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  Nick lowered his eyes.

  “So you were there. Standing right there, I mean. Almost on top of her.”

  “Yes.” Close enough to smell her.

  “No wonder you’re freaked out.”

  From the corner of his eye, Nick noticed Sara’s gaze traveling down his legs, taking in the mud drying on his shoes.

  “It scares me”—Sara said, shivering slightly—“and I wasn’t even there. To see a body like that, it must be pretty frightening—no matter how many times you’ve been around crimes like that before.”

  “It is,” Nick admitted.

  “I didn’t really get a good look at the pictures. But I could see how violent the crime was. The guy who did it must have been crazy.”

  “That’s not what scares me.”

  Sara was silent, waiting for Nick to meet her stare, waiting for him to continue.

  “It scares me more how sane he was.”

  Again, Sara shivered. “What do you mean?”

  Nick regretted that he had let them dwell so long on the murder.

  “Tell me,” Sara said, prodding him.

  “How the same person can be one thing at night,” Nick said at last, “and then something else during the day.”

  Nick read Sara’s confusion.

  “The guy stabbed this woman so many times—so brutally—she was nearly unrecognizable,” he explained. “This same guy, though, takes the time to gather her up and sneak her out to the bank of this river to dispose of the body. That’s what scares me. That the same person can somehow reconcile the two realities.”

  “Because you think maybe we’re all capable of doing the same thing.” Sara’s eyes hadn’t left his face. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “To some degree—yeah, maybe.”

  “Sane during the day. Killers at night.”

  Once again, Nick looked down at the table.

  “You think you’re capable of it?”

  Nick turned Sara’s words over in his mind. He found himself wondering whether she was asking him a question. The truth is you’ve got to be a little insane to work a job like this. His own voice seemed to resonate in his head, and he felt his face flush.

  “It still sounds pretty amazing,” Sara said into the awkward silence. “Your job, I mean.”

  “And what about you?” Nick asked her, determined to change the subject. “What do you do? You’re not a student either, are you?”

  A slight darkness clouded Sara’s expression. There was something overwhelmingly light about Sara, he realized in contrast. Her hair was silvery blond. Her eyes were translucently green. Her teeth were dazzlingly white. Her skin was ivory. Still, as radiant as she was, there was something mysterious about this woman in front of him, too, something elusive he couldn’t define. “No,” she said, “I’m not a student, either. Is it so obvious that I’m too old?”

  Loosening up a little, Nick looked up and down her body, from the top of her head to her toes. After all, she had invited him to. “Not exactly,” he said. “It’s not that you look too old to be a student. You seem too focused.”

  “That’s the last thing I am.” Sara’s laugh was genuine, and Nick felt himself relax even more. “Just say it, I look too old to be a student.”

  He refused the bait and pushed the compliment another way. “Too polished anyway.”

  “I’m an actress,” Sara said. “Well, off and on, anyway. Off right now. That’s why I’m back here in Seattle.”

  “You’re from Seattle originally?”

  “My parents live in Bellevue.”

  “You’re staying with them?”

  Sara shrugged. “For a while. Maybe I’ll get my own place one of these days. Or maybe I’ll just head back down to LA.”

  “You’ve got something to head down there for? A project, I mean—a movie?”

  Sara shook her head. “I’ve been lucky enough, I guess. But I haven’t pursued it as much as I should. I’m thinking maybe I’ll do something else entirely. Get into business, I don’t know.”

  Nick’s cell phone vibrated, and he glanced down at its screen. Recognizing Laura Daly’s personal line from the Telegraph building, he remembered the staff meeting this morning, the first one for the month of October, when assignments would be handed out by the editors. The senior editor would no doubt be wondering where he was. “Excuse me,” Nick said. “I’ve got to take this.” He pressed a button on his phone and raised it to his ear. “Laura?”

  “Were you planning to grace us with your presence, Nick?”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Nick threw a quick, embarrassed smile at Sara.

  “Don’t sweat it. We’ll talk when you come in. Listen, you somewhere close? There’s something I’d like you to do now. A couple of blocks from here. It can’t wait. You got a pen?”

  Nick cradled the phone against his shoulder and searched through his bag for pen and paper. After scrawling down an address, he snapped the phone shut and looked apologetically at Sara. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Oh, really? That’s too bad.” When Sara glanced down at her watch, Nick noticed a gold and platinum Rolex loose on her wrist, its face set with diamonds. Not exactly the watch of a struggling actress.

  “I wish I didn’t have to. It’s work.” He closed the lid of his laptop and gathered his belongings from the table, scooping them into the soft leather shoulder bag he carried as he pushed his chair back from the table.

  “Well, I enjoyed meeting you, Nick.”

  “It was good to meet you, too,” Nick said, in a hurry.

  “You’re not forgetting something?”

  Nick stopped to make certain he had grabbed all his things from the tabletop, then looked up at Sara, meeting her friendly gaze. He wasn’t certain what she was referring to, and his expression reflected his puzzlement.

  “I thought maybe you were going to ask me out.” Sara’s tone was playful, but she dropped her eyes, bashful.

  Nick ran his fingers across his unshaven cheeks as he tried to assess her sincerity. He hadn’t been expecting the approach.

  “I have a weakness for shy guys,” Sara said, as if she were answering an unspoken question.

  “I thought the pictures might have frightened you off.”

  Sara laughed sweetly. “The pictures are why I’m here.”

  Nick measured her for a few more seconds, once again intrigued by this woman. There was more to her than her pretty face, he thought. Her appearance camouflaged it at first, but then, as much as her beauty validated her, the juxtaposition served too to heighten the observation. She was dangerous. At last, Nick relaxed into a smile. “I suppose I could ask you out for a coffee. But we’ve done that already, haven’t we?”

  Sara met his eyes. “It’ll have to be something more, then.”

  Repeating the innocent words in his mind, Nick felt a sudden thrill pass through him, taking his breath away. “That sounds promising.”

  “Give him an inch and he takes a yard. I meant dinner.”

  “Really?”

  “You sound tentative. You don’t want me to see who you are after dark?”

  “Now you’re just mocking me. I’m shy, that’s all. You said it yourself. That’s what makes me so irresistible.”

  “You go to work now,” Sara said. “Here’s my number.” She reached across the table and took Nick’s phone from him, tapping a few numbers onto the display and then saving the number under her name. “Give me a call. I’m free tonight, if that’s not too soon.”

  “No,” Nick said, wondering how he would be able to wait that long. “It’s not too soon. I’m free tonight, too.”

  Sara watched him as Nick found his way through the crowded coffee shop to the exit. It was an unguarded moment for her, and her face reflected what she felt inside. Had he turned back around, her wistful expression would have confused him. Standing behind him as she had worked up her nerve to approach him, looking over his shoulder at the photographs this self-possessed man had taken that morn
ing at the crime scene, Sara hadn’t expected to like him. Not like this. Not this much.

  chapter 4

  After leaving the coffee shop, Nick headed downtown. He parked his car at the Telegraph, then cut back a few blocks on foot to Fourth Avenue to stake out the address the senior editor had given him over the phone. The rain had let up, but a drizzle was soaking through his clothes. Across the street from his target, he took his camera from his bag, checking its settings as he killed time, brushing water off its lens, scoping out the neighborhood. A few pedestrians were wandering in and out of some of the storefronts, but for the most part this section of town was abandoned in the middle of the day. A wind whipped up for a few seconds, scattering cold raindrops in its wake. Nick turned his back to it, waiting for it to die.

  The address belonged to a nondescript three-story brick building. A massage parlor occupied the second and third floors, above a rundown store selling vitamins and health supplements. A small neon sign glowed feebly in a curtained window on the second floor, spelling out MASSAGE in dusty red letters. The heavy blackout curtains in the windows had been sitting undisturbed so long they were streaked and faded. One or two had come loose from their rods and had been tacked back into place with nails.

  After ten minutes, the flimsy, worn door leading up to the second floor hadn’t been disturbed. Except for the glow of neon, there wasn’t any sign of life upstairs. The clerk in the vitamin shop on the ground floor had spotted Nick, leaning against a street lamp half hidden by an old and rusty, junked car, and every so often the greasy-haired man would glance at him, trying to figure out what he was doing there. Nick looked up at the sky, measuring the light. It was dark, but he wasn’t going to have to worry about the resolution of the photographs. He made a few adjustments to the camera’s settings, then snapped a picture, examining it for shadow on the LCD screen. Satisfied, he raised the camera back to his eye and took a few pictures of the neon sign and the front door.

  Some minutes later, an unmarked squad car slowed in front of the parlor before continuing down the street. Nick watched it slow again at the end of the block and come to a stop at the curb in front of a fire hydrant. The brake lights glowed bright red, seeming to streak the heavy air with their color, then went dark. All four doors swung open. Nick zoomed the camera in a few notches, then snapped several pictures of the street cops as they stepped from the car.

  An unmarked white van with wired windows followed half a minute behind the cops, pulling to a stop just in front of the car. The lead officer went over to the side window and said a few words to the driver of the van, then turned to face the other three uniformed policemen. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get this done.” He let his eyes travel the length of the street. Nick was aware when the officer’s gaze paused on him, taking him in. The policeman gave Nick a nearly imperceptible nod, then, checking his watch, led his squad toward the parlor. “Me ’n Wilkins’ll do the honors upstairs. Horace, you stay out here in the street. Murphy, you take a run down the alley there and find the back of the building. Radio in when you’ve got the rear covered.”

  “You got it,” one of the cops said.

  The officer glanced at the sky. “Hoof it, why don’t you, Murph. It looks like it’s going to pour again in a few minutes here.”

  The cop disappeared down a narrow alley halfway down the block. Nick could hear the scrape of his footsteps echoing off its close walls, then the rattle of a metal gate in a chain-link fence.

  When his radio squawked a few moments later, the officer checked his gun, then led another of the cops through the scarred, peeling door to the second floor, leaving the fourth patrolman behind them on the sidewalk. Nick took a quick snapshot of the two policemen disappearing into the building.

  They were standing barely twenty feet apart on an otherwise empty street, and it didn’t surprise Nick when the remaining cop addressed him. “You with the paper?”

  “With the Telegraph,” Nick replied.

  “You drew the short straw, huh?”

  Nick shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s a pretty routine bust,” the cop offered. “We don’t expect any trouble.”

  “It’s not so often you close these places down.”

  The cop slid his hands beneath the edges of his utility belt and squared his shoulders. “No, not so often,” he conceded.

  “What makes this one worth the trouble?”

  The cop shook his head. “They say the girls are underage, I guess.”

  Nick nodded, remembering that Daly had told him the same thing on the phone. They say they’re trafficking in young girls from China. Laura Daly had spoken the words strangely, without much feeling—like this was something that might go down every day. Her lack of emotion had surprised Nick a little, and the words stuck with him.

  From upstairs, a single, truncated shriek rent the silence. The cop twisted to look up at the curtained windows. “That’ll be one of the girls,” he said. “Sounds like they probably caught her in mid-session.” He smirked at Nick. “Shouldn’t be long now.”

  Five minutes later, the flimsy door swung back open. Nick raised his camera to his eye. The first person into the street was an old Chinese woman dressed in a robe and slippers, her hands cuffed in front of her. She was followed closely by the lead officer. “Why don’t you get over here, Horace”—he said to the cop, yanking the door all the way open—“give me a hand with this.”

  As the cop joined him, the officer reached back into the building to lead the next person out—one of the prostitutes. Nick snapped a picture as she stepped into the street. She was anything but underage. She was short and squat, wearing tight black pants that failed to hide her lumpy legs, a pink shirt streaked with stains. She bent her head forward as she emerged from the stairwell, covering her face with her hands in shame. Four more women followed, all of them Asian. None of them was attractive, and, like the first one out the door, not one of them was young.

  Three customers stepped outside behind the prostitutes. Nick took a picture of each of the men as they stepped into the street. The first was an awkward young man with a pimply red face. The second, a tall man in a plaid shirt and jeans, looked like a construction worker. Finally, dressed in a cheap dark blue sports jacket and a pair of ill-fitting khaki pants, a stout, mustached man with a thick head of wiry hair was escorted through the doorway by the last cop. His eyes drawn to a flash of gold in the weak light, Nick zoomed in on the heavy wedding band encircling the stout man’s pudgy finger and pressed down on the shutter.

  The lead officer spoke a few words into his radio, and the driver swung the white van around and met them in front of the building. Nick took pictures of the police helping the prostitutes and their johns into the van. The cop had been right. It had been a routine bust. There was nothing spectacular here, but Nick figured he had captured the tawdry color Daly wanted for the spread. The van pulled away to take the offenders to the station to be booked.

  About to return his camera to his shoulder bag, Nick was surprised to see the stout man in the blue sports jacket still engaged in a conversation with the lead officer. Why hadn’t they arrested him like everyone else? Nick snapped a quick picture of the officer unlocking the handcuffs from the man’s wrists, then at last continued down the street toward the Telegraph.

  Nick was staring at his computer in the cavernous newsroom. The room was bustling with reporters. The desks were all occupied, and messengers were running down the aisles and corridors. The editors were hunched over copy, laying it out and readying it for the next edition. After turning in his pictures of the raid, Nick had caught the second half of the staff meeting late that morning. Afterward, though, he hadn’t sat down to begin his new assignment. Instead, he Googled Sara Garland on his computer, and he spent the rest of the day sorting through the few images he found.

  “What a beauty,” Laura Daly said over Nick’s shoulder.

  Nick hadn’t heard the senior editor approach over the din of the newsroom, and he swi
veled in his chair to look up at the tall, gray-haired woman. Despite the fact that she was large boned and dressed in a predominantly masculine wardrobe, there was something unmistakably feminine about Laura Daly. She ran the paper on a shoestring, and she demanded the respect of the entire staff, from her editors down to the clerks. Nevertheless, she rarely raised her voice. She never tried to dominate at all. Instead, her authority derived from her character. She led because people wanted to follow. Nick tracked her eyes to the screen of his computer. “I met her today.”

  “Did you now?” Daly studied the screen. “There’s something curious about her eyes. She looks like she’s seen a lot.”

  “How much you think someone like her can earn acting?” Nick asked. “Bit parts, I mean, on a few TV shows.” He was thinking of the gold and platinum Rolex on Sara’s wrist.

  Daly considered the question. “I have no idea. They don’t earn all that much, though. A few hundred dollars—a thousand dollars—an episode if they’re lucky. I don’t recognize her. You?”

  “No.” Nick imagined that he would have remembered her if he had ever seen her on the screen, even in a small part. She was that beautiful. “Her name’s Sara,” he said. “Sara Garland.”

  “Garland?” Daly let a quiet whistle sneak out through her teeth.

  “You know her?”

  “Not her,” Daly said. “Her dad. You work for him.”

  Nick looked up at his boss, perplexed.

  “Her stepfather is Jason Hamlin. That’s Jillian’s daughter. Now I say it, she even looks like Jillian, doesn’t she?”

  Nick had seen Jason Hamlin in the office a few times, but never his wife. “I’ve never met Jillian.”

  “Google her, too, why don’t you?” Daly chuckled dryly. “So it doesn’t really matter how much she earns acting.”

  “She said she’s living with her parents in Bellevue.”

  “That’s the Hamlins,” Daly confirmed. “Their house is on Lake Washington. Right on the lake, with its own pier. It’s a place Jay Gatsby would have found impressive.”

  “I’m having dinner with her tonight.” Nick regretted the note of pride in his voice.