Russell Andrews - Aphrodite

Justin had to agree with him. But those choices weren't what interested him. "Do you know who owns this building?"

"I work for the people who manage the mall. That's who I know. I deal with the individual tenants. I'm responsible for upkeep, within a budget, and day-to-day stuff like security and tenant complaints. The owner deals directly with my contact at Alexis. Bert Stiles."

"Growth Industries," Justin said. "They pay their rent on time?"

"Never been a minute late."

"Why do you think there's no one there right now? This is prime business time, right?"

"It should be. Although, I gotta say, this place hasn't had a prime business time in quite a few years."

"Mr. Fromm," Justin said, slowly, "how'd you like to let me into room 301?"

"Detective, I would be happy to. Except I quite like this job. It's easy and they pay me really well. And, aside from the fact that you don't have a warrant-do you have a warrant?"

"No."

"You're not even local. So I can't see as there's anything in it for me at all if I let you in. Except trouble."

Justin decided he'd hold off on his answer, give himself a few seconds to see if he could think of something other than trouble that just might be in it for Mr. Byron Fromm, but before he could come up with anything, his cell phone rang.

"Yeah?" he said, answering it.

It was Jimmy Leggett. "Where the hell are you?" the chief said. "Actually, I don't care where you are. Just get the hell back."

"I thought it was my day off," Justin said.

"Not anymore," Leggett said. "The shit's hit the fan."

"What happened, Jimmy?"

"We got another body, that's what happened. We got another god-damn body."

"Who?"

Leggett told him who it was and Justin heard his own sudden intake of breath.

"Where?" he said. "When?"

"I can't give you any details over the phone. Just get back here."

"All right," he told the chief, glancing over at Byron Fromm. "I just need about half an hour here to-"

"No half hour," Leggett cut him off. "I've been ordered to get you back ASAP."

"You've been ordered?" Justin asked. "Ordered by who?"

"By me," a strange voice said over the phone. Justin could hear the receiver being wrested away from his boss.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded.

"Special Agent Leonard Rollins. FBI. And that's the end of your little Q and A, Detective. Get your ass back here. Now."

Justin heard the receiver at the other end of the line click off. His cell phone went dead. He stared at the pale, overweight man standing in front of him. A harsh rock song blared into his head. Nick Cave. Is there anybody out there, please? It's too quiet in here and I'm starting to freeze. Under fifteen feet of clear white snow…

The words and music felt as if they were going to smother him. It was exactly the way he felt: freezing and isolated, buried under an unbearable weight.

"Something wrong, Detective?" Byron Fromm asked.

"Yeah," he told the building manager, and he thought the man looked a little too gleeful, as if whatever information had just been transmitted over the phone had somehow gotten him off the precarious hook he was on in his shabby-and-getting-shabbier suburban sanctuary. "Life's about as wrong as it can possibly be."

Before leaving the Weston mall, Justin went into a Barnes amp; Noble, strode over to the magazine rack, and stared at the rows of new magazines. By his count, eight of them had a picture of Maura Greer on the cover. Maura Greer, the onetime East End Harbor townie turned Washington intern who'd been missing for over three months. The girl whose body, according to Justin's frantic boss, had just been found floating in East End Bay.

Justin flipped through several of the magazines, read a page of Dominick Dunne's theorizing in Vanity Fair, checked out what Mark Singer had to say in The New Yorker. He bought them both, along with a copy of Jump magazine. He drove back to the ferry and, as it cruised across the sound back to Long Island, he read the piece in Jump. Then he read it again. And then a third time.

And he began to wonder if East End Harbor would ever again be the quiet little town it had been just forty-eight hours before.

by Leslee Carter Reese On the day her daughter Maura disappeared, Rachel Greer had a psychic experience.

It had never happened to her before, not like this. Before this particular Thursday it was just the usual I-knew-who-was-on-the-phone-the-moment-it-rang or I-was-just-thinking-about-you-exactly-when-you-called kind of thing. But on February 23, at four-fifteen in the afternoon, she felt a chill sweep through her entire body. The feeling was both disturbing and enthralling. It was as if a ghost had plunged inside her, filling her with the frigid sensation of death and the glowing power that she is now convinced came with her brief foray from this world to the next and back again.

There is little question in her mind that a ghost did, in fact, plunge inside her.

There is also little question in her mind that the ghost was her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Maura Devon Greer.

Maura, who has been living in Washington, D.C., for the past eighteen months, interning at the Food and Drug Administration, has been missing for three months. She has, in essence, disappeared off the face of the earth, and her disappearance has not only caused scandal, it has disrupted the political landscape in a way not seen since the emergence of Monica Lewinsky or Chandra Levy. It has stirred widespread national debate from both the left and right about the nature of the media. In our post-September 11 world we were all going to be focused on the serious and pressing issues that swirl around us. The emphasis on celebrityhood was over, as was our obsession with scandal, sex, and frivolity. Yet, since this young Jewish girl disappeared, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio call-in shows seem to have done little but speculate about the sordid details of Maura Greer's life and presumed death.

It is essential to the well-being of the United States and our efforts to cope with the potential threat of biological warfare that the secretary of Health and Human Services, Frank Manwaring, function without distraction. Instead, the search for Maura Greer has damaged Secretary Manwaring's credibility, possibly beyond repair, and put a stranglehold on his effectiveness.

But most of all, Maura's disappearance has caused heartache for her family. In the midst of our global obsession with terrorism, it is easy to forget that there are other, smaller tragedies in life. Unless, of course, you happen to be living in the middle of such a tragedy.

Maura Greer left her one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., at approximately four o'clock in the afternoon on Thursday, February 23. It is presumed that she went to pick up her car, a three-year-old silver Honda Accord, in the underground garage beneath her apartment building. Although she was not spotted there, the garage was vandalized and the attendant, Hector Diaz, has also been missing since that day. (For a time, Mr. Diaz was a suspect in the disappearance, but police have since ruled out that possibility.) According to a neighbor who saw her in the hallway on her way out, there was nothing about Maura's demeanor that struck him as strange. He did say that she was dressed rather provocatively, but Maura usually dressed provocatively. She had never been a shy girl, and that aggressiveness carried over to her sexuality. She was never afraid to voice her opinions or take over a room with her personality or use her body to give her an advantage. There was only one area of her life about which Maura seemed to turn inward, reticent to reveal details even to her closest friends: her relationship with the current man in her life.