Vigil (4 page)

I moved away from the wall, which meant that I was practically pressed up against him. “It’s okay. You can…” I swallowed.

His eyes searched mine. They were so blue.

I moistened my lips.

His face inched closer to mine.

I slammed my eyes closed.

And I felt the brush of his lips against my own.

The moment was shattered by a knocking on my door. Airenne’s voice, “Cecily? Is there someone in your room?”

I opened my eyes.

He was dashing away from me.

“Wait,” I said.

He vaulted through the window and disappeared.

What? Had he just jumped?

I hurried to the window. Leaning out, I saw that he was swinging across to the building next to mine. He was suspended from a rope, like some kind of rock climber.

I watched as he landed on the roof next door. He looked down at me.

“Cecily?” said Airenne from outside the door.

He turned away. He strode across the roof and the darkness swallowed him.

“Hello?” said Airenne.

“No, Airenne,” I said, still staring out the window. “I’m alone.”

* * *

I had barely set my coffee down at a desk when Lauren was out of her office and coming for me. “Oh, good. You’re finally here.”

I looked around for the clock. “Am I late?” No, I was right on time. Anyway, people tended to wander in and out of the office whenever they wanted. It was more important that a reporter get her copy done than that she show up at a specific time.

“Henry wants to see us,” she said, taking me by the arm and ushering me towards the elevator.

“Henry? Why?”

Henry Kingston was the editor-in-chief of
The Aurora Sun-Times.
I’d only seen him twice, in the weekly meetings that the staff attended. He really seemed like a throw-back to the newspaper editors from the 1940s. He was balding. He had a paunch that protruded over his gut. And he barked a lot. Even though I romanticized that era of newspaper writing, I was a little afraid of Henry. I’d never seen him look… happy, exactly.

The elevator doors closed on Lauren and me. She pressed the button for Henry’s floor.

“What do you think he wants?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Lauren. “But it’s probably got something to do with Vigil, because we broke that story together. And there was stuff on television about him this morning.”

“There was?” I didn’t watch news TV. I liked my news in black and white. Words. It was so much harder to screw with the written word. It was blunt, honest, and clear. TV distorted things. It plastered up images and smiling pretty ladies in suits telling you about murders, and before long, it was impossible to tell what had actually happened.

Lauren nodded. “Vigil rescued a girl last night. And she went to every major network immediately afterward.”

“He rescued…?” After he’d left me or before? “What do you mean rescued?”

The elevator door opened.

We emerged in a subdued hallway, muted mint green paint on the walls. The carpet matched.

Lauren turned to her right and started walking. Her heels clicked on the floor.

I struggled to keep up. I didn’t wear heels, but my flats were just as noisy. “Rescued from whom?”

She smiled at me over her shoulder. “Ooh, nice use of the correct form of ‘who.’ Still, I imagine that’ll go out of the language soon. I see it incorrect in print all the time, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It drives me batty.”

She shrugged. “Language changes. Keep up.”

A door at the end of the hallway opened, and there was Henry. “Finally,” he barked. “Get in here. Both of you.”

* * *

Henry’s office was large, but not as large as I would imagine for an editor-in-chief. He had a massive desk, covered in photos of smiling children. I guessed they were all related to him. There sure were a lot of them. But then, he was probably old enough to have grandchildren. His wall dotted with various plaques and a few framed news stories.

There was a big television screen mounted to the wall in front of his desk.

It was blaring.

“Sit down,” he said, gesturing to two seats. “Watch this.”

We did as we were told.

On screen, a thin woman with obviously-dyed red hair and numerous tattoos was blubbering at the camera. “I thought I was dead. There was a man with a knife. He was wearing one of those theater masks. He looked like the Phantom of the Opera. He was crazy. But Vigil saved me. He sailed in on this rope and scooped me up, and took me away from the crazy man.”

Henry switched the TV off. “We named him, dammit. Us. For the first time this century, a newspaper scooped the networks.”

Lauren and I swiveled in our chairs to face Henry.

“Henry,” said Lauren. “The girl was rescued last night. We couldn’t have beat them to this story. The paper was already at the presses while this was going on.”

“I know that.” Henry waved her away. “I don’t care about this girl. I don’t care about the guy she claims was trying to kill her, the one they’re calling The Phantom. For all we know, she made the whole damned thing up. None of that matters. But it does rankle having them sail in and try to take over our story.” He turned to me. “
Your
story.”

They both looked at me.

I didn’t know what to say.

“It was your story, wasn’t it?” said Henry, turning annoyed eyes on Lauren. “You haven’t confused the interns again this year, have you?”

“I never confused the interns!” She was indignant.

“It’s my story,” I said.

“Good,” said Henry, looking me up and down. “Listen, girlie, anyone can get lucky with a hot story one time. You’re just a kid from school, and you lucked onto the front page. It takes a real reporter to stay there, to find her way back week after week.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, I want to be a real reporter, sir.”

“Sir.” He laughed. “She calls me sir.”

“She does impressive work,” said Lauren. “She’s polite too.”

Henry was still laughing. “All right, then. You want to be a real reporter, get me more on this guy. These news stations, all they’ve got is some wide-eyed trashy girl talking about Vigil. We had quotes from Vigil. Can you talk to him again?”

My mouth went dry. I knew what the proper answer here was. I was supposed to say yes, and then I was supposed to do everything in my power to find the masked man again. The masked man who’d climbed in my window last night and kissed me. “I can try.”

Henry arched an eyebrow. “Try?”

“It’s only that I don’t know anything more about him than what I reported. He found me. I didn’t find him.”

“How’d he find you?”

“I was on the docks, and he told me to leave because it wasn’t safe,” I said.

“So, you go back to the docks,” said Henry. “And wear something trashy. That should attract some scumbags. Hopefully, Vigil will come in and save you.”

Right. And if he didn’t?

Henry opened the door to his office. “By tomorrow morning, girlie.”

I gulped.

Lauren left the office, and I followed her.

Henry slammed the door after us.

“Is he for real?” I said.

She started walking. “Anything about him seem fake to you?”

“He told me to wear something trashy. That’s like sexual harassment in the workplace, isn’t it?”

She snorted. “You’re going to go to the docks, aren’t you?”

CHAPTER THREE

“You going clubbing?” Airenne asked me.

I was in the bathroom, applying eyeshadow. I knew two ways to wear makeup. One was mascara and lipstick, and it was my general mode of operation. The other was Cabaret-style. Full-on makeup. The works. Too much makeup for normal interaction. Makeup for the stage.

That was what I was doing right now.

I looked up from the mirror. “No, this is for a story.”

She lounged in the doorway to the bathroom. “You going undercover as a hooker or something?”

I considered. “Kind of.” The truth was that the girls who’d been killed had all been hookers or strippers. I’d spent a good portion of the day going over all the news reports about Vigil, and the reigning consensus was that the man that they were calling The Phantom was the serial killer.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about that.

I thought the killer was Hayden Barclay, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was this other guy. The Phantom.

Or maybe Henry was right, and the girl had made the man up. After all, it did seem strange to think that two masked men had suddenly appeared in Aurora.

And there was a third possibility, one I didn’t want to consider. Maybe I’d been right in the first place. Maybe Vigil was the killer. Maybe he’d climbed into my window to finish the job, but Airenne had scared him off. That might explain his sexual advances towards me. The fact that the killer kept parts of the women’s bodies suggested a sexual motivation.

“Seriously?” said Airenne.

“I’m going to try to find Vigil again. Last night, he rescued some trashy girl from the docks. So I’m going to be a trashy girl on the docks and hope he finds me.”

She made a concerned face. “What if he doesn’t? What if something bad happens to you? That neighborhood isn’t safe, you know. Especially not dressed like that.”

I looked down at my tight jeans and halter top. I thought I looked pretty hot. But I was showing a little bit more skin than I usually did. And the shirt required that I not wear a bra, which was kind of pushing it for my 36Cs. I had bandaids over my nipples, and that was it. I was kind of… floppy, I guessed. But the bandaids seemed to be keeping me from having cone-boob. “I’ll be fine.”

“I don’t know. If you’re not back by midnight, I’m going to start worrying,” she said.

“Two o’clock,” I said.

“One,” she countered. “If you’re not back by two, I’m calling the police.”

I laughed. “Thanks.” Airenne wasn’t bad. I didn’t have anything in common with her, but she was a decent person, and I appreciated that about her.

“Seriously, check in with me,” she said. “If something happened to you, I could not handle the rent alone.”

I laughed again.

“For real,” she said, but she was grinning too.

I dug around in my makeup bag for my eye pencil. “What are you getting into tonight?”

“I’m doing a piece on Veronica Waite,” she told me. “It’s kind of a tribute thing. There’s going to be a big benefit that will raise money for her trust. Anyway, I’m just doing research on her youth and stuff, because no one talks about that.”

“Veronica Waite. I know I’ve heard that name before,” I said.

“She was a Broadway star,” said Airenne. “They called her Veronica Legs, because she had long, long legs, and she always wore short skirts.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “She was Christine in
The Phantom of the Opera
. For like years and years, right?” I probably only remembered that because this mysterious Phantom guy meant that I had
Phantom of the Opera
on the brain.

“That’s her.” She grinned. “She was also Callum Rutherford’s mother.”

I groaned. “That’s why you’re so into this.”

“I’m going to meet him,” she said. “Maybe even at the benefit. He’ll want to give me a quote for a story about his mother, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “I guess.” Honestly, I wasn’t sure if he’d want to talk about his mother at all. The woman had been killed violently, and they’d never caught her killer. Callum’s father had been killed at the same time, if I remembered correctly. Of course, he’d been so young at the time that he probably didn’t even remember them.

Still. I didn’t like talking about my dead grandparents. It hurt too much.

Airenne wandered into the bathroom and began rummaging through my makeup bag. “I didn’t even know you owned this much makeup.”

“I used to have to wear it for work,” I said.

“Where did you work?”

I shrugged again. “Nowhere special.”

“I’ve never heard of a job requiring makeup.”

“They didn’t require it exactly. It was definitely expected, though.” I snatched the bag back. “I gotta get going.” Why had I brought that up? I didn’t want to talk about my past. Especially not with Airenne. She’d never understand.

* * *

I stuck to the back of the smoky room, hugging the corners. Technically, no one was supposed to smoke cigarettes inside any bar or restaurant anymore, but some of the dives out by the docks didn’t pay much attention to any of the laws. It burned my eyes and invaded my lungs, and I knew the smell would cling to me until I took a shower and washed it out.

In front of me, there were two pool tables and a smattering of small tables. The lights were suspended from the ceiling, low and yellow.

I knew that I was supposed to be standing outside on a corner, bait for Vigil. But I’d seen Hayden Barclay come into this bar, and I hadn’t been able to stop myself from following him.

After all, Barclay was the real story. Vigil was something that had happened to me by chance. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Confused, I guess. I didn’t know how to write a story about a man that I found so attractive.

Okay, attractive wasn’t exactly the right word.

I thought Vigil was liquid sex.

But he was crazy. He was obviously mentally disturbed, running around in that costume, saving girls. He wasn’t the kind of man I should get involved with.

And it would be easier not to be involved with him if I wasn’t writing stories about him all the time.

If I could bust Barclay as the killer who was dismembering women, it would overshadow the story of Vigil. No one would care about that. They’d care about the fact I’d brought a killer to justice.

Barclay was more important to me than Vigil. That was that.

But I was staying back, out of sight, because I didn’t want him to see me. He probably wouldn’t recognize me. It had been a long time since I’d seen him, and he’d never paid a particular amount of attention to me. Still, I didn’t want to risk the idea that he might remember who I was. Even worse, he might connect me to Darlene.

And since he’d
killed
Darlene…