t' do" she sniveled. "I'm bored."

Mickey thought, knowing he had to figure out something or Lisa would start to howl. That would bring an adult, or worse, the cop. Then he heard a strange sound, like a whistle.

He glanced up, looking for the source. The sound resolved itself into a peculiar song, one that sounded a lot like it was being played on one of those weird whistles they had for music cla.s.s "

ocarina" his teacher called them. The kids called them "sweet potatoes," 'cause that was what they looked like.

The teacher never let Mickey play one of those. She never let him play the drum or the cymbals, or even the triangle. All he ever got to play were the notched sticks and the blocks with sandpaper on them. And not even the blocks since he'd tried to sand Jimmy Kreske's face with them.

But the kids at school never got any music like that out of their whistles, not even nerdy Elen Atkins, who was taking clarinet lessons. It was weird but real neat.

He finally spotted the player, and was amazed that he hadn't seen her before. She couldn't have gotten to the middle of the mall without pa.s.sing them at least once. It should have been pretty hard to miss someone dressed like that, in a kind of coat or cape made out of bird feathers. It was wild, like something out of a Conan movie, and like the music she was playing. Mickey wanted a coat like that he could just imagine what the other kids at school would say when he swept in with it over his shoulders.

The flute player had painted designs on her face and looked like a punk rocker. Mickey liked punk rock. Maybe this girl had a band! Maybe she'd want him in the band!

She sort of nodded her head at him when she saw he'd spotted her, and stopped playing.

"Wow " said Lisa in awe, scrambling to her feet. " I wanna look like that "

The girl tucked her whistle away somewhere out of sight, nodded at them again, and vanished through the door behind her leading to a service corridor.

Robin pulled Mickey's sleeve. "You think she wants us t' go with her?"

Mickey was certain of it. This was just how neat things happened in cartoons.

"What d'you think? Come on, or we're gonna lose her!"

The three of them scrambled after the girl; when they got to the alcove she'd been in, the door to the service area was closed but it was also unlocked.

"See?" Mickey crowed with triumph. "What I tell you guys? Let's go!"

* * *"Hey wetback?" Sara called from the front, her voice echoing hollowly in the nearly empty room.

"What?" Mark answered absently.

"I'm off but you might get some bodies down here. We got a couple of missing kids "

"Every time the weather gets warm we get missing kids, so what's new?" Mark stared at his map, and frowned.

"These have been gone a while. All from the same family. Dan Rather even picked it up. Big-time stuff."

Mark grunted something in reply. He was trying to see if there was a pattern to where the cult- killings showed up on the map.

"Anyway, third shift may be busy, but Chief reserved that terminal for you guys, so don't let them bully you off of it, okay?"

"Fat chance," Mark replied, replacing the pins that represented single kills with ones with blue heads, to see if anything stood out that way. "But thanks for the warning, Yank."

"Just buy me lunch again."

"On my salary?"

"It's bigger than mine." Sara sailed out the door, he heard it thunk shut behind her, and Mark promptly forgot her.

Di was keying more data into her astrological database after a quick trip to the public library. The 'normal' cycles hadn't come up with any more of a match than could be accounted for by chance, so now she was trying some more esoteric ones.

"If this doesn't work," she muttered at Mark, who was switching pins around again, "I'm going to have to make a long-distance call. A couple of them, actually. One at least to my voudoun contact in New York to establish some credibility for me with whoever's local. Probably one to my house sitter if I can find a modem; I need more stuff from my database."

"I didn't know you knew so much about computers " he looked sideways at her in surprise.

"I don't, actually," she said, keying like one possessed. "The real work was done by my house sitter.

Andre is very good, and since he has a lot of time on his hands and knows what my 'other job' is, he set me up a number of programs and databases."

"Hm. Boyfriend?" That was news. Di had always been pretty much of a loner.

"Sort of. Off and on. More me being flaky than anything else; I don't really see where I can settle down right now."

He chuckled, and leaned back to see if he could see a pattern from a distance. "I have a hard time picturing you with a hacker."

"G.o.d forbid!" She actually took her eyes off the screen for a moment to glare at him. "I have better taste than that! Andre is just good with computers. He's 'just good' at a lot of things he plays violin very well, he's a d.a.m.n good dancer "

"Ah, but can he cook?"

"He burns jello. Can you?"

"Burn jello? With the best look, do you see any pattern here?"

"No," she said finally. "Have you tried a chromatic from blue with the oldest kills first?"

"No " he bent over his map.

It was hours later, Sara's warning notwithstanding, when they were interrupted.

"Mark?" came a call from the front of the room. "You guys still at it back there?"

"Yo, Ramirez," Mark called back, his voice fogged with fatigue. He craned his neck to see over the low wall of the work station. "What's up?"

A short, thin, intense young man in faded jeans wormed his way back through the desks and terminals to their position. "You guys up with the news?"

Mark stretched, feeling his shoulders pop. "Couple kids missing?" he hazarded. "Sara said something before she left."

"Three," said Ramirez grimly, "And dead. Chief sent me after you. He thinks your nut case just became a baby-killer." * * *

"Ah s.h.i.t" Mark cursed; his tone, if not his words, conveying anguish the anguish a cop was supposed to stop feeling after a while. The anguish he couldn't help feeling when a homicide victim was under twelve. "Man, I hate it when stuff like this happens."

Ramirez just nodded; he felt it too.

Mark couldn't force himself near the site; just couldn't. Couldn't handle itty-bitty shapes under those olive-drab sheets. It made his gut twist up inside; made him want to go pound on something.

Made his eyes sting. So Di had gotten her clearance and was with the Forensics team without him.

This time the location was a half-abandoned ranch just outside the Fort Worth city limits well outside the range of any of the previous human deaths that they knew of but within the range for the cattle mutilations. Mark made a mental note to ask the Narcotics boys if they'd been finding any John Does out here since April.

The kids had been found in an old cattle tank, a tank that the caretaker swore on his life had been left dry, with the drainhole unplugged.

It wasn't dry now. It was full to the rim, and the water was fresh. It wasn't rain water, either; there hadn't been enough rain in the past week or two to put more than a couple of inches on the bottom of the tank.

Somebody had come out here and deliberately filled the tank; and they'd have had to fill it by hand, bucket by bucket, from the tap fifty yards away. Somebody had gone to a lot of work and done it undetected, unseen so that somebody could drown three kids here this evening.

Again, undetected, unseen.

They'd taken the old caretaker away about an hour ago; Mark hoped they'd reached the hospital in time. The shock of finding the kids had thrown the former ranch hand into a heart attack.

"Hey Valdez " one of the Forensics boys hailed Mark, who waved him over. "Look, this is none of my business, but what makes you guys sure that this is the same loony? The kids weren't slashed up or anything "

"This " Mark held up an envelope that Melanie Lee, one of the other Forensics folk, had given him.

There was more than enough of the flower petals this time to go around. "We looked back over all the records; nine times out of ten you guys found plant stuff, and I suspect the tenth just meant the cult was either real good at cleaning up after themselves, or there was already native stuff in bloom on-site.

None of the copycats or the lone loons left flowers behind."

"Weird." The Forensics man shook his head. "I like that chick you guys brought in; you never know she's there unless she finds something then she just points it out and waits for us to deal with it."

"Yeah, she's okay," Mark admitted. "She find anything this time?"

"Naw. Look, if this is gonna help you it'll be on the coroner's report, but I can tell you now. This is real bizarre. It doesn't look like anybody laid a finger in violence on these kids until they put 'em away.

Doc thinks they were maybe drugged; he'll be looking for that in the autopsy. I figure they had to be see, before they were croaked, somebody painted 'em with rubber cement."

"With what?" Mark hadn't seen the pathetic little corpses, so this took him by surprise. Ramirez, who had, just nodded.

"Honest to G.o.d, thick rubber cement, or something a lot like it; painted 'em about half an inch thick everywhere except their mouths, and I mean everywhere. Like that old story about the gal who got painted gold kids would have died from that if they hadn't been drowned. Whoever it was sealed everything shut with the stuff, in fact, before it dried; eyes, nose, genitals, the works, all but the mouth.

Thing is, it wasn't messed up much; they really don't seem to have struggled."

"Which bears out the drugging. Prints?"

He shook his head. "Just like all the rest; partials only, d.a.m.n near worthless, and what little we get doesn't match any files. We've sent 'em to the FBI, but "

"Yeah, I know, even if our birds have pa.s.sports or were in the armed forces, those records aren't on-line. Means searching archives."

"Which could be months."

"No s.h.i.t. And even then, working only with partials we're gonna match half of Texas." Mark shook his head. "Man, I wouldn't have your job at least I can make some motions like I'm doing something.""Yeah, well I wouldn't have yours. I'd just run in circles. In the lab I can maybe figure something out." The Forensics man nodded, barely visible in the gathering darkness. "Luck, Valdez."

"Thanks. Same to you."

Mark and his colleague watched the Forensics crew begin breaking things down in silence until Di separated herself from the rest and made her way across the dusty stockpen to them. In the near-dark after sunset she looked like a thin, wispy ghost.

"Mark, I need to " She stopped, noticing the third person.

"Sorry, I didn't have time for formal introduction before. Ramirez, this is Di Di, Alonso Frederico Ramirez, fellow slave in the department; was Vice, now with us Homicide, I mean. Us guys with names that end in Z gotta stick together."

Ramirez smiled thinly. Until lately, that hadn't been too far wrong. Then the Chief had been made Chief and things had gotten better. The old fart hadn't given a fat d.a.m.n about affirmative action but when he saw potential being wasted, he saw red, and did something about it.

"He's currently clawing his way up despite the efforts of the rest of us to keep him down."

Ramirez grinned a little more genuinely.

Di gave him a long appraising look. "So what's that got to do with creative esoterics?"

"He's cool, Di he was on that voudoun cathouse bust, and the madame cursed him."

"Made me a believer, let me tell you," the young man said fervently. "Ended up taking a vacation across the border, looking for an old-time brujo to get it off me."

"Did you ever find one?" Di asked, curiosity evident in her voice. "In my experience you have to fight like with like."

"No no, I got lucky. Dispatch hired in a little bitty gal from Baton Rouge. Ran into her in the hall one day she took one look at me, freaked, and practically bludgeoned me into accepting a date with her."

"You sure freaked when you found out that the date included her and her granny...." Mark could still remember the sour look on Ramirez's face when he'd confided the details to Mark.

"And a soon-to-be-deceased rooster and a mess of other s.h.i.t. d.a.m.n good thing for me her granny was visiting."

Di chuckled. "d.a.m.n good thing for you that she and her granny have a soft spot for cops. A lot of voudoun pract.i.tioners won't even talk to cops."

"Yeah, well, maybe I did 'em a little favor or two, like pa.s.sin' on down the grapevine that the old lady is okay and maybe Baton Rouge Bunco shouldn't ha.s.sle her."

"Well, I need a favor; I want to do a full unshielded probe and some other things, and do it without attracting attention. Can you two keep me standing up and pretend to talk to me for about five minutes?"

"You gonna go limp or rigid?" Mark asked.

"Rigid."

"No prob. Ramirez, grab her elbow okay Di "

One second she was "normal" the next, stiff as a corpse; eyes staring, teeth clenched. Mark and his companion pretended to make small talk, watching covertly for anyone approaching them, but no one did. Four or five minutes later they could feel her muscles relax, and she was "back."

She leaned up against Mark, shaking. "Oh h.e.l.l. Mark, I hit problems. Feels like I've been run over.

I nasty stuff. Worse than the last time."

"Get anything?"

"In general, yes it is the same bunch, and this time I got enough to identify five signature auras.

But in specific, no, I got hit in a major way. In very specific they know about me, and they're blocking me."

"Huh?" Mark was startled out of speech.