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quietly—just as odd as any other cop and possibly more stable than most.
    I felt I should ask him some insightful, buddy-bonding sort of question at this point, but I couldn’t think of one. Or have some clever comeback for his snarky quip—if he’d have been Quinton, I’d have called him a smart-ass at the very least—but that also seemed to come up blank for me. Instead I just gave the eye roll I awarded to most bad jokes and puns.
    “You guys find anything like this in the rest of the boat?”
    “Not guys. Only me. But there is nothing else quite like this. Other stains, other similar materials, but not arranged as so.” He made an indicative circle with his finger at the blood-painted symbols and their collection of muck.
    I stood back as far as I could and still see the whole space. I gave the encircled star and its mess a sideways glance through the Grey; it writhed and wavered in liquid colors that circled the bloody star like the edges of a whirlpool. I couldn’t detect any sign of who had made the circle or what it was for, but I did see some holes in the pattern—just two or three. . . .
    “Is this exactly as you found it?” I asked Solis.
    “No. I removed one of the pebbles and some of those shiny flecks for testing. I believe the flecks are fish scales.”
    “And the pebbles?”
    He shrugged. “Very old glass that’s been sand-scoured.”
    Beach glass, though they didn’t look much like any kind of glass from where I was standing. Dull surfaced, pitted, dirty, and partially smirched with filth and blood, they looked more like small, colorful river rocks or broken marbles of almost a dozen colors: cobalt, apple green, gold, cherry red, kelly, aqua, brown, violet, white, jade, and black with a rainbow sheen barely seen beneath the crud. They were irregular shapes that ranged in size from shards no bigger than my pinky fingernail to clods as long as my thumb; when you consider how large my hands are, that’s a good-sized chunk of junk. But even knowing what the material was, I still didn’t have any idea what had happened aboard the
Seawitch
.
    I shook my head, disquieted and cold. “Let’s see the rest and get out of here.”
    Solis raised an eyebrow at me—this was the second time I’d made a point of my desire to leave quickly when he knew me for a tenacious pain in the ass more likely to throw herself right in front of trouble than run from it. But I’d made a resolution not to get in Death’s face anymore; I was pretty sure I was no longer bulletproof, and I had someone else’s pain to consider now that I seemed to have an official significant other.
    “C’mon. Do you really want to stay here any longer than you have to?” I asked.
    He gave it only a moment’s thought. “No.”
    I took a few reference photos using a small digital camera Quinton had lent me. Then Solis and I backed out of the cabin and I followed him through the rest of the boat. We looked into the other crew cabin, washroom, and storage area in the front part of the boat, finding more dirt and stains and a single, empty duffel bag abandoned at a random angle under a bunk and now glued to the floor by creeping black mold. Collectively, the boat had room for up to five crew members—providing they were very slim and not picky about privacy or claustrophobia. We also found a large compartment under the pointed bow where the stems of two large anchors poked into the hull through steel-lined sleeves, and a heap of chain and rotting rope sat to either side of a large electric winch so rusted that the chains would have to be cut free before the anchors were ever dropped again. I hoped we wouldn’t need to dig around in there for clues, though the twining, colored mist of the Grey that tangled in the chains gave me a sour feeling.
    When we finished with the crew cabins, we went through the engine room, which connected to the crew area by a narrow door hidden in the wooden paneling at the aft end of the corridor. The