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time. I barely had the chance to sit down at my desk when McGuire was at his office door. "Markowski, Renfer!" he barked. "You got one."
      We'd caught a homicide. The stiff, according to McGuire, was in a house on Linden Street. The address was near the campus of the University of Scranton, which I attended for three years before running out of both money and ambition.
      "We know anything about the perp?" I asked. "Vamp, werewolf, or..."
      McGuire shook his head. "Or none of the above. It isn't clear the killer was a supe."
      I let my raised eyebrows ask the next question. McGuire got it immediately.
      "It's our case," he said, "because although the perp might not have been a supe, the victim was ."
      I heard Karl mutter under his breath, "Well, fuck me to Jesus with a strap-on dildo."
      I couldn't have put it better, myself.
     
    The house on Linden Street was typical for that neighborhood – a mid-size Victorian with a front yard the size of a postage stamp. The uniforms had secured the scene, but forensics hadn't shown up yet. There's a joke around the station house that if forensics ever arrives on time, it's a sign of the Apocalypse.
      I think the forensics guys started that one themselves, to stop detectives from bitching.
      Inside, I hung back a little and let Karl ask one of the uniformed cops, "So, what do we got here?" He just loves saying that at crime scenes. What the hell, we were all young once.
      One of the uniforms, a stocky guy named Conroy who I knew slightly, led us down a dim hallway toward a room where lights burned brightly. Halfway there, the smell told me this was going to be a bad one.
      What crept up my nostrils was a mixture of blood and shit and sweat and fear, and if you don't think fear has an odor, just ask any cop. Overlaying all of that was something a lot like roast pork, which is what burned human flesh smells like.
      I don't eat roast pork anymore. I haven't since my second year on the job, when I arrived at a crime scene shortly after a guy had doused his sleeping wife with gasoline and set her ablaze.
      From the warning my nose had given me, I wasn't surprised by what was waiting for us in that room, which the owner of the house probably called his study. I saw Karl's face twist when he saw the corpse, but I wasn't worried about him. He'd been a uniform himself for six years before joining the Supe Squad. Like any cop, he'd seen plenty of the ugliness the world has to offer. Although maybe nothing quite so ugly as this.
      The vic was a male Caucasian, early fifties. He was tied, with heavy fishing line, to a sturdy-looking wooden chair that probably belonged behind the ornately carved desk over near the window. Shelves on every wall were filled with old-looking books, but the man in the chair wouldn't be consulting them any more. It's pretty hard to read once your eyes have been burned out.
      The man was naked, so it wasn't difficult to see everything else that had been done to him – cuts, bruises, and burns covered the body from scalp to shins. I stepped forward for a closer look, making sure to breath through my mouth as I did.
      The tissue damage around the burns suggested a very hot flame, the kind you get from a blowtorch. I glanced around the room, but didn't see anything that would produce that kind of heat. Maybe the perp took it with him. On the floor not far from the chair was a wide strip of duct tape, about six inches long, all wrinkled and bloody.
      Karl started to say something, stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. "How'd you know the guy was a supe?" he asked Conroy. "He's no vamp, that's for sure, and a were would probably have transformed and got free. That ain't silver holding him to the chair."
      Before Conroy could answer, I said, "Look here." Taking a pen from my pocket, I leaned over the vic's left hand. I slipped the pen under his fingers, what was left of them, and gently lifted the hand up. Despite