“No. She was found on an old abandoned subway platform downtown. At a station that closed about fifty years ago.”

“Fifty years ago?” I blinked. “What was she doing there?”

“Nothing. There’s no blood at the scene. She was killed somewhere else.”

“But if she was exsanguinated . . . I mean, there wouldn’t be blood, would there?”

“Oh, there would be a fair amount. It wasn’t done with surgical tidiness.” Obviously not wanting me to dwell on that, he continued, “Transit workers found her. It was just dumb luck that she was discovered so quickly. Workers seldom have a reason to access that site, and no one else is supposed to go there at all. Hardly anyone even knows the place exists. The body could have been there for weeks or months, completely decomposed—or even eaten by rodents—before anyone found it.”

I gave a startled gasp of revulsion.

“Sorry.” He touched me briefly in apology and gave himself a shake. “I didn’t mean to . . . You know.”

I realized he’d spoken so frankly because he was too exhausted to self-edit well.

“Anyhow,” he continued, “this play you’re in has been such a headache to the department for the past couple of nights that the officers on the scene thought of it right away when they saw the historical costume the victim was wearing. And, of course, it turned out that she’d made quite an impression on the patrolmen outside the stage door last night.”

“Then they also called you because this might be connected to . . .” Even though we were alone, I lowered my voice, “To your undercover case?”

“Well, calling me was a professional courtesy. So to speak,” he added, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. “Mostly, they were being thorough. Daemon Ravel’s involvement will put this investigation under a microscope. The department doesn’t want some telegenic celebrity lawyer to create reasonable doubt by claiming we failed to exercise due diligence or cross-reference similar cases.”

With his long hair, grubby clothes, and beardshadowed face, Lopez looked kind of scary when he scowled darkly over the prospect of that happening.

Then he continued, “But the cops who caught this case really like your costar for the murder. Failing that, they really like an as-yet-unknown obsessed fan for it. And their third favorite theory is that Angeline just made one bad choice too many last night. Murder is usually pretty simple, you know. So, with all those juicy possibilities right in front of them, they’re inclined to think any similarities to my case are probably just . . .” He shrugged. “Coincidence. A distraction.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know yet. They need to interview Daemon and to get forensics results. And I need to go over their case more thoroughly tomorrow. Tonight, I was, uh, caught flatfooted. I only really heard what was said up until the point where they named the actress who Angeline attacked last night, and I realized you were the person she was dressed up like when she was killed. After that ... everything else was just kind of a roaring in my ears.”

“Oh.” Despite my skimpy clothing and a noticeable draft, I felt a welcome warmth slide gently over my skin.

“So I thanked them for the information, and I asked to be updated tomorrow,” Lopez said. “I also agreed to follow orders, maintain my cover, and not interfere in this investigation.”

“But then you came here.”

“Then I can straight here,” he confirmed.

The glow was spreading all through me now. “Thank you.”

He held very still while I brushed his hair out of his eyes.

“You’re welcome.”

My hand lingered for a moment. He closed his eyes with a soft exhalation, turned his head, and pressed his cheek against my palm.

I smiled as the stubble on his jaw tickled my skin. “You really need a shave.”

He smiled, too, and opened his eyes. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

Sitting together in the shadows, our eyes held for a contented moment.

Then Mad Rachel’s voice, echoing through the whole backstage area, broke the spell. “What do you mean I can’t leave?”

We both turned our heads to listen. I heard an unfamiliar male voice arguing with Rachel near the stage door. I couldn’t make out his words. His tone was polite but firm, despite Rachel’s growing hostility.

“The police? Why do the police want to talk to me?” After another brief interchange, she said, “Fine, all of us! Whatever. Why?” When she didn’t get an explanation that satisfied her, Rachel started shrieking for our stage manager. “Bill! Bill! BILL!”

I heard more voices. Agitation began spreading through the cast and crew now. Leischneudel sounded confused and anxious. I heard Bill’s voice, too. He sounded depressed.

“I think that’s my cue,” Lopez said wryly. “I’d better go.”

“They’ll see you,” I said with concern. He’d had trouble at work in the past because of me; I didn’t want to cause him more problems. “The cops, I mean.”

“No, they won’t.” Looking more alert now, he rose and took my hand. “Come on. There’s something I need to show you.”

“Now?” I got to my feet.

“Yes. Hurry.” He tugged me with him as he moved along the shadowy corridor, heading away from the commotion generated by Mad Rachel.

“Not this way,” I protested softly. “It’s a dead end.”

“Not exactly.”

“But—”

“It’s the way I came in.”

I frowned. “How?”

He turned the corner and, as I’d predicted, we entered a dead-end alcove. There was some cleaning equipment, a broken vending machine, and a scarred door that led down to the basement. Lopez opened the door, turned on the stairwell light, and pulled me after him.

“You came in via the basement?” I asked.

“And if I can, then maybe someone else can, too,” he said.

I felt cold again. “Such as the killer?”

“I’d feel better if this building were more secure while you’re working in it,” he said, descending the stairs rapidly. “I’ll show you how I got in, so you can show the stage manager—or whoever’s responsible for this kind of thing around here—and have him seal it up.”

“Slow down,” I said anxiously. “This dress isn’t made for scrambling up and down staircases.”

“Oh, sorry.” He let go of my hand so that I could use it to lift my skirts as I descended the rest of the way. I felt air on my back and realized I was still half-unlaced.

“I’ve never been down here before,” I said as we reached the bottom of the stairs. It turned out to be pretty much what you’d expect of the basement of a sixty-year-old theater: big, dusty, industrial, shadowy, and full of air ducts, water pipes, and machinery that powered the Hamburg.

Lopez led me across the length of the large basement, into a dark alcove behind piles of junk and ancient, rusted-out machinery, and down a few more stairs—smoothly worn and slippery with time. At the bottom of the small flight of steps, set deep in this seemingly forgotten corner under the theater, there was a big, heavy, very old door. I noticed stains and rusting on its lower portion, as if there’d been occasional flooding at this level over the years.

If I weren’t with someone I trusted, I’d be very nervous by now. Actually, given that a woman who was a ringer for me had recently been murdered, I would be balking and shouting for help. But since I was with Lopez, I was just surprised and curious, as well as puzzled. What did these obscure portions of the Hamburg Theater have to do with either of us?

He opened the heavy, creaking door, and I saw that it led into a pitch dark corridor. Lopez paused and bent down to pick up something—a small backpack that was sitting on the floor, next to the door. I didn’t realize it belonged to him until I saw how easily the thing slid into place as he slipped the straps over his shoulders.

“You really did come in this way,” I blurted.

“I thought I might be conspicuous upstairs, carrying a backpack, so I left it here. I wanted to slip in and out of the theater without anyone but you noticing I was there.” He grinned at me. “Little did I know that your dressing room is as busy as Grand Central Station.”

Looking at our subterranean surroundings, I said, “Sneaking into the theater from underground seems a little elaborate.”

“Well, I thought I could probably get in this way.”

“Why did you think that?”

“And it seemed easier than trying to slip discreetly past a few hundred crazed vamparazzi and a team of patrolmen who’ve been alerted by now to keep a sharp eye out for anyone who looks suspicious.”

“Such as a scary-looking undercover cop?”

“Fine, I get the message, I’ll shave,” he said.

“And change your clothes?”

“That, too,” he agreed absently. “Come on, we need to hurry. They’ll start looking for you soon.”

He reached into one of the Velcro-flapped pockets of his military-style pants, from which he pulled out a small flashlight with some straps hanging from it. Using this for illumination, he led me through the door where he’d collected his backpack, and down a long, dark corridor with a low ceiling. I tripped on the rough ground, and he took my hand again, holding onto it to steady me as we proceeded. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I realized that the walls were rough and unfinished, and the low ceiling was slightly curved. This wasn’t a corridor, it was a tunnel.

“Where are we?” I asked, clutching his hand tightly.

“We’re going under the street.” His voice was calm, despite the eerie surroundings. “Don’t worry. The structure is solid here.”

“Uh-huh.”

At the end of the tunnel, we emerged into a small chamber with a very high ceiling and a crumbling iron spiral staircase which, bizarrely, led nowhere. There was just a sealed wall at the top of those stairs. On our level, behind the staircase, there was a low, rusty, iron door set deep in the wall.

“Your crew could seal off the door we came through back there,” Lopez said, “but I think this one would be a better choice.” He rapped his knuckles on the thick, old iron door. “It’s the only way into this whole area, and a little welding would seal this thing so tight, no one and nothing would get through there.”

“I’ll tell Bill,” I promised.

“Make sure you do. It’s important.”

I glanced around at the strange place we were in. “I’m not likely to forget.”

He smiled at that. “True.”

“But this seems ... well, kind of an improbable way for anyone to try to get into the theater.”

“I got in this way,” he reminded me.

I gestured to our underground surroundings, dark and spooky in the faint illumination of his little flashlight. “How did you even know about this?”

“That’s not important right now. What is important—”

“Is that I tell Bill to seal up this door. Yes, yes, I know.”

Lopez grunted a little as heaved open the heavy door under the spiral staircase, an effort that was accompanied by a long, loud, echoing screech of rusted hinges.

I flinched at the noise, and I thought the jarring racket would surely be heard. But then I realized we were too far away from the theater for that.

“Where exactly are we?” I asked, after the door was open and the screeching had stopped.

“Under Eighth Avenue.”

“Why did someone build a cellar under Eighth Avenue ?”

“This isn’t a cellar,” he said. “Or it wasn’t, back then.”

“Back when?”

“The nineteenth century.” Lopez pointed to the spiral staircase. “This was originally an access chamber to the water system under the Village. For maintenance workers. The entrance from above ground was sealed off decades ago. Probably to prevent curious kids or pedestrians from getting down here and getting hurt.”

I peaked through the rusted door he had pried open and looked into the stygian darkness beyond. “This was the water system?”

“Part of it. Abandoned more than a century ago. Here, have a look.”

He came closer to me and raised his flashlight to my head. The straps I had noticed dangling from it touched my hair, and then he settled the light on my forehead, tightening the straps around my head to keep it steady.

That’s when I realized what the device actually was. “This is a headlamp!”

“Uh-huh.” He finished adjusting it on my head, then fastened the strap around my chin. “As long as we’re here, you might as well see.”

“See what?”

Lopez grinned. “A glimpse of the hidden world under the city.” He took my hand again and led me to the threshold of the ancient door, leading into pitch darkness. As we ducked our heads to pass under the doorway, he said, “Watch your step. There’s a little water in here.”

“How much water?” I hung back, tugging against his hand.

“Not that m . . . Oh, you’re worried about your costume ?”

“Fiona will kill me if I ruin these shoes.”

“Fiona?”

“The wardrobe mistress.” The light on my forehead shone on Lopez, who was standing in pitch darkness. I could see a curved wall behind him, made of long, narrow bricks. It looked very old. Intrigued, I took one cautious step forward. “What is this?”

“Watch your feet,” he said, gently halting me with a hand on my shoulder. “I forgot for a minute you’re in some Regency lady’s shoes. Here, try this. Lean on me.” He shifted position and claimed both my hands, holding them so that our palms were pressed together, our fingers linked. “Go ahead, lean in.”

“This is like a trust exercise in acting class.”

“And the fact that you’re bound to fall out of that dress if you lean forward one more inch has nothing to do with my suggesting this.”

“Oops.” Realizing he was right, I hunched my shoulders a little to prevent that from happening.

He sighed. “Oh, well.”

Leaning forward in this awkward posture, I let Lopez take a lot of my weight as I turned my head this way and that, trying to illuminate the parameters of this mysterious place with the headlamp.

The forgotten underground tunnel stretched out darkly on either side of me, its smoothly cylindrical shape carrying on in a straight line as far as I could see in this faint light, gradually disappearing into complete and intimidating blackness in both directions. The curved ceiling was only a little higher than Lopez’s head, and a narrow, very shallow stream of water flowed through the gently rounded brick floor at his feet.

“This is amazing!” My voice echoed eerily through the long, empty tunnel, prompting me to call, “Helloooo !” Then I listened to the echo that bounced along the brick walls and disappeared into the distance. “Cool.”

Lopez encouraged me to lean further in, still using his hands for balance, so that I could see more.

I flinched a bit when I spied something creepy dangling from the tunnel ceiling in the syrupy darkness some distance to my left. “What’s that?”

He peered in the same direction. “Tree roots. Over the years, they force their way through the mortar of these old underground constructions.” He added, “Eventually that affects structural stability and can cause problems.”

“But since the tunnel’s not in use anymore . . .” I started to shrug, then realized that my precarious balance, as well as my low neckline and partially undone laces, made that an unwise gesture.

“It’s still not good for public safety to have things collapsing under Eighth Avenue—or anywhere else,” Lopez said. “And people down here can get hurt in cave-ins.”

“Who comes down here?” I demanded.

“Well, urban explorers, for one.”

“Oh, people who explore tunnels, bridges, abandoned shipyards, and stuff? I’ve seen some TV programs about them.”

I thought urban exploration seemed interesting—but also like a hobby I was content to know about only via my television. It looked dirty, uncomfortable, and dangerous, and I suspected that anyone who did it regularly probably had to get a lot of shots, since it seemed to bring people into frequent contact with garbage, sewage, rust, used syringes, industrial waste, rats, and other things I didn’t want to get close to. I gathered from my TV viewing that urban exploration was also not strictly legal, since it often involved trespassing or going into places where public access was prohibited. I wasn’t in a position to be smugly critical about breaking the law; but the possibility of being arrested did strike me as an additional disincentive for crawling around in polluted storm drains.

“Here, look this way,” Lopez said, gesturing with his head and shifting his weight to reposition me and point my attention in the other direction, away from the eerily dangling tree roots. “Look at what I found when I was coming to see you.”

I was about to ask again why he had chosen a route through abandoned underground water tunnels, rather than a more conventional path to the theater, since even trying to sneak past vamparazzi and cops struck me as less trouble than coming via this eccentric entrance, but then my attention was captured by what he was trying to show me, as he instructed me exactly where to point the light that was fastened to my head.

“Oh!” I said with surprised pleasure, leaning heavily against his supporting hands as I strained to see farther down the length of the tunnel. “Look! What is that?”

About thirty yards away from us, a series of long, shinywhite spires hung down from the sloping ceiling. Some of them were perfectly straight; others twisted and twined into weird, fantastic shapes. Some were very short and thick, while others were slender and almost long enough to touch the tunnel floor. They gleamed beautifully in the faint light of my headlamp, glistening like stony icicles, as if dotted with glitter or tiny shards of crystal.

“They’re stalactites.” I could hear in his voice that he was pleased with my enthusiastic reaction to this surprise. “There’s a lot of stuff under the city that’s abandoned or forgotten, but none of it is stagnant or dead. It’s constantly changing. Those crystal formations developed over decades down here. They’ll keep growing for centuries if they’re left undisturbed.”

“Growing how?” I tilted my head from side to side, enjoying the way the shifting light made the dangling formations glitter.

“Water drips down from the street and the ground above us, through layers of soil and sediment, picking up mineral deposits along the way,” he replied. “Those stalactites are formed by years and years of that water creating tiny cracks in the tunnel ceiling and leaving behind microscopic deposits from every drop that falls. Until you get that.”

“Yeah.” After a moment he added, “And it’s all right under our feet every day, while we’re walking around the city.”

I looked at the beautiful shapes for another moment, then asked, “If you came here this way, where did you come from? How did you get into this tunnel in the first place?”

“Oh, there’s a whole maze of entrances and exits. This tunnel hasn’t been in active use for over a hundred years, but it links up that way—” He nodded in one direction. “—with the steam tunnels under New York University.” Then he nodded in the other direction. “And it connects that way with a portion of the old covered canal under Canal Street. If you know where you’re going, you can link up with the storm drains for this part of the city, too, or with part of the old sewage system.”

“Ah. With attractions like that, no wonder you didn’t just use the street entrance to visit me.”

Lopez smiled. “Well, apart from not wanting to be seen, since I’m not supposed to be here, I wanted to check this out. To see if it looked like anyone else has been using this entrance.”

“And what’s your conclusion?”

He shrugged, which made me lose my balance. Preventing me from falling, he helped me stand solidly on my own feet again. Then he stepped out of the tunnel and joined me on dry ground in the access chamber. “I can’t tell whether anyone’s been here. But I’d have felt better if the door had been rusted shut when I tried to get in tonight.”

“This really doesn’t seem like a place where you’d want to find the exit blocked,” I said as I removed the headlamp and returned it to him.

“Oh, I could have just doubled back until I reached a different exit. And then I’d have tried to slip into the theater some other way.” He shook his head. “But the fact that the door’s still working . . . Well, it doesn’t really tell me anything. Except that I want you to make sure it gets welded shut.”

“I still don’t understand how you even knew this door was here. I mean, I work here, and I didn’t know any of this underground stuff was attached to the theater. And I’ll bet when I show it to Bill, he’ll be surprised, too. So how did you . . . Oh.”

I looked him over head-to-toe again as it all started coming together in my mind. Lopez had just revealed an unusual level of familiarity with the physical underbelly of the city, and he had come here via abandoned underground tunnels. I remembered him telling me this past summer, when we had visited a crumbling nineteenth-century watchtower together in Harlem, that he’d always been interested in such places and was prone to poking around in them. And tonight, I now realized, he was dressed and equipped much like the people I saw on TV programs about shimmying down manholes and crawling through forgotten drains and sewers.

“Does your undercover case have something to do with urban explorers?” I asked slowly.

“Something,” he said.

“So you . . . you . . .” I gestured vaguely to the tunnel. “Do that?”

“I used to. In high school and college. I pretty much gave it up when I became a cop, since it’s not exactly legal—especially not since the attacks of nine-eleven. There’s been heightened security ever since then.” He started leading me back the way we had come here. “We’ve stayed down here too long. They’ve probably looked all over the theater for you by now.”

“So now you’re doing this as undercover work?” I persisted.

“Well, I’m not a creeper anymore, but Hector Sousa is.”

“Creeper?” I repeated, following him into the dark but dry tunnel that had led us to this access chamber.

“Someone who goes where he’s not supposed to go.”

“Like an urban explorer?”

“Uh-huh. Here, watch your step.” He took my hand to lead me back through the dark tunnel that ran under the street the Hamburg was on, using the headlamp as a flashlight again. “My first assignment after I got out of uniform was on an antiterrorism task force, working undercover. There was a lot of anxiety at the time about urban explorers wandering around abandoned sites and installations, both underground and above ground, without supervision or authorization. Who exactly were they? What were they doing? What were their intentions ? Had they been infiltrated by anyone whose intentions weren’t innocent? And so on. So the department created an identity for me—”

“As Hector, a man with no razor?”

“—and I made contact with urban explorer groups in the city, going into the field with them—which mostly meant going underground at night—and looking for terrorist activity.”

“Did you find any terrorists?”

“That’s classified.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“But it was a big waste of time.” He added, “Don’t ever tell anyone I said that, though.”

“Who would I tell?”

“At first, it was kind of fun, since I was getting paid to do things that I used to do as a hobby. But I don’t really like undercover work. You’re isolated from other cops, and you have to lie to everyone all the time—the people in your real life, as well as the people you’re investigating.” We exited the tunnel and entered the Hamburg’s basement through the heavy door at the bottom of the short flight of old steps. “And since my investigations weren’t finding anything worth reporting, I felt pretty silly and useless after a while. So I started pressing for reassignment, until I finally got it.”

“But now they’ve convinced you to do it again?”

“I was approached a few weeks ago and asked if I could re-establish some of my old contacts and activities in the urban explorer community. Same identity, different kind of case. And the OCCB agreed to, um, loan me out for a little while.”

So evidently Lopez’s changed appearance since the last time we’d met was the result of spending a lot of time underground in recent weeks, as well as assuming Hector’s identity.

“You’re not looking for terrorists this time?” I asked.

“I’m not supposed to discuss what I’m looking for,” he said as we passed through the basement, heading toward the big staircase that would lead me back up to the theater—where NYPD cops were probably already questioning my fellow actors.

“But your case has similarities to last night’s vampire victim?” I prodded.

“Vampire victim,” he repeated, looking pained. “You just couldn’t resist using that phrase, could you?”

“Well, she did have all her blood dr—”

“You’ve been hanging around the vamparazzi too long.”

“I don’t hang around with them.”

“Then maybe playing a vampire victim every night has affected your judgment.”

“My judgment is . . .” I realized that he had just deliberately steered me away from the subject of his investigation—and was trying to irritate me enough that I wouldn’t notice the ploy. Which made me even more curious, naturally, about what he was investigating that might be related to Angeline’s death. “You said one of the reasons they briefed you on last night’s murder was because of where the body was found.”

“You should go upstairs now,” he said firmly. “They’ll be looking for you.”

“Underground.”

“Your friend Licenoodle will be worried.”

I ignored this obvious attempt to distract me. “What are you investigating underground that—”

“Esther.”

I gasped as the most horrifying possibility occurred to me. “There’ve been other victims, haven’t there?”

For a moment, his expression went so carefully blank that I knew he was considering lying to me. Then his shoulders sagged and he said, with obvious reluctance, “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” I repeated shrilly.

He sighed in weary resignation. “In the past couple of months, three bodies have been found in ... unusual underground locations.”

“Three murder victims?” I exclaimed.

“One may have been natural causes.”

“May have been?”

“There, uh, aren’t enough remains for us to be sure.”

“Oh.” I queasily recalled what he had said earlier about the effects of decomposition and hungry rodents. Then I demanded, “And the other two bodies?”

He hesitated, then nodded. “Murder.”

“Were they exsanguinated?” Seeing that he didn’t want to answer me, I prodded sharply, “Well?”

“Try to stay calm.”

“Lopez!”

“We’ve kept this out of the press. No one knows the details. And it has to stay that way. Do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, go on,” I said impatiently.

“The bodies of two missing urban explorers have been found at other abandoned underground locations.”

“Drained of all their blood?” I asked anxiously.

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

Looking very tired again, he said, “Only some of their blood was drained.”