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she’d thought about a man and a bed in the same moment…Diego, she guessed. She wasn’t sure she appreciated the awareness that fluttered deep in her stomach. She didn’t trust the sharpness of her breath. It felt dangerous in its own right.
    Was it possible that she could ever handle dangerous again?
    Lorenzo rose from the bed and came back to the table. She took another deep breath as he passed her, big and warm and solid. Some risks were probably better than others. And he didn’t feel dangerous, just the awareness of him did.
    Zack Lorenzo still felt remarkably safe, for a stranger.
    When he sat on his plastic chair and began scribbling, she waited for him to glance up at her, wanting to see his eyes again. She couldn’t remember what color the detective’s eyes were. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze deliberately.
    â€œI don’t think I even used the word zombies, the reporter did,” Jo admitted, reaching for the partially eaten piece of pie he’d pushed away from him earlier. He’d offered it once, after all. And he didn’t seem to want it. “I could’ve been delirious.”
    â€œYeah,” he muttered through his note-taking. “Right. You sound like the real flighty type.”
    Since he said that sarcastically, she took it as a compliment. She also took a bite of pie, and it tasted wonderful, sweet and syrupy. She actually ventured a question. On the off chance they were both sane, after all. “But zombies are from Haiti, right? Or maybe Louisiana. Not the southwest.”
    â€œUh-huh,” Lorenzo agreed, still scribbling. When he finally looked up, it was all business. Business with deep, brown-green eyes. “There’s theories about whether real zombies were ever dead or maybe just drugged. Some scholarly types even talk about philosophical zombies…living people who just go through the motions, without thinking anymore, you know? But you’reright. None of that seems to fit with this Tio guy you described. Wasn’t Tio one of the Jackson 5?”
    â€œThat was Tito,” she told him, pleased. Who else listened to old ’70s music, anymore?
    Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s a relief. So think back. Could he have been into voodoo?”
    She swallowed another bite of pie and decided to at least pretend this was possible. Why not err on that side, for once? “Nope. If anything, it was something like Santeria.”
    Lorenzo blinked at her. “You couldn’t have mentioned this earlier in the story?”
    It impressed her that he knew what Santeria, a form of Cuban witchcraft, even was. Her grandfather was a scholar of this kind of stuff, but most people… “I’m just guessing. Tio wasn’t Mexican, and I’ve heard that a lot of the Brujas have a bias against mixed bloods.”
    Zack rubbed a hand down his face, then squinted at her. Something about uncertainty on a face as rugged as his looked downright endearing. “Any chance you know someone around here who could tell me more about local Santeria or Brujeria?” He considered that. “Someone relatively sane?”
    Her first urge was to call him crazy. But when she pushed past that urge and thought about it… “Ashley Vanderveer, the nurse practitioner at the Almanuevo clinic.”
    The one where the boy’s body had gone missing.
    â€œPeachy.” When he saw the question in her face, Lorenzo added, “I already tried her, asking where the corpse wandered off to, but she wouldn’t talk to me. Said I’d have to hurt myself—and that it wasn’t an invitation.”
    Jo laughed. She’d always liked the new nurse…though to be honest, she guessed Ashley wasn’t really new. She’d been running the closest medical facility to Spur for two years now. It was a sign of how strictly Jo had kept to herself, that she’d never pursued that possibility of friendship.