The old woman snarled, shoving Melantha away from her onto the bricks. Straightening up defiantly, she once again sucked in a deep breath.

But if she was preparing another scream, she never made it. Even as she opened her mouth, another of the white lines arrowed through the air squarely into her chest, and she was thrown backward as if she'd been hit by a speeding car. She slammed into the tree behind her with crushing force, bounced off, and collapsed onto the bushes.

Caroline looked at her, an icy chill adding to the pain in her head. There was something about the way the woman lay draped across the greenery that told Caroline she was dead. "Melantha?" she called tentatively. "Melantha!"

"I'm here," the girl's voice came shakily from somewhere off to her side. Fighting against her lingering dizziness, Caroline once again pushed herself up onto her knees.

And suddenly the night sky lit up with a brilliant strobing of red lights. There was the roar of a car engine; and with a screech of brakes a police car skidded to a halt by the end of the courtyard.

"Police!" someone yelled, shoving open the door. "Stay where you are! You—stop!" There was a sound of rapid footsteps—

And then Roger was there, dropping onto his knees beside her, his arms wrapping tightly around her.

"Caroline!" he gasped, breathing hard.

"I'm all right," she assured him, clutching at his arms. The flashing red lights had been joined by the white beam of a floodlight, and in its stabbing glare she looked around for Melantha.

The coat she'd given the girl was a few feet away, lying crumpled on the ground. Melantha herself was gone.

So was the dead woman.

12

The Crime Scene Unit's floodlights threw multiple shadows in front of him as Fierenzo walked across the courtyard and stopped by the freshly gouged hole in the bricks. "Here?" he asked.

"No, here," the cop walking beside him corrected, pointing to a spot three feet closer to the low wire fence. "I saw her lying right here."

Fierenzo looked at the mangled bushes alongside the building. A squirrel might be able to hide in there, but not a teenaged girl. "And then she got up and went where?"

"I don't know," the cop said, carefully filtering most of his frustration out of his voice. "And she only got halfway up before I got the spotlight on the scene."

"What about the older woman?"

"She was over there," the cop said, pointing at a group of squashed bushes just in front of the tree with the broken limb. "I saw her, too, before we got the spot going."

Fierenzo looked around. Two women vanished into thin air, one of whom had allegedly been shot and killed.

Only there was no body, no blood, and no bullet. She and the girl had both disappeared, as had the two men Whittier had been babbling about when he and Powell arrived. There was, in fact, nothing to prove this whole thing was anything other than a hallucination or a hoax.

Except, of course, for the shattered bricks and the broken tree limb.

He stepped over to the limb. This wasn't some delicate little branch a careless ten-year-old might break if he put his weight on it. It was long and healthy and two inches in diameter, the kind of limb you would normally take off with a chain saw.

But this one hadn't been chainsawed. The cut was rough and compressed, like someone with immense upper-body strength had taken a slightly dull axe to it.

In fact, it rather reminded him of the much smaller gashes he'd seen on the trees at the Whittiers'

place.

He crouched down beside the downed limb, glowering with frustration. It had taken them over an hour to track down the cabby who'd brought Caroline Whittier and the girl here, and as a result they had arrived only minutes before the incident. If the cabby had given him the right address in the first place, he and Powell might have been in position to witness the incident themselves instead of being two buildings up the street looking at mailbox names.

But they only had what they had. Glancing around, he started to stand up.

And paused. From this angle, and this elevation, he could see something he hadn't noticed before.

Etched across several groups of the bricks were long, narrow cracks. Stress lines, apparently, only they weren't centered on the hole that had been blasted in the brickwork. Instead, they were radiating outward from a spot near the low wire fence. "Where did you say the woman was lying when you came around the corner?" he asked the cop.

"Right about there," the other said, pointing to a spot a foot away from the center of the crack system.

"Thanks," Fierenzo said, straightening to his feet. Retracing his steps across the courtyard, he crossed the street, making his way through the line of neighborhood gawkers gathered on the far side. The cop standing guard on the building door let him in, and he trudged his way up the stairs to the third floor.

Powell answered his knock. "Anything?" Fierenzo asked.

The other shrugged. "They've given a statement," he said. "Doesn't make any more sense than what they'd already told us downstairs."

The Whittiers were sitting side by side on the couch, Caroline nursing a cup of tea as another cop stood watch against the opposite wall. "Mr. and Mrs. Whittier," Fierenzo said as he crossed the living room and sat down in a chair facing them. "I'm Sergeant Thomas Fierenzo. You and I talked earlier this afternoon, Mr. Whittier."

Whittier's lips compressed briefly. "Yes."

"Let's start with Melantha," Fierenzo said. "I want her full name, and where exactly she is."

The Whittiers glanced at each other, and the husband give a microscopic shrug. "We think her name's Melantha Green," Mrs. Whittier said, her voice tight. "And we don't know where she is.

When I looked for her after the police arrived, she was gone."

"What about you?" Fierenzo asked, shifting his gaze to Whittier. "Did you see where she went?"

Whittier shook his head. "I noticed her a few feet away from Caroline as I was running up," he said.

"But I was concentrating on my wife."

"Did you see her get up or start to crawl away?" Fierenzo persisted. "Do you remember which direction she was facing? Anything?"

"All I remember is seeing Caroline's coat on the ground."

"Where was she hiding when the two officers came to your apartment Wednesday night?"

"I don't know that, either."

Fierenzo looked at Powell. The other detective nodded fractionally and started for the door, gesturing to the cop standing by the wall. "Officer?"

The cop followed him out into the hall, Powell closing the door behind him. "All right," Fierenzo said, leaning back in his chair and eyeing the Whittiers. "It's just you and me now; and if you'd like, all of this can be off the record. Just tell me what happened."

"What do you mean?" Whittier asked cautiously.

"I mean all the strange things you've been afraid to tell anyone," Fierenzo said, studying their faces and trying to judge whether or not he was hitting anywhere near the target. "Melantha's habit of disappearing whenever cops show up, for instance. Or tell me about the people on your balcony this afternoon trying to break into your apartment."

That one got definite twitches from both of them. "Breaking in from the balcony?" Whittier demanded, frowning.

"They tried to hammer their way through the glass," Fierenzo said. "My guess is that they were scared away by the second group, the ones who came in through the front door."

"Wait a second," Whittier said, sounding thoroughly confused now. "Are you saying we had two different sets of intruders?"

"Three in through the front, two in from the balcony." Fierenzo lifted his eyebrows at the wife. "It was two people you saw up there, wasn't it, Mrs. Whittier?"