Tom dropped Dema off at the Federal Building on Clark Street before going back to his precinct. On the way, he asked her, "What did you make of that scene with Hanley? I thought he was going to be a tough nut, then he just fell apart. What do you think tipped him over the edge?"

Dema knew Tom wouldn't be the only one who wondered why Hanley broke so quickly. "It had to have been the girls," she said.

"You mean reading their names to him. I guess you're right. When he heard the names, he couldn't keep them buried. The memories came back to haunt him, and he cracked."

Dema looked grim as she got out of the car. "Yeah. Let's hope they haunt him all the way to the chair. It's what he deserves."

Tom nodded, and then drove off. Dema went up to her office and filled in O'Mally.

"Another of your 'tips' pays off. Good work, Dema. Do you think they'll get a full confession out of him?"

Dema pictured the police interrogation room, with the girls only Hanley could see browbeating him. "I'd say the odds are pretty good," she said.

She went back to her usual desk routine. But after being deep in the shaman dream to talk with the ghosts, she couldn't quite shake the feeling of altered reality. It was nothing tangible. In fact it was more that everything seemed a bit intangible. She was going through the motions, but it was like watching a moving picture of herself. She thought about what her mother had said, that reality itself was ghostly, that everything we see is really an internal illusion.

She looked around the office, and everything looked normal, but a little thin, like it was projected on a movie screen. Then she saw Cindy Blair walk over to the coffee maker and pour herself a cup. She looked normal too, but a little fuzzy somehow. Dema watched her closely. After a minute, she figured it out.

Cindy was a good agent, but a little frumpy. She didn't make a strong first impression. But she had an air of confidence about her that made people forget the frumpiness. What Dema was seeing, she realized, was the reality of her frumpy appearance, overlaid with the self-image that she projected. In other words, she thought, she was seeing the "real" Cindy, overlaid with her "ghost."

She thought about that for a while. Normally she, and she assumed everyone else, must somehow merge the two versions of Cindy mentally, and would only have one internal image. Now, with her increased sensitivity to the spirit world, her mind was showing her the physical form and the spirit form separately.

Her musings were interrupted by a bit of commotion as Doug Fletcher got up and sprinted across the office to catch up with Steve Wilson at the door. What Dema saw was the physical Doug sprinting, with the spirit Doug a step and a half ahead of himself.

She leaned back and smiled. No wonder he was always bumping into things.

Dema tried to get back to work, but with the ghostly double vision overlaying everything she couldn't seem to focus. She decided to go home early. Then the thought of driving with this going on didn't seem like such a good idea, so she decided to walk and try to clear her head. It wasn't that far to the Medical District and the town house.

Out on the street, it did seem better at first, she felt almost normal. But after a while she began to think maybe this wasn't such a good idea either. She had encountered a crowd of people. People and their ghosts. Trying to avoid walking through spirit bodies, she ended up bumping into real ones. Everything was getting fuzzy. She stopped and leaned against a wall until the crowd cleared. 

Walking on, she began to feel almost dizzy. She shook her head to clear it, but that didn't help. 

She could call someone and ask for a ride, but that would be awkward to explain so she just kept going. Soon she got to the tree-lined avenues of the residential district. Even the trees had a ghostly aura for her now. It was as if every living thing was surrounded by a mist of possibilities. At least the sidewalk was solid.