“She’s letting him help her set up?” Clay said.

“Looks like it.”

“Huh.”

About ten minutes later, Jaime popped her head out from the alley and motioned us over as Jeremy left, presumably to round up Antonio and Nick.

“We only get one shot at this, so the more brains we have, the better questions we can ask.” Jaime stopped halfway down the alley. “Her spirit’s still here, so what I need to do is coax her over-kind of like what I did at the portal site. Then I’ll be doing something a little different. I want you to hear her answers directly, so I’m going to channel her. That means she can speak through me, but can’t hear or see you guys, okay?”

“Got it.”

Jeremy approached. I looked behind him and saw that Antonio and Nick had taken up position at the end of the alley. Two couples sneaking into the dark depths of an alley wasn’t that unusual in this neighborhood, although hearing them talking might be a little odd. But with an active crime scene right across the road, we weren’t likely to attract much attention.

“I was just telling them how this’ll work,” she said to Jeremy. “I’m not going to introduce you guys-no need to make this more complicated. As far as she’ll know, it’s just me and her.”

“This…” I began, then faltered.

Jaime nodded for me to go on.

“Is she going to remember this?” I asked. “Any of it? If she’s seen the crime scene, seen what happened to her…”

“Wiped clean when she crosses over. Postdeath amnesia, which is why we need to get to her now. She’ll forget what happened, and this conversation.”

“So you’re like a…psychic? Like those people on TV?”

A small laugh. “Exactly like that.”

“Have you ever been on TV?”

Jaime hesitated, but at a nod from Jeremy, she told the young woman who she was, and the woman knew her TV spiritualists well enough to be impressed and, maybe, for a few minutes, to forget what had happened to her.

“Okay,” she said finally, taking a deep breath, like a child steeling herself to do her best. I wondered how old she was…then realized I probably didn’t want to know.

Jeremy started the interview, keeping it slow, easing her into it by asking what she’d done earlier that evening, who she’d spoken to, the sort of police-type questions that wouldn’t help us, but were more humane than jumping straight to “so, how’d you die?”

We did get to that question, although, of course, Jeremy didn’t word it quite that way.

“It was a guy,” Kara said, then gave a squeaky giggle. “Guess I don’t need to say that, huh?”

“He approached you on the street?” Jeremy asked.

Jaime relayed the question.

“Yeah,only I was kinda off near the alley. I had to, uh, go, you know, and the bit-old bat in the store on the corner won’t let us use her bathroom unless we buy something. I was coming out of the alley, and this guy stopped me, wanted a blow.”

“Did you get a look at him?” Jeremy said.

“Uh, kinda…but not really. It’s dark right there. I know he was a guy. Dark hair. Kinda skinny. Looked okay. That’s all I really noticed-that he wasn’t, you know, gross.” She paused, then hurried on. “If he’d wanted me to get into a car or something, I’d have made him get out into the light. I’m pretty careful, but it was only a blow, and he didn’t want to go anywhere, just the alley, so I figured it was safe…”

Her voice trailed off. Jeremy stopped the questioning for a few minutes, giving Jaime time to talk to Kara, make sure she was ready to continue. When she was, Jeremy skipped the “what happened next” part, which I’m sure would have fulfilled anyone’s definition of “traumatic,” and instead asked whether the man had said anything or done anything that might help us find him.

“Uh-uh. It happened pretty fast, I guess. He took me in there and I thought everything was okay. I heard someone else, down the alley, in the dark. A woman. I thought it was another girl, with a guy, but then she seemed to be talking to my guy. I was gonna tell him it’d cost him extra for that-doing it in front of his girlfriend or whatever. Then I smelled something. Something awful.”

Through Jaime, I asked her to describe the smell, if she could.

“It was like when this cat died at a place I was staying at and everyone thought it ran away and we were gone for a week and came back and-” She made a gagging noise. “It was real rude. Never smelled anything like that before…until tonight. Then I saw a shape move at the end of the alley and then-” She shook her head. “That’s it. He must have…done it then.”

Jaime let her go after that, with an herbal mixture she hoped would send her to the other side. We could have pressed for more, but we already had our answer. Rose had been there, and probably the bowler-hatted man was in the shadows with her. According to Jeremy and Clay, Patrick Shanahan could never be mistaken for “kinda thin,” meaning someone else had been with the zombies. Their true master, the one they’d been killed to serve.

“He’s out,” I said.

Jeremy paused, as if struggling to find another explanation. Then he gave a slow nod.

“I hope you don’t mean-” Clay looked at us. “Ah, shit.”

We decided to try tracking the zombies from the crime scene, hoping “Jack” was still with them. Even if he wasn’t, this might be our chance to try the “kill a zombie and follow him to the controller” ploy.