Chapter One

The man at the morgue was straight out of central casting. Pale, bloated face, long, skinny fingers, creepy black eyes. He actually grinned at Gaia as he pulled Ella's body out of the morgue's special refrigeration system. Gaia wasn't afraid of the guy - she was never afraid - but it didn't take too much imagination to picture the kind of things he might do after hours to the corpses in his care.

"Can you identify this woman, Ms. Moore?" the man asked, flicking his gaze over Gaia's body before raising his eyebrows at her.

"Her name is Ella. I mean ... it was Ella. Ella Niven."

It sounded to Gaia as if her voice were coming from a speaker in some other room: fake, distant. Everything about the moment seemed fake - the harsh, fluorescent lights, the antiseptic stink of chemicals, the cold metal surfaces - everything, in fact, except the film of sweat forming over the pathologist's upper lip. Ella certainly didn't look real. Her skin was a sort of light blue-gray color, and her lips were completely white because of all the blood she had lost. Her dyed red hair had been pushed away from her face, and it resembled the kind of cheap clown wigs they sold on Bleecker Street.

Gaia thought Ella would at least appear as if she were finally at peace. People always said that about the dead. But Ella just looked ... lifeless. Cold and lifeless.

Creepy Guy smiled again, holding out a form for Gaia to sign.

And then it was over.

The next thing Gaia knew, she was running down Seventh Avenue, determined to put as much space as she could between herself and the basement of St. Vincen