‘What’s going on, Lillian?’ she asked. ‘How can this be?’
Lillian snapped her fingers in front of Alexis’s face, and the girl blinked and looked at her.
‘One thing at a time, okay?’ Lillian said. ‘Tell nobody about this, until we’ve figured out what’s going on.’
Alexis nodded and hurried out of the morgue. Lillian turned back to the remains before her, shaking her head. She heard Alexis’s car start and pull away into the distance, the engine noise jolting Lillian from her thoughts.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ she whispered to the corpse.
Suddenly, the lights in the morgue went out and plunged her into darkness. A wave of panic fluttered through Lillian as she struggled to maintain her balance in the complete blackness. She cursed the fact that, like all morgues, there were no windows.
It was a hell of a time for the power to go out. She stood for a moment, waiting for the emergency generator to cut in, but nothing happened. Then the door to the morgue slammed violently shut, the crash sending a lance of terror through her.
‘Hello?’ she called out. At two in the morning she should have been alone in the building.
Nobody responded in the absolute darkness looming around her.
Slowly she backed away from the gurney until she felt the edge of the worktops behind her. She felt her way around the edge, past the sinks and the polished steel scales until she located her handbag, fumbling inside until she found her cell phone. She lifted it out, hitting a button — any button. To her relief, the screen glowed with bright blue light, illuminating the morgue.
A horrific skull-like face lunged toward her from the gloom. She screamed with primal fear as hands grabbed her with vicious force. As the light from her cell phone was smothered so her consciousness slipped away.
4
Keep running. Don’t quit.
Ethan Warner’s heart pounded in his chest and his lungs burned as he ran down the sidewalk, dodging past pedestrians who had already leapt clear of the teenager in the gray hoodie dashing past them on West 27th Street.
Ethan focused on the target, lengthening his stride and trying to control his labored breathing. Several weeks of circuit training had improved his fitness, but he was still nowhere near the level he’d been in the Marine Corps and right now the kid ahead of him was running with the added benefit of fear coursing through his blood. Semper fi, Ethan chanted to himself over and over again as the kid sprinted across St Louis Avenue with casual disregard for incoming traffic.
A distorted voice sounded in his ear.
‘Where you at?’
‘Heading west, 27th on South Central,’ Ethan wheezed into a Bluetooth earpiece and microphone. ‘Where the hell are you?’
‘Stand by,’ came the affronted response. ‘No need to get yourself agitated.’
Stand by, my ass, Ethan thought as he struck out across South Central Park Avenue, an SUV honking its horn at him as he swerved around the front fender, staggered onto the sidewalk again and almost collided with a woman and two children leaving a convenience store.
The kid ahead of him suddenly turned right, dashing into an alley that cut between rows of buildings and stores lining the streets.
‘He’s off the main, heading north toward West 26th!’ Ethan shouted, hurling himself into the alley in pursuit before seeing the kid standing facing him not twenty yards away.
A gunshot shattered the air in the narrow alley, and Ethan hurled himself down onto the asphalt, rolling sideways and slamming into a large trash can.
‘He’s got a piece!’
‘Copy that.’
Ethan peered round the side of the dumpster and saw the kid was running through puddles toward the end of the alleyway, which was half blocked by an unoccupied black jeep. Ethan leapt up, shouting as he ran.
‘Don’t make me shoot!’ he bellowed, hoping to hell that the kid didn’t look back and see that Ethan wasn’t carrying. ‘Lose the piece!’
The kid ducked sideways to dash past the parked jeep. Ethan accelerated and was about to follow him when the jeep’s door suddenly opened. A deep, solid thump echoed down the alleyway as the kid hit the door at full speed, staggering backwards and toppling to the ground. Ethan slowed as he saw his partner, Nicola Lopez, leap from the jeep and stride toward the disorientated kid who staggered to his feet and whirled, striking out at Lopez with the butt of his pistol. Lopez blocked the blow with a fluid movement of her left arm, batting the pistol aside and following immediately with a roundhouse right that smacked into the kid’s jaw. The boy slammed onto his back as Lopez, drawing a black T-baton tonfa, placed one booted foot on his wrist to prevent him from using his gun and jabbed one end of the baton into his throat.
‘You have the right to remain silent, else I kick your sorry ass further,’ Lopez snarled down at their quarry. ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney the state will appoint one to you who will most likely be goddamn useless. Do you understand?’
A weak voice squealed up at her as Ethan approached.
‘Who the hell are you?’
Lopez flashed a badge at the kid on the ground, a silver shield with ‘Bail Bondsman’ emblazoned beneath it.
‘You jumped bail, Mickey,’ Lopez said as she turned him over, knelt on his back and cuffed him. ‘You’re going back to jail.’
Ethan glanced at the vehicle from which Lopez had leapt.
‘How’d you get into that jeep?’
Lopez flashed him a dazzling smile as she jerked Mickey onto his feet.
‘Door was unlocked,’ she replied with an innocent shrug.
Ethan shook his head as Lopez guided Mickey ‘Knuckles’ Ferranto out onto West 26th Street and along the sidewalk to where she had parked their black SUV. He waited until she’d shoe-horned Mickey into the vehicle and shut the door before speaking.
‘You broke and entered?’ he said in disbelief. ‘Jesus, we’re supposed to be finding criminals, not becoming them.’
‘Got the job done,’ Lopez replied without remorse. ‘I’d left it to you, you’d both be halfway to goddamn Ohio by now.’
‘I was getting there,’ Ethan said defensively. ‘He hotfooted out of the mall the moment he saw me.’
‘The job’s done,’ Lopez said, brushing a strand of black hair out of her eyes. ‘Who cares about the small print?’
Ethan blocked her path as she made her way toward the SUV’s passenger door.
‘The police? The attorney’s office? You can’t keep doing things this way, Lopez. What the hell happened to going by the book?’
‘It got me nowhere in the force.’
‘Yeah, and breaking the rules got your partner killed.’
Lightning flickered behind Lopez’s dark eyes as they locked onto Ethan’s, and he forced himself not to take a step back.
Since they had begun working together, Ethan had found out about what had befallen Nicola Lopez’s former partner in the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington DC the previous year, crumbs of information that had slipped out during conversations. Detective Lucas Tyrell, a long-serving officer, had been shot and killed by his own superior in an apartment way down in Anacostia. To say that Lopez had taken the hit badly was something of an understatement. Now, despite their partnership, Ethan often felt as though he were running a poor second best to Tyrell. Lopez seemed unwilling to share directly with him what had happened, as though she hadn’t quite moved on yet. Her casual disregard for the law was a direct and, for Ethan, somewhat unsettling manifestation of that.