He checked to see if anyone had eyes on him. No one did. They were all searching for casings and latent prints. Hudson tugged the ticket from Garrison’s pocket. Crouched, he examined it, shielding it in his hands like a flame. The bottom right corner was singed. On the front, the words ADMIT ONE were stamped, and on the back, a message:

Welcome to The Ruins

Where your true self dwells

“The Ruins,” he whispered. The place didn’t ring a bell. He stood and was about to google it when another whoosh of cold air assaulted him.

“Christ.” ME Winthorp appeared next to him. Her black earmuffs looked like giant bolts screwed into her skull. “Why’d it have to be him?” She knelt beside the body, pressed two latex fingers to Garrison’s throat. “Deceased. You got the time, Officer?”

He was “Investigator” now, but Hudson didn’t correct her. He touched the center button on his phone. “Eleven forty-seven.”

“December nineteen, twenty-three forty-seven hours,” she said into her recorder. “You know how much longer they got?”

He didn’t remember answering. Time crashed into him hard as a wave and when he broke free, it was around 2:00 A.M. and Garrison was stiff with rigor mortis. He watched as three men from the coroner’s office arrived and lifted him into a black polyethylene bag. The zipper’s teeth connected as the bag swallowed Garrison, and he felt the ugly, finite sound of it, like a serrated knife ripping him from bottom to top, gutting him like a fish.

3 MORGAN

“Sorry for all the pomp and circumstance.” Bennett’s gaze rose over the edge of his cocktail glass to meet Morgan’s as he sipped his Manhattan. The drink was a lurid color, like blood in the water. “You must think we’re some real grade-A snobbery.”

Morgan smiled down at the bar. She did think that. But, after spending the last six hours with the Reynolds clan, she’d decided that they were nice snobbery, at least. If anyone had thought less of her with her Target leggings and Honda Civic, they’d kept it to themselves or discussed it out of earshot. It was all a whir, from walking up the cobblestone drive to being here, now, at Beck’s Bar with Clive Reynolds’s youngest son, who, with his good bone structure, white teeth, and eyes the color of money, was what her mother would call “a fine piece of man candy.”

Christmas lights draped from the liquor case, bathing everything in a hellish red glow. Or a festive glow, depending on how you looked at it.