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screaming and covered with vomit. She was dressed to kill, as always, but she didn’t hesitate to gather me in her arms and hold me while she waited for the ambulance. One of the last things I remember before I passed out was the sight of her beautiful tailored suit, ruined by my blood and tears.
    “Callie . . .”
    This reproval comes from Alan, quiet, serious, to the point. Alan’s way. Alan is a huge, scary-looking African-American. He’s not just big, he is gargantuan. He is a mountain with legs. His scowl has caused more than one suspect in an interrogation room to wet himself. The irony, of course, is that Alan is one of the kindest, gentlest people I have ever known. He has a tremendous patience I have always admired and aspire to, and he brings this to our cases. He never tires of going through the evidence, of examining the smallest thing. Nothing bores him when he is tracking a killer. And his eye for detail has broken more than one case. Alan is the oldest of us, in his mid-forties, and he brought ten years of experience as a Los Angeles homicide detective with him when he joined the FBI.
    A new voice. “What are you doing here?” If displeasure was a musical instrument, this would be a symphony.
    It’s said without preamble or apology; blunt, like Callie, but without her humor. This comes from James. We call him Damien behind his back, after the character in The Omen, the son of Satan. He’s the youngest of us all, only twenty-eight, and he’s one of the most irritating, unlikable people I’ve ever known. He grates on you, sets your teeth on edge, and infuriates. If I ever want to piss someone off, James is the gas to throw on the fire.
    James is also brilliant. That off-the-charts, white-hot nova kind of brilliant. He graduated from high school at fifteen, got perfect scores on the SATs, and was wooed by every college worth a damn in the nation. He picked the one with the best criminology curriculum and proceeded to burn his way through to a PhD in four years. Then he joined the FBI, which had been his goal all along.
    S H A D O W M A N
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    When he was twelve, James lost his older sister to a serial killer with a thing for blowtorches and screaming young women. He decided he was going to work in this office the day they buried her. James is a closed and faceless book. He seems to live for just one thing—what we do. He never jokes, never smiles, never does anything unnecessary to the job at hand. He doesn’t share his private life or anything else that would give a clue to his passions, likes, dislikes, or tastes. I don’t know what kind of music he enjoys, what movies he prefers to watch, or even if he does.
    It would be too simple and neat to think of him as just efficient and logic-driven. No, there is a hostility to James that comes out in sharp bursts. His disapproval can be acrid, and his thoughtlessness is legendary. I can’t say that he takes joy in the discomfort of others; I would say instead that he just doesn’t care about it one way or the other. I think James is forever angry at a world where individuals like the one who killed his sister can exist. Even so, I long ago stopped forgiving him for himself. He’s too much of an ass.
    But he is brilliant, a brilliance forever blinding those around him, like a permanent camera flash. And he shares an ability with me that ties us together, a gift that creates an umbilicus between us, that gives me an evil twin. He can get inside the mind of a killer. He can slide into the nooks and dark places, consider the shadows, understand the evil. I can do it too. It’s not uncommon for us to end up working together on certain parts of a case, in a very intimate sense. During those times, we get along like oil and ball bearings, smooth, flowing, unstoppable. All the rest of the time, being around him is about as pleasant as someone sanding me like a two-by-four.
    “Nice to see you too,” I reply.
    “Hey, asshole,” Alan purrs, a low chord of