The sheet music was written in B-flat, which Evelyn Winthrop knew because she could read music the way other people read faces—she could tell a genuine expression from a forgery at a glance. And this, this was a forgery disguised as jazz.

The notation was proper, classically structured—the kind of thing you'd find in a Chopin nocturne—but the rhythm swung with the careless, syncopated laziness of a speakeasy that opened after midnight and closed when the cops came. Someone had taken a classical mind and taught it to move like a Prohibition bootlegger.

She folded the pages and slipped them into her satchel beside her newsprint notepad and her pencil with the bitten eraser. The piano had stopped—Julian Hale had finished his set with that characteristic abruptness, like a man who realized halfway through the last chord that he'd revealed too much—and the speakeasy had erupted into its usual post-music chaos: glasses clinking, bodies jostling, the kind of desperate joy that only exists when everyone knows the party has to end eventually and they're all trying to stuff a week's worth of living into four minutes of silence.

Evelyn moved through the crowd the way she moved through every scene she was investigating: quietly, leaving no impression, noting everything. She'd been following Julian Hale for three weeks. The _New York Tribune_'s society editor had given her the assignment as a joke—"Go to Long Island, find out why fancy people are dying at fancy parties, and try not to get drunk doing it." But three weeks of following Julian had turned her assignment into something else. Something real.

He spotted her immediately. They always did, at these things—the reporters, the cops, the people who wanted something. Julian's eyes cut through the smoke and the gin haze and found hers the way a lighthouse finds a ship.

"Miss Winthrop," he said. He didn't ask what she was doing there. He already knew. "I hope you're not writing about me."

"I'm writing about dead girls," she said. "But if you want to go on the record, I'm listening."

His smile was thin and tired. It was the smile of a man who knew the conversation was going to cost him something he couldn't afford. "Then you'd better sit down, Miss Winthrop. And you'd better prepare yourself for the fact that every story has a body count, and mine is longer than you think."

Behind them, at the piano, someone began to play. The notes were wrong—or rather, they were right in a way that suggested the player knew the rules and was choosing, deliberately and with full knowledge of the consequences, to break them.