Chapter 1

She closed her eyes and could feel the waves of music sweep through her. She no longer heard it, only feeling the vibrations flow through the air, passing through the core of her body. Flowing past out, it was subtly altered after slipping through her body.

She concentrated on the strained notes of just one of the instruments, the violin. She could feel the bow in her fingers, strings dragged across the arch of chords. The exquisite friction that caused the sounds-- the sounds imprisoned in wood before bursting forth in glory.

Each droning reverberation slips from the instrument, playing across her skin, teasing her flesh. Then flowing into her, uncaringly ripping through her nerves as it passes. She could feel the hollow ache as the music left her body.

With the hollowness, came the sweet torture of anticipation in her soul. She only had to wait for the music to assault her again.

But nothing came.

She opened her eyes slowly, reluctantly as the noise of the applause around her assaulted her. The cacophony sounded painful in comparison to what she had just experienced. There was jostling movement around her. It was the audience standing, clapping.

She felt weak and drained, violated by the loss of the music, but she stood anyway. Joining the herd, clapping mindlessly like she felt the others were. There was no way they could have felt the music as intimately as she had.

She could see the stage again, the object of her attention, standing in front of the symphony, holding the violin as if it was a baby. The young woman she knew intimately as well, but no one else in this audience could possibly know that.

"That was really quite good, wasn't it?" The man to her right said.

She glanced at him and smiled, nodding her agreement. Inside she was filled with repulsion. Not with him, but with the farce she had to put up with. She knew his intention. She knew what he wanted, but she also knew that it would never happen. Still she had to encourage him, to keep up appearances. It sickened her that this was what she had to do just to survive.

She stopped clapping, reaching and giving her date's hand a squeeze. He thought it was an escalation of their flirting. He saw it as a sign that things were going well. That the future he envisioned with his date was still a possibility.

To her the gesture was an apology, a fruitless effort to make up for what she was putting him through. The gesture paled against what she knew she was doing to him.

She turned her eyes back to the stage, back to the blonde haired figure. For a moment their eyes met. An unspoken, private conversation ensued, a split second shared across the gulf of people.

She smiled up at her, beaming with pride and excitement. Happy for what her lover had accomplished tonight--overjoyed in the moment of unbridled art. Awestruck with her skill and humbled that she even had the opportunity to know her so well.

Then the moment was gone, the violinist attention drawn away by a young boy handing her flowers that had been tossed to the stage.

She knew that her date would soon escort her back to her flat. They will stand on the stoop and she would thank him for a wonderful evening. He will ask if they could do it again and she would agree. She will give him a demure kiss on the cheek and then retreat up the stairs.

Once in her flat she will wait the painful hour or two that it would take for her lover to arrive. And then, for a little while at least, everything would be perfect.

Something grabbed her, dragged her from the sidewalk. She went to scream, but felt a hand clasp tightly across her mouth. Something cold and metallic pressed to her throat.

"Bernadette Lysette Edwards?" A voice hissed in her ear as she tried to struggle. "Or should I say, Lisa Cook? That is your real name, isn't it?"

The hands released her, pushing her forward, causing her to smash against the brick wall of the alley way. The pain shot through her face, causing her to scream out, but the only noise she heard was a sickening gurgle. She felt something warm on her neck, dripping.

"Don't bother to answer." The voice hissed again. "I already know the answer. I know everything about you. Besides, you couldn't answer if you wanted to."

She turned around, leaning against the wall heavily. A darkened figure faced her, face obscured by a cloth tied around his upper face, leaving just his mouth exposed. In his hand he held a knife coated with a dark substance.

She clutched to her neck and felt the blood seeping out of her. She screamed again, but still nothing more than a gurgle erupted from her. In front of her the figure sickeningly licked the blood, her blood, from the edge of the blade.

"Unclean." He hissed back at her, his teeth stained crimson. "Unclean."

She stumbled forward, trying to run. The figure blocked the exit back onto the street her only path to safety was to run further down the alley.

The figure didn't move, letting her hope that there was an escape. She spotted a door in the alley and started to pound on it. Her fists echoing empty against the metal. She still tried to scream, but only sickening pops of sounds came out of her.

"Unclean." The figure repeated again, stalking closer now. "And no one will help you. You'll die here. Alone. In the dirt of the gutters. Just like whores do."

The door didn't give and there was no sign that anyone was on the other side. She attempted to run further, but felt increasingly weak. She could feel the warm sticky touch of her own blood soaking the front of her dress.

Before she even made it three more feet, he was on top of her.

She woke as the first light of dawn crept through the window and shined down on her face. Her back ached as she stretched. She'd fallen asleep sitting in the corner of the couch. Now the ache in her back would remind her all day of the mistake.

She frowned as realization slowly slipped back into her mind.

She'd fallen asleep waiting for Bernadette to arrive. She couldn't remember when she fell asleep, all she did realize was that Bernadette never woke her. And that was unusual. She walked to her apartment door and looked at the floor. Nothing.

She had expected to find a note there. Something to explain that things had gone late and she couldn't make it. That Bernadette didn't want to wake her. They'd talk later, maybe for lunch or something.

She wanted to share the evening's triumph with Bernadette. She cursed everything that kept them apart. They were unable to even enjoy such simple pleasures together. All she wanted to do was to congratulate and celebrate with her. She understood that they couldn't do that in public, but at the very least she wanted to be able to do it in private.

She looked at the clock and saw she had to be at work in an hour. But she still had enough time to do one thing.

She dug through the drawer near the door and found a penny. She carried it out into the hallway and stopped in front of the phone on the wall and dropped the penny into the box next to it. She then dialed the number she knew so well.

"Good morning. May I speak to Lisa please?" She asked when the phone connected.

"Serena?" The voice at the other end replied, Serena recognized it as Lisa's mother.

"Yes." Serena replied, "I know it's early, but I just wanted to congratulate her."

Lisa's parents thought that their daughter and Serena were just very good friends. An illusion the couple was happy to maintain. They had no reason to question any more. After all, no respectable girl would be anything more.

"We thought she had spent the night at your place." Her mother replied, sounding surprised. "With the concert and all, we thought she might have been late and decided to stay in the city."

Serena blinked at this, confused. She felt a sick feeling curling up in her stomach. That Lisa might have grown tired of her. That all they shared really just was a phase for her. And she'd had grown out of it.

"No." Serena replied, doing her best to try to sound calm. Not let her emotions show. "When she gets in, ask her to call me?"

Serena didn't wait for the answer she just hung the phone up. She felt like collapsing in the hallway.

He thought he'd seen it all. He'd spent three years in the precinct, filing papers, handing out mail. He spent another fifteen walking the beat. Five years as a detective, and he was planning to call it a career shortly.

In the process of those years he'd seen things that would make grown men cry. He'd numbed himself to the sheer barbarism people could inflict on each other. If nothing else, people's creativity seemed limitless when dreaming up new horrors to inflict onto one another.

"The blood trail goes from here..." The younger police officer pointed to a metal door covered with bloodstains. "To back there, where we found the body."

Detective Warren surveyed the alleyway. It smelled and looked like a slaughter house. He couldn't believe that something like this had gone on and no one noticed sooner. The alley way would have normally stunk of human waste, but the acidic smell of drying blood was overwhelming even that.

"We thought she was just another prostitute." The officer commented, impassionedly. "Then we found this."

He motioned towards the small violin case on the alley floor.

"Not the sort of thing your average street walker carries." The detective observed. His eyes followed the blood stain on the alley wall, near the street opening. The pool of blood on the ground beneath it. Then the footsteps tracked to the door.

"Do we have a name for the girl yet?" He asked the younger police officer.

"Lisa Cook." The officer replied, matter of factly. "She's a musician or something over at the opera house. Goes by the name Bernadette. Twenty two years old. We think she was on her way home from the Opera House."

The detective glanced back out onto the street, placing the location on the map he had of the city in had in his head. "Where does she live?"

"Long Island. Brentwood." The officer replied.

The detective thought about it for a second, "Train station is in the other direction."

The officer glanced at him, confused. "What?"

"I said, the train station is in the other direction." The detective shook his head, stepping further back into the alley way, to where the body still lay on top of refuse piles. Thankfully covered with a sheet, but the sheet couldn't hide the blood splashed onto the wall.

He frowned, "Where's the damn photographer? Get his ass over here so we can show this girl some damn respect!"

It was a bad enough that she had to die here, the least they could do was move her body before the rats got to it. The officer nodded and started barking orders.

Worse, he didn't need some rich family to show up and question their procedures too. The last thing he needed was something threatening his retirement.

The detective just shook his head as he looked up at the alley wall, the word 'Unclean' scrawled across it in blood.

With nothing else to occupy her mind, Serena threw herself into her morning work.

The crates from Thimphu would be arriving this afternoon, if everything went according to schedule. Which meant the exhibition hall still needed to be cleared, the contents sorted, packed, and shifted into the Museum's storage for safe keeping.

The Board of Caretakers would have a fit if the new displays weren't in place for the exhibition on Friday night. And all of the new deliveries needed to be checked in, examined, and mounted.

Even with the work to do, she still couldn't shake the discomfort in the pit of her stomach. She knew something bad was coming, but she just didn't want to confront it.