Free Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber Page A

it.”
    “Lucky me,” say Lorna sourly.
    “No, this is right,” says Sheryl. She looks up, cups her hand to her ear. “What’s that you say? No lie? Made in heaven ? Well, lawsy me!”
    “I’m calling 911,” says Lorna.
    “You may laugh, but I got a good feeling about this. And let me slip a little professional note into your file, honeybunch. Us Catholics talk to the saints all the time. And sometimes they talk back. You need to find out some more about Emmylou’s religious background before you toss her among the lunatics.”
    Lorna finesses this uncomfortable moment by signaling for the waiter, and then she makes much out of checking the time and fretting about an appointment she has at one-thirty. That Sheryl is sincerely religious she regards as an amusing flaw, like the fat. On the other hand, Sheryl’s point is a good one and supported by the DSM. She will find out about that the next time she sees Emmylou. As they leave the restaurant, she is already planning her questions. She will have to get through the consult first, but that should not pose a problem. Mickey Lopez thinks everyone is crazy, which means she will only have to roll Howie Kasdan, which she knows she can do and will take grim pleasure in doing.

Four
    P AZ WAS AT last having sex again. It had been a long time between and he should have been more excited, for although he rammed away valiantly, and although the woman sighed and moaned beneath him, he seemed to have become somewhat detached from his sexual apparatus and also disturbed because he could not recall the woman’s name. They finished, leaving him drained but not satisfied. What the fuck was her name? He rolled off her. She chuckled. “That was great, Jimmy,” she said. So she knew who he was, why couldn’t he…?
    “Could we turn on the lights?” he asked.
    “You sure you want to?” she asked. She had a throaty, pleasant voice.
    “Yeah, turn it on.”
    He felt her moving, reaching for the switch, and then the light went on, a little pink bedside lamp. Paz was out of bed in an instant going for the door, scrabbling, kicking at it, although it was clear now that the door was just painted on the wall, crudely at that, a child’s drawing of a door. There was no way out of the room. The woman was still chuckling, although it was hard to know how she managed it, since her face was as smooth and featureless and white as an egg.
    It was the pain that woke him up, the pain from his toes. He cursed vividly in the two languages he commanded when he realizedhe was standing in the little hallway leading to the rear door of his apartment. He’d kicked his right toe bloody against its base. Paz staggered to the kitchen sink and leaned into it, running cold water over his head. He turned the water off, dried himself with a dish towel, and listened. Mrs. Ruiz, his upstairs neighbor, was moving around. The old lady was a light sleeper and his screams and the kicks had awakened her, as they had before. Maybe the rest of the neighborhood too. He prayed no one had called the cops.
    He had a tendency to be paranoid about his status in the department. At present he was untouchable because he had almost single-handedly cracked the biggest mass murder case in the history of the city, but that was fading in memory, or rather the false story of the so-called Voodoo Murders was fading. The memories of what had really happened were still pretty fresh in Paz’s mind.
    He limped to a kitchen chair and examined his foot. The big toe on the right foot was nearly half again as large as its mate on the other foot and turning plum. The nail looked loose and was rimmed with drops of blood black as India ink in the crime-light glow coming in through the kitchen jalousies. He wiped the blood away with a paper napkin and used it also to wipe the sweat from his forehead and neck. Paz had been having nightmares every night for the past week, and walking in his sleep, and he took this as touching on his mental