chapter
ELEVEN

So we all crammed into a taxi to Washington Heights, right up under the George Washington Bridge—the west One-Sixties and on. Washington Heights is what real estate agents call a “transitional” neighborhood. Until very recently, it was working class and poor and ethnic, mainly immigrants who didn’t have family established in better neighborhoods. I remembered when it was Jewish and Italian and Greek and then Hispanic. Bodegas—where you can buy pork rinds and saints’ candles and other occult paraphernalia mixed in with the Campbell’s soup and ramen noodles and toilet paper—still dot the street corners. The complexion of the area is in the process of changing again, this time from poor and immigrant to young and hip and hopeful.

Overhead the bridge traffic rumbles nonstop and the streets are in deep shadow from the tangle of overpasses and the bus station that perches atop giant pylons. Sybil led us to a run-down building next to one of the bridge access entrances. The place looked like a relic from the near past, the first floor and stairwell covered with graffiti, mainly in green and silver, probably gang tags. The linoleum on the stairs was worn through to the sub-flooring and I could hear TV voices shouting in Spanish.

Vincent lived on the third floor. Sybil fitted two keys into two locks, one of them of the police bar variety favored in iffy areas. The door itself was solid metal, made to withstand serious attack.

We entered through the kitchen, which was aggressively clean and unfathomably large. I looked to explore the cabinets under a huge slab of countertop, but couldn’t find the doors. “It’s a bathtub,” Sybil said softly, and then I saw that the Formica slab was just a loose, heavy piece which could be removed. And, as Sybil said, it was a bathtub, old and scarred enamel scoured impeccably clean.

The kitchen led directly to another room in the railroad car arrangement. This middle room appeared to be a study and living room. A large TV sat against the wall and a small desk was tucked into a corner. I watched Nathan go through the desk methodically, sifting the bills and noting the books. I noted the books, too, all of the new demon coursework through the first four years. Vincent was definitely ambitious. Most demons didn’t qualify past the first year or so of study. Most preferred the other employment opportunities to the long years of apprenticeship and all the exams to rise in the ranks of Hell.

Nathan moved around with confidence, making notes, looking, wiping a finger over the remotes to see how long they’d been unused. I was impressed with the way he searched: patient, organized, in command in an unfamiliar environment.

Sybil had already moved into the bedroom. I was shocked to see the bed was made. Fine linens, six-hundred-thread-count sheets and a duvet cover in sage green looked vaguely familiar. Oh, right, Syb’s from before she’d redecorated. They had seemed feminine mixed with her florals, but here the simple lines and solid colors looked tailored, disciplined, and masculine. A framed picture of Sybil stood on the left side of the pine dresser, symmetrically balanced with a photo of an older, dark-haired woman on the right.

“His mother,” Sybil said when she noticed me looking. “That was his biggest regret about being a demon, that he couldn’t come back and take care of her.”

Other than the photos, the bedroom seemed strangely impersonal. The bed was freshly made, the clothes uniformly folded and organized in the dresser, the closet hung with all the shirts arranged by color and facing in the same direction.

Sybil stood in the middle of the room shaking her head. “It’s wrong,” she said, and wrung her hands. “It’s just . . . wrong.”

Nathan was next to her immediately. “What’s wrong?”

Sybil looked around as if she were trapped. “Vincent is neat, he keeps the place well,” she stared slowly. “But . . . he’s not this anal. Not usually. And there’s only one uniform hanging in the closet, and he has three.”

“Well, he was wearing one for work,” I said. “And the third could be at the cleaners.”

“Then he didn’t come home to change,” Nathan said crisply and made more notes. “Let’s go through room by room, Sybil, and you tell me what’s wrong.”

She looked around the bedroom again. “The uniforms. Everything is too neat in the closet. I think someone else must have gone through it.” She turned and looked at the bed. “There’s no book on the end table.”

“He kept books in here?” I was surprised. I hadn’t pegged Vince as an intellectual.

She nodded. “His current course work, and notebooks. He wrote out his notes by hand. He was working on The Hierarchy and Sin series.”

We went back to the living room and this time Sybil looked over the bookcase by the desk. “And look here, none of the books from that series is here, either.” She looked around and appeared confused for a moment. “Something else is missing.”

Nathan nodded. “Electronics. We can assume he had his phone on him, but there’s no computer.”

Sybil nodded thoughtfully. “Right. I don’t see his computer. Or his iPod, or his camera. None of them.”

“You know he had the iPod and the camera?” I didn’t think he’d earned that much.

Sybil turned red. “I loaned him my old ones I didn’t need anymore.”

“Are we done?” I asked, but I should have known better. Nathan went to examine the bathroom, only to find that there wasn’t one. There was a tiny water closet next to the kitchen.

“There’s only the tub and sink in the kitchen,” Sybil said. She opened a cabinet next to the sink and, sure enough, it had a cheap mirror hung on the inside and the lowest shelf held a toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, deodorant, and shampoo.

“Lily, would you look at this?” Nathan’s voice sounded a bit strained and low, close to my shoulder.

I turned to face him and was overwhelmed with his presence enveloping me. We were alone and the smell of his cologne (Versace L’Homme—thank goodness, something decent) and cashmere, the broad shoulder so tempting to lean on, the impulse to simply melt into him was nearly irresistible. Suddenly his arms were around me and he held me so tight and it felt so good. His face was just over mine. “Lily, Lily,” he whispered and all of a sudden we were kissing.

His mouth devoured me. Why had we been apart? Why had we broken up? There was only this feeling of return between us, the knowledge that we both belonged here, together, with each other.

He knew it, he had to feel it quivering like a frightened thing between us.

Then he broke the kiss gently and stepped back. One single step. Not so much away from me but to show me something.

“Look at this,” he said, and he pointed to the trash bin which he had pulled out from under the sink.

“I’d rather not,” I replied, smiling. “It’s trash.”

Nathan nodded. “Exactly. Do you have any idea how much information is in the trash? Archaeologists love trash middens. And here we are, and . . . look. Just look.”

I took a deep breath and looked into the plastic-lined canister. There was a toothpaste box, coffee grounds and filters, and a few pieces of paper that looked like grocery receipts and movie stubs.

Nathan reached down to the papers, and that was when I noticed that he had put on latex gloves. I was impressed; I never would have thought of that. But it enabled him to reach into the garbage and grab the papers. I didn’t see why they would be interesting. Nathan, though, wasn’t bothering with the movie tickets. Instead he had laid out the receipts on the counter, facedown, and that was when I saw the writing.

Single words, as if they were personal reminders. They didn’t make any sense to me. “Get Sybil,” Nathan said to me.

I found my friend still fondling the remotes with a bemused expression. “The other things should be here,” she said. “He was methodical, he kept all the remotes and the iPod and camera together. Everything in one place, he always said. And I always joked that this apartment was so small that there was only one place.”

I put my arms around her and let her cry quietly for a minute before I told her that Nathan needed her in the kitchen. Then I steered her gently around the beanbag chair and the table.

Nathan wasted no time. “Please, Sybil, we need your help. Take a look at this. Don’t touch it, just look. Is that Vincent’s handwriting?”

She shook her head No.

“Are you sure?” he asked again.

“I’m sure,” she said.

“Even I’m sure,” I added. I’d seen Vincent’s writing any number of times, on work orders and messages and notes detailing what a plumber or electrician had done while I was out. Vincent printed everything in neat, boxy letters that looked like he’d been trained to write on blueprints or something like that. The words here were scribbled cursive only vaguely intelligible, where Vincent’s writing was more legible than half the fonts on my computer.

Nathan looked at them and hummed. Then he turned them over to the receipt side. I was confused. What could a grocery receipt tell him? Well, one was from Duane Reade. Nathan looked at that and then opened the cupboard where we’d discovered Vincent’s toothbrush.

“What information can you get from a pharmacy receipt?” I asked, curious.

Nathan smiled. “Look at this. First of all, this Duane Reade is in Brooklyn, see the address down here? Now look—there’s a shampoo purchase here.”

“Yes, so?” I asked.

Sybil’s eyes opened very wide. “Not the same shampoo as in the cabinet. The one on the receipt is Suave—look here. And Vincent uses L’Oréal.”

“So this isn’t his handwriting and it isn’t his receipt,” I repeated slowly, understanding the implications. “And so if there are addresses on the other receipts we have some idea of where he’s being held!”

“Not so fast,” Nathan said softly as he studied and made notes to himself. “We don’t know that he’s kidnapped or in trouble. So far as we know at the moment, he could be gone entirely voluntarily, although that looks less likely. What we do know is that there was someone here who was not Vincent. We know that this person shopped someplace that was not in this neighborhood.”

“We know that person used cheap shampoo,” Sybil added.

“A common brand,” Nathan agreed. “Those are the hardest to trace. Anyway, we know that someone else was here and possibly cleaned up after himself, and maybe took the electronics.”

“A thief?” Sybil asked.

Nathan shook his head. “A thief wouldn’t have left the place so neat. I’d bet serious money that whoever was here wiped down the surfaces so there won’t be prints. No, the electronics that were taken were things that could have useful information. I wonder . . .” He looked out the window blankly, his mind somewhere else.

“What?” Sybil was agitated and worried. And I didn’t blame her.

“I wonder if he was waylaid so that someone else could come up here and search. But for what? For keys? For his computer?”

The computer was obvious. “You’re sure he didn’t bring it to work?” Nathan asked.

“No, never,” Sybil insisted. “It was a Dell laptop, a big one. Fifteen inches, I think, too big for me to haul around. Mostly he just used it here, and for MagicMirror, of course. But it’s definitely gone. It’s too big to hide easily and it always sat on his desk or the bedside table.”

Nathan gathered up the receipts from the counter and looked in all the other trash cans in the place to make sure there wasn’t anything else interesting in them. Then he put the slips of paper into an envelope and labeled it, and then put it into a plastic baggie in his notebook. I was impressed; he was acting just like a detective on the cop shows. He peeled off the latex gloves and dropped them into the kitchen garbage and asked Sybil to close up. “I don’t want any of us to leave prints, but Sybil has been here and her prints would be expected,” he explained as we exited.

“I want to get this into the office and check it for prints, though I doubt they left any. Whoever was there looks very professional,” he added.

“What do we do?” Sybil asked.

Nathan turned and faced her, and took both her hands in his. He was so kind with her, so grave and determined. “We will find him. I’m in a big agency and we do this all the time. What you do is wait. Try to go about your normal routine. I know that’ll be hard, but try anyway. Go to your office, go home, see friends, go to your usual places. If this is a kidnapping they will most likely contact you.”

“Do you think it is a kidnapping?” Sybil asked softly.

Nathan stared into her eyes and smiled slightly. “I can’t tell yet, but right now the indications are against it. I think they wanted Vincent’s computer and files, and got him out of the way for a while. I don’t think they intended to kill him or even hurt him, or they wouldn’t have left the apartment so neat and clean. That wouldn’t make sense. They don’t want him to know that it’s been searched and things are missing, not immediately. And they cleaned their prints. They expect him to come back here.”

“You really think so?” Hope was struggling feebly in Sybil’s eyes.

“I’m just pointing out the evidence,” Nathan said firmly, and I wanted to throw my arms around him and kiss him again. Once for myself and once for how wonderful he was being to Sybil, addressing her concerns and calming her with facts, but not making empty promises.

But it still bothered me. “Why?” I asked. “Why would anyone search Vincent’s apartment? Why would anyone kidnap him? What would they want?”

“Money?” Sybil suggested. “I do have money. I don’t know what else. Unless they just hate demons.”

“But if they just hate demons, why Vincent?” I pondered. “Because he’s associated with us? Why not one of us? And what would they want, anyway? It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Nathan shook his head. “We don’t know for certain that Vincent has been kidnapped. We don’t know what happened, yet, and it’s my job to try to find out. Why don’t you both go home for a bit? Lily, could you go with Sybil? You both need lunch. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten anything all day, have you?” This last was said to Sybil again, and she shook her head.

“Then go on. See if there is anything else you can think of. There may be some information when you get there. I’m going to take this to my office. We’ll be in touch.” With that last he looked directly at me. I wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him not to go, to come with us, with me. To stay with me tonight, forever.

And then he was down the staircase before I could say anything. By the time Sybil and I had made it to the front door he was closing a car door behind him.

“We’ll have to call a car service,” Sybil said. She had a number on speed dial, which made me wonder how often she came this far uptown with Vincent.


Sybil insisted that she would be fine, and that I should go home and get some rest; and so I dropped her at her apartment and went home. Alone.