I walked Russ Meyer to an interview room and cuffed him to a chair. He smirked at me. "You think these will hold a witch?"

"They've done pretty well so far," I said. "And if you get cute, look up." Russ blinked, staring at the ward drawn on the ceiling of the interview room. "Think of yourself as a cell phone," I said. "This is a dead spot. That ward mark makes sure of it."

Bryson knocked on the observation mirror, and I stuck my head out the door. "Bright boy here doesn't have a lawyer. I called the public defender's office. Couple of hours."

I gave Russ a smile. "Make yourself at home, Mr. Meyer." Ducking out, I walked into the bullpen with Bryson. "Let's use the time we have and dig deep on Russ's no doubt sad and inadequate life. If he's got a sealed juvenile record, find a judge who will unseal it. Look at his financials. See where he's getting his drugs from. Everything."

My detectives bent their heads over their computers. I tapped Kelly on the shoulder. "Hunter, do me a favor."

Kelly raised his eyebrows. He was about as strong and silent as they came. I said, "Go offer our suspect a coffee and see if you can get a read on what kind of magick he's messing with, and more importantly, if it involves pulling hearts out of little girls' chests."

Hunter nodded. "My pleasure." He lumbered up, like a landslide in reverse, and headed for the interview room.

I went into my office, settling down with a cup of microwave coffee and the overnight dispatches that had come in. Two assaults at were bars, one drunk and disorderly, a domestic dispute between a witch and her live-in boyfriend.

I shoved the dispatches into my outbox for Norris, our unit's civilian assistant, to distribute to the detectives and put on the board, and was about to call Kronen for the autopsy results on Lily Dubois when my office door opened and Detective Just-Call-Me Natalie Lane came in.

"I know SVU is one big happy commune, but around here we knock," I told her without looking up from my email.

"The desk by the coffee machine was empty," Lane said. "I put my things there. Hope that's okay."

"I can't imagine you'd care if it wasn't," I said. Lane spread her hands.

"Is there some problem I'm not aware of?"

"The squad might not be too happy with you," I said, gesturing at Andy and Javier, who were looking at Lane's box of things and her potted fern with frowns. "Lot of baggage comes with that desk."

Lane raised her eyebrows. "Oh?"

"Annemarie Marceaux used to sit there," I said.

"Really. That detective who went bad?"

"The same," I said. Lane shook her head.

"That was a real shame. Whatever happened to her?"

"I shot her in the stomach after she tried to kill me." I closed out my email in-box and stood up. "Was there anything else I could help you with, Detective? A welcoming fruit basket, maybe?"

Lane shook her head and backed out of my office, giving me a twitchy look over her shoulder. I smiled. I was having a crappy morning and I didn't feel bad at all about taking it out on Lane. She sat down at her desk and started to arrange her knickknacks.

I took a minute to dispel the memory of Annemarie, the detective who had sold me out to the Thelemites and almost gotten Will, Bryson and me killed. I'd trusted Annemarie. She'd been a friend. Lane's cutesy framed photographs and ceramic figurines wouldn't change that.

Kelly came out of the interrogation room and stalked across the bullpen, beckoning me. "He's a warlock, like me, and a piss-poor one. You believe he had the nerve to give me attitude?"

I snorted. "I know biker gangs that wouldn't give you attitude, Kelly."

"No call for cutting out the heart," Kelly said. "Warlocks don't use fetishes for their workings. You're looking for some low-down, dirty blood magick."

"Great," I muttered. There was nothing to do but wait for the public defender to show up. "Andy." I snapped my fingers at him. "What's going on with the security footage from the port?"

"No joy, ma'am," he said. "They cycle the tapes every twelve hours and they'd already been erased."

"Fucking perfect," I muttered. Andy gave me his sad-puppy look, and I waved him off. I hate waiting for a case to break when there's nothing I, personally, can do to dispense justice. I looked at Russ Meyer, sitting in the interrogation room staring at the ceiling, drumming discordantly on the tabletop.

Pete Anderson, our CSU investigator, was still collecting evidence in the scuzzball's apartment, but I had Russ's cell phone, bagged and tagged. I slipped on gloves and took it out of the evidence baggie, scrolling through the call history.

There were a series of photos from the night before, and I perched myself on the edge of Lane's desk to look through them, just to be a pain in her ass.

Lane cleared her throat, and I turned the screen toward her. A waitress's ample bosom filled the screen, poured into a black lace top with a nametag that read, improbably, trouble. "There're about twenty of these," I said. "Looks like a bar-hop."

"I can't believe what passes for a night out these days," Lane sniffed.

"Yeah," I said, scrolling past three more rack shots, "it's sure a far cry from a wholesome outing at the roller disco with the musical stylings of Andy Gibb and Leif Garrett."

Lane slammed her hands down on her keyboard. "How much older am I than you, Lieutenant? Five years? Seven? What gives you the right to judge me, just because you batted your eyes and got into a desk job early instead of being stuck on the streets because you didn't suck the right cock?"

"You don't want to go there with me," I said, still looking at Russ's cell phone. "I worked my ass off on the streets. I didn't sleep my way into this job and if I did, that would just mean you were jealous of my good looks and charm."

A long stretch of quiet. I deliberately kept my eyes on my work, not giving Lane the satisfaction of a reaction. I wasn't losing control of my squad because of some self-righteous sex detective.

"Maybe I was mistaken," Lane said stiffly, looking back at Lily's autopsy report.

"Maybe you were indeed," I said. The next photo in the text history was a self-portrait of Russ and the type of bar skank who thinks that a shredded denim skirt and a cowboy hat are a look.

Lane opened her mouth, but I shushed her. "Hex me." The timestamp of the photo was 2:23 A.M.

"What?" Lane demanded. I flipped through my notes from the scene, finding Kronen's estimate of how long Lily had been in the water.

"Time of death was between one and three A.M., best guess. You know how hard it is when a body goes in the water..."

Lane lifted her shoulders. "So?"

"Look," I said, showing her the phone. Lane sat back, her plump face folding into lines of displeasure.

"Shit. You just gave him an alibi."

"That I did," I said. "Let's figure out where this is so we can confirm it."

Bryson came over and looked at the screen. "That's the OK Corral," he said. I cocked an eyebrow at him.

"Do a lot of clubbing on your off nights, David?"

He smirked. "I'd recognize those cute little cowboy hats anywhere. They do a line-dancing contest on the bar Saturday nights..."

I held up my hand. "I got it. You and I are going down there. Lane, Meyer is all yours when the lawyer shows up. Maybe you can irritate something else out of him about Lily."

"My pleasure," Lane said, pushing back from her desk with a glare and going toward the elevators and the bathroom.

"You're being kinda hard on her, aren't you?" Bryson said as I grabbed my jacket from my office.

"I don't like some overgrown honor student foisted on me," I said. "She's way too eager and she's a pain in the ass."

"That's fair," said Bryson. "But you were a way bigger pain when you came to Homicide."

"David, don't go making sense. It goes against the natural order of things."

We took the Nova down Devere, to the wasteland of cheap bars, biker hangouts and piercing parlors behind Nocturne University. The OK Corral was on the outskirts, beyond the safety zone that college students populated, out in tweaker, hooker and bad-guy territory.

I automatically noted a few road bikes parked at the curb, flying gang colors, and shrugged out of my suit jacket, unbuttoning the top button of my shirt and pulling it loose to hide my badge and waist rig. I didn't want to look threatening if I didn't have to.

"It's not as bad as it looks," Bryson said, shoving the metal fire door open like he owned the place. The smell of stale beer, sawdust, vomit and sex slapped me across the face along with a loud blast of Brooks Dunn.

"Clearly," I told Bryson.

A blonde girl was winding herself around a pole on one of the raised platforms at the rear of the bar, apathetic as if she were waiting for a bus. The decor, a few token hay bales, longhorns and strands of barbed wire crisscrossing the ceiling, was about as sad as the rest of the place.

I tapped on the bar and motioned the bartender over, showing him the cell phone picture. "You see a skinny tweaker kid in here last night snapping these?"

He shrugged one thin shoulder, his bones poking against the skin. "Maybe. What you want him for?"

Bryson and I showed our shields and the bartender's eyes darted around, taking inventory of his scant customers. Probably trying to remember any outstanding warrants.

"We're not looking to bust you," I said. "Just tell us if the kid was in here or not."

"Yeah," the bartender sighed. "Threw him out at last call. Drunk off his ass."

Last call was 4 A.M. in the city limits. Assuming that the barkeep wasn't covering for Russ, he had an even more rock-solid alibi than we thought. I pulled a folded picture of Lily Dubois on the autopsy table from my hip pocket and showed it. "How about her?"

"Lemme see..." He took it with fingers black on the tips from holding a glass smoke bowl. After he squinted for a second, he recoiled. "Is she dead?"

"Nah, she's napping," Bryson snorted. "Just tell us: You seen her, yes or no?"

The bartender grimaced. "I knew she looked young."

"Meaning?" I prompted.

"Look, I tell you what I know and you don't bust me for serving a minor, right?"

"We're not Vice, you twitchy little freak," Bryson said. "Just spill it."

"She was in here," said the bartender, going to the register and digging around under the cash tray. "She ordered a gin and tonic. Not a gin and tonic sort of place, you feel me?"

I looked at the gyrating girl again. She was having a hard time staying upright. "I get it."

"Anyway, her ID was sketchy but we were slammed, so I took it to start a tab and she never came back for it. Never paid her fucking tab, neither." He passed me the small laminate square, and I ran my thumb over Lily Dubois's face. The ID wasn't obviously a fake, but it gave her age as twenty-two, so it had to be.

"You didn't think she looked maybe a little youthful youthful to be in this shithole?" Bryson asked the bartender. He spread his hands. to be in this shithole?" Bryson asked the bartender. He spread his hands.

"Man, this place has dancers twenty-five years old that look younger than that chickie. She had the cleavage, she had the attitude, and I didn't look too hard. My mistake."

"Yes," I agreed pleasantly. "Your mistake that allowed her to be killed and dumped in the bay. Who did she leave with?"

The bartender didn't appear remorseful in the least. "I don't keep track of the skirts in here, lady. I did my civic duty and talked to you cops. Now I got work to do." He retreated to polish glasses. At least until we left, and he returned to dealing meth to his customers.

"You have got got to find a new place to hang out," I told Bryson. "This is just sad." to find a new place to hang out," I told Bryson. "This is just sad."

"Dead end, too," he said. "No cameras, no witnesses."

"Don't be too sure," I said. "Give me fifty bucks."

Bryson frowned. "You make more than I do. Pay scale for lieutenants is a whole gods-damned galaxy away from us grunts."

"You want results, David? Give me the fifty bucks."

He counted out two twenties and two fives and passed them to me. I crossed the sawdust, peanut shells and broken glass crunching under my boots. The dancer perked up when I approached. "You want a private session?"

I gave her a peek at my shield. "I want to talk to you. You working last night?"

She stopped moving and tottered to the edge of the platform in her hot-pink platform heels. "Yeah. Usually I'm days but I took a double. I was here until closing. Napped in the back."

"What's your name?"

"Dakota."

"Original." I fanned the photograph of Lily and the money under her nose. "You see this girl leave with anyone, Dakota?"

The dancer bit her lip. "Money first." I passed her the bills and she tucked them into her bra, disappearing the green folds like a magic trick. "She left around the beginning of my shift with Johnny Boy. I was glad, too-she was dancing like a tramp and cutting into my tips."

"Johnny Boy?" I said. The dancer shrugged.

"Well, it's not, like, his real real name. That's something all long and foreign and stuff." name. That's something all long and foreign and stuff."

"Of course," I said. "Silly me."

"He comes in every night," she said, starting to gyrate again as the song changed. "Around nine. Stays until two or so. Unless he meets a girl he likes, then it's earlier."

"Thanks," I said, pocketing Lily's photo. "We'll be back."

CHAPTER 5.

It was getting near lunch time, and the hole in my stomach told me I'd only had coffee since my abruptly interrupted supper the night before. I have a were metabolism, and when it demands food it's hard to ignore.