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lunatic, claiming it was a matter of life and death that I reach Adam immediately. I’m not sure the guy who answered the phone actually believed me, but maybe he was just sick of answering my calls. Whatever the reason, he transferred my call.
    The call must have gone to Adam’s work cell phone—a number he had never given me, though I was pretty sure Dom had it. Hmm, maybe next time I needed to reach Adam at work, I should call Dom instead of the damn office.
    I swear I could actually
feel
Adam’s annoyance at my call through the phone. “I’m in the middle of something,” he said curtly. “Unless—”
    “I just received a severed hand in the mail.”
    That shut him up in a hurry. He was quiet for a moment, then I heard him mutter something, the sound muffled. I think he was holding his hand over the phone.
    When he spoke to me again, there was a lot less background noise. I guess he’d moved to somewhere more private. “I’m on my way to interrogate a suspect,” he told me. “I can’t get away just now.”
    “Don’t you have flunkies to do that kind of thing?” I think there was an edge of hysteria in my voice.
    Adam sighed. “Sorry. Not this time. You need to call 911.”
    “The return address on the package is yours.”
    “Fuck,” Adam said after a moment of shocked silence.
    “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
    Another long silence. “All right. I’ll see what I can do about getting free to come over. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
    “Thanks.”
    Adam was never big on saying hello or good-bye, so he just hung up.
    There was nothing I could do now but wait. Shivering in a phantom chill, I fluffed up the pillows on my bed and made a nice backrest out of them. Then I sat and tried my hardest not to think.

Chapter 5

    It took Adam more than an hour to get to my place. Lugh did his best to keep me calm while I waited, but I was seriously rattled, and I was lucky I didn’t spend the whole hour bent over the toilet. I was so creeped out that when the front desk called to announce that Adam had arrived, I jumped so high I almost hit my head on the ceiling.
    I was glad he was finally here. But my front door was locked, which meant I had to walk by …
it
… on my way to let Adam in. Feeling like a little girl in a haunted house, I held a hand up to my eyes to shield my vision. I didn’t even take my usual precautions to confirm the identity of my visitor. Luckily, it really was Adam, and not some homicidal maniac out to kill me.
    “Where—” he started to ask, but I just pointed in the general direction, still trying not to look.
    He nodded briskly and took a couple of steps toward the dining room. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him take in the scene and frown.
    “I see you took good care of the evidence,” he said dryly as he pulled on some gloves.
    “When I first opened it, I thought it was rubber,” I said, and my voice hardly sounded like my own. I liked to think of myself as a tough chick, but I wasn’t feeling so tough right now.
    Adam must have finally noticed what bad shape I was in. He gestured to the living room. “Why don’t you go sit down? You look like you’re about to pass out.”
    I’d have liked to argue with him, but I was afraid he was right. I made my way rather unsteadily toward the couch. Adam squatted to examine the hand, his body thankfully hiding it from view. I was pretty sure that was deliberate, and I felt absurdly grateful to him. He studied it in silence for what felt like forever, looking at it from every angle without touching it.
    “It’s embalmed,” he informed me. “And from the looks of it, I’d say it was already embalmed when it was cut off.”
    I crossed my arms over my chest, still feeling the chill that had descended on me the moment I’d realized what was in the package.
    “Don’t you need a lab tech or something to make a determination like that?”
    He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I’ve been a cop for fourteen years, and