"Never seen the like. But then, I'm only a lower-grade adept. You really

ought

to ask a wizard or a sorcerer."

"Or a mage?" said Blood.

McCafferty gave an abrupt laugh. "Yeah, right. If anyone would know, a mage

would. That's if you can find one and if you can manage an appointment.

There're

only about three of 'em left living."

Blood stared out the car window. "I wonder..." he said.

The scene at the Metropolitan Police headquarters at New Scotland Yard on

Victoria Street was an absolute madhouse. The police superintendent had

assembled a special task force to investigate the Ripper murders (everything

the

police superintendent did was special, though it was rarely efficient), and

though Blood was nominally in charge of this special task force, he did

everything in his power to avoid them. Consequently the task of supervising

the

task force fell by default to Inspector Morris Fitzhugh Harper-Smythe, (or

Hyphen-Smythe, as his colleagues in the department habitually referred to

him),

a man to whom such jobs usually fell because he thrived on them like a rose

in

horse manure.

Turn Hyphen-Smythe loose with a couple of file clerks and a typist, and

before

you knew it, the place was awash in confidential memos and eyes-only reports.

Give him an entire task force to play with and he could create veritable

arabesques of bureaucratic confusion. Teamwork was the watchword of the day,

as

Hyphen-Smythe constantly reminded everyone. There was a team taking calls

from

psychics who had "seen" the Ripper in various visions and impressions. There

was

a team searching through the records of every sex offender who had ever

opened

up a raincoat, and another team searching through past homicide cases to see

if

any "common threads" could be found. Hyphen-Smythe was obsessed with common

threads, as one could see readily by the evidence of his wardrobe. And to

help

him look for common threads he also had a team of. interviewing psychologists

and psychiatrists and assorted chat-show experts by the dozens, "assembling a

profile" of the killer. Yet another team was actually attempting to draw that

profile as everyone who claimed to know someone who knew somebody who had a

friend who'd spoken to someone who claimed they "caught a brief glimpse" of

the

killer was interviewed. Blood's migraine returned the moment he walked in.

The first thing he saw as he came in was a matronly woman in a cloth coat

arguing with an Identi-Graph that one of the officers had sat her down with.

She

was trying to dictate a description of the "suspicious personage" that she

had