Emerging from his building, Jake cast a furtive glance at the Tower, where he had once worked for Nicholas Tower, the genetics king. He had moved into this particular building to keep an eye on the structure.
Turning his back to it, he faced Laurel’s parlor, then unlocked the four locks on the door. When he had moved into the building, he accepted an offer to supervise its security in exchange for a big rent discount. Although Laurel’s space was part of the building, she had given him the keys herself.
He opened the door, and city light filled the dark space as the alarm box whined. Allowing the door to close behind him, he switched on the lights and punched his code into the keypad, silencing the alarm.
Jake descended two steps into the sunken parlor and moved to the table in its center. Drawing the Glock from his shorts and hoping he wouldn’t need to fire it with one hand, he moved into Laurel’s living quarters in the back. “Laurel?”
He used the Glock’s barrel to flip the switch for the ceiling light in the kitchen. With his heart beating faster he drew in a breath and moved to the windowless bedroom, where he flipped another light switch. He noted nothing out of place. Then he crossed the kitchen to the bathroom. It was also empty.
What the hell had happened to Laurel? In the time Jake had known her, she had never left this storefront home and business. He knew she was hiding from someone. But who would a romance novelist have to hide from, and why did Erika Long adopt the alias Laurel Doniger, psychic healer? He knew her powers were real because she had used them to heal his injuries when Katrina worked her own magic on his psyche and lower back.
The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, an instinct he had developed while still in NYPD. As he turned to leave the bathroom he glimpsed a flash of dark color moving behind him in the mirror.
Maria entered her one-bedroom Bronx apartment feeling exhausted from three and a half days’ worth of driving. Setting her bags down, she looked through the mail her mother had stacked on her table. The apartment looked cleaner than she had left it.
All she wanted to do was take a shower and change, but she had an important call to make first. Sitting on the sofa, she kicked off her sandals and entered a number into her phone.
Bernie Reinhardt, her partner, answered midway through the third ring. “Please tell me you’re in a New York state of mind. These guys Mauceri keeps partnering me with are driving me crazy.”
“I just walked into my apartment.”
“That’s good since you’re supposed to work tomorrow morning.”
“You don’t have to remind me. What’s the latest on Alice and Shana?” Alice Morton was the surviving sister of Papa Joe and the mother of Prince Malachai, two powerful drug dealers killed during the Black Magic epidemic. Joe’s wife had been killed, too, leaving Alice to care for his daughter, Shana. Maria had felt a bond with the seven-year-old girl and wanted to see her escape the family business.
“Big Alice has definitely taken over Papa Joe’s franchise,” Bernie said. “She’s got half a dozen lieutenants and a powerful street operation. She and Shana moved into a condo on Thirty-fourth and Ninth.”
“Is there any activity in their condo?” If Alice was using her condo for business around Shana, Maria could convince the court to take the little girl away. And then what?
“Negative. She’s playing it smart.”
“They all do until they get stupid.”
“Speaking of which, how’s your vacation partner?” Bernie disapproved of Jake.
“I don’t want to talk about him right now.”
“Good. Besides overthrowing a Caribbean country, did you have a nice leave?”
“Mission accomplished.”
“I’m glad to hear that. What was your mission again?”
“Good night, Bernie.”
“Good night, kid.”
Ending the call, Maria selected some clothes from her bedroom, then went into the bathroom and ran the shower.
Jake aimed his Glock at the man who stood behind him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” A short man with shock-white hair raised his hands.
Exhaling, Jake raised the Glock, aiming it at the ceiling, then at the floor. “You almost got yourself killed.”
Jackie Krebbs lowered his hands. “Well, that would have been pretty damn fucked up.”
Jake slid the Glock into his shorts.
“What the hell happened to your hand?”
“I lost it.”
“I can see that.”
“Where’s Laurel?”
“You got me. She disappeared a week and a half ago.”
“Do the cops know?”
Jackie shook his head. “Miss Doniger left me specific instructions not to notify the police if she disappeared.”
“That happens to be illegal.”
“I do what she tells me. According to her no one will even notice she’s gone, except Eden, Inc. when her rent is late.”
“If the alarm didn’t go off she left on her own,” Jake said.
“Maybe.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Let’s go to my office and talk.”
Jake was not accustomed to Jackie calling his work space in the basement of the building his office. “Lead the way.”
Edgar pushed his dinner plate aside. “That was great.”
“I would have made something special if I’d known you were coming home,” Joyce said.
Home, Edgar thought. “No, this was delicious. I don’t remember the last time I had a home-cooked meal.”
“Are you sure that’s all you want? You hardly touched it.”
“I’ve been having trouble digesting my food.”
“You need a physical.”
“I don’t know if I have a job, let alone medical benefits.”
“Everyone has medical coverage now. If you get caught up in some bureaucratic quagmire, I’ll dip into my savings.”
“I couldn’t let you do that.”
Joyce glanced at Martin, who watched them like a spectator at a sporting event. “You can’t account for your whereabouts for nine months. You have no memory of why you disappeared, where you were, or how you got back. You need a physical and you probably need therapy.”
Edgar raised one hand. “First things first: I need to go into work and learn the status of my job. I’ll worry about the rest after that.”
“Martin, finish your dinner and do your homework.”
Martin pushed his plate aside like Edgar did. “I’m done, too.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Dad didn’t have to finish his.”
“Listen to your mother, please,” Edgar said.
With a sullen expression, Martin returned to his food.
“I don’t need you to undermine my authority with him,” Joyce said.
Edgar raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t do that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I was just backing you up.”
“I don’t need you to back me up. I’ve raised him alone or close to alone for most of his life. If I tell him to do something, I need him to listen to me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I did anything wrong.”
Giving him a stern look, Joyce rose. She picked up her plate and his and carried them into the kitchen.
Edgar glanced at Martin, who shrugged. He stood and followed Joyce into the kitchen, where she scraped the uneaten food into the garbage. He took the plates from her hands. “I’m sorry.” Then he took the plates to the sink and ran water over them.
Joyce moved beside him and crossed her arms. “Our son joined a cult.”
Edgar tried to look surprised.
“The Dreamers. They pose as a science fiction fan club for a company called Sky Cloud Dreams. Martin got sucked into their shtick over the Internet. Jake and Maria got him out of it, but I’ve had to keep my eye on him.”
“I’ll have to thank them.�
��
“You have to speak to Martin.”
“Okay, I will.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You already know this, don’t you?”
“How would I?”
“Jake went to Louisiana looking for you a month and a half ago. I don’t know why he chose there, but he told Martin he was getting close. Then he went to Miami. During the same time, Maria took a leave of absence. Less than three weeks later, here you are.”
“I told you, they had nothing to do with this.”
“Why do I have the feeling they’re both back now?”
Edgar said nothing and she returned to the dining room.
Jake followed Jackie through the basement to his office. As they passed the garbage compactor, he recalled battling zonbies and disposing of their sawdust-filled cadavers in there.
Jackie opened the door to the windowless office and threw a heavy set of keys onto a wooden desk covered with papers. Jake sat opposite the desk.
“Miss Doniger told me this day might come, and if it did I should tell you what I know, which isn’t much.”
Jake had believed he was Laurel’s sole confidant. “You’ve got my attention.”
“Miss Laurel moved in here almost three years ago. Her tenancy was arranged through Eden, Inc. Eden had just bought the building and kept on Monde Building Management, the company I work for. I don’t deal with Eden, and I’ve never met any of the suits there. Everything they need is communicated to my boss, Jeff Wilson.”
Jake had met with Wilson when he agreed to supervise the security for the building. He never enjoyed meeting with corporate types, but he couldn’t complain considering the dirt cheap rent he paid in exchange for his services.
“I worked here fifteen years before Eden took over. MBM was worried their contract wouldn’t be renewed. Jeff told me he had the feeling Miss Doniger was an important tenant, and I laughed when he told me she was a psychic. Then he sent me to meet with her. As soon as she shook my hand she knew exactly how to talk to me.”
Laurel was a psychic but only when she touched her subject or spent prolonged periods of time near him, which allowed her to read his vibrations. She had read Jake several times and knew him better than anyone else on earth.
“Miss Doniger told me she never intended to leave home and I would be in charge of arranging her grocery deliveries to my office, then I would bring them to her. Security was a big concern of hers, and she would only see clients who made appointments. She was nice and I liked her, and I had the feeling she was hiding from someone, that she needed protection. I did everything she asked. It wasn’t an imposition. Two weeks later, I learned Eden was keeping MBM.”
Jake had the feeling Jackie had fallen in love with Laurel. “Do you think Laurel had that kind of pull?”
“I don’t know how, but yes.” Jackie opened a drawer, took out a bottle of scotch, and held it for Jake to see.
Jake shook his head. In Miami, he had drank a beer with Maria and had felt fine, then Malvado’s goons had forced him to ingest Black Magic on Pavot Island. Even though the Mambo Pharah had drained the addiction from his body, thinking of Black Magic made him antsy.
Jackie filled his glass and gulped the alcohol. Setting the glass down, he sighed. “Then you came along and you hired Carrie. I guess I didn’t think about how weird the building had become because things were weirder outside with the scarecrows. Now they’re gone and so is Miss Doniger.”
“Tell me how she disappeared.”
“The last time I saw her was one morning a week and a half ago when I checked in on her. Everything seemed fine. When I checked in on her the next morning she didn’t answer the door, so I used my keys. She was gone but the alarm was on. Only three people had the code: her, you, and me. I checked with Central Alarm Station, and they told me the alarm hadn’t been turned off during the night.”
“She’s a psychic, not a magician. She didn’t vanish. She had to walk out that door. Maybe there’s another exit neither one of us knows about.”
Jackie smiled. “I know every square inch of this building.”
“Do you know her by any other name?”
“No, just Miss Doniger.”
“What about her background?”
Jackie took another gulp of scotch. “Nothing. But here’s the thing: after you left, she told me that if she disappeared she didn’t want me to notify anyone and she didn’t want you looking for her. I thought it was a weird thing for her to say, and then she was gone. But she was clear that she wanted us both to forget all about her.”
Rising, Jake made eye contact with the engineer. “She knows me better than that.”
Jackie smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
4
Jake stood at his office window and gazed at the Tower glowing in the night sky. Then he closed the blinds, shutting the sight out, and sat at his desk and booted his computer. He spent forty minutes going through his e-mails, which he had avoided checking on the road because he didn’t want to take a chance on his location being traced.
After first meeting Laurel Doniger he had conducted an online search, but it had turned up no useful information about her. In fact, he had found no evidence that the psychic even existed. But now he had another name: Erika Long. He located the same biography online that he had seen in the back of the novel Stormy Sands.
New York Times and USA Today best-selling author Erika Long is the creator of over 20 romance novels, including the High Seas trilogy and the award-winning Love Runs Deep. Erika is the winner of multiple literary awards, including eight from the Romance Writers of America, for which she served two terms as president, and two from Romantic Times. Erika grew up on Long Island, New York, graduated with honors from Vassar, and worked as an assistant editor at Random House before selling her first novel to Lilian Kane’s Eternity Books. She enjoys sailing, skydiving, and horseback riding.
This gave Jake plenty to go on. As he expected, the author of twenty books generated a lot of interest online, with over one hundred pages of links turning up on Google. The most recent dealt with her disappearance. From the New York Daily Post:
Police are investigating the disappearance of romance novelist Erika Long, last seen leaving her Upper West Side condo on Saturday.
“We’re terribly worried about her,” said Harla Soto, president of Eternity Books. “It’s not like her to just leave like this without telling anyone.” According to Soto, Long is not currently seeing anyone and has never been married.
Long is the best-selling author of 20 romance novels, including six for Eternity Books under her real name and fourteen for Harlequin under the pseudonym Kelly Lion. She is best known for the award-winning Stormy Sands and the High Seas trilogy.
Jake had always suspected Laurel Doniger had been in hiding, and now he knew it.
He probed deeper into her background. Erika Long was now thirty, three years younger than Jake. She had grown up in Hicksville, Long Island, where her father operated a chain of movie theaters and her mother worked in the same office. She had graduated high school with honors, then Vassar. While in college, she sold several romance novels to Harlequin under the pseudonym Holly Rebell.
After a one-year stint at Random House, Erika sold her first novel under her real name to Eternity Books, which published her next five books, including the best-selling High Seas trilogy. The books were New York Times best sellers, and she followed them with Stormy Sands, her greatest success. All six books had been optioned by Hollywood, and the High Seas trilogy was currently being produced as a TV miniseries.
After Erika’s disappearance, Harlequin reprinted her first fourteen titles under her real name. All her books remained in print, and if anything, the mystery of her disappearance had increased her sales.
Jake scrolled through the links and stopped at a newspaper headline. He clicked on the link.
Sidney Long, the owner of a Long Island movie theater chain, died on Saturday after being struck by lightning outside his Hic
ksville home. Long, 59, died one week after the disappearance of his daughter, romance novelist Erika Long. He is survived by his wife, Helena, 56.
Jake continued to dig.
A Long Island woman drowned on Saturday when waves capsized her boat in waters off Long Island Sound. Helena Long, 56, set sail alone with the purpose of spreading the ashes of her husband, Sidney, 59, who was killed by lightning one week earlier, at sea.
The Longs’ daughter, romance novelist Erika Long, disappeared two weeks earlier and has not been heard from since.
Jake paused. Two parents killed one week apart, and within two weeks of Erika Long’s disappearance. A tragic streak or something more nefarious?
Laurel was psychic; she had read his conscious and subconscious mind when they had sex. She possessed healing powers. She had absorbed the curse Katrina put on him. She had advised him with regards to Katrina’s zonbies and the transmogrification curse that transformed Edgar into a raven, and she had sent him upstate to the spiritualist assembly Lily Dale in search of information on Avademe. She was as embroiled in the world of the supernatural as he was.
He skimmed through interviews with Erika, who came off as more genuine before her success with Eternity Books. The interviews she gave during her six years with that publisher seemed rehearsed and showed less personality.
Jake did a search on Harla Soto, the president of Eternity, which led him to the company’s slick and sexy website and to another figure: Lilian Kane, the owner of the publishing house. Jake had never heard of Erika Long before seeing Maria’s copy of Stormy Sands, but he had heard of Lilian Kane. He knew her as the author of trashy romances and soap operas, and he had seen her name above the titles of cable TV movies and on perfume commercials that ran on network TV. As he recalled, his late wife, Sheryl, had kept several paperback editions of Kane’s novels in their bedroom.
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