Claimed by the Detective and the Don

Chapter 2 — Wrong Body

COLE

The hallway light buzzed and flickered, throwing everything into strips of yellow and black. I crossed the six feet between Lenore's door and Mae's room with my gun already up, my bare chest cold in the draft from somewhere. The next door hung open a few inches, same as it had a second ago. Nothing moved behind it.

I pushed it the rest of the way with my foot.

The smell hit before my eyes adjusted. Copper and something worse. Mae was on the floor by the window, half-turned toward the door like she'd tried to run and the floor had caught her first. The blood had already stopped spreading. That told me more than I wanted to know.

"Don't come in here," I said, not turning around.

Lenore came in anyway. I heard her bare feet stop hard on the floorboards behind me, heard the small sound she made, not quite a scream. My shirt hung off her shoulders, too big, the sleeves past her hands. She looked like a kid who'd put on her father's coat and walked into a war.

"That's not—" she started.

"Stay by the door."

She didn't listen, but she didn't move closer either. She just stood there with one hand pressed flat against the frame, looking at what was left of her friend, her face gone the color of the wall behind her. I'd seen a lot of people look at a lot of bodies. I'd never seen anyone go that still that fast.

I crouched down near Mae without touching anything. Her throat had been opened clean, one motion, no hesitation marks. Whoever did this had done it before. Her hands weren't marked. No defensive cuts, no broken nails, nothing under them. She hadn't fought. That meant she hadn't seen it coming, or she'd known the person well enough not to be afraid until it was too late.

I looked at the room next. Mae's robe was on the chair, folded like a woman does when she's not in a hurry. Her shoes were lined up by the bed. Nothing was knocked over except what the body had taken down on its way to the floor. No struggle before the struggle. Whoever came in here hadn't broken in. He'd been let in, easy, friendly.

That itch started behind my eyes, the one I get when a scene's telling me a story and the story doesn't match the room it's in.

"Cole." Lenore's voice came out thin. "Cole, why is she on that side of the room."

I didn't answer right away. I was already seeing it the way she meant it. Mae's bed sat against the same wall as Lenore's, same layout, same building, same floor — two rooms built like mirror images of each other. Anybody coming up those back stairs in a hurry, anybody who didn't know this floor as well as he thought, could walk through the wrong door and never know it until it was too late to matter.

The window. The chair. The angle of the bed. Even the lamp, knocked half off the nightstand, sat in almost the same spot where Lenore kept hers.

I looked at Mae's face for the first time straight on. Dark hair, near enough to Lenore's color in low light. A build close enough, height close enough, that from behind, in a dim hallway, in the half-second a man gets to make a decision he's already made twenty times in his head, it would have been an easy mistake.

Too easy.

"He came up here for you," I said.

I hadn't meant to say it out loud. The words landed in the room like another body dropping.

Lenore didn't say anything. She just kept looking at Mae, and something moved behind her eyes that wasn't shock anymore. Shock has a shape to it, a kind of blankness. This wasn't blank. This looked like recognition trying not to happen on her face.

"Lenore." I stood up, came toward her slow, the way you'd come toward something that might run. "You know something."

"I don't—" She stopped herself before the lie finished forming. That was almost worse than if she'd said it clean.

Down the hall, a door opened. Then another. Voices started up low and fast, the particular hum of a building full of people pretending they hadn't heard anything until they absolutely had to admit they had. Somebody was going to call it in, or already had. The band downstairs had stopped playing. I hadn't noticed when.

"Lenore. Look at me."

She did, finally, and for a second I saw the whole weight of whatever she was carrying sitting right behind her eyes, close enough to touch, close enough that if I just asked the right question she might actually answer it. Her mouth opened. I waited.

Footsteps came up the back stairs, heavy, unhurried, the kind of walk that belonged to a man who owned whatever he was walking into.

Lenore's face changed before I even turned around. The fear didn't leave it. It just got company.

"Sal's coming," she said, and closed her mouth on everything else she might have told me.