Page 6 of 2045 Clementine Lane: Catherine

We begin the laborious trek around the building again. But he catches up to us quickly. Without saying anything, he nudges both of us out of the way, his largebody bustling us aside easily, and picks up the woman with one small grunt of effort.

Lizzie leads the way, her stride never faltering in her six-inch heels. I follow close behind, barefoot on the dirty sidewalk. The Handsome Stranger walks by my side in perfect silence as he carries the girl. When I sneak a glance at him, he is looking down at my face, his expression carefully guarded.

Lizzie unlocks her car and opens the back passenger door. The man crouches down and gently places the woman on the seat before stepping aside.

“Thank you.”

He doesn’t reply. Reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket, he pulls out a black business card and hands it to me. The card is thin between my fingers. The matte black paper is offset by a silver disco ball on the front. On the back, there is only a name, Nico Drakos, and a cellphone number.

With one last look at my face, he turns and walks away. That’s it. No questions. No knight in shining armor routine.

I watch his retreating back for a moment as I slip the card into the hidden pocket of my dress. As he gets further away, so do the fantasies he brought with him. He’sthatman. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed son of a third-generation mogul, living in a penthouse suite daddy pays for.

“Are you okay to drive?” I ask Lizzie, putting the stranger from my mind.

She turns to me, her eyebrow raised. “Well,I’mnot hallucinating on mushrooms.”

I get in the car and lean back in the chair, relaxing,exhalingfor the first time in what can only be twenty minutes but what feels like hours. Colors dance behindmy eyelids still, but they’re warm and slow now, a soothing kaleidoscope.

The girl is quiet in the back seat. As we drive toward the freeway, the blare of sirens shatters the night. Lizzie throws her head back and howls like a wolf, her mocking yowl strangely harmonic to the shrill scream of the LAPD’s sirens.

I smile and shake my head.

“Catherine.”

We both glance at the back seat. The girl is slumped against the door, half-sitting, half-lying down.

“My name is Catherine.”

“Well, well, well, Toni-Baby, she talks!”

“Leave her be.”

“Welcome to the party, Pussy Cat,” Lizzie says.

She drums her hands on the steering wheel and howls again, pulling a reluctant smile from me, and when I glance back at Catherine again, I can see that she’s not quite sure of the warren she’s just landed in. “Too late to run now, Catherine.”

To her credit, she doesn’t flinch or draw back at my dry tone. She turns those oversized, green eyes on me and nods tiredly, knowing full well what she’s walked into.

Chapter 1

Aiden

June 12, 2008 – Four Years Later

“What do we have, Mani?”I ask as I approach.

A few sergeants linger a safe distance away from the body, their dark navy uniforms stark against the green of the grass they’re standing on. They’ve strung crime scene tape as best they could. It’s haphazard, but I don’t worry about it. The six-foot, chain-link fence should keep the stragglers and the morbidly curious out.

The first responders have placed a tarpaulin over the corpse. From where I’m standing, the body is just that: A body. There’s no face, no gruesome crime, no imaginings of a life unfinished. Just a lump under a plain piece of cloth that was salvaged from a police cruiser as an afterthought.

“Female. Suspicious death. Positive identification found lying next to the body IDs the victim asElizabeth York. Age, thirty-two. Listed address: Two-zero-four-five Clementine Lane, Los Feliz. A woman,” he checks his notes, “Maria Torres, saw her lying on the dock from the sidewalk. She called out. When the victim was unresponsive, she placed the call to 911.”

“Time?”

“About an hour ago.”

“First responders came out?”

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