“Stella,” Katie said aloud, “was it Danny? Danny Zigler?”
Stella frowned. I…no. I don’t know. I don’t know! But go…please. It’s dark. Go now, and help me, please help me. Go, and don’t get yourself killed, or how the hell will you help me?
The ghost was finding her personality. Brash in life, she would be so in death.
Katie turned.
She knew the city so well. Knew the streets, the legends, even where trees grew and bushes were thick, where foliage had been cut back, where locals gathered, and where they did not.
She knew her city.
But she felt as if she was being watched.
As if she had been followed.
And while just a block away the city was alive and bursting with music and colorful revelers, those who had come from near and from far, she felt alone.
But she knew it; she had been seen.
She had been seen talking to thin air, right at the place where Stella had been killed.
Something seemed to creep along her nape. Something more frightening than she had ever experienced. Not of another world, but of this world.
She sensed evil. Living, breathing evil.
He was hidden, watching. Her senses seemed acutely attuned, and it was as if she could hear him standing still, and yet causing a slight rustling. Watching her. Stalking her. Waiting, his breath coming fast, his hands clenched at his sides. Strong hands, the kind that could quickly cause suffocation, and then squeeze the life from the living.
The ghost was agitated, too.
She began to fade.
“Run!” she said.
And Katie did.
Cleaned up, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, her face scrubbed, her hair in a ponytail, Stella’s friend Morgana Willams seemed like a woman in her late thirties-in fact, she looked like the girl next door.
“I know who you are,” she told David wearily.
He had offered to buy her a drink. She hadn’t wanted alcohol; just a cup of coffee. It was still readily available.
They sat at a little open-air table in the far back of the establishment, within sight of many who were escaping the music and yet still partying. Some looked as if they were already preparing for hellacious hangovers the next day.
Some had been moderate, and were watching out for their friends.
“I didn’t kill your friend,” he said.
She smiled, a dampness about her eyes. “I believe you. Of course, I wasn’t here ten years ago. I came down from the farmlands of Indiana. I didn’t want a boring life, you know. I’m not sure I exactly planned on this life, but…hey. Maybe I’ll find Mr. Right somewhere.”
“You never know,” he told her.
“The police already questioned me,” she told him.
“Well, it makes sense,” he told her.
“They questioned everyone in the club. One of the guys is your relative, isn’t he? A cop named Liam Beckett.”
“He’s my cousin.”
“Yeah, you can tell.”
“He’s a good guy,” David told her.
She nodded. “He was real respectful. He didn’t treat us like we were all whores-or the underbelly of society.”
David smiled. “Well, you are gainfully employed. And, by the way, I thought you might have been a dancer-as in musicals-at some time. Were you?”
Her face lit up. She was almost pretty. “You could tell that? Really?”
He nodded.
“I started off in the Big Apple-New York City,” she said. “I even worked Off Broadway. But then I met Joe, and Joe introduced me to…a few friends who weren’t friends at all. Cocaine and heroin, and before I knew it… Never mind. You’re not here to listen to my story, are you?”
“You can dance,” he assured her simply.
She sipped her coffee. “I can’t tell you anything I haven’t already told the cops. Stella did have a thing with Danny Zigler-on again, off again. And she had some regulars, but she didn’t even tell me about them. She said that she was sworn to silence, ’cause big muckety-mucks never wanted anyone to know that they hung around with folks like us. I told her that the muckety-mucks were ashamed that they needed help to get it up, you know what I mean? But-you think that Danny might have killed her? Danny always seems like a nice guy. He’s not ambitious, but…lots of guys down here aren’t exactly balls of fire, you know what I mean?”
“So you can’t name anyone else she might have had a regular relationship with?”
Morgana sniffed. “You got a cigarette?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “No, but I’ll get you one.”
The bar itself was still open. The fellow running it seemed to be Eastern European, possibly Russian. When David asked for a pack of cigarettes, the fellow’s accent confirmed his thought. Russian or Ukrainian.
The bartender didn’t know him, and he accepted the money for the cigarettes with no comment on his past or the day’s events.
David brought the cigarettes to Morgana. She lit up and inhaled greedily, looking at David. “Yeah, yeah, they’re going to kill me one day. But they keep me off the hard stuff.”