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You get ’em in the really bad places.” She’d never seen one this
close before.
    “Pittsburgh,”
Clay said.
    “Shit,” Ed
repeated.
    Jewel agreed.
With a poppet in the Kraft Building, there was no longer any question whether
the place was hinky enough to be condemned. The feds had shut all of Pittsburgh
down for just a handful of these things.
    Randy reached
past Jewel and casually dipped his fingers through the figure. Jewel gasped.
The poppet’s image swirled and deformed as if he had scooped up some honey.
Then, when his fingers were gone, she slowly reformed into her old shape.
    “Magic,” Randy
said.
    “Urk,” Ed
said.
    Clay backed
up. “How did you find this?”
    “Remember
O’Connor?” Ed said to Jewel. “Used to do immigration until he got too fat to
move around. Then he phoned taxis from home.”
    Jewel
remembered. “He’s a wreck.” O’Connor was the kind of drunk who never actually
fell down, but he was never sober.
    “He used to be
a good investigator,” Ed said. The Department was loyal to good people. “He
came in once a week to collect his check. Sometimes he sat down here all day
and played cards, shot the shit with the older guys. Smartened up the young
kids if they was smart enough to let him.”
    “He’s helped
me a couple of times,” she admitted. Then she noticed the past tense. “Oh.”
    “Yeah. He was
found dead in his apartment this morning. One of the guys thought he might of
left some gin money in the locker, so he bust it open.”
    Jewel cracked
her first smile all day. “Let me guess. Sayers?”
    “Yeah.” Ed
snorted. “Poor unlucky fuck.”
    A laugh escaped
Jewel. She watched the naked girlie-girl in the locker do indecent things with
no more props than her own outrageously-proportioned body. “Did Sayers stroke
out, or just stroke?”
    “Talk like a
lady, dammit.” Ed frowned. “Sayers came up and told me, like he should. What I
want youse to do is deal with this. Then go over to O’Connor’s apartment and
see if there’s any clues. Find any more of it.” Raptly, he stared. The tip of
his tongue touched his lower lip. Then he shuddered. “Just deal with it! And come
up to my office when you’re done.”
    When he’d
stumped out, Jewel looked at Clay. “Any ideas?”
    Clay shrugged.
“How should I know? Does it move from locker to locker? Can we just shut the
door and forget about it? How did it get down here, anyway?”
    “You’re a big
help.”
    “This is a
pocket zone,” Randy stated.
    “Got it in
one,” Jewel said.
    Clay watched
the show. “Is it alive?”
    “That remains
to be seen,” Randy said crisply. He shut the locker door as much as was
possible — somebody had pried it open with a crowbar, destroying the
combination lock in the process — and opened the adjacent locker, which was
empty. Jewel watched with fascination. Randy ran his hand over the wall shared
with the infested locker, then tapped it lightly, as if testing for stickiness.
Then he opened the pocket zone locker again and stared expressionlessly at the
small, very womanly figure inside.
    “Well,
Sherlock?” Clay said.
    Ignoring Clay,
Randy squatted and gingerly pulled out one of the magazines stacked in the
locker. He handed it behind him.
    Jewel grabbed
it before Clay could. “Girls, Giggles,
and Garters. What kind of magazine is that?”
    Clay took it
from her. “Tame porn.” He flipped through, and she caught a glimpse of bare
skin, black lace, red lace, bold eyes, pouting breasts. “Very, very lame, very
tame porn.”
    “O’Connor was
kind of a sweetheart,” she said absently. She watched Randy tease a crumpled
white bag out of the top shelf of the locker. Standing, he was much closer to
that dancing thing in the lower
compartment.
    Jewel saw the
poppet reach for him. It put its hands right through his jeans.
    “Ohmigod!
Randy!” Jewel shrieked.
    Randy looked
down and backed away, far too calmly in her opinion.
    The girl in
the locker pouted, looked sly,