"I heard you were the one found the body," Joe Mo said. "Nasty business, wasn't it? Makes you wonder what Jokertown is coming to. You'd think she'd be safe, if anyone was." He blinked behind the dark, thick lenses. "What can I do for you, dear boy?"

"I need to see the file on the ace-of-spades killer."

"Yeoman," Joe Mo said.

"Yeoman," Jay Ackroyd repeated thoughtfully. It came back to him then. Yeoman, I don't care for this, Chrysalis had said with ice in her voice, that night a year and a half ago when they'd faced off in the darkened taproom of the Palace. She was always a master of understatement. "I remember," he said.

"Why, there hasn't been a new bow-and-arrow killing in more than a year," Mo said. "You really think he's the one?"

"I hope not," Jay said. Yeoman had entered the taproom silent as smoke, and before anyone even noticed him, he'd had a hunting arrow notched and ready. But Hiram Worchester had stepped in the way in righteous indignation, and Jay had gotten the drop on the guy. Suddenly Yeoman was gone in a pop of in-rushing air. Jay Ackroyd was a projecting teleport. When his right hand made a gun, he could pop his targets anyplace he knew well enough to visualize.

Only he'd sent that fucker Yeoman to the wrong damn place. "I had the sonofabitch dead to rights, Joe," he said. "I could have popped him right into the Tombs. Instead I sent him to the middle of the Holland Tunnel, God knows why." Something about his tone when he'd replied to Chrysalis, maybe, or the loathing in his eyes when he glanced toward Wyrm, or maybe the fact that he'd had the decency to hesitate when Hiram stepped forward and blocked his shot. Or it could have been the girl he had with him, the masked blonde in the string bikini who seemed so fresh and innocent.

It hadn't been what you call a deliberate, conscious decision; a lot of the time Jay just went on gut instinct. But if he'd been wrong that night, then Chrysalis had paid for it with her life. "I really need to see that file," he said.