Indy scraped hands across his face, and stared at the ceiling.

Three days.

Two more dead children, a boy and a girl.

His mind recoiled from the faces, focusing on the facts.

Same killer – same means of death and probably the same murder weapon, from what the medical examiners could claim. Same . . . indications of –

Don't be afraid of it. It's just - And another part of his mind warred with the voice of reason. Only a fool wouldn't be afraid! What they did to those kids –

More and more sadistic each time. Oh, the needle marks he looked for and counted, now. The fact that such small children were sexually active – raped – no longer made him quite so ill. He was horrified to think he might be getting used to seeing it.

It was the – the other marks that still had the power to catch him unaware.

Marks of chains. Manacles, collars. Strange patterns carved into dead flesh. And in the wide eyes of each, stolen innocence.

Indy swallowed, determined to keep his lunch where he'd put it.

Death was harsh, but all the more so when unexpected. And the killer – the killer reveled in these deaths. As their confidence grew, so did their brutality. The blood was – god, it was everywhere.

And they had almost no leads. No alerts on federal databases; no indications of previous patterns, or any escapees who might have fled to the area. Just a new psychopath, who had mothers clutching their children close under wary watch.

He'd seen the hunter track evil, once. But thick as this thread of malevolence was, it was lost in a city so large. Gabriel could only tell him that it was closer than it had any right to be.

So he went through the normal channels. But the streets were too quiet. Even the mafiosa were wary and silent. He could find nothing. It doesn't make sense! All this – and no one's heard anything!

He'd been teamed with the man masquerading as a DEA agent, trying to pin down the shipments of herbs – each of which went somewhere different, was divided and distributed and disappeared – and brought back together, they were certain, at the final location.

Their opponents were clever, and practiced. And by the carelessness and deliberation – God, they'd left the last kid on his own front yard! – they were casually cruel.

Tired hazel eyes met his, the body of the eight-year-old boy between them. "Every death draws them further from humanity."

Indy shuddered at the memory. "Anything?"

Fingers sifted dark strands. "Nothing," Gabriel sighed. Not that either of them had expected anything different, sorting through files and computer databases, comparing the scenes and searching for a pattern.

"The only trend I can see is that the victims are progressively younger," Indy offered. He pressed at an ache resting behind his temples.

"Yeah."

A few more minutes of shuffling papers, and the man across from him flipped the file onto the table in irritation. Chair legs scratched across linoleum.

"Where are you going?"

"Come on."

Indy scrambled to his feet, barely catching the door before it slammed. "Wait a minute!"

The broad back didn't even slow down. Swearing under his breath, Indy grabbed for his leather jacket. "Yeah," he snarled back at Schaefer's smirk as he hastened past the man's desk. "Gabe, hold it!"

The car was running, and waiting, when he burst into the parking lot. He'd barely managed to get the door shut before they were backing out. By the time he had his seatbelt on, they'd reached a main throughway leading out to the north branch of the Chicago River. "Where are we going?"

"Crime scene."

Indy didn't bother asking which one. Any of them would have been too much; he had no desire to revisit any of those places.

"Oh – my – my baby -"

Mrs. Edna Hewitt had screamed on finding her son laid out on the grass in front of her home. Fifteen minutes and a 911 call had let the reality sink in, let the tears come. A girl no older than five clutched her leg, staring with wide eyes.

Maybe it was time for Henry Jones to retire, and move on. He'd been doing what he could for years, but – it wore on him.

Those were thoughts for another time.

"I still don't understand why they were so sure I knew something about what was going on," Indy commented. He half-wished there was a physical reason for the white knuckles clutching the dashboard, but it was no good; Gabriel was a careful driver. Admit it. You're afraid you won't find anything until the next body.

Speaking would make it so. So he wouldn't say anything.

"Well, we have that advantage, at least."

"What?" Indy snapped.

Gabriel spared a moment from the traffic to glance at him. So he hadn't been paying attention. So what.

"They think you're dead," he repeated patiently.

Indiana snorted. "With good reason. People don't generally float when they're tossed overboard with cinderblocks instead of a life preserver."

A grunt reached his ears. "We're here."

Here was the side of a minor highway, the ditch had been cordoned off and the road blocked to everything but police traffic. This scene was still fresh, as it hadn't yet rained; so it was guarded by a two-cop rotation. No more was needed – the crime had already been committed, after all.

Indy shoved hands in his pockets, following the hunter. "I thought you said you couldn't track them," he murmured, too low for the on-duty uniforms to hear.

"I can't," Gabriel admitted quietly. "It's – saturating the air, everywhere. It thins out this way." It being a pervasive darkness, described to him as a choking cloud of ill intent.

The two carefully circled the small, chalk-sprayed outline, moving toward the road. Fifteen feet or so from where they had parked, the hunter took a deep breath.

"You think this is where they unloaded."

Hazel eyes scanned the bent blades of grass, signs in gravel on the shoulder. "It's likely." There were no tire-tracks, but scuffmarks clearly showed where something had been dragged through roadside dust and gravel, into the brush and garbage littering the grassy divider.

Gabriel bent, frowning.

"What is it?"

Crouching, Indy saw the other reach out a latex-covered hand to lightly brush something hidden between blades of grass.

Glossy black, the skin broken and oozing on some; but three berries were whole, surprisingly untouched amid the clump that had been crushed. "These are non-native."

"What is it?" Botany had never been his strong suit. He might not be a vegetarian, but he could still hate plants.

"Deadly nightshade."

That he knew about; poisons were important in history, for their practical uses. But what the hell was it doing here? Evidence. More evidence. More pieces of a puzzle that I wish I could make sense of! Tracking the Holy Grail had been easier than this. "Bag 'em."

Moments of silence, as they moved slowly over the ground, looking for any trace of a fallen hint that might lead them to the killers. Gabriel treaded soundlessly at his side, his concentration eerily unnerving.

"Anything?" One of the uniforms approached. He was the more solemn of the two; Indy understood. It was always worse when the victims were children. He held up the evidence bag, grimaced.

"We'll have to find out more back at the station."

With a nod, and quiet words of encouragement, the two got back in the car again. The drive back was mostly silent, broken only by comments and current conditions on the police radio.

When they found the head detective for the case, he was lounging in his office. A bottle of aspirin and a cup of coffee told the reason for the abandonment of the reports, papers, and interviews neatly arranged on the desk. A pot of java filled itself, bubbling merrily, off to the side. Indy rolled his eyes at the oft-stereotyped donut box perched, half-empty, on a cold printer.

He leant against the doorframe, peering in. "Bum."

Schaefer blinked, sitting up from the inelegant slouch that had him spilling out of his chair and against the wall. "Oh, you again."

"Yep." Officer Jones moved into the room, taking the only chair and leaving the hunter to prop up the wall just inside the door.

"Where were you?" Aaron reached for the coffee, blinking. He'd been putting in awful hours, trying to solve this one.

"Finished looking over the case files," Indy shrugged. "Then we went out to the Rundell scene, see if we could pick up anything more a second time around."

Coffee mug impacted the table with a soft clank. "And did you?"

"Found these." Indy handed the evidence bag over to the detective, who stared thoughtfully at the small black berries. Then he marched over to the coffeemaker and selected a zebra-striped mug from Aaron's collection.

"Belladonna?"

Indy blinked in surprise. "How'd you know?"

Schaefer extended the folder he'd been flipping through before they entered. "Toxicology report's in."

Indy scanned the page, sipping the hot brew. "This – doesn't make any sense."

"Let me see it."

He handed it off to Gabriel. The hunter's face tightened. "It's not what I had expected."

"You think there's something missing?"

Gabriel shrugged, pulling out his own notes. Hazel eyes were unreadable. "I was tracking shipments of Goat Weed and LSD to this area, among others."

"Goat Weed?" A wealth of carefully construed derision in that tone.

Hazel eyes reflected exasperation. "It's not something normally purchased in bulk."

"You can say that again," Indy breathed, staring at the penciled reminders in the margins. Ten kilos?

"What else were you tracking?" Aaron reached for the hunter's written report. Indiana yielded it, turning his attention to Gabriel.

"Hallucinogens and barbiturates, mostly. Some of these," he held up the ToxRep. "Heroin, cannabis, deadly nightshade and hemlock."

"And soot and pork fat and wolfsbane," Schaefer snorted. He chewed thoughtfully, speaking around a mouthful of sugar and dough. "Eye of newt and toe of frog? 'Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble'," he intoned. Indy choked on a mouthful of coffee, trying not to laugh.

"Quite likely."

Not an ounce of humor in that voice. Indiana stared, swiping at black stains on his jeans. "Gabe?"

"Flying ointment." A furrow between dark brows. "Except for the cannabis."

"What's that?" Aaron couldn't hide his interest.

"Psychoactive herb," Gabriel retorted. He leant against the table, arms folded and eyes thoughtful. "Believed to have aphrodisiac properties."

That explained more than it didn't. They still didn't have a match on the semen samples. More disturbingly, the medical examiner reported that there was DNA from at least five different individuals. He didn't even want to think about what that meant. "Cannabis, huh?"

Gabriel's answer was soft. "Yeah."

The toxicology was only underscoring what they didn't know.

"What's with the flying ointment?" Aaron asked, with the tone of a man who just knew he was going to regret opening his mouth.

"Sixteenth century potions that witches used to fly on broomsticks. Or so it's believed. How they were used is debatable; ingested, rubbed on the skin, who knows?" Indy absently reached for the file again. "There's even a rumor that the ointment was on a stick inserted into the vagina, but there's no credibility to the claim."

"How the hell do you know that?" Aaron was giving him a strange look.

"Took a course in college," Indy shrugged. Yeah. About twenty of them. But as that was about eighty years ago – well. History's the one thing that doesn't change. It just grows.

Gabriel was nodding. "And with the heroin – that makes sense."

"Excuse me?" Aaron asked blankly. His feet fell off the desk with a thud. "You want to explain that?"

Indiana winced. Tensions between the cops and federal agencies couldn't be shoved under the rug. Gabriel had been managing just fine up to this point, but there had been a bit of resentment.

And they were all sick and tired of failing to solve this case. Aaron, the lead detective, not least of all.

The hunter remained unruffled. "Belladonna's a toxin," he said bluntly. "The berries we found were more than enough to lay out a child, or even a grown man. Poppy is a chemical counter that ameliorates most of the effects of nightshade. Poppy gives opium, morphine, and -"

"Heroin," Schaefer sighed.

"Exactly."