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head. I wasn’t Sherlock, so it didn’t happen easily. I tried to imagine him flying, hitting the wall, and cast my eyes over the damp asphalt. “He probably got clocked somewhere over there,” I motioned to a few blood spots that had fallen in the alley, and I started over there, careful where I stepped so as not to disturb potential evidence.
    “Yeah,” Reed said, following along behind me, matching his steps to mine. “That’s a solid hit. You’re talking a high on the scale meta to hit like that.”
    “Scale?” Detective Maclean said, staying right where he was by the corpse.
    “There’s a scale of powers,” I answered idly as I threaded over to the place of attack. “Low-grade metas don’t hit much harder than a normal person. High scale, though …” I waved at the body next to him. “Like a car doing ninety. They’re also correspondingly faster, more dexterous, agile …”
    “Uh huh,” Maclean said, now with his arms folded in front of him. “When I was a beat cop, probably twenty-five years ago, I saw this guy pick another guy up with one hand and throw him ten feet. You think that was a meta?”
    “Probably,” I said, stooping to look at the blood spatter at my feet. I sniffed, catching a whiff of something that was neither a dumpster nor our corpse. I looked up at Reed, whose nose was twitching. “You getting this?”
    He frowned, wrinkling his nose as his nostrils flared. “Is that … cigarettes?”
    “Yeah,” I said, following my nose to the origin point of the scent, “and rosemary, I think.” The smell lingered faintly behind a dumpster maybe ten feet from the place where Professor Dr. Carlton Jacobs had met his fateful sucker punch.
    “Rosemary?” Detective Maclean called to us from where he stood near the mouth of the alley. “From what?”
    “Either the perp’s dinner or some sort of herbal remedy, maybe?” I asked, shrugging. “Not sure, it’s pretty faint and masked by the scent of smoked cigarettes.” I looked around but didn’t see any discarded butts. “I don’t think he smoked any here, he’s just trailing the aroma.” I sniffed and caught it lingering under the cold.
    “I don’t smell anything,” Maclean said, sniffing. He made a face like he’d gotten a brain freeze headache from huffing the Chicago air.
    “You wouldn’t,” I said, taking another whiff. Definitely rosemary. Weird.
    “Where should we go first?” Reed asked.
    “His college is closed at this hour, I’m assuming.” I stood up, looking back down the alley to catch Maclean’s nod. “To his place, I guess, so we can pore over the details of Professor Jacobs’s life, see if we might be able to find a motive for the killer.” I made my way carefully back to the body. “Because it looks to me like whoever did this … they waited for a while, either for him or someone else.”
    “Premeditation,” Maclean said, nodding.
    “They didn’t throw a love tap, that’s for sure,” I said, “and if he was the target, and they waited for him … it means they knew he was coming. And hopefully we’ll be able to find some idea of why he was here in this alley in the middle of the night,” I stared down at Professor Jacobs’s blank face, the blood wreathing his head like a crown of red, “and where exactly he was going when he got murdered.”

5.
    I stepped out of the cab after about a five-minute ride onto a road overlooking Lake Shore Drive, which I had already realized was probably one of the swankier addresses for Chicago. Lake Michigan was glittering black, lights sparkling along its surface just across the street and over the freeway-like version of Lake Shore Drive that was separated from the residential one I was standing on by a waist-high barrier with fencing. Occasional cars were zooming past over there, while I stood on a much more placid residential drive, in front of a decidedly upscale apartment building.
    It was either an old and refurbished brick building, or it was a