Today, though, all I saw was the calm deep brown of the earth. There were no stains to accompany Groleski’s frozen body; he’d apparently been killed and eaten elsewhere, and only removed to this location afterward. Why anyone would haul a body halfway up a cliff was beyond me, except it was in keeping with the other victims. They were all outdoorsy types. Only one or two had gone missing while hiking or trail-breaking, but they’d all been found in haunts like the ones they’d loved to spend their lives in. Groleski’d been a rock climber.

“Walker?” A man’s voice rose up from below, floodlights too bright to let me see the speaker when I glanced down.

Not that I needed to. I dropped my chin to my chest and took a moment before shouting a response. “Sorry, Captain. I’ve got nothing.”

I was too far away to hear his exasperated sigh, but I felt it ripple over my skin anyway. I was good at disappointing Captain Michael Morrison. Some days it seemed like my only stock in trade. I could have lived with that, but this was the third time in a row I’d failed to come through on this case. At least the other two times he hadn’t been awakened at oh-god-thirty to call a dud shaman to a crime scene: those bodies had been found in daylight. This one should’ve been, too. Nobody in their right mind would be scouring cliffs at three in the morning, but Groleski’s brother had found the body. I guessed a family missing a member wasn’t in its right mind.

Billy jerked his thumb, and I leaned back from my stabilizing rope, bouncing the ten or twelve yards down to the ground. The harness became a Gordian knot under my cold fingers and Morrison’s gimlet eye, but the rope began to draw up as soon as my weight stopped holding it taut. The forensics team would be taking our place with Groleski’s body, now that the esoteric detectives had completely failed to see anything untoward. Some good we were.