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a roadkill pheasant, with her tail feathers pluming up from her head and butt.
    Holly made the mistake of turning her over, thinking maybe she could help. There was blood everywhere, and Holly should have known Lavita was dead, but she had to check anyway.
    It was horrible. Face smashed in, the front of her body flattened as if she’d been crushed in a trash compactor—but only the front of her. Holly let go of the body as if she’d been stung, but instead of flopping back down into the pool of blood, the corpse had rolled slowly over onto its back in a grotesque, boneless fashion.
    By this time, Holly was screaming her head off. Cooling blood ran down her fingertips. She’d thought of the man from Boston who had apparently fallen from a great height onto a bathroom floor. This was similar, if not quite the same. People soon flooded the room and asked her questions she couldn’t answer. The police talked to her at length, but she had nothing useful for them. They stared at her with hard-eyed irritation. The killings were freaking them out, she thought. Like mean dogs, they had turned their fear into anger and suspicion.
    The rest of the dancers had shunned Holly after that. Somehow, finding her there with blood on her face, having obviously disturbed the corpse, had put her into the untouchable category. She learned then what it must have been like to be declared the village witch when the crops failed.
    When new girls came to audition, the bosses treated Holly like old meat. She’d pushed away their grasping hands on many occasions and she thought they’d come to accept she wasn’t going to go for that kind of thing…but she was wrong. When the new girls were hired, no one had a kind word for the girl who had found Lavita. They dropped her off the list. After less than two months as a showgirl, she was back on the street again.
    Her next job took longer to land. Money was tightening up around town as it headed into the cooling, windy period that passed for autumn in the desert. Her rent money came due and she found herself hiding in a dark apartment, listening to hammering and threats from outside her door until her landlord gave up and stomped away, muttering curses. She knew eviction was coming, as relentlessly as the desert winds.
    Holly had headed down to the end of the Strip that night—to the seedy side—then walked a few blocks away from the boulevard. There she found bars with patrons who didn’t want to be identified. The streets were dimmer, as every other pale orange sodium-vapor streetlight had been knocked out. She walked into the first strip club she found, which turned out to be Tony’s place. She found the Pole Dance Palace discouraging, but she was desperate. The establishment specialized in something called “friction dancing,” and after a ten-minute audition followed by a five-minute training, she found herself out on the floor.
    Friction dancing was just what it sounded like and she was having a hard time with it until another of the girls grabbed her by the arm on her break.
    “Here,” the older girl had said, pushing a black ovoid pill into Holly’s palm. “Try this. It makes things easier.”
    Holly dry-swallowed the pill without looking at it or thinking about it. She didn’t want to think at all. After that, the night slid by and at quitting time she had over a hundred in tips alone. Four nights later she paid up her rent. The future had brightened.
    Before two months had passed, however, she was hooked on cocaine and pills and when the next month’s rent came due, she didn’t have it again. Her habits ate money like a hungry flame.
    Tony Montoro had finally fired her on a Tuesday night.
    “Come back if you clean up, doll,” he said with a serious face.
    Holly understood they were kind words. In truth, perhaps the first ones she’d heard in a long time. Walking the streets again, she eyed the girls who walked there with her. They had glazed eyes and painted faces. No one had