WARNING:
THERE WILL BE NON-EXPLICIT SEX AND VIOLENCE IN THIS STORY. But nothing worse than many mystery novels you could buy or view in the regular world.

If you want to comment, send email to <luba@lubakmetyk.net>

Prologue

Seated at his counter in the spacious lobby of the New Scotland Yard building, the veteran sergeant eyed the approaching brunette appraisingly. He'd been assigned to the reception desk because he was considered to have good judgement about people. So it was up to him to decide which visitors deserved serious attention or needed real help, and from which appropriate department and officer, versus who was merely a crank who could safely be dismissed or fobbed off on a low-level flunky.

The girl, who'd paused to brush thick chestnut hair back off her face as she looked around, was young -- in her late teens, or twenty at the most. She wore an old brown leather jacket over a Queen's College, Cambridge sweatshirt above clean but worn blue jeans and well-broken-in trainers. Although the details of her figure were hidden by her casual, baggy clothes, she was obviously slender, slightly below average in height.

After that brief pause, she came up to his desk. Big brown eyes stared determinedly at him as she said in a high, clear -- and distinctly American -- voice, "I need to speak to somebody about the Modern-Ripper case, please."

"Why's that, miss?" he asked politely. As far as he could tell, the young woman in front of him was unlikely to be a reporter, and she wasn't upset enough to be a relative or a friend of any of the victims. She looked serious and seemed sensible -- but they'd had far more than the usual number of false leads and fake confessions already in *that* particular serial-murder case.

Small, pearl-white teeth bit into her lip nervously -- he noted absently that she wasn't wearing any lipstick to worry about mussing or fixing -- as she glanced around the milling crowd in the busy lobby, then replied hesitantly, "The papers say nobody knows how the victims were related, that they don't seem to have had much in common. Well, I know something -- something unusual -- that they all *did* have in common."

He stared back at her for a long moment, but she didn't drop her gaze; she held his look as she waited for his response. He decided to go with his gut reaction, and reached out for the internal telephone on his desk. "Let me ring one of the officers on the task force."

He hadn't completed his move before the girl's arm shot up, then froze with her hand halfway to his. He looked up at her deliberately, quizically; a delicate pink flush suffused her fair complexion as she stuttered quickly, pleadingly, "Please -- *anybody* except Detective Inspector Green... *please*."

That surprised a snort of laughter out of him, which the veteran officer managed to turn into a weird combination of a snort and a sneeze. "You've met her before, I take it?" He carefully hid his sympathetic grin at her badly hidden wince. "Right, miss, I'll get you Detective Inspector Wisdom, then." Rude and abrasive as Pete Wisdom might be, the sergeant figured she'd be much better off telling her tale to him than trying to deal with that hellcat Phoebe Green.