He spoke quickly and quietly, divulging all of the details of the Maxwell woman's visit to the station, including the specifics of her statement 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 news in silence. He sensed fury in that slow, wordless exhalation, and it chilled him.
"I ran her personal data for you, Sire - all of it," he offered; then using the dim glow of the cell's display, he recited Gabrielle's address, unlisted phone number, and more, the servile Minion so very eager to please his dreaded and powerful Master.
Chapter Three
Two full days passed.
Gabrielle tried to put the horror of what she had witnessed 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 promised, 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 elsewhere in the club. According to the cops at the station Saturday night, the story had been the same from everyone their dispatched patrol had questioned at La Notte. A brief scuffle at the bar, but no reports of violence in or outside of the club.
No one had seen the attack she reported. There had been no hospital or morgue admissions. Not even a damage 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 beneath 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 another 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 foolishness of man's greed and arrogance.
Gabrielle had always felt something of an outsider, a 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, except the couple who had adopted her when she was a troubled 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 gravestones 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 herself. She was actually in need of some solitude, and as the doorbell sounded again, she felt a niggle of mild annoyance 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 waiting on her stoop. A reproduction gaslight stood on the 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 compelling, 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 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 policeman's badge and the picture identification card next to it, bearing his name.
"Okay. Come in, Detective."