"How do you think I am?" I managed between clenched teeth. Turning my face away from him, I smiled hard, an old trick I'd learned for suppressing the gag reflex.

"I understand," he said. "Come on—have a seat over here."

I let him sit me down on the curb. "I don't suppose you have any idea why anyone would want to do something like that," he went on, sitting down beside me.

I shook my head. My stomach was starting to recover, but my brain was still reeling with the shock of the mutilation. "Looks like a ritual murder."

"Yeah, that was my first thought, too," Kylowski said. "Trouble is, we don't have any of the other usual trappings. No robes, no weird jewelry or tattoos, no strangled chickens. Not to mention that they were killed and mutilated here on the street and not in some abandoned warehouse or tenement."

"Maybe it's a new—" I broke off as a key word abruptly penetrated the haze of nausea. "They were mutilated?"

"That's right," he confirmed. He was back to scrutinizing my face. "Both of them were done the same way."

I hauled myself to my feet, my stomach suddenly forgotten. One mutilation was a sick perversion. Two mutilations was a potentially intriguing pattern. "Let me see," I said.

We retraced our steps to the bodies. Kylowski crouched down beside the man and twitched aside the cloth.

His head behind the ear was a copy of the mess that was now Lorelei's, with the lower part of the skull torn to shreds. But there was one vital difference between his upper face and Lorelei's: right in the middle of his forehead was another thudwumper hole. "Which of them was shot with my gun?" I asked Kylowski.

"Funny you should ask," Kylowski said. "Both of them."

I frowned at him. "Both of them?"