The huge oak desk had been tipped over across the upper part of her body, hiding her face. She'd been wearing blue jeans and a plain white blouse. The front of the blouse was spattered with tiny droplets of blood. Her left leg bent the wrong way at the knee, and a jagged red piece of shinbone poked through the denim. Jay squatted by her left hand. He could see her finger bones through the ghostly outlines of tendons and the smooth, clear skin. All five fingers were shattered, the ring finger in two places; her crystalline flesh was suffused with the rosy glow of burst capillaries. Jay took her broken fingers in his own. A faint warmth still clung to her body, but she was cooling even as he held her.

After a moment, he released her hand and tried to lift the desk off her. It was heavy. He grimaced, shoved harder, and righted it with a grunt. Only when the desk was back against the wall did he look back down at Chrysalis.

Her face was gone.

Her skull hadn't been crushed as much it had been obliterated. The back cushion of her chair was sticky with dried blood. Bits of mashed brain oozed out between fragments of bone. Everything was red and wet. A small pool of blood had gathered under what was left of the chair, soaking into the Oriental rug. Jay looked up and saw more blood, a faint spray of it across the front of the desk and low on the walls, around the light socket. The patterned antique wallpaper was a gloomy purple color, very Victorian; it was hard to see the blood spatters, but they were there when you looked.

Jay stood up and tried not to feel anything. He'd seen bodies before, more than he cared to think about, and Chrysalis has been playing dangerous games for a long, long time. She knew too many secrets. Sooner or later, something like this was bound to happen.

He studied the position of the body, committing it to memory. It wasn't Chrysalis now, just dead meat, just evidence. When he'd seen all there was to see, Jay turned his attention to the rest of the room. That was when he first noticed the small rectangle of cardboard, lying beside her left thigh.