“Who are you?” Nora’s voice breaks because she hasn’t said anything since the burial, and tears are still stuck in her throat.
“My name doesn’t matter.” The man drops the cigarette and crushes it out on the grass. It seems like such an improper gesture in this place of somberness and death. “What I have to say does.”
“I don’t know you.” Nora is nineteen and confident, fit and strong and fast, but now she’s afraid. Perhaps this fear is a new thing that will stick with her, now that her mother and father are gone.
“Nor will you. But you’ll know my words, and heed them. You were meant for more than this, Nora. I’m sorry for your grief, but it is also your freedom. There are places you must go. Things you must learn. Hide from the glare, take to the shadows. Find your path.”
Her uncle calls her. Nora glances back and waves, and when she turns again, the man is walking away.
“Where? Learn what?”
“You’ll know soon enough,” the man says without turning around. As he strides off, he lights another cigarette.
Nora does not follow. She trudges back toward the Mercedes and her uncle. He seems angry, and as she approaches, he berates her for wasting time. “There’s a wake. We should be there first to welcome people. Hurry, Nora.”
Her hand burns. She holds it before her, fingers splayed, and her fingernails have grown dark. Black. Something leaks from beneath them, like black ink except more ethereal—
Wait a minute. It wasn’t like that.
Uncle Theo’s eyes go wide with fear, his mouth drops open—
That didn’t happen.
She reaches for him. He cringes back against the car, reaching for his phone as it begins to ring—
No, no, not like this at all. I got into the car and went home, waited for the life insurance payout, traveled the world and went to Nepal, hid from the glare, took to the shadows, never saw Uncle Theo again—
Nora jerked upright on her sofa. Shadows retreated like startled creatures, darkness faded, and weak light filtered into her apartment from outside. On the coffee table, her phone was ringing.
One of the cats hissed somewhere out of sight, and the light of the waxing moon touched her skin.
“Fucking hell.” Nora snatched up the phone. Her heart galloped, and her back and armpits were damp with sweat. Sam Loh’s image grinned at her from the screen. She answered, and his voice had never been so welcome.
“Hey, sexy.”
“Sam. You … startled me.” She glanced at the digital clock on her DVD player. “It’s after two in the morning.”
“The news cycle’s twenty-four hours.”
“Bastard. Okay, what’s up?” She always liked hearing from Sam. In the time they’d worked at NYChronicle together—sometimes in the same vehicle, on the same story, for days on end—a pressure had built between them that had no real avenue for release. They’d found that release in many sessions of great sex. Eventually they’d said they loved each other, though Nora had never been sure.
Then Sam had left. He’d fallen out with Rajitha over his handling of the kidnapped-woman story. His focus had been more on the weird rumors of Indigo rather than the gritty truth, and their editor had questioned his commitment to serious journalism. He in turn had questioned her commitment to the truth, and it had blown up into a furious confrontation, an argument that took place in the paper’s main office at a time when most people were at their desks. Voices had been raised, names called. Rajitha had been left with no recourse but to fire Sam. Luckily, he saved her the trouble by resigning on the spot.
Such events inspired by Nora’s secret life should have made her relationship with Sam complex and troublesome, but they had since become the best of friends. Her stated belief in his Indigo story had endeared her to him more than ever, and his childlike fascination with the character pleased her.
Of course, she could never tell him the truth.
“Got a tidbit I thought I should throw your way,” he said.
“A tidbit?”
“A curious coincidence. Maybe. Call it a favor.”
Nora frowned and ran her hand through her hair. Her dream lingered, its dregs echoing even as she sat here in her silent apartment. The cats slept. She heard one of them snoring softly from somewhere out of sight, and she wondered what their dreams were like.
“At two a.m.?”
She could hear his cheeky smile through the phone when he said, “It’s not the first favor I’ve given you this time of night.” She wished he’d facetimed her instead.
“Okay, you’ve got me intrigued, so out with it.” She walked to the kitchenette with the phone to her ear, and as Sam started talking, she poured a glass of water.
“You’re reporting on these child murders, right? Another one tonight?”
“Yeah.” She blinked and saw the mutilation, the horrors inflicted on the girl’s innocent body.
“I’ve been working on a piece, too, for the Indie. More directed at the police investigation than the murders themselves—the cops’ inability to catch the killer, drifting off into politics and bureaucracy. Whether or not there’s a human-trafficking angle to the abductions of these kids who end up dead.”
“I’d been wondering the same thing. But I don’t think they’re related. These kids … there’s a ritual element to this, I think. Just between us, not for print. I don’t think traffickers were behind this.”
“Ritual … like that cult stuff with Indigo last year?”
“Maybe.” She hesitated. Sam was fascinated by all things Indigo, and she didn’t want him digging too much. “I’ll keep you posted. But unless it’s a smoke screen, disposing of the bodies like this, I don’t think it’s related.”
“Maybe not. But you know I’ve got some decent police connections—hell, some of them are your connections, too. They don’t like me too much after all the focus I’m throwing on the trafficking stuff, the vanished kids, but with these murders … well, they’re putting everything into trying to catch the bastard.”
“So far ‘everything’ isn’t enough.”
“Anyway, a name came up last night: Bullington. One of the lawyers who repped the cultist couple who abducted Andy Chesbro last year.”
Nora almost dropped the glass. Chesbro had been the fancy attorney’s kidnapped husband. Police had arrested a Scarsdale couple for the actual kidnapping but could never link them to the cult assassins who’d murdered Chesbro’s wife—the ones Indigo had killed. The Scarsdale couple had gotten off after a grand jury inquiry showed police misconduct in the investigation—the lead detective had botched the whole thing.
A month later, the Scarsdale couple had been murdered in their home.
Indigo hadn’t been responsible for those deaths. She had assumed it was the Phonoi, cleaning up their mess.
She leaned back against the kitchen worktop and blinked rapidly a few times, trying to shake the memory of blood gushing across her hands, and fear in the faces of the assassins as she put an end to them.
“Nora?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Tell me about Bullington. He was part of the legal team for the kidnappers?”