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“Not exactly,” I said.

“This was a troll kill,” Wilkes said. He didn’t sound sure; he sounded desperate.

Henderson turned to him. “You keep saying that, Wilkes. You keep saying it was trolls.”

“That biologist herself said it looked like primates. It sure as hell wasn’t a person. There aren’t that many primates running around the Tennessee hills.”

“She said humanoid,” I said.

They both looked at me again.

“Dr. Onslow said humanoid. A lot of people assume humanoid means primate, but there are other options.”

“Like what?” Wilkes said. His beeper went off. He checked the number, then looked at me. “Excuse me, Captain Henderson.”

Henderson looked at me. “Do you and the sheriff have some sort of history, Ms. Blake?”

I frowned. “History? How?”

“He was very certain that you shouldn’t be anywhere near this body. He was also very certain that this was a troll kill. Very certain.”

“Who called you guys then?”

“An anonymous tip.”

We looked at each other. “Who suggested I get to join the fun?”

“One of the EMS crew. The man’s usual partner met you last night.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know him.”

“His regular partner is a girl. Lucy something.”

That explained Lucy’s medical knowledge, and why she wasn’t working on the day of the full moon. Don’t want to be around fresh blood with the moon almost full. Too tempting. Too chancy.

“I remember her vaguely, I guess.” I remembered her more than vaguely, but the last time I’d seen her was just after I’d murdered someone, so I was going to be fuzzy on the details. For one awful moment, I wondered if Henderson had been trying to trick me and the body was really Lucy. But the height was wrong. The woman had been tall, not my size. Most of the women that Richard dated were short. I guess if you’ve got a body type you like, you stick to it. My choice of victims seemed to be a lot wider.

“Why did they need a power circle, Ms. Blake?” Henderson asked.

“To keep in what they called.”

He frowned at me. “Like you said before, the foreplay is getting tiresome. Just tell me what the fuck you think it was.”

“I think they called a demon.”

His eyes widened. “A what?”

“A demon,” I said.

Henderson just looked at me. “Why?”

“When I crossed the circle, I got that feeling of evil. No matter how monstrous the critter, it doesn’t feel the same as something dedicated to evil and no other purpose.”

“You see many demons while you’re out slaying vampires, Ms. Blake?”

“Once, Captain, just once. It was . . .” I stepped out of the circle of power, and I felt better. They’d done their best to hide the traces, but things like this have a tendency to cling. “I was called into a case that they thought was a vampire, but it was demonic possession. The woman . . .” I stopped again because I didn’t have words for it, or no words that wouldn’t seem silly, melodramatic. I tried to tell the story by sticking to the facts. Me and Sergeant Friday.

“The woman had been an ordinary housewife, mother of two. She’d been a diagnosed schizophrenic, Captain. Her particular brand of craziness was almost a multiple personality disorder, but not that clear-cut. She was like the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. A model churchgoer, teacher of Sunday school. She canned her own vegetables, sewed doll clothes for her girls. But when she was bad, she slept around, abused the kids, hung the family dog from a tree.”

Henderson raised an eyebrow at that. For a cop, it was pure shock. “Why wasn’t she in a hospital?”

“Because when she took her medicine, she was the good mother, the good wife. I talked to her when she was ‘well,’ and she was a very nice person. I saw why the husband tried to hold on to her. It was tragic in the true sense of the word that her own brain chemistry was destroying her life.”

“It’s sad, but it’s not demonic,” Henderson said.

“Neighborhood pets were vanishing, showing up drained of blood. I traced it to the woman. Her history of mental illness had raised flags with the cops. So far, just sad, right.” I stared off up the hill at