Paul's "one local guy" lives in a suburban hellhole in Redwood City, a few blocks from Kaiser and the train station. We pass through a knot of houses covered in sheet metal and pinwheels, and park in front of a red paint-and-termite-colored house with a vacant lot on either side, a city citation on its picket fence, and plywood on all its windows. I walk into the yard, and I'm immediately thinking about waiting-room jitters and screaming, borrowed memories planted somewhere just inside the gate. I'll be buying wart cream tomorrow.

Rust flakes off on Paul's hand as he slams the knocker onto its plate. He's just rubbing it onto the siding when the door swings open and a hatchet-nosed man in a muumuu leans out, with an aura like the inside of a colostomy bag.

"What?" He's got a bulldog voice, posturing and huge.

"This Dr. Bingo's place?" Paul asks.

He narrows his eyes at Paul. Fingers covered in seaweed grope at my mind, and then he's really frustrated. "Who the fuck wants to know?" He's got that iron-clad derision you only see in entitled idiots, which of course tears my temper right in half.

"Nice angst bomb on your perimeter," I snipe. "You steal those echoes from Kaiser or just keep the bits you cut off your patients?"

He doesn't appreciate my humor. "You just got the jitters then you're lucky. Most folks get the biopsies."

Some part of me winces, but it isn't my face. "I'm a little better armored than that."

Paul takes the opportunity to step in front of me. "We're looking for Dr. Bingo," he drawls, doing his best to sound happy about it. "I'd appreciate it if you let us talk to him."

He sneers at Paul. "Why the hell you want to see Bingo? You ain't human and you ain't a client."

"No." Paul sniffs. "But I am sanctioned by someone a whole lot bigger than you. So you want to have a friendly chat? Or you want me to see if you'll fit in my boss's mouth?"

The big guy's brain downshifts without a clutch, and suddenly he's all acid and apologies as he stammers something about needing to talk to "the boss". The door closes, and Paul flows theatrically off the porch, scoping out the boarded-up windows.

"You think they're guilty?" I ask.

He scoffs. "Pope had to make a public apology, man. These days everyone's guilty of something."

The door opens, and the guy in the muumuu gestures for us to follow him inside. My stomach flips around and tries the backstroke as I step over the threshold of the butcher shop; I manage to keep myself just composed enough that the gout of heart-stopping regret just inside the door doesn't knock me on my ass.

The house is damp; I hear the buzzing of at least a dozen swamp coolers, and everything smells like rotten flowers. The big guy leads us into a low-ceilinged dining room with avocado green carpeting, where we meet a rat-faced man in his pajamas and some fat codger in a fourth-hand suit, looking tough and sour. Rat-face is the only one who's still human.

"Gentlemen," he says, clenched up tight in his armchair.

Paul shrugs. "Not last I checked. So you're Dr. Bingo then?"

"Dr. Binkowski," Rat-face insists, "but I've gotten a nickname or two in my time. How can I help you?"

Paul glances at the old man with the demon in him, who looks back like Paul's a side of graying beef. Paul doesn't break stride.

"You been around," he says, eyes still on the old man. "You gotta know the drill, then."

"We're clean here," the old man croaks, looking daggers at Paul. I don't get his subtext, but I can see it without a telescope.

"You hollow people out for a living," Paul deadpans. "I wouldn't call you clean."

"Maybe so." Dr. Bingo gives us a chuckle, tries to make like it's all funny. "But I've broken no part of the agreement." He says it like a career criminal, light, pure, and practiced. "I'm a professional man offering professional services."

"What do you call your profession, then?" I cut in. Snarking at him makes the knot in my chest a little looser. "Endocist? Possession technician?"

"There's no need for harassment," he coos, but I hear the volcano bundling up under his decorum.

I sigh without relaxing. "My apologies. You can help us"—I glance at Paul—"by talking to us about a dead guy."

"Someone axed a human?" the old guy says. "Big fat deal."

"Wasn't a human," Paul mutters, and the room goes quiet. He smiles, fishes a cigarette out of his coat, and turns to Dr. Bingo. "Glove-job down in Sunnyvale." He switches over to a hum as he slips the cigarette into his mouth. "Hispanic guy, kind of gangly. Someone filleted him with a kitchen knife"—he lights it, gives his face that kid-with-a-flashlight veneer—"and we were really, really hoping you could prove it wasn't you." Paul loves this part of the gig almost as much as I do.

"Alright," the skinny man acquiesces. "So, someone killed one of you." Dr. Bingo says "you" the same way Klansmen say "blacks". Nice guy. "That's terrible, but, people die all the time. All three kinds." There's a glance at me for emphasis. "Why should this be different?"

Our interlocutors are already putting out an uncomfortable shade of orange; when I pull the Seal of Solomon out of my pocket they all go supernova.

"Because we found that in his hand," Paul says.

Rat-face runs his hand down the arm of his chair, then runs it back up for good measure. One of his fingers is twitching like a fish on a deck, but it stops as soon as he finishes staring at the Seal.

"Those don't work anymore," he says. He searches both of us for agreement. "Those haven't worked since the apology, those haven't—"

I field this one. "Just because no-one believes in it doesn't mean the Church won't recognize it."

Dr. Bingo's face is a razor. "Are you accusing me of alerting the Inquisi—"

"Not unless one of you is the idiot who left this there," Paul cuts in. There's a spark of brilliance in his eyes. "Either prove he wasn't your glove-job, or prove whatever debt he was carrying was paid, or we'll be telling the wrong-angled community at large that you let one of your clients get himself hunted down."

Bingo chokes. "You can't know—"

"And neither can they," I cut in. "But panic and logic never really had much to do with each other, did they?"

Dr. Bingo goes red. "I can't—I won't discuss—this is my job."

"This is our lives." I'm trying not to shout, and according to my ears I'm not succeeding. "If whoever did this whacks someone else, we can't guarantee we'll be able to pick up whatever stupid earmark they leave there before the police find it." I stuff my hands into my armpits, try to make like I'm crossing my arms. "We dodged the Inquisition twelve years ago. You really want to see if we can do it again?"

"Inquisition now won't have no teeth," the old man sneers.

"Neither do leeches, but they can still suck you dry." Not my best work, but he's not the best brain.

"Look," Paul growls, to Dr. Bingo and Dr. Bingo only. "If you help us, you help keep the thunder from coming down on everyone. And if you don't help us, you leave people who can erase your memory hanging out to dry, and look like a suspect. So why don't you just make your life a hell of a lot easier?"

Dr. Bingo looks at his hands. His futility is infectious; I want to slap him just so I'll stop getting tense. He flexes his hands, and the spike in his agony drags my attention back to the nervous twitch in his finger.

He gives us a long sigh, and nods to Mr. Muumuu. "Get our friends the file."

The big guy glowers at Paul, and stomps past his two friends and up the carpeted stairs. We smile and stare at the two possessors to the tune of a filing cabinet being ransacked.

"You sure he'll be able to find it?" I ask. "Doesn't look like he can read that many words at once."

Dr. Bingo snorts, and goes back to rubbing his hand against the armrest. I turn my attention the old man, with a side business set up for Paul. I'm getting nothing but rainbows and static off either of them; whatever might make them recognize each other, they're not interested in putting it on the air.

The big guy comes back downstairs in a thunder of chubby feet, and passes off a fat manila folder to the doctor. He looks at the name on the tab, sighs, and offers it up to me.

The file is twenty solid pages of revulsion, not helped by Dr. Bingo and his angle man buddies staring the entire time we read it. Leonardo Morrison, 34 years old; most recurring memory is of his foot slipping as he goes to kiss his new bride. Went to UC Santa Cruz, ultimately majored in Philosophy; least favorite job of all time was Cash Control at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Roommates with his future wife in college, they were having difficulties; tried polyamory as a possible solution but agreed it wasn't working, at which point "Little Leo" decided to use his existence as collateral on his wife never having to work again. And they say magic is dead.

"Fuck," I say, as I finish going over their questionnaire. I look up at Dr. Bingo. "What, you had to have him write it all down?"

"Symbolic," Paul says, oblivious as usual. "Get your life outside of your body, put your memories—"

"I get it." I really wish I didn't. I open the file again, page to the fat, irregular pieces at the back. They're pages from a photo album, dusty 5x7s of our paired set of corpses and a little girl with parchment-colored skin, wild brown hair, and a neverending collection of G.I. Joe and Voltron shirts. Her name, according to the file, is Carmel.

"Retro," I say. I keep myself from grinning.

"You have what you need," Bingo says, not quite a question.

I give him a long look, and pull the notebook out of my breast pocket. "I think we do. One sec." I scribble down the girl's name, study her face for a good long while, and lay my fingers on the edge of the photo.

I get a Big Wheels car, and a birthday party, and a tiny voice with far too much intelligence in it asking Daddy to transform Grimlock for her please please please. Then I get the smell of paste, and long slender fingers gluing down the photo, and a ripping thunderclap of loss that has Paul tugging at my wrist to bring me back to earth.

"Satisfied?" Dr. Bingo asks. His two friends flex a bicep or two as punctuation.

I give him a smile everyone can tell I don't mean. "You're clean." I do my best to make it a curse word. "Have a nice day."

I turn around halfway to the door, and add, "Good luck with the hand."

The house is roiling with pent-up curses as we close the door behind us.

Paul smirks as we head down the walk. "You learn to be suicidally sarcastic in grad school, or you have to work on that in your free time?"

I'm all smiles. "So, seriously, you think they're guilty?"

"I repeat my earlier statement," Paul says, and remembers at the last second to add a mysterious smile.

I shrug as we pass back through the gate, which neatly conceals my spine turning into a jackhammer. That time was some kid bracing himself for an allergy shot; where the hell did these guys get those memories?

"I'm going with not guilty, right now."

"Yeah?" Paul looks over at me, but only because he thinks he's supposed to.

I give him another shrug. "They just about wet their pants when I showed them the Seal, dude. Even if they did have beef with the body's new tenant they clearly don't want escalation."

"Right." He rubs at the nape of his neck. "So who are you thinking, then?"

"Not a demon," I say. "Wrong fingerprints. Normal with a clue, maybe, or a psychic, someone with enough sight to know what Leo was but not enough data to know the Seal wouldn't do anything."

"So a moron." Paul's all grins as he opens the Cavalier.

"That's one way of putting it." I shake my head. "We don't know enough, or it's not synching up or something."