barroom. It wasn't that kind of neighborhood.
The cat stared for a long minute at the grimy plate glass windows of Charmaigne's. The barroom door was propped open with a cinderblock but with the sunshine so bright it was only darkness inside. At length the stray set of across the street. It paused beside one of the New Orleans P.D. squad cars, then slipped beneath the vehicle. The cars had been there long enough that the engine was not even warm above the stray.
With a practiced, feline nonchalance, the cat went up onto the sidewalk and slipped into the steamy, fan- swirled gloom inside Charmaigne's. Two uniformed police officers stood just inside the door on either side, as though they were concerned someone might try to escape the stale beer and bad cigar stink of the place. A third officer stood in the center of the barroom with a man in a white shirt with rolled-up cuffs and a loosened black tie. His hair had been cut with a military severity and he wore a gun on one hip, a badge clipped to the other.
At their feet was the corpse of a boy, perhaps fifteen years of age, who lay on his belly in a pool of his own blood. His face was sideways, one cheek on the floor in the coagulating crimson, the other turned upward, the diffuse sunlight in the darkened barroom creating an otherworldly sheen upon his ebony skin. He was not the only corpse in Charmaigne's. Behind the bar there was a second dead man, a wiry former fighter named Calvin Traviligni, known to most as Trav. Trav had tended bar at Charmaigne's for seventeen years and had taken a bullet to the face, crashed into a rack of bottles and died in a puddle of broken glass and a potpourri of spilled whiskey, vodka, rum and gin. No liqeuers. Nobody in this part of town drank that shit.
At the back of the room a fourth uniformed officer sat with a young black girl who wore too much make up. Old before her time, Jaalisa had been on her way home after a long night on the only job she'd ever known, a job her father had first given her, and heard the shots. Saw a car tearing off down the street. She insisted to the officer that she had seen nothing more.
The stray took all of this in immediately and it darted across the room and slide along the base of the bar beneath the lazily whirling fans. The beer and cigar smells were ingrained in the wood, but the new scent of fresh blood hung in the air like a fresh coat of hell's own paint. The cat was skittish at the smell of blood but did not let its instincts turn it away. The plainclothes cop, a detective, noticed it, and the cat noticed him noticing, but they ignored one another.
At the back of the bar the cat went to a corner booth that was draped in shadows, not far at all from where Jaalisa was being interviewed, squeezed for some vital detail that might make this crime more than a statistic. The stray leaped up onto the bench of that booth and sat down.
And then it changed.
The only sound was a low rush of air, like a man inhaling suddenly. Flesh rippled and bone stretched with impossibly fluidity. Where the cat had been, Clay Smith now sat staring at Sergeant John Brodsky, the uniformed cop who had called him down here in the first place.
Deja vu. Clay had first been in Charmaigne's forty-seven minutes earlier. He and Brodsky had a passing acquaintance based almost entirely upon Clay's reputation. He wasn't a private investigator, but for a wealthy resident of the Quarter he had found himself in the midst of enough murder investigations in recent years — and was invaluable in solving nearly all of them — that some of the members of the N.O.P.D. had come to rely upon him. Other cops, however, detectives in particular, despised him.
Clay didn't mind. It was never about being liked.
A call on his mobile phone from Brodsky had brought him to Charmaigne's before the department had sent a homicide detective down. That was better for everyone, politics-wise. He had talked to Brodsky, heard about Jaalisa's 911 call, the deaths of Trav and the kid on the floor, and nodded once.
Then he had gone to work.
Someone had gunned the kid in the doorway while Trav was getting the place cleaned up for business. The bartender always came in early to wash the floor, wipe down the tables, all the things that nobody wanted to do when they were closing up at 3 a.m. The kid — whom no one had identified yet — had obviously run in through the door and then been shot in the back. Trav had been a witness, and witnesses have a very short life expectancy.
Clay had examined both bodies without touching them. He had made a show of considering the crime scene. But that was just for the sake of the cops who were watching him, trying to figure out how he did it.
They couldn't see the tether.
The souls of murder victims never passed on to the afterworld immediately. Always, they clung to their victims for a time, crying out for vengeance, perhaps hoping someone will hear their anguish. If Clay reached the victim within the first few hours after their murder he could still see the tether, an ethereal trail of ectoplasm that stretched from the hollow shell that had been the victim's flesh all the way to the current location of the soul.
The soul that was attached like a lamprey to its killer.
Clay had followed the tether out the door of Charmaigne's and then on a twisting path through the French Quarter. Eventually, it had led him back here.
The voices of the policemen and the tired, hard-edged words of the prostitute seemed like church whispers as they drifted through the bar. Clay slid from the rear booth and stood up, black shoes scuffing the floor. He wore tan chinos and a simple, v-necked navy blue t-shirt and his hair was freshly cut. In this neighborhood he would have stood out, been noticed by everyone he passed. But nobody had noticed a stray cat with copper fur and one white ear.
Clay started toward the front of the bar.
Sergeant Brodsky looked up sharply from questioning Jaalisa, notepad and pen in his hands, and he frowned deeply, then stood up and moved to block Clay's path.
'I didn't even see you come in,' Brodsky said.
The man had a round little keg of a beer gut and his slumped even when standing, but his eyes were bright and intelligent. He only looked the part of the fool. Even now there was something in his voice that suggested that he knew there was something unusual, even unnatural, about Clay Smith, but he would say no more about it.
'You weren't supposed to,' Clay told him with a smile.
Brodsky processed that a moment, eyes narrowing. Then he nodded. 'You find anything?'?'Yes. Your perp.'
Closer to the front door, the plainclothes detective cleared his throat. 'Sergeant, what the hell is this?' He strode toward them, shoes rapping the pitted wood floor. 'Where the hell did this guy come from?'
The detective was pale, with dark circles beneath his eyes. He had probably not been drinking yet today, but the stale smell of alcohol exuded from his pores. There were sweat rings forming under his arms and the white shirt looked rumpled as though he might have slept in it.
'Lieutenant Pete Landry, meet Clay Smith,' Brodsky said. 'He's here to help.'
The Lieutenant's nostrils flared and he stared at Clay. 'You're him.'
'Yes.'
'He's got a lead on the perp,' Brodsky offered, making a game attempt to defuse the tension.
'Oh, he does, huh?' The Lieutenant rolled his eyes and reached into his shirt pocket to pull out a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out, dragging the moment, and fished into his pants for a lighter. When he snapped it open and set fire to the end of the cigarette, he gazed at Clay through the flame, then clicked the lighter shut.
'So, give, genius. Who killed Travaligni and the kid?'
Clay did not smile. Instead, he stared at the wretched, silently screaming ghosts that clung to Pete Landry, tearing at him with insubstantial fingers. Trav the bartender was there. And the kid. But there were others as well. An attractive, middle-aged woman, a thug with cruel eyes, an old man whose spectral body seemed contorted somehow.
'Come on, Lieutenant,' Clay said. 'You did. You killed them.'
The hand holding the cigarette to Landry's lips shook and dropped away from his mouth.
'Christ, Clay!' Brodsky snapped. 'What the hell are you — '
'The kid had something on you, saw you do something else you shouldn't have been doing. Or maybe he was a runner for you. What are you supplying on this block, Pete? Crack? Heroin? He pissed you off, this kid. And the fool
