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braid and she wore glasses. Her face looked experienced, tough even. In her business suit and skirt, she looked like a lawyer. Emotionless, dedicated, and breastless. But her legs were nice: soft, tapered, sexy. He wondered what she’d look like without the glasses and her hair down. He found the idea exciting.
    She looked at him. “Has anyone lived there since Zero occupied it?”
    “No, not a person. It’s been more or less up for sale for twenty years. Although, I imagine it’s had its share of transients.”
    The streets and buildings became shabbier as Fenn drove. There was litter on the walks. Rusting, stripped cars at the curbs. Everything, both house and building and avenue alike, seemed to be painted a weathered gray. The people who watched them drive by all had the same hungry desperation in their yearning eyes.
    And finally, the house.
    The scene of the crimes of Dr. Blood-and-Bones.
    “I almost hate leaving the car out here,” Fenn told her.
    “It’s a police car.”
    “Doesn’t matter in this neighborhood.”
    They got out and went up the walk. The street was deserted in either direction. Leaves and litter blew up the pavement.
    * * *
    The house was big and ugly and ominous. Like something lifted out of Poe or Lovecraft and dumped in this filthy back street. It was set up on a hill and they had to follow a set of crumbling, frost-heaved stone steps up to its door. The other houses were packed up against it, but beneath its towers and leaning turrets, they were unnoticeable.
    “What a place,” Fenn said, studying the sloping yard and its dead trees and arid grasses.
    “It’s very atmospheric,” Lisa agreed.
    “Most of the houses around here were like this at one time,” Fenn told her. “But most were razed for housing and building space. But not this one.”
    Lisa tried the peeling, faded door. It was open. “Who owns it now?”
    “Didn’t I tell you?” he asked. “I spoke with the family lawyer. Eddy owns it now that his old lady bought it.”
    They went in and were struck by a feeling of desolation, of emptiness. It was impossible to imagine anyone actually living here. Laughter, joy, love, life—those things didn’t belong. The place seemed haunted by itself, by its own flat neutrality. Dust twisted in the air and a cool breeze played in the halls. There was an entrenched feeling of insanity as if the house itself had lost its mind.
    The grime and dust were disturbed at the bottom of the steps. There were dozens of footprints in this area.
    Fenn’s temples were beginning to throb.
    “That’s where they found the girl,” he said. “Right at the foot of the steps. She was probably stabbed up there and fell.”
    “No idea who she was?”
    “Nothing. No identification. Nothing on her prints. Her face was butchered so badly I don’t think her own mother would have recognized her.”
    Lisa walked around, looking down corridors and into rooms. “I wonder if he came here, knowing what his father had done.”
    “You think Eddy killed her?”
    She shrugged. “Who can say? The M.O. wasn’t the same as his father’s, certainly, but that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s just getting going.”
    “Wouldn’t that be something.” Fenn shook his head.
    “I know I’m grasping at straws here, Mr. Fenn, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Somebody killed her.”
    “But in the same place as his father?” he said. “It’s incredible. I’ve got an A.P.B. out on our boy. Maybe it’ll turn up something.”
    They checked the house room by room. As they did, Fenn described to her where the girl had died and how. Lisa told him of the elder Zero and where in the house he had committed his own atrocities. It wasn’t very appetizing conversation, but in this place, such talk seemed fitting. Its atmosphere demanded talk of dread and dismemberment; it had no use for anything but the darker prospects of human endeavor.
    After a time, he chuckled and said, “You’re not much of a first