“If you want me to leave, tell me,” Louella said. “Some of the girls do."

Jess studied her through narrowed eyes and said, “Why?”

“The girls who, well, work with Lenny...” She looked away when she said that. “They make a lot more money than the girls who don’t.”

Jess could guess how. Lenny would be the guy who “arranged” things between high rollers and those dancers willing to provide what people in the trade euphemistically referred to as extras. She wondered if Lenny had been the target of Vice’s undercover operation, or if he was a middleman for someone higher up the food chain.

She was... curious. With a cop’s keen interest, she wanted to know exactly what sort of slug would crawl out from under his rock if she lifted it. There was always a chance that he was killing dancers who became a problem — but it didn’t seem like a big chance. The crimes she was looking at didn’t have the feel of anything that had been done to keep a business running smoothly. The killing had been the point for the killers, not some other motive.

She’d keep her eyes open, though. In case he was mixing business with pleasure.

Louella led her out of the concrete back rooms into the main club, through a wide, burnished-wood-and-brass lobby, and up a broad, curving staircase. Customers already on the premises looked her over, and though she wished desperately for a longer skirt, or pants and a heavy jacket, she remembered the part she was playing. She smiled at them — the showgirl smile, practiced in front of mirrors by dancers since dance began, and once learned, never forgotten.

And the men smiled back. Some leered.

Jess’s queasiness returned.

Louella nodded toward the open door to the right of the landing, and raised her eyebrows in question.

“Don’t. Go. Anywhere,” Jess told her, sounding more desperate than she’d intended.

Louella smiled. “Not a problem, honey.”

They went through the door together.

Lenny stood with his back to them, talking on the phone and flipping through a ledger.

“I brought a new girl,” Louella said.

He held up an index finger. “Minute.”

Lenny was big. Six five maybe, probably close to three hundred pounds, and most of it looked like it was still muscle. Blond hair going silver, a voice both deep and coarse, accented with last week’s episode of The Sopranos and way too many mob movies patched over a lifetime of deep-fried Southern good ol’ boy. He snapped, “No, Kasim, the house is short for the last week because we had a bunch of dancers quit.... How the fuck do I know? Someplace opened up that has a smaller tip-out, or that lets them have tattoos and piercings, or that gives ’em darker corners to screw in. They’re goddamned flakes — you know that — and if you build a business that depends on goddamned flakes, sometimes your receipts are going to come back funny.” A long pause. “Yeah, well, I’m interviewing one now, so how ’bout you let me do my job?” He slammed the phone down and turned around, looking pissed.

He might have been a good-looking man. But Jess hated him on sight. He gave her the creeps.

Louella said, “This one’s only here to get your okay, Lenny.”

And Lenny started to say something to Louella, except that as he was opening his mouth, he looked at Jess.

He froze, and his face went pale and gray and sweaty, and his breath rushed out of him in a whoosh. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. He scrabbled for his chair with suddenly shaking hands — big, meaty, ring-bedecked hands — and collapsed into it as if his knees wouldn’t hold him any longer, and for a second Jess wondered if she was going to have to do CPR on the bastard.

He stared at her, saying nothing. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

“Have we... met?” Lenny asked, his voice shaking, his face getting grayer and grayer.

“Not that I know of,” Jess said. “I’m Grace Callahan. I’ve been Hot Pepper, and Randi Lee, and Silver Jones, but not for a few years now, and nowhere around here. I suppose you might have seen me a long time ago.”

Jess watched Lenny the way wolves watched injured deer. He looked like prey to her. He was limping, and she smelled blood. But... from what?

“Good Lord have mercy,” Lenny said. “I reckon I... must have.” The mobster voice fell away completely, and for a moment he was someone else. Not the gangland wannabe anymore. He was younger. Vulnerable.

Scared.

He stared at her with eyes that had, a moment before, been hard and cold. Ruthless. Killer’s eyes. But that hardness had washed away. Lenny stared into Jess’s eyes, looking for something he wasn’t finding, and she would have given anything to know what he wanted to see. Because that would have told her so much. Then he cleared his throat, and that questioning look slipped away, replaced once more by flat, dead, reptilian eyes. “Grace, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Teri already cleared you?”

“Yes.”

“Gimme your permit and your license. I know Teri told you the rules. The club has other opportunities too, and if you want to find out more about them, you come to me. But... not right now. I’m... not feeling so good right now,” he said.

She handed him the IDs he requested. He photocopied them, punched holes in the photocopied page, and put it into a ring binder behind his desk that said DANCERS down the spine in big, carefully hand-printed black letters.

He handed her the license and the permit, and as he did, his hand touched hers.

She hid the shudder she felt, but not the look of loathing in her eyes. She saw his surprise, noted the way he backed up, and thought longingly of a couple of takedown moves. Not because she had anything on him. Simply because it would have felt good.

She didn’t even take the time to put her IDs in her purse. She just said, “Anything else?”

“No. Not right now.”

Out in the hall again, Jess caught her breath.

“That was... weird,” Louella said. “I’ve never seen him look like he looked right then.”

“I don’t know what that was about,” Jess said. “But it was creepy.”

“Creepy is one of Lenny’s specialties,” Louella said as they walked down the stairs. “All the rest of his specialties are worse. Stay out of his way.”

Jess nodded. “Those sound like words of wisdom to me.

“We’re done for today,” the house mom said. “Teri will call you to discuss the schedule. She’ll have to look at it before she can give you definite times.”

“That’s fine,” Jess said. “I’ll have to run down a couple of costumes before I can start anyway.”

Louella nodded. “I know some girls who are selling their costumes. If you’d like, I’ll let them know you’re looking. That’ll help you keep your costs down.” She paused. “Give you more for your brother, you know?”

Her brother. Apparently Louella had been listening at the door. Jess couldn’t forget about her brother. Jess must have looked surprised at Louella’s mention, because the house mom added, “I think you’re very... brave, doing this for him. And turning down Lenny’s specials, too. Knowing what you need the money for, I would have understood if you’d told me to leave. But I think it says something good about you that you didn’t.”

Jess felt like such a fraud. This was the part of undercover she’d hated. Fooling the decent people, making them think she was something she wasn’t, in order to get to the bad ones. Louella seemed like a decent person. “Thanks. I’m... Don’t make too much of it, okay? Lenny wasn’t that hard to turn down.”

Louella laughed. “He’s persistent, though. He’ll be back with offers.”

Jess, at the bottom of the stairs, nodded toward the grand ballroom and said, “My ride should be in there waiting for me. Thanks very much for your help. I’ll see you... well… whenever I make it on the schedule. And” — she dug into her ridiculous little purse for paper and a pen, about the only things that fit in there beside her ID and lipstick — “here’s my cell phone number. You can give it to the girls with costumes and tell them they can call me.”

Louella took the number and said, “Tell your brother we’ll be cheering for him.”

Jess nodded. “I’ll do that.”

Hank was sitting at a back table, a strange, sick expression on his face. He turned to look at her as soon as she came through the doors, and rose immediately. Jess had been planning to watch a few of the girls dance, just to get an idea of their routines, but the look in Hank’s eyes suggested she shouldn’t even ask.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m running late. When you asked for a ride, I thought you said this would be quick,” Hank snapped, and Jess realized that quite a few people were watching the two of them: the bartender, some of the customers, a couple of dancers. “Did you at least get the job?”

“Yes. Don’t know when I’ll start, though.”

“But you’re done here for today?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get the hell out of here before I’m so late that I lose my job.” He glared at his watch and stormed out a step ahead of her.

He was convincing. She’d give him that. He’d tipped her to the fact that his foul temper was an act with the comment about giving her a ride. But he was quite convincing as a pissed-off man kept waiting.

He didn’t say anything else until the two of them were in the car, and they were actually back on the road. And then he said, “Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“Your hand.”

Jess reached over and put her left hand in his right one, and saw him look even greener than he had before.

“Now the other one.”

She put her right hand in his, and she thought he was going to have to pull over.

“What — or who — did you touch in there?”

Jess started to blow him off with a smart-assed remark about psychics and stupid voodoo shit. But Hank had managed to convince her that he had something going on with his psychic tricks. So she closed her eyes and ran her memory backward from the moment she walked into the place. “Doorknobs first — the one at the side entry, then both sides of the one in Teri’s office. Desk and shelf, Teri’s office. Shook Teri’s hand. Chair, Teri’s office. Railing in the corridor that the dancers — and probably the other employees — use. Railing going up the steps to Lenny’s office. Wall in Lenny’s office. Lenny’s hand. That was a bit less fun than squashing live cockroaches with my bare fingers, incidentally. The house mom’s hand when I gave her my phone number. Railing on the other side when I was coming down the steps. The door frame on the way into the room where you were sitting. The exit doorknob on the way out.” She sat very still for a moment, remembering, making sure she hadn’t missed anything. “A table on my way through the back of the foyer to go up and meet with Lenny. I tripped on an Oriental rug and caught myself on the table edge.”

“Shit.”

“Why do you ask?”

He glanced over at her. “Because you touched the killer, or something the killer touched, and I was hoping we could narrow it down.”

“I touched... You’re kidding.” She wanted to call him a fraud, or a fool, for making such a claim. Except he wasn’t presenting this to her in the way the other psychic she’d worked with had. He wasn’t closing his eyes and murmuring things like, “I’m sensing movement through the Veil.”

Jess had bought that whole dramatic act when she was so desperate to find Ginny. She’d thought that someone would have to be a little different — a little odd — to have more than five senses. She’d wanted to believe, too, because she had run out of other hopes, and she needed something to believe in. She’d eventually realized the psychic was a charlatan. But she’d assumed that all psychics were like that one. Had Hank sounded anything like that previous psychic, she would have had no trouble blowing him off.

But he didn’t seem to have an ounce of pretense in him.

She shifted a little sideways in her seat so she could look at him better. She had the scarred side of his face toward her. It was odd, but that side seemed more like the real Hank to her. “You can’t tell which of them it was? See into their heads or something?”

“No. It doesn’t work like that. I get... emotions and physical sensations, sounds and smells and tastes, sometimes an idea of physical location. Shreds of inner personality, but that might not match outer personality at all, and in this case is likely not to.” He frowned. “A lot of it is physical sensation. It’s hard to connect that to an individual person, but sometimes I can get a specific piece of information that’s useful.”

“What does it feel like?” she asked him.

“What?”

“Being psychic. What does it feel like to touch something and get impressions from it?” She watched his hands as he drove and shifted, and watched the way his feet moved over the clutch, the brake, the gas pedal. Comforting.

“Depends. Touching something happy doesn’t feel like much of anything. Maybe a little buzz along my nerves, along with flashes of sounds and pictures, sensations, sometimes tastes or smells. Something nasty, though...” His voice trailed off, and he negotiated an intersection before picking up the sentence again. “When I touch a critical piece of evidence from a murder scene, it feels like... pardon me” — he glanced sidelong at her before returning his attention to the road — “it feels like a bad case of shit cramps. Can double me over sometimes. Depending on what I’m touching, I can get the physical sensations of the death itself, the pain, the fear, the anger, the lust, the perversion, sometimes words and the screaming, smells and tastes — the killer and the victim in their final interaction all mixed together. It can be horrible.”

Jess stared at him, trying to imagine voluntarily doing anything that affected her that way. “That sounds hellish. More like a disease than a gift, if you don’t mind my saying so. Have you always... been psychic?”

He laughed a little. “No. Just since I got myself blown up. As for it being a disease — it seems that way to me most of the time, honestly. It gives me a lot of information I’d rather not have, all the time and whether I want it or not, and so far I haven’t found it compensating me with little bluebirds of happiness elsewhere in my life to make up for all the awfulness.”

Jess turned and looked out the front again so she wouldn’t stare at him. “The injuries you got in battle made you psychic?”

His voice held puzzlement. “I’m not sure. I don’t think it was the actual injuries. I had bad damage to my right arm and right leg, and extensive facial damage, but no brain injury. I didn’t spend any time in a coma, and while everybody including me was sure I was going to die, I didn’t die, even for a minute. No white light, no review of my life, no dead friends coming to meet me. From what I’ve since read about late development of psychic ability, I guess what caused this in me was the trauma surrounding the whole mess.”

“The physical trauma.”

She caught his shrug out of the corner of her eye. "“Personal stuff, too. There was no joy in Mudville back then, no matter where I looked for it.”

“That sucks," she said. “So why do you let Jim put you in situations where you have to deal with that?”

He drove in silence for a long time, and she could see him struggling with whether or not to answer her question.

“It’s the mission,” he said at last. “My mission. To stand up for people who can’t protect themselves. To do the right thing, not the easy thing. I swore once that I would give my life to do that, and though I can no longer serve as a soldier, the oath is still there.” He stopped at another red light, turned on the left turn signal, and said, “I still mean it — you know? So that’s why, when Jim calls me and asks for my help, I give it. I would do it without charge, but Jim insists on covering the classes that I don’t teach while I’m taking the time off.”

Jess got a lump in her throat. How could she not believe in Hank Kamian? He might be a great psychic, or a lousy psychic, or just a guy who got sick to his stomach at crime scenes and mistook that for being psychic. She couldn’t judge his qualifications; she had only his reading of her upon which to base any such judgment, and while that was impressive, she could not verify how he’d gotten his information. But all that was beside the point. She had no doubts that he was a good man.

He pulled into the parking lot of his dojo, and she said, “Here? I thought you were going to drop me off at my place.”

“Later.” He took the key out of the ignition, unlocked his door, and got out. He looked in at her and said, “First, however, you and I are going to go into the back classroom and do that workout we missed yesterday.”

“Right now?”

“Right now. I’m going to be sure that you have all the tools you’ll need to defend yourself in unarmed combat.”

He took a deep breath and added, “I want to make sure you can kick ass stark naked if you have to. The monster who is hunting in that club has managed to gain the trust of every one of his victims. They’ve all had a close relationship with him. And he’s played on that relationship to murder them.”

“You feel one killer?”

“So far, yes. Only one personality. But one personality that has destroyed a lot more than three women.”

“They weren’t looking for a killer.”

“Come on.” He slammed the door and walked away from the car, leaving Jess to either sit in the heat or trot along after him.

She could use a workout, she decided, and followed him into the dojo.

He already had a black uniform pulled off the rack for her. “My donation to the cause,” he said.

“I’m going to need a sports bra, too.”

“Yeah, we have those. Look on those shelves. They’ll be to the right of the belts.”

Jess found a bra that would fit, and then debated between fighting in a rhinestone thong and skipping the underpants entirely, since Hank didn’t seem to stock panties. She decided that nothing at all was preferable to doing kicks and throws with the thong creeping up her butt. She’d have to buy the uniform when she was done. But she would have done that anyway.

She changed in the public restroom, scrubbed the gunk off her face, pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and went out to join Hank on the mats.

In the front room, a women’s self-defense class was in progress. The back room, though, they had to themselves. “You ready?” Hank said.

Jess nodded. She’d always been very good at defending herself.

He did some standard frontal attacks, and she moved with him, diverting the force of each assault so that he went flying past her. He rolled gracefully out of her throws, and came at her again, using a slightly different attack each time.

She focused on defense, on form; she tried to keep her attention strictly on what they were doing. But every time she connected with him, and every time his weight and his heat moved past her, she wanted to touch him. Feel him. She didn’t. But she wanted to.

“Nice,” he said at last. “You have excellent form, and great live hands. Let’s see how you do from behind.”

Her mind went all sorts of wicked places with that, so much so that she missed her first grapple and he took her down. He let her right back up, though. “Pay attention,” he said, his voice rough. “This is your life we’re trying to save.”

“I know.”

The next time he grabbed her from behind, she broke his hold and escaped. As she did the next handful of times. She broke free from choke holds, arm pins, waist grabs. She stayed sharp. She fought hard.

She couldn’t forget the sheer heat of him behind her, or the strength of his arms around her, or the occasional brush of his cheek, already rough with beard stubble, against hers.

When they were both sweating, he backed away and said, “Good. As long as you’re paying attention, you’re solid on the basics.”

She laughed out loud. “The basics?”

He grabbed a couple of folded towels off a stack in one corner, wiped his face and neck with one, and handed her the other. “The basics,” he said.

She took the towel he gave her and wiped the sweat from her face. “That’s a whole lot of years of experience, and working with the best trainers in the APD.”

Without warning, she was flat on her back on the mat with his full weight on top of her, with her arms pinned at her sides and his powerful thighs and calves locking her legs into place.

“I know,” he said, staring into her eyes. “The person who is doing this,” he told her, his voice even and careful, “finds a way to befriend his victims. He wins their trust. And when they trust him, he kills them. Or he and friends kill them. Either way, you have to stay alert. Every. Single. Second. You didn’t, and now you’re in trouble. So. Get me off you.”

His voice, his weight on her, his heat, his power, the musky male scent of him mixed with the clean sweat of their exertions, sent signals to her body that bypassed her brain entirely. Jess didn’t think at all, didn’t even know what she was going to do until she did it.

She kissed him. A full, open-mouthed, tongue-probing, rip-my-clothes-off-of-me-and-take-me kiss, freighted with years of repressed hunger and yearning and desire to be touched that she’d walled off. Her lips touched his, and the floodgates inside of her opened, and as their tongues collided and as her body arched up to meet his, he relaxed a little.

She got her feet under her and with one sharp, hard movement flipped him over, so that she was on top, he was on the bottom.

And she was still kissing him. She lay atop him, her legs wrapping around the outsides of his, her heels hooking under his thighs to pull them up to cradle her buttocks.

He let go of her wrists, and interlocked his fingers with hers. And he kissed her back. Passionately. Wonderfully. His lips searched her mouth, her jaw, the line of her throat, the tender space where her neck joined her shoulder. He nibbled, he licked, he bit, he sucked, and she whispered, “More. Harder.”

Her nipples beneath the uniform felt like pebbles, and her breasts tingled; her body ached to feel his skin on her skin, to lift her hips over his straining cock and plunge down onto him and wrap him in her and feel the two of them slide together, to feel the hard, heavy thrust as he pounded into her and their bodies crashed together as she rode him, as they lost themselves in each other.

She wasn’t wearing underwear. It wouldn’t be all that hard to make it happen.

She shuddered as he rolled them over again and covered her with his body. She could feel how hard he was, how ready. She wanted him. Right then. Right there.

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her, but the kiss was gentle instead of passionate. He said, “We can’t do this, Jess,” and his voice held the same urgency she felt, the same wild hunger.

“Yes, we can,” she told him.

“Think about it.”

And she lay beneath him, feeling desire burning her from the inside out, and she disconnected her mind from her body. She’d had plenty of practice at that.

Why couldn’t they do this?

And she knew the answer to that question.

They couldn’t pursue each other because they were work partners with a critical job to do. Because people’s lives depended on the two of them having their focus on their work, and on both of them doing one thing and doing it well. And on that one thing they were doing well not being each other.

Hank had said that Jess was going to have to stay sharp. To keep her mind on what she was doing every second, she couldn’t have it drifting off to him. If she lost her focus, someone else could die. If she lost her focus, she could die.

She looked him in the eye, and took a deep breath. “Can I hate you for being right?”

“Not as much as I’m going to hate myself; I guarantee it.” He kissed her lips once more, lightly, and pushed off her. “We still need to finish our workout,” he said. “I want to make sure you get the advanced stuff. Better that you have it and don’t need it than need it and don’t have it.”

Jess nodded and rose. And they got back to work.