“I don’t know—Belleview or Belleville or something?” She huffed out a sigh. “Listen, I know your next question, and I don’t know who her boyfriend is. The other lady asked that, too. I will say this, though. She posted on Facebook the other day, so I don’t think she’s missing or anything. She probably just went out of town or something. Or took off with some guy.”
“She have a habit of taking off?”
“Lately? Yeah. It’s one of the reasons she moved out. One commercial and she became a total flake. Started blowing through money, shopping all the time, stiffing me for rent, acting all above everyone. I finally kicked her out.” She jammed the phone in her purse. “Freaking spray tan ad and you’d think she was Meryl Streep.”
“What about co-workers? How’d she pay her bills before she got the acting job?”
“She waited tables at Sushi Go-Go.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m headed there now, and I’m running late, so—”
“If you happen to hear anything, please call me.” Krista handed her a business card. “I need to find her by tomorrow.”
She scoffed. “Good luck.”
“You think she’d blow off a court date?”
“Depends what’s in it for her.”
“How about staying out of jail? Ignoring a subpoena’s a serious offense.”
“Whatever. One thing you can count on, Lily’s life is all about Lily.”
~ ~ ~
Krista studied Lily’s picture as she trekked up the stairs to her office. Amber Swift hadn’t provided a ringing endorsement of her ex-roommate’s character, but Krista kept her mind open. Former friends and lovers often had axes to grind.
Mac was still at his computer, but he’d been out, judging by the venti Frappuccino parked at his elbow. He couldn’t work the coffee machine either.
“Scarlet call in?”
“Nope.” He glanced up at her. “I ran that list for you. Came up blank.”
Krista had asked him to run a list of utility companies to see if Lily had shut off any of her services. People were amazingly cheap, even when they were on the lam, and they sometimes had their security deposits forwarded to a new address.
But the utility info jived with what she’d seen at the house. So far nothing indicated Lily had moved, only that she was away from home temporarily.
Mac handed her a yellow legal pad, where he’d jotted some notes.
“I checked that cell phone, too, and it’s been de-activated for more than a month.”
“We should try social media. I know she has a Facebook account, maybe Twitter.”
“You have any account info? It’s not exactly a unique name.”
Krista pulled a color copy of the driver’s license photo from her rapidly expanding file. “She might be using a headshot as her profile pic. If it’s a candid picture, she might be holding an orange cat.”
Krista went into her office and sat down at her computer. She logged onto a database called “Who Reps?” that she and Scarlet subscribed to. Given their location, it had proved useful over the years. She found Lily’s agent in only a few clicks. Berle Braxton, presumably the woman who’d left the note on the front porch.
“Got a hit on Twitter,” Mac called from the other room, and Krista got up from her desk to go see.
“Username ‘Lilykins99,’” he recited. “And you were right about the headshot. It’s a black-and-white. Very Lana Turner.”
She looked at him.
“What? She starred in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Spencer Tracy. She was one of the original scream queens.”
“I didn’t know you were a film buff.”
He shrugged. “Classic horror.”
She tried to get back on track. “When was Lily’s last update?”
“I’m getting there. Lemme see…. Shit, New Year’s Eve.”
“Not a regular then.”
Krista went back to her desk and sent the agent’s contact info to her phone. She grabbed a Mars Bar from her bottom drawer and gathered her purse.
Straight up noon. Twenty-four hours and counting, and Lilykins was still missing in action.
“Where are you going?” Mac asked.
“Century City. Call me if you get anything,” she said as she rushed out the door.
~ ~ ~
The morning’s smooth takeoff turned into the afternoon’s crash and burn.
Berle Braxton of Braxton Creative wasn’t at her office.
Krista finally got through to a Marie Daniels in Belleview, Louisiana. But the woman hadn’t seen or heard from her daughter since she’d “run off to that God-forsaken land of fruits and nuts” and she seemed happy to keep it that way.
Krista fought rush hour traffic to make another pass by Lily’s house, but she spotted no red Kia in the driveway—only Julia Meyers in her Mexican dress, puttering in the yard again.
Krista’s shoulders were in knots by the time she made it back to Huntington Beach. She checked her mirrors as she drove. All day she’d had a vague feeling of unease and had been glancing around, half-expecting Brad Stark’s angry mug to put in an appearance. But she hadn’t spotted him, and there was nobody tailing her as she pulled onto her palm-lined street.
Anyone who knew Krista’s personality would never guess she lived in a canary-yellow cottage with a white picket fence. She’d inherited the place when her grandmother died and hadn’t bothered to change much about it after she’d moved in. She pulled into the carport and went around to the front, bypassing the outside staircase that led to the second-floor studio apartment, which she rented out.
Krista stepped through the front gate and the sweet smell of jasmine drifted over her. She plucked her mail from a birdhouse-shaped mailbox painted yellow to match the cottage. As she unlocked the front door, Spencer squawked his greeting.
“No place like home! No place like home!”
She dumped the mail on the armchair and walked over to the giant cage that occupied a corner of the sunroom.
“Hey, Spence.”
He flapped over and she fed him some cashews through the mesh cage. Grandma Dot had always predicted the macaw would outlive her, and she’d been right. He cocked his head and looked at her. He was a beautiful bird with brilliant blue and gold plumage and a shiny black beak. If he’d stayed in the Amazon, he could have been a real ladies’ man.
“Give us a kiss,” he screeched.
She fed him another nut, then plopped onto the sofa and kicked off her shoes. She stared glumly at the ceiling, munching cashews before mustering the energy to unfold the notebook computer sitting on the table where she’d left it last night.
She dusted off her hands and logged onto Google to enter Lily’s name.
“Where you at, girlfriend?”
She scanned the results, but no new leads. She checked her email. Nothing new from Mac.
Dread tightened her stomach as she pictured the note at Lily’s house. It was one thing to run off with a guy for a few days or to ignore emails from a pushy lawyer. But Krista didn’t know a lot of aspiring actors who ignored their agents. That bothered her.
It bothered her almost as much as DeSilva’s off-handed comment that Lily was not “make-or-break” to the case. Lily Daniels was critical to Walker’s case, or no way in hell would he fork over six grand to find her.
Krista hopped onto Google to learn more about the case.
OC Teen Charged in Doctor’s Slaying.
She skimmed the LA Times article. Alan Sheffield, a trauma surgeon at Cedars-Sinai, had been found dead behind a Dumpster in Anaheim, shot in the face. It had taken authorities two days to ID the victim, whose wallet was missing, along with the keys to his Mercedes. Both the wallet and the car had turned up in the possession of Marco Saurez, eighteen.
According to police records, Saurez confessed to the murder after his arrest at a convenience store in Newport Beach, where he’d been using Sheffield’s gas card. Saurez’s court-appointed lawyer entered a plea of not guilty. It wasn’t long before Drak
e Walker took over the case and started making noise about a jailhouse beating and a coerced confession.
Krista looked up the article’s author, John Wayland. He was listed as a staff writer. Those were slowly becoming extinct, just like the newspapers they worked for.
She read the final sentence again. On trial for his life. Wayland seemed to have sympathy for the kid, and she wondered if he knew something he hadn’t put in the story.
Krista’s phone chimed. She recognized the number of an admin she knew over at Walker & Associates. DeSilva had been dodging her calls, and she’d asked her friend to keep an eye on him and let her know when he left.
“Hey, the meeting ran long,” she told Krista. “He just took off a few minutes ago.”
“Any guess where he was going? Home? The gym?”
“Well, he was with Hessman, so my guess is Coppertank.”
Krista checked her watch. Seventeen hours and counting.
“Thanks for the tip.”
~ ~ ~
Coppertank was a trendy microbrewery in Huntington Beach that attracted a combination of tourists, locals, and beer snobs.
Krista found DeSilva at the bar, flirting with a surfer chick who was spilling out of her tube top. She laughed at something he said before slipping away to join some friends at a nearby table.
DeSilva spotted Krista, and the look on his face said he wasn’t happy to see her. She didn’t mind—she got that a lot.
“Where’s Hessman?” she asked, grabbing a stool.
He nodded toward the end of the bar, where the newly divorced defense attorney was hitting on a young brunette.
“I’m fresh out of favors, Krista.”
“I don’t need any.”
“Right.”
She flagged the bartender. DeSilva’s beer looked like motor oil. Krista ordered something pale with a wedge of lemon.
“I just need some info. Tell me about Lily.”
He glanced over her shoulder at the door. “You’ve got a file.”
“File’s thin. Like maybe they left out a few hundred pages? Come on. What’s her role in this thing? What’s Walker worried about?”
The more Krista knew about the dynamic in play, the more she knew about where to look for this witness.
DeSilva’s gaze settled on her. Maybe he realized the sooner he gave her something useful, the sooner she’d get out of his way.
“Marco Saurez is facing sixty to life. You know who his cousin is?”
“Who?” Her beer arrived and she took a sip.
“Roberto Garcia. Goes by Chollo. Walker got him off a drug rap two years ago. Would’ve been his third conviction.”
“So he’s been inside.”
“Spent most of the last decade inside. Doesn’t want the same for his cousin.” He tipped back his beer. “And anyway, he might not be guilty. There’s talk of police coercion.”
“Where have I heard that before?”
“True, but this kid turned up for his hearing with his ribs kicked in. Walker’s got pictures of it.”
Krista tipped her head to the side. “And the cops say what?”
“Jailhouse beating, rival gang. Just what you’d expect.”
And there it was. The gang connection.
A connection that could be the reason behind Lily’s sudden disappearance. Except for one thing.
Lily was a witness for the defense, not the prosecution. Would some rival gang—one that had a grudge against Saurez or his family—want to screw up the trial and make sure Saurez got sent away?
Sixty years to life was a serious grudge.
Krista sipped her beer. “So, Walker thinks he can get him off?”
DeSilva smiled. “Wouldn’t take the case otherwise. Not good for his acquittal rate.”
“But Saurez was arrested driving the victim’s car and using his credit card. And an eye witness puts a guy matching Saurez’s description behind the wheel of a black Mercedes, speeding away from the alley where the victim was found, right after gunshots were heard.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve got another eye witness who casts doubt on all that.”
“Lily Daniels.”
“She was across the street from the alley and says she saw a guy who looked nothing at all like Saurez or the victim parking a black Mercedes at the end of the alley. She watched the guy walk away from the car and catch a ride with a black Range Rover at the end of the block. This was a full hour before the supposed gunshots.”
Krista thought about that. Where was the doctor while this was happening? Was he already dead? If so, it certainly complicated the prosecutor’s murder-by-a-gansta-car-thief scenario.
“Who’s the prosecution’s witness?”
“Vinh Nguyen. Vietnamese business owner, runs the motel across from the crime scene. Been here thirty years, speaks good English. He’s a law-abiding citizen with a son on his way to Stanford—first kid in their family to go to college. Jury’s gonna love this guy.”
“Meanwhile, you’ve got a twenty-two-year-old unemployed actress with a drug possession charge under her belt.”
He frowned. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Around.”
“Sounds like you got a handle on it. What do you need me for?” He tipped back his beer.
“I want the file. The real one. Lilian Daniels is crucial to your case, so don’t tell me you didn’t turn her inside out. I know how you guys work.”
DeSilva plunked his glass down. “Walker’s protective about his case files.”
Walker was paranoid, like every other defense attorney she knew. Lawyers on both sides worried about leaks and spies, especially if the case had been in the news, and especially right before trial. It was a cutthroat business. If the defense team’s case strategy slipped out, they’d lose the element of surprise, and possibly the case, too.
Krista got all that, but she had her own end to worry about. And she didn’t like working with incomplete information.
“It’s not like I want the whole case file,” she said, “just Lily’s piece.”
DeSilva glanced over her shoulder, clearly getting impatient. “He’s touchy about this one.”
“Come on, Andy.”
He met her gaze. She could see she was wearing him down.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She smiled and slid off her barstool, pulling some money from her purse. “Thanks. I mean it.”
“Yeah, no promises.”
“Can you get it to me tonight?”
“Get serious.”
“I’m on a clock here. I’ve got sixteen hours left.” She punched his arm playfully. “Come on. The night is young. You’ve got interns burning the midnight oil over there. Give someone a call.”
He sighed, and she knew she had him. Persistence worked.
Plus, he was on a mission to hook-up tonight, and she was botching his chances. He glanced past her again, and she tucked her money under her beer glass. Time to go.
“No promises,” he said, “but I’ll see what I can do.”
~ ~ ~
Krista made her way by Lily’s Newport Beach rental and pulled into the driveway of a vacant house that looked like a rundown version of Lily’s home.
She got out quietly and glanced around. Moths flitted around the streetlamps, which cast spheres of light on the pavement between every third home. The street was quiet. No joggers, no people milling on porches. Not even any cars, just the distant whir of traffic on the San Diego Freeway.
Krista eased down the driveway and passed under one of the streetlights. The air smelled like fresh-cut grass. Mrs. Meyer’s house looked sleepy, but the blue flicker in back told Krista she had a TV on in the bedroom.
Krista was more concerned with Lily’s other neighbor, who had about six home security signs sprouting up from the flower beds and a Beware of Dog warning tacked to the fence. Sure enough, a dog started yapping as soon as Krista walked by. It was about the size of a hamster, judging from the bark, but still it was unnervi
ng to listen to as she unlatched the gate and slipped into Lily’s back yard.
The back of the house was darker than the front. Overgrown bushes lined the fence. A trio of plastic patio chairs sat near the back door, clustered around a ceramic bowl overflowing with cigarette butts. Stray beer bottles littered the lawn.
Krista zeroed in on the northwest window, which would be the back bedroom. She wiped the dusty pane with the sleeve of her jacket and aimed her flashlight through the glass. Unmade bed. Clothes strewn about. The closet door stood open, but from her angle, she couldn’t see anything inside. The bedroom was a pigsty for sure, but it didn’t show the callous disarray of a place that had been ransacked. Looked more like the hovel of a sloppy teenager.
Krista moved to a higher-up window and peered into the bathroom. Beyond a row of shampoo bottles, she saw a crumpled towel on the floor and cosmetics scattered across the vanity.
More yapping. A door opened. Krista switched off her flashlight and stopped to listen as someone ordered the dog inside.
She crept around to the garage, such as it was. It didn’t have a door. The structure listed severely, and didn’t look like a smart place to house a car in an earthquake zone. Lily’s Kia wasn’t there, and Krista hadn’t expected it to be. She skirted around the back and set her sights on tonight’s main objective.
People’s faces often brightened when Krista mentioned she was a P.I.—especially the men. They probably pictured Tom Selleck in his red Ferrari, surrounded by bikini-clad women. The reality was a bit less glamorous, involving tedious phone calls, fruitless stakeouts, and nausea-inducing trash dives.
Krista sucked in a breath and approached the big plastic cans nestled against the fence. Something scampered along the wall, and she swept her flashlight around just in time to see a wiry gray tail disappear beneath the slats. Shuddering, she turned her attention to the cans.
She opened the first one and knew she’d hit pay dirt by the rank smell. She pulled out the top bag and set it on the ground. She lifted bag after bag out and piled them around her in a circle. She reached the last one, plunked it at her feet, and crouched down. She took a gulp of air and whipped out her Leatherman. A quick slash of the knife.
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