True Colors Read Free Page A

out.

Chapter Two
    Law
     
    Alice got off the subway at the next stop and ran up the stairs to street level. She was a total wreck, spooking at the slightest thing while she tried to think past the incredulous shout still echoing in her head.
    Had he experienced the same epiphany when he looked at her?
    Mate. Killer.
    Police?
    Be smart, be safe now. Could the badge have been fake? Rattled though she was, that seemed like an awfully unlikely stretch—unless impersonating a police officer was how he had gotten inside Haley’s apartment in the first place. Haley’s door had been open, not broken. Many crimes had been committed by people posing as police officers, including one of the most famous in the twentieth century, the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in the 1920s.
    But he’d told her to go to the nearest police station. That sounded authentic—unless he hoped to grab her before she actually got inside. Why would he do that? Now she was sounding paranoid and irrational—except she had left the normal boundaries of reality behind two days ago when she heard that Peter had been killed.
    Their group was small and tight-knit for a reason. The shock waves of Peter’s death had barely begun to reverberate through the circle when Alex Schaffer, the group’s leader, had emailed everyone yesterday to tell them he couldn’t get in touch with David and had anybody else heard from him?
    Nobody had. Alice and Haley had planned that very evening to huddle together and grieve for Peter and fret over David’s disappearance. Alice had been ready to coax Haley into packing a bag and coming to stay with her for at least the weekend, and not fifteen minutes ago she had realized that the dark red hollow at the midsection of Haley’s sprawled body was in fact the inside of Haley’s body.
    If that man was the killer and he had come back to Haley’s apartment to clean up something, if he thought she could identify him and tie him to the crime, he would want to do anything he could, even risk proximity to the police station, in order to get rid of her.
    She ran into a small piece of luck as a taxi drove down the street with its light on. She waved at it and when it stopped, she jumped in and locked the doors. “Drive around,” she told the cabby.
    “Okay,” said the cabby. He was an intelligent, anemic-looking Wyr in his mid-forties, with a dry, dusty scent and fingernails bitten to the quick. He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Anywhere in particular you want to go?”
    “I’ll tell you in a minute,” she said. “Just get moving.”
    “Fabulous,” the cabby said with a shrug. “It’s your dime.”
    Alice pulled out her cell phone and finally dialed 9-1-1. For a wonder, an operator picked up after only a few rings. “I need to report a murder,” Alice said.
    The cab slowed, and her driver gave her a sudden sharp look in the rearview mirror. She glared at him and he ducked his head. The cab picked up speed again.
    The snowfall had thickened. Alice watched the passing streets through the windshield wipers while she gave the operator Haley’s address, and what details she knew. “When I left the building, a man chased me,” she said. “He had been in the apartment. I managed to get on to a subway train as the doors closed so I got away from him, but he had time to show me a badge through the window. He said he was a police officer and he ordered me to go to the nearest station. I need to verify his identity if I can.”
    “Ma’am, I can’t do that for you over the phone,” said the operator. “You need to go to the nearest police station.”
    “Look, I’m a teacher,” Alice said. Her voice unraveled along with her composure. “I’m not some tough soldier or cop-type that deals with crime scenes and death every day—I teach first-grade kids, okay? Usually the worst part of my day is trying to get the glue and glitter off my jeans after craft-time and preparing for parent-teacher conferences. Now I’ve had