Notte? It’s a wild place, I hear. Popular with the goths, the
ravers . . .”
“Your point being?”
The cop shrugged. “Lotta kids get into some weird shit
these days. Maybe all you saw was a little fun getting out of
hand.”
Gabrielle exhaled a curse and reached for her cell
phone. “Does this look like fun getting out of hand to
you?”
She clicked the picture recall button and looked
again at the images she had captured. Although the snap-
shots were blurry, diffused by the flash, she could still
plainly see a group of men surrounding another on the
ground. She clicked forward to another image and saw
the reflective glow of several eyes staring back at the lens,
the vague outlines of facial features peeled back in animal
fury.
Why didn’t the officers see what she did?
“Miss Maxwell,” interjected the younger police officer.
He strolled around to the other side of the desk and sat on
the edge before her. He had been the quieter of the two
men, the one listening in careful consideration where his
partner spewed nothing but doubt and suspicion. “It’s ob-
vious that you believe you saw something terrible at the
club tonight. Officer Carrigan and I want to help you, but
in order for us to do that, we have to be sure we’re all on
the same page.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
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“Now, we have your statement, and we’ve seen your
pictures. You strike me as a reasonable person. Before we
can go any further here, I need to ask if you would be will-
ing to submit to a drug test.”
“A drug test.” Gabrielle shot out of her chair. She was
beyond pissed off now. “This is ridiculous. I am not some
tripped out crackhead, and I resent being treated like one.
I’m trying to report a murder!”
“Gab? Gabby!”
From somewhere behind her in the station, Gabrielle
heard Jamie’s voice. She had called her friend soon after
she arrived, needing the comfort of familiar faces after the
horror she had witnessed.
“Gabrielle!” Jamie dashed up to her and surrounded
her in a warm hug. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,
but I was already home when I got your message on my
cell. Jesus, sweetie! Are you all right?”
Gabrielle nodded. “I think so. Thanks for coming.”
“Miss Maxwell, why don’t you let your friend here take
you home,” said the younger officer. “We can continue this
at another time. Maybe you’ll be able to think more clearly
after you get some sleep.”
The two policemen rose, and gestured for Gabrielle to
do the same. She didn’t argue. She was tired, bone weary,
and she didn’t think even if she stayed at the station all
night she’d be able to convince the cops of what she wit-
nessed outside La Notte. Numbly, Gabrielle let Jamie and
the two officers escort her out of the station. She was
halfway down the steps to the parking lot when the
younger of the men called her name.
“Miss Maxwell?”
She paused, looking back over her shoulder to where
the officer stood beneath the floodlight of the station.
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“If it will make you rest any easier, we’ll send someone
around to check in on you at your home, and maybe talk to
you a bit more, once you’ve had some time to think about
your report.”
She didn’t appreciate his coddling tone, but neither
could she find the anger to refuse his offer. After what she
had seen tonight, Gabrielle would gladly take the security
of a police visit, even a patronizing one. She nodded, then
followed Jamie out to his waiting car.
From a quiet corner desk in the precinct house, a file clerk
hit the print key on his computer. A laser printer whirred
into action behind him, spitting out a single page report.
chipped Red Sox mug, rose from his rickety, putty-colored
chair, and casually retrieved the document from the
printer.
The station was quiet, emptied out for the midnight
shift break. But even if it had been hopping with activity,
no one would have paid any attention to the reserved, awk-
ward intern who kept very much to himself.
That was the beauty of his role.
It was why he’d been chosen.
He wasn’t the only member of the force to be re-
cruited. He knew there were others, though their identi-
ties were kept secret. It was safer that way, cleaner. For
his part, he couldn’t recall how long it had been since he
first met his Master. He knew only that he now lived to
serve.
With the report clutched in his hand, the clerk shuffled
down the hallway in search of privacy. The break room,
which was never empty no matter the time of day, was cur-
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rently occupied by a couple of secretaries and Carrigan, a
fat, loud-mouthed cop who was retiring at the end of the
week. He was bragging about the primo deal he had got-
ten on some backwater Florida condo while the women
basically ignored him, the two females lunching on day-
old, frosted yellow party cake and washing it all down with
Diet Coke chasers.
The clerk ran his fingers through his pale brown hair
and walked past the open doorway, toward the restrooms
at the end of the corridor. He paused outside the men’s
room, his hand on the battered metal handle, as he casu-
ally glanced behind him. With no one there to see him, he
moved to the next door down, the station’s janitorial sup-
ply closet. It was supposed to be kept locked, but seldom
was. Nothing much worth stealing in there anyway, unless
you had a thing for industrial-grade toilet paper, ammonia
cleanser, and brown paper towels.
He twisted the knob and pushed the old steel panel in-
ward. Once inside the dark closet, he clicked the push-
button lock from within and retrieved his cell phone from
the front pocket of his khakis. He pressed speed dial, call-
ing the sole number that was stored in the untraceable,
disposable device. The call rang twice, then fell into an
ominous silence as his Master’s unmistakable presence
loomed on the other end of the line.
“Sire,” the clerk breathed, his voice a reverent whisper.
“I have information for you.”
He spoke quickly and quietly, divulging all of the details
of the Maxwell woman’s visit to the station, including the
specifics of her stateme
nt about a gang killing downtown.
The clerk heard a growl and the soft hiss of breath skating
across the cell phone’s receiver as his Master absorbed the
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news in silence. He sensed fury in that slow, wordless exha-
lation, and it chilled him.
“I ran her personal data for you, Sire—all of it,” he of-
fered; then using the dim glow of the cell’s display, he re-
cited Gabrielle’s address, unlisted phone number, and
more, the servile Minion so very eager to please his
dreaded and powerful Master.
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Three
Two full days passed.
Gabrielle tried to put the horror of what she had wit-
nessed in La Notte’s alleyway out of her mind. What did it
matter, anyway? No one had believed her. Not the police,
who had yet to send anyone to see her as they had prom-
ised, and not even her friends.
Jamie and Megan, who had seen the thugs in leather
harassing the punker inside the club, said the group left
without incident sometime during the course of the night.
Kendra had been too involved with Brent—the guy she
picked up on the dance floor—to notice any trouble else-
where in the club. According to the cops at the station
Saturday night, the story had been the same from every-
one their dispatched patrol had questioned at La Notte. A
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brief scuffle at the bar, but no reports of violence in or out-
side of the club.
No one had seen the attack she reported. There had
been no hospital or morgue admissions. Not even a dam-
age report filed by the cabbie at the curb.
Nothing.
How could that be? Was she seriously delusional?
It was as if Gabrielle’s eyes were the only ones truly
open that night. Either she alone had witnessed something
unexplainable, or she was losing her mind.
Maybe some of both.
She couldn’t deal with all the implications in that idea,
so she sought solace in the one thing that gave her any joy.
Behind the sealed door of her custom-built darkroom in
the basement of the townhouse, Gabrielle submerged a
sheet of photo paper in the tray of developing solution.
From pale nothingness, the image began to take shape be-
neath the surface of the liquid. She watched it come to
life—the ironic beauty of strong ivy tentacles spreading
over the decayed brick and mortar of an old Gothic-style
asylum she had recently discovered outside the city. It
came out better than she had hoped, teasing her artist’s
fancy with the potential of an entire series centered on the
haunting, desolate place. She set it aside and developed an-
other photo, this one a closeup of a pine sapling sprouting
from between a crack in the crumpled pavement of a long-
abandoned lumberyard.
The images made her smile as she lifted them out of
the solution and clipped them to the drying line. She had
nearly a dozen more like these upstairs on her worktable,
wry testaments to the stubbornness of nature and the fool-
ishness of man’s greed and arrogance.
Gabrielle had always felt something of an outsider, a
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silent observer, from the time she was a kid. She chalked it
up to the fact that she had no parents—no family at all, ex-
cept the couple who had adopted her when she was a trou-
bled twelve-year-old, bounced from one foster home to
another. The Maxwells, an upper-middle-class couple with
no children of their own, had kindly taken pity on her, but
even their acceptance had been at arm’s length. Gabrielle
was promptly sent to boarding schools, summer camps,
and, finally, an out-of-state university. Her parents, such as
they were, had died together in a car accident while she
was away at college.
Gabrielle didn’t attend the funeral, but the first serious
photograph she took was of two maple-shaded grave-
stones in the city’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. She’d been
taking pictures ever since.
Never one to mourn the past, Gabrielle turned off the
darkroom light and headed back upstairs to think about
supper. She wasn’t in the kitchen two minutes before her
doorbell rang.
Jamie had generously stayed over the past two nights,
just to make sure Gabrielle was all right. He was worried
about her, as protective as a big brother she never had.
When he left that morning, he had offered to come by
again, but Gabrielle had insisted she would be fine by her-
self. She was actually in need of some solitude, and as the
doorbell sounded again, she felt a niggle of mild annoy-
ance that she might not have any alone time tonight, either.
“Be right there,” she called from inside the apartment’s
foyer.
Habit made her check the peephole, but instead of
seeing Jamie’s blond sweep of hair, Gabrielle found the
dark head and striking features of an unfamiliar man wait-
ing on her stoop. A reproduction gaslight stood on the
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sidewalk just off her front steps. The soft yellow glow
wrapped itself around the man like a golden cloak draped
over night itself. There was something ominous, yet com-
pelling, about his pale gray eyes, which were staring
straight into the narrow cylinder of glass as if he could see
her on the other side, too.
She opened the door, but thought it best not to remove
the chain lock. The man stepped in front of the wedge of
open space and glanced at the tight chain length that
stretched taut between them. When his eyes met
Gabrielle’s again, he gave her a vague smile, as if he
thought it amusing she would expect to bar him so easily if
he truly wanted in.
“Miss Maxwell?” His voice stroked her senses like rich,
dark velvet.
“Yes?”
“My name is Lucan Thorne.” The words rolled past
his lips in a smooth, measured timbre that eased some of
her anxiety at once. When she didn’t say anything, he went
on. “I understand you had some difficulty a couple of
nights ago at the police station. I wanted to come by and
make sure you were all right.”
She nodded.
Evidently the police hadn’t completely blown her off
after all. Since it had been a couple of days with no word
from them, Gabrielle had not expected to see anyone from
the department, despite the promise to send a patrol out to
look in on her. Not that she could be certain this guy, with
his sleekly styled black hair and chiseled features, was a
cop.
He looked grim enough, she supposed, and apart from
his dark, dangerous good looks, he didn’t seem intent on
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causing her any harm. Still, after what she’d been through,
Gabrielle thought it wise to err on the side of caution.
“Have you got ID?”
“Of course.”
With deliberate, almost sensual movements, he opened
a thin leather billfold and held it up to the crack of space at
the door. It was nearly dark outside, which was likely why it
took a second for Gabrielle’s eyes to focus on the shiny po-
liceman’s badge and the picture identification card next to
it, bearing his name.
“Okay. Come in, Detective.”
She freed the chain lock, then opened the door and let
him enter, watching as his broad shoulders filled the door-
way. His presence seemed to fill the entire foyer, in fact. He
was a large man, tall and thickly hewn beneath the drape
of his black overcoat, his dark clothes and silky jet hair ab-
sorbed the soft light of the pendant lamp overhead. He
had a confident, almost regal bearing about him, his ex-
pression gravely serious, as if he would be better suited to
commanding a legion of armored knights than schlepping
out to Beacon Hill to handhold a hallucinatory female.
“I didn’t think anyone was going to come. After the re-
ception I got down at the station this weekend, I figured
Boston’s finest had written me off as a nutcase.”
He didn’t acknowledge or deny it, merely strode into
her living room in silence and let his gaze roam freely over
the place. He paused at her worktable, where the roughs of
some of her latest images had been arranged. Gabrielle
trailed after him across the room, casually watching for his
reaction to her work. One dark brow quirked as he pe-
rused the photographs.
“Yours?” he asked, turning his pale, piercing eyes
on her.
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“Yes,” Gabrielle replied. “They’re part of a collection
I’m calling Urban Renewal.”
“Interesting.”