Overbite. Meg Cabot
for you.”
“I beg your pardon,” Holtzman said, his gaze dipping to all the files spread across his desk. “But are you seriously suggesting to me that there is someone out there killing tourists?”
“It looks like it,” Alaric said. He thumbed through one file. “Here’s an entire family. The O’Brians from Illinois, a family of five. Last seen by the concierge at their midtown hotel when they asked directions to M&M World. They never checked out. No one seems to have thought anything about it until Mr. O’Brian never showed back up at his job and the kids never returned to school. That’s when Grandma contacted the police in Illinois, and they, in turn, contacted the hotel, who assumed the family had simply flaked out—”
“Give me that.” Holtzman snatched the file away from him. “This can’t be possible. It would have been all over the local media. Someone snatching tourists from Manhattan? Just as the Feast of San Gennaro is starting up?”
“Not someone,” Alaric said. “Something.” He laid the rest of the files down with a thump. “Because where are all the bodies? You’d think by now they’d have started to turn a little ripe.”
Holtzman looked slightly sick to his stomach, but Alaric only looked thoughtful. Then he brightened. “I know. Let’s ask Padre Caliente tomorrow night at the Vatican treasures show. He’ll know what to do. He knows everything.”
Holtzman had already picked up the phone. He pointed at the door. “Out. Get out of my office. Now.”
Alaric was no more than a few steps out of the building and down the block before he began to reflect on the news his supervisor had imparted about Henrique Mauricio, and its implications for him personally and the unit as a whole. None of them, he concluded, was good.
His Palatine-appointed therapist, Dr. Fiske, was always encouraging Alaric to picture the worst-case scenario. It was healthy, the doctor said. Pessimists apparently lived longer than optimists.
“Because reality,” the doctor liked to say, “is never anywhere near as bad as what we imagine might happen.”
“I don’t know, Doc,” Alaric had said the last time they’d met. “Can you imagine anything worse than demons turning out to have a choice between being good and being evil?”
“Oh yes,” Dr. Fiske had replied cheerfully. “There are lots of things worse than that. After all, they could choose to be good.”
It was at this point during the session that Alaric had stood up and walked out. If he hadn’t, he imagined he probably would have stuck his fist through the doctor’s drywall. Or through the doctor’s face.
Alaric spent the evening after his meeting with Abraham Holtzman trying to imagine every worst-case scenario that Father Henrique’s being transferred to Manhattan could entail.
This was how he found himself working over the punching bag in his apartment until after midnight. Exhausted, he eventually showered and went to bed, only to be tortured by dreams in which Lucien Antonescu had chosen to be good. In one dream, he was lying in the bright sunshine in the grass in Central Park, with his head in Meena Harper’s lap … which was impossible, of course, because the prince of darkness would turn to ash if he stepped into sunlight.
Meena was laughing. Lucien Antonescu kept kissing her hair, which was long and dark and, for some reason, was continually falling into Lucien’s face.
It was a great relief when Alaric’s cell phone woke him early the next morning.
At least until he answered it and heard his boss’s voice saying, “Meena Harper is in some kind of trouble.”
Then something seemed to tighten in his chest. He knew it was not a pulled muscle from overworking the bag.
It was hard to think things could possibly get worse than that until he heard the words New Jersey and I’ll drive from Holtzman’s mouth.
But when he actually saw Meena Harper emerge from a taxi in front of the Freewell, New Jersey, Police Department, wearing one of those too-tight-in-the-chest dresses—this one black with little pink roses on it—she seemed to favor, the morning sun glinting on her newly auburn hair, he realized that all the worst-case scenarios he’d been imagining came nowhere close to the horror of this one:
There was a pink scarf tied around her throat.
Meena woke to the shrill vibration of her cell phone and glanced at the digital clock by the side of her bed. It was only six o’clock in the morning, two hours before she usually had to wake, because she lived so close to work. No one would call this early unless something was wrong.
Something, it turned out, was very wrong. She knew it the minute she picked up her phone and saw the New Jersey area code.
Meena didn’t know anyone who lived in New Jersey anymore. Not since her parents had retired to Florida.
Her pulse slowed almost to a standstill.
“Who the hell is that?” her brother demanded, stumbling shirtless from his room to stand in her doorway, blinking down at her sleepily. Jack Bauer had also scrambled from his basket in the corner and was now eagerly bouncing around beside her bed, thinking it was time to get up.
“Work,” she lied. “Can you take Jack out?”
“What the hell,” Jonathan said, but without rancor. “Come on, Jack,” he said to the dog, and went to go find his shoes and the dog’s leash.
Meena answered the phone.
“Hello,” said a woman’s voice, familiar, but older and more quavering than Meena had been expecting. “This is Olivia Delmonico. To whom am I speaking?”
Meena had thought she might eventually hear from the woman in David’s life.
But not this one.
“Um,” she said. She wasn’t ready. She—
“Hello?” Mrs. Delmonico said. “Is anyone there?”
“Yes,” Meena said. “Yes, Mrs. Delmonico. It’s me, Meena Harper.”
“Meena Harper?”
Mrs. Delmonico formed the words with obvious distaste. David’s parents had never liked Meena. Though neither they nor David had ever come right out and said so, Meena had always gotten the feeling they hadn’t approved of their son moving in with her after college, and not just because they didn’t believe in couples living together without the benefit of marriage, but because …
Well, they just hadn’t liked Meena. Maybe they’d felt like an aspiring writer wasn’t good enough for their ambitious son …
Or maybe it had had something to do with Meena mentioning, during her first dinner out with them, a celebration of David’s graduation from dental school, that Mr. Delmonico didn’t have to order any wine on her account, especially considering his “health concerns.”
Mr. Delmonico’s ongoing struggle with alcoholism had turned out to be a secret his parents had managed to keep from David his whole life. Up until that night, that is, when she’d blown it.
Oops.
“Well,” Mrs. Delmonico said. “This is … I don’t know what to say. I just found your number on a notepad by the side of David’s kitchen phone. I wasn’t aware the two of you were still … in touch.”
“Oh,” Meena said. She thought fast. “That. Well, you know I moved out of our old apartment recently, and I found I still had some boxes of his, so I got in touch