the bottom of the page was a barely legible scrawl in a feminine hand: Waterfront murders?
Dorian dropped the paper. He’d foolishly assumed that Gwen’s interest in the triple murders on the docks had been nothing more than that of any reporter doggedly pursuing yet another story about gangland assassinations.
None of the remaining papers shed further light on Murphy’s conjecture or Gwen’s query. The drawer at the front of the desk was locked. Dorian forced it open and found a folder bulging with lined notepaper and more clippings. The label read Dad’s Notes. Dorian laid the folder on the table and spread the clippings on the desktop.
About half of the articles were stories covering homicides that had occurred over the past two years, ranging from presumed mob hits to unsolved murders. Notations written in a masculine hand decorated the browned margins, most unintelligible.
A single torn sheet of white paper, neatly typed, revealed Murphy’s thoughts.
They exist. I don’t know who they are yet, but I do know that I’m on the verge of uncovering something important, something that will expose the killers and vindicate me.
It is increasingly clear that this organization bears no loyalty toward any of the various gangs in Manhattan, but has a very specific agenda of its own. Today a man came to see me, calling himself by the name of Aadon and claiming that he possessed invaluable details of several past murders that would open my eyes to a world hidden from all but a privileged few. He brought with him a book, which I have only just begun to read. I now have reason to believe
And there the note ended. In the bottom margin Gwen had written: Pages missing. Why? What book? Who is Aadon?
The last three words were heavily underscored. Dorian rubbed his chin and stared at the closed, dusty curtains behind the desk. Aadon. He had never heard the name, nor did he have any idea to which book Eamon had referred. The reporter’s ideas would certainly seem the ravings of a lunatic to most humans. But it appeared as if he had unwittingly come close to exposing a truth mankind had only suspected throughout its history: the existence of the nonhuman races.
Dorian set the typed page aside. Beneath it, clipped to a sheet of thin cardboard, was a photograph. It showed a youngish man with a narrow face and intense eyes, and underneath someone had written: Aadon. On the reverse side of the cardboard was glued yet another clipping, this one about a corpse, badly burned, dredged from the river on the afternoon of February 4, 1926. That had been only a few weeks before Eamon Murphy died.
Murphy’s theory should have died with him. But he had a daughter who had kept his notes and clippings, a reporter in her own right. Her father couldn’t have known about the most recent murders, but Gwen did. She knew the corpses had been drained of blood, and she had clearly decided that there was some merit in her father’s ideas, or at least that she had an obligation to continue his investigation.
And what did she have to build on? Blood cults. Human corpses bled white. A mysterious man who had turned up in the river—perhaps after he’d promised Eamon information that would prove his theories.
It all added up to a very dangerous equation. And Gwen was in the middle of it.
The apartment door rattled. Dorian shoved the papers back into the folder and was just putting them in the drawer when Gwen walked in.
“You’re up!” she said, her eyes sparkling with pleasure. “Are you sure you should be—” She saw what he had in his hands and stopped. Her gaze flew accusingly to his.
Dorian backed away from the desk and lifted his hands as if she were holding a Tommy gun pointed at his head. She charged forward, slammed the drawer shut and spun to confront him.
“You broke into my desk,” she said. “Why?”
No ready answer came to Dorian’s mind. “I was curious about your profession,” he said.
Her shoulders relaxed. “If you’d wanted to know,” she said, “all you had to do was ask.”
“I apologize.” He retreated to the sofa and sat down, hoping to allay her distress. “I was unaware that there were aspects of your work you preferred to keep secret.”
“A locked drawer usually means—” She took a deep breath and blew it out. “Okay. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know, as long as you don’t tell anyone at the Sentinel.”
“About your father’s ideas?”
She nodded, swivelled the steno chair to face him and sat down. “I only came back to the apartment because I forgot my notebook,” she said, “but a few more minutes won’t matter.” She pulled her skirt over her knees. “How much did you read?”
“Enough to know that your father’s theory of a murderous cult did not meet with the approval of his employers at the Sentinel.”
“That’s right.” She slumped in the chair. “It was almost all Dad thought about during the year before he died. Everyone saw how much he’d changed. When he approached the city editor with the cult story…” She knotted her hands in her lap. “They thought he’d gone crazy.”
“Had he?”
“No! He…” She sighed. “The odd thing is that he seemed to become very quiet in the last weeks, as if he’d given up. It wasn’t like him. He wouldn’t talk to me about it. And all these notes…” She made a helpless gesture. “I didn’t know anything about them until he was gone.”
“He was a gifted reporter, was he not?”
She smiled wistfully. “He was the best there was.”
“Then you accept his theories.”
“At first all I could think of was proving he was right. But in spite of all the work Dad had done, all this stuff he’d locked away in his files, he’d left too many questions unanswered. Until the cops found the bodies on the waterfront, it didn’t seem I had much to work with.”
Dorian was careful to keep his expression one of restrained interest. “But the state of those bodies led you to believe that your father might have been correct.”
“It’s crazy, I know. But I’ve never heard of regular mobsters who did that kind of thing.”
“Indeed.” Dorian settled more deeply into the sofa’s sprung cushions. “So you’ve continued to pursue the story on your father’s behalf?”
“Strictly on the Q.T. Officially the triple murder case belongs to Randolph Hewitt. He’s one of the senior reporters in the city room. He never liked my dad, and he already suspects I’m poaching on his territory.”
“You don’t think he’ll support your father’s conclusions?”
“Even reporters are human. Sometimes they see only what they want to see.”
Dorian curled his fingers around the arm of the sofa. “Do you have any specific information that would confirm the cult theory?”
“Not so far. But I’m getting close. Remember how I told you that I was supposed to meet a witness on the waterfront the day those hooligans introduced me to the fishes? That lead hasn’t panned out, but there was this man, Aadon…” She smoothed an imaginary wrinkle in her skirt. “After I read through Dad’s notes and saw the photograph, I realized that the same guy was found in the river not long after he met with Dad.” She shook her head. “I hit a dead end with that lead, too, but I’m sure I missed something important. This time I’ll push on until I find the truth.”
“And what of this book?”
“That’s the biggest puzzle of all. There wasn’t any sort of unusual book among Dad’s things. And he didn’t mention it again in his notes. It’s as if he wanted to keep it hidden.”
Dorian leaned forward, unable to contain his disquiet. “Have you considered what you’ll do if you discover