He wasn't about to tell her that he'd been on the wrong end of a Capone-era tommy gun, or that he'd been p.r.o.nounced dead in a hospital, only to wake up in its morgue forever changed.

He'd been offered a choice then-live or die. He'd chosen to live.

"I sorry. Is it still a painful memory for you?"

He shook his head. "It's in the past." Further I the past than she could ever imagine. "But I do know something about police work. I know where to look for the answers we need, and how to get them without anyone being the wiser." He'd visited a great many police departments since his change. There were always unsolved crimes- things he picked up on through his ability to read the thoughts of mortals, to move about almost silently. There were always wrongs he could help right. And he did. Had for years. Evidence would turn up where none had been before; missing weapons would be located; witnesses would come forward. And the police never knew they'd had a helping hand-a cold, pale helping hand. In a lot of ways, he was a better cop now than he'd ever been before.

She pursed her lips, then nodded. "If you really think you can learn anything, then... then yes. Let's do it. Here, take my extra gate key so you can get back into my parking lot." She turned away, walking toward her car.

"Gray," he said to her back.

She stopped and turned to face him again. "What?"

"My name is Michael Gray."

"Oh." She smiled at him, weakly, shakily. "Thank you for that."

He nodded and then she got into her car and he got into his.

After he left her, Michael went first to the building where Mary had dropped Tommy off the night before. There was no security no key card required to get into the building, and it wasn't difficult to find the right apartment. Even without the yellow police tape marking the door, he would have known. He could still feel the lingering chill of death in the air. And there was the stench. Burning flesh did not emit a pleasant aroma.

The apartment door was locked. The lock gave without much resistance to the pressure of his hand, and he went inside and closed the door behind him. He didn't turn the lights on. He didn't have to.

The place reeked of smoke and charred flesh, but the only sign of fire was in the bedroom. A ring of black surrounded the bed-it had burned through the carpet and charred the floor underneath. The headboard had been destroyed, leaving only a bit of charred wood at its base. The wall behind it was blackened, as well, and the ceiling above. The mattress was missing, probably in a crime lab by now. Oddly, the rest of the room showed very little damage. The firefighters must have arrived in time to contain the blaze, saving most of the apartment and the rest of the building. And probably a lot of lives in the process.

The room had been ransacked. Many items, he sensed, were missing.

He went to the bed, bracing himself for the onslaught of sensations the acts would bring before he placed his hand on the bed springs.

He expected horror. Pain beyond endurance. Heat and searing torment. It wasn't what he got. He got nothing at all other than an image of a body on fire. No thoughts. No sensations. Tommy hadn't been conscious when he'd gone up in flames.

Frowning, he searched the apartment but found no clues, got no other images. It wasn't until he left the building, on his way to the police department, that he felt that death energy again. Not from within, but from the alley just below Tommy's window.

He followed his senses into the garbage-strewn alley. Rats skittered from his approach. And then he smelled it.

Blood.

Moving closer, he located the source, a dark spatter on the brick outer wall of the building next to Tommy's. He pressed his hand to the stain and immediately felt a stunning blow to his forehead, right between the eyes, and what felt like an explosion at the back of his skull. He smelled the hot sulphur scent of gunpowder, and though he didn't hear a shot his ears rang as if they had.

Someone had been shot in the head. Right here in this alley.

A young man. Early twenties, small and wiry, with brown hair.

G.o.d, Tommy had been shot right here. This was where he'd died.

It made no sense, Michael thought as he returned to his car and drove away.

Someone had lured or forced Tommy into the alley only to then return him to his apartment. The risk of being seen carrying a body should have been enough reason not to do such a thing. And then to bind the boy to his own bed and burn the body-it was insane.

He was still no closer to learning what the police had found to implicate Mary, he realized. Whoever had done this had known where Tommy lived. Perhaps it was someone he knew, then. Or perhaps it was simply someone who had watched him enough to have learned that minor detail.

h.e.l.l, they could have figured that much out from the address on his driver's license.

But why? Why kill the boy at all, much less burn the body?

He found out more when he slipped into the police station and played mind games with the officers on duty to keep them away from the places where he needed to snoop. The place was no small-town PD, but it wasn't an overwhelmed, understaffed urban one, either. No, this was a wealthy community, and their police department was well funded.

There were the usual drawers full of paper files, but each folder had a pocket in the front, containing a CD-ROM. A quick check told him everything in the folder-from the crime scene photos on down-had been recorded on the CD. It couldn't have been any easier.

He found the box of unused CD-RWs and made a copy of the official records.

Then he put everything back where he'd found it and slipped quietly out of the police department.

Easy. When you could plant thoughts in people's minds, convince them they needed to be elsewhere and move too fast for human eyes to detect more than a blur of color it was almost too easy.

He got into his Jag and drove back to Mary's apartment, eager to examine the evidence he'd found.

More eager, though, just to be close to her again

Chapter 6.

She paced, torn in two about what she should be doing right now One tiny part of her brain told her she ought to be on the phone with the police, telling them everything she knew about Michael Gray-which was pathetically little. Every other part of her trusted him implicitly on nothing more than instinct.

But with her life?

Licking her lips, she picked up the business card that Officer Dunst had given her. She looked at the telephone number. Officer Dunst had said they were "good people."

Glancing outside just once, seeing no sign of Michael, she picked up the telephone and dialed the number.

"Supernatural Investigations Service."

Mary had second thoughts. She certainly didn't need to add any supernatural bent to what should be a simple background check. "I think I have the wrong number.

Sorry."

"Don't you think you'd better make sure of that before you hang up?"

She sighed. "Look, I just need an ordinary P.I. for a routine background check on someone. There's nothing... supernatural about it. I shouldn't have called."

"How'd you get this number?" the woman asked.

"I... um... a cop gave it to me."

"Officer Dunst?"

"Yeah."

The woman said, "Well, he sent us a lot of business. I imagine he knew we'd be more than glad to take care of your routine background check for you, even if it's not precisely our usual area."

"You think so?"

"Either that or he has a feeling there's something supernatural about your case."

That was the feeling Mary had had when Dunst gave her the card. But she didn't want to explore that suspicion too deeply. "I just-look, there's this man who's shown up in my life. He seems to know things he shouldn't, claims to be some kind of psychic. I just wanted someone to run a background check on him." "We can usually do up a pretty thorough report within twenty-four hours. It'll cost you a hundred bucks. That's our special Dunst referral discount rate, by the way.

Sound acceptable to you?"

"Yeah. Yes, that'll be fine. His name is Michael Gray. He's here in Bangor now, but he says he was a cop in Chicago, shot in the line of duty."

"h.e.l.l, girl, with that much to go on, we won't have any problem at all."

"Good." She heard a vehicle outside and jerked her head quickly toward the door. "Call me. Make sure you only talk to me though. My number is-"

"We have it, hon. Shows right up on our caller ID box. I'll talk to you tomorrow."

She hung up the phone, feeling guilty as h.e.l.l and hoping to G.o.d Michael would keep his promise not to go poking around in her mind, reading things that were private.

The call she'd just made felt to her like a deep and unforgivable betrayal. To keep her mind off it, just in case he snooped, she thought about Tommy, and the moment she did, the horror of the way he had died came flooding back to her. She didn't think she would have any problem keeping her focus on that-she might have a problem driving it from her mind later on, though.

Someone knocked on the door, and she knew it was Michael, could almost feel his presence, but she looked first, all the same. Then she opened the door and let him in, and forcibly resisting the impulse to slide her arms around him and press herself close to him and whisper that she'd missed him.

Maybe she was losing her mind.

He looked tired. Or it might have been worry that made his eyes seem so careworn, his face so tense.

"Did you find out anything?"

He nodded. "Many thing. Still not everything. I think I ended up with more questions than I had before." He searched her face, and she almost squirmed with guilt, wondering what he could see there. "How are you doing?"

"I'm fine. And you'll have to take my word for it, since you promised not to do any more trespa.s.sing in my private thoughts."

He smiled just a little. "I wasn't. I told you I wouldn't, Mary, and I won't. I promise."

"Just making sure. What did you learn about Tommy?"

"You want the good news or the bad news first?" He set his brown leather bag on the floor and shrugged out of the trench coat, then hung it up on the coatrack.

"You mean there's good news?"

He nodded, picking up the brown bag again, and walked through the apartment taking a seat on one of the stools at the bar. "Yeah. There's good news. Tommy wasn't burned alive. He was shot in the head in the alley outside his apartment." "But... but the police said he was tied to his bed and burned alive."

"He was tied to his bed and burned, but not alive. He was already dead."

As Michael spoke, he pulled a laptop computer out of his case, flipped it open and pushed the b.u.t.ton that made it come on.

She wondered how the h.e.l.l he could know any of that, then guessed. "You must have got a look at the autopsy report."

He shook his head as the computer went through its warm-up routine. "The autopsy hasn't' been done yet."

"Then-"

"I went to the apartment. I touched the bed. I got nothing. But in the alley outside, I felt the bullet. It entered here." He poked a forefinger to the spot between his eyebrows. "Exited here." His palm open, he cupped the back of his head. "There was an explosion of blinding pain, but very brief. Like the flash of a camera. Then he was gone."

She closed her eyes. "You don't know how much I want to believe it happened that way, Michael, but-"

"I found the spray of blood on the alley wall. The police will find it, too. And when they do get their autopsy report, it will verify that Tommy was shot in the head and killed before his body was burned."

"You're that good?" she asked.

"I'm that good." He pushed a b.u.t.ton on the computer, and the slender CD drive popped open. Ten he dropped a shiny disk into it and closed it again. He hit a few keys.

"I stopped on the way back to take a look at this. It's gonna be hard to take, Mary."

"So this would be the bad-news part?"

He nodded. "The police were investigating Tommy."

She frowned. "For what?"

"He was their lead suspect in your break-in and the stalking."

"They told me that. But I... I find it very hard to believe."

"They were going to execute a search warrant at his place today. As it turned out, they didn't have to. The fire was pretty much contained in one part of the bedroom.

The rest of his place only suffered smoke and water damage, I imagine the fire department contaminated any forensic evidence that might have been there, but... well, they did find these."

He flicked a b.u.t.ton, nodded at the screen. There were rows and rows of thumbnail-sized photographs-and they were all of her. She squinted.

He moved the mouse until its arrow pointed at one, clicked it, and the photo appeared full-size. It was her making drinks, standing behind the bar at The Crypt.

Taken from behind. Michael closed it and clicked on another, then another and another. In one she was walking through the front door of her apartment. In another she was in her bed, sound asleep. There were photos of her at the grocery store, at the bank, photos of her car, with close-ups of the license plate.

"He had an entire alb.u.m full of these."

"He was that obsessed with me?" She stared at Michael, shaking her head in disbelief.

"No, Mary. I don't think he was obsessed with you at all. I think he was hunting you. These aren't the kind of photos a man with an obsession takes. These are surveillance shots. Every one has the date, time and place noted on the bottom. And there's more." He clicked on another image. Enlarged, it revealing a hand-drawn map.