by Amy Gentry
Now, from a vision as capacious and sprawling as the city itself, my world had contracted to the size of this motel room. It had been meant as a base from which to plan my new life. Now it was a cell in which I sat waiting obediently for the warden.
The motel phone rang. I picked up on the first ring. “Amanda.”
“Dana,” she said pleasantly.
“Where are you? Are you here?”
She laughed. “In L.A.? No. I’m in Austin.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m in your apartment right now.”
“What? Why?”
“Oh, I just stopped by to look for something,” she said lightly. “Then it occurred to me, with everything going on—you’ve heard about Fash, haven’t you?—it might be a good idea for me to lie low for a little while. In case there happens to be a crackerjack IP sleuth in the Austin Police Department.”
I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt as if her hands were around my throat, squeezing.
“And since we’ve always had each other’s backs, I knew you wouldn’t mind. Think of it as housesitting. I tried watering your plants but I think they’re too far gone.”
“What happened to—” I couldn’t say Fash’s name. “That has nothing to do with me.”
“Oh, really? Nothing? Nothing at all?” She laughed again. “I wonder why the cops knocked on your door a few minutes ago. If what happened to Fash had nothing to do with you.”
“Cops?”
“Don’t worry, they went away. They’re not kicking down any doors yet; they just want to question some people. Standard procedure. It seems there were some irregularities with Fash’s medications.” She paused. I remembered what Kim had said about Fash going off his bipolar meds and felt ill. “And then there’s the gun.”
“Amanda.”
She continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “This is quite a mess, Fash’s demise. Especially so soon after he was in the local news.”
“Did you do it?”
She laughed. “You mean, did I pull the trigger? Come on, Dana. Do you really think I’m capable of murder?”
“I don’t know what you’re capable of.”
“I just told him the truth, Dana.” She sighed deeply. “Some people spend their lives running from who they are. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. If I’m the only one willing to be honest, does that make me a criminal?”
“Did you—did you mess with his meds?”
“Medication just helps people lie to themselves. You should have heard Fash talk—well, we mostly messaged—about how his pills made him feel. Numbed out, distant from his emotions. He wanted to get off them. Most people do. But people need help.” The phone made a shifting sound, as if she were wedging it casually between her cheek and shoulder. “And if those people happen to use Runnr to pick up their prescriptions . . .” She trailed off.
“That’s sick.”
“What’s sick is how many people don’t even need pills to lie to themselves,” she offered cheerfully. “Isn’t that right, Dana?”
I ignored the taunt. “You have to tell the police, Amanda. It’s gone too far. You can see that, can’t you? It was a bad idea in the first place, and now—we have to stop. It’s over.”
“Convenient that you get to decide when it’s over,” she said sharply. “I’m supposed to turn myself in? Or go into hiding?”
“That would be the right thing to do, yes.”
She snorted. “Which one? The one that’s best for you, right? No, I don’t think so. Look. Just do your mission, and you can go back to making the world laugh.”
“My mission,” I spat. “How fucking dare you.”
“How did that audition go, anyway? Not so well without this, I bet.”
“Without what?” Then, suddenly, I knew what she was holding. I covered my eyes with my free hand.
“It’s strange that you left your wig behind, seeing as how it’s so important for your act. Not to mention it’s got your DNA all over it. Along with Carl’s, I’m pretty sure. You probably left a few strands in his place, and Branchik’s.”
“Amanda.” I pushed my hair back off my forehead.
“It would definitely tie you to at least two crime scenes.”
“Amanda, don’t.”
“Don’t what? Drop a strand or two over at Fash’s house?”
“Oh my God.”
“I might not need to. You guys seemed awfully chummy at that bar after Funniest Person. I’d be willing to bet his robe picked up a few strands.”
My eyes prickled with hot tears as I realized she must have been there after all. Watching me win second place. Waiting for an advantage. “What do you want from me?” I said helplessly.
“The stakes have been upped significantly over the past few days, Dana. You have my third name. I need you to act on it. You’ll be glad you did. Trust me.”
She hung up, and I stared at the four walls of the motel room, my new life.
Jason opened the door with a dopey smile. “I was wondering when I’d see you again,” he said. “Busy lady these days.”
“We have to talk.” Before he could respond, I said, “Not about last night.”
“Okay.” He stepped back and waved me in. The living room felt womblike and stuffy behind the closed curtains. Left to himself, Jason never opened them, which had driven me nearly insane when we lived together. But now I was glad for the musty half-dark of the living room. As Jason went to the kitchen to get us fresh mugs of coffee—he’d only just woken up, I could tell—I twitched one of the curtains aside and glanced out the window. Just because she’d said she was in my apartment didn’t mean she was telling the truth.
Jason came back in and handed me my coffee, which I set down without tasting. My heart was already racing. There was one question I had to ask immediately, before I talked myself out of it, no matter how crazy it made me sound. As I opened my mouth to ask it, I realized, incredulously, I didn’t even know her last name.
“Do you know an Amanda? Tall, skinny, curly bleached-blond hair?” I waved my hands around my head in an invisible mane.
His forehead wrinkled. “You mean Amanda Dorn? Why, do you know her?”
The perfectly ordinary last name made her sound more human than she was in my head, and the way Jason said it—casual, completely at ease—made me realize a part of me had been expecting him to blanch in horror. If I had once thought of her as an imaginary friend, over the past few days she had become my phantom tormentor. But Jason looked only a little uncomfortable, possibly even annoyed.
“Yes. Amanda Dorn,” I said, trying it out. “Could she—would she have something against you?”
“I’m pretty sure she hates my guts. Does that count?” He started to say more, then hesitated, frowning.
I took a deep breath. “Jason, it’s very important that you tell me everything you know about her and what she could have against you.”
He put his hand to the back of his neck and scratched under his collar. “Look, Dana, are you sure you want to know? Last night, you said you were sick of hearing about my ex-girlfriends, and now you’re barging in here demanding to know everything.”
“Ex-girlfriend,” I repeated numbly.
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s the one I was trying to tell you about last night.”
“You’re Amanda Dorn’s ex-boyfriend in L.A.” Hollow-eyed, in the bar, the first night we met: He didn’t hit me, if that’s what you’re thinking. My reply: Sounds like a prince.
“It didn’t last that long.” He was running his hands through his hair nervously. “I mean, give me credit, I figured out she was crazy pretty fast.” He glanced at me. “She’s not a—a friend of yours, is she?”
I shook my head, my eyes on the floor.
“Thank God.” Jason had taken a large swig of coffee and set his mug down again. “I met her at an audition, and we started talking. I should have known better. Actress on the make. This was when I was hangin
g around with Aaron Neely, and a lot of people were giving me time because of it. I wish I could go back and—” He flushed. “Look, I got kind of a big head, I’ll be the first to admit it. But I paid the price. Amanda Dorn was a grade-A, gold-digging, star-fucking nut job. When I figured out she was more interested in meeting Neely than in dating me—it made me feel kind of crazy for a while too.”
“She wanted to meet Neely?”
“Oh yeah. She talked about him incessantly,” he said bitterly. “I guess she’d seen what kind of arm candy he carried around and thought she might just fit the bill. I think she’d auditioned for him or something but couldn’t get anywhere with him on talent alone.” He wrinkled his nose. “She was a terrible actress.”
Yet she had fooled me. So Amanda had a grudge against Neely too—one she’d neglected to mention. Had he harassed her too? Or had he just rejected her? Maybe she was only using me as an excuse to get back at him, just like she wanted to get back at Jason. What had she said about her evil ex-boyfriend? That he wouldn’t let her talk to other men at parties? And I’d listened sympathetically, nodded along. Swallowed her side of the story right away, without any proof. Flattered by her praise and embarrassingly eager to make my first real female friend, even if it was just a random stranger in a bar. If her ex hadn’t happened to be Jason, I would have gone on thinking of him as the psychopath who had done her wrong. My stomach sank as I thought first of Branchik, then of Carl. I had done those things to human beings, for someone whose last name I hadn’t even known.
Was it possible that my experience with Neely—still fresh, at that point, though now it seemed impossibly far away—had warped my perceptions so completely? Or had I always been so willing to believe the worst of men, even before Neely? And if so, was it because of Mattie, or was something else wrong with me? Something even deeper?
“Are you okay?” Jason said, and I realized I had been quiet for a while. “We really don’t have to talk about this. I said I wouldn’t burden you with this stuff anymore, and I meant it.”
“You called her crazy,” I said carefully. “What kind of crazy?”
“Well, just to give you an idea—after we broke up, I found spyware on my phone. And the fights we had, the yelling and screaming—”
He kept talking, but my ear snagged on the word spyware. I hadn’t heard it before, but it reminded me of Amanda talking about planting malware in Carl’s computer. I’m in charge of software.
Software, malware. Spyware.
I clapped one hand over my mouth and one hand over Jason’s.
“What—” His voice came out muffled.
I shook my head violently, put my finger to my lips, pressed my hand over his mouth harder. Pointed to my purse with a pleading expression.
Slowly he raised his hand to my wrist and pulled my hand away.
I opened my purse and pulled my phone out between my finger and thumb, as if I were handling something that could turn around and bite me any minute. With the other hand I made a helpless gesture. What do I do? I mouthed.
Jason gestured to my car outside. I nodded, lifted my keys as silently as possible out of the bag.
Say something, he mouthed.
I shrugged, panicked.
“About these fights,” Jason said out loud, and I almost jumped. “She and I would just, you know, go at it. Scream at each other for hours on end. It was awful. I cared about her, but she was just out for her.”
“You know what?” I was catching on. “I’m starting to remember why I didn’t want to hear anything about this. It sounds like you still care about her, Jason. Maybe everything she told me was right about you.”
“Dana, don’t leave!” Jason jumped up from the sofa and pointed frantically toward the door, jerking his head and lifting his eyebrows.
I grabbed my keys, making sure they rattled loudly. “I’m just going out to my car. I need a minute away from this crap.” I opened the door and walked out. “Maybe I’ll come back in after I cool down. Just give me some space.” I stalked down the front walk to the car, my heart pounding, acutely conscious that I was alone with Amanda now. I unlocked the car, tossed the phone onto the front seat, and slammed the door. Then I hurried up the walk and into the house.
Once the door was closed, I leaned my back against it.
“So. You too, huh?” Jason said.
I started laughing weakly. I couldn’t help it; it was nerves. “What exactly is spyware?”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” he said. “It turns your phone into a tracking device. Your stalker can see who you’re calling, who you’re texting. Where you are.”
Where you are. A motel. A film studio. Jason’s house. I fought down panic. “How does it get on your phone?”
“A couple of different ways. I’m pretty sure she just installed it on my phone when I wasn’t paying attention. But some people e-mail it as an attachment, like a virus. Or you could even text a link and hope they follow it.”
A link. Like the one to the Aaron Neely video.
“And she could really have been listening to us this whole time?”
“The prefab spyware packages available on the internet would give her access to e-mail, texting, browser history, that type of stuff,” he said. “But what she put on my phone was much more sophisticated. The memo recorder was locked in voice-activated mode, so she could listen in on everything I did. The guy I took the phone to was pretty impressed. He said he couldn’t be sure he had caught all the features. I wound up just buying a new phone.” Jason looked at me. “Dana, just tell me what the hell’s going on. How do you know Amanda?”
I groaned. “She lives in Austin now. She came to one of my performances. She pretended—I thought we were friends. She never mentioned you. Not by name, anyway.”
“Well, she definitely knew your name.”
Random stranger in a bar, indeed. It was even worse than I had thought. And I had been even stupider than I’d thought. “You told her about me?”
“Yeah, I mentioned you. I mean, of course I did. All my stories have you in them.” He squeezed my hand briefly. “Once she found out my former writing partner was a woman and my best friend on top of that, she would never believe we were platonic. She was insanely jealous.” He smiled slyly. “I guess she was onto something.”
“This isn’t cute, Jason.” I pointed out the window to my car. “She knows I’m here, and she knows I’m with you. She’s been sending me creepy messages. Today she sent me flowers.” I shuddered, thinking of the note. I couldn’t tell him what she really wanted, not without explaining the whole thing. But I could come close. “I think she wants to hurt you.”
“She wouldn’t be the first.”
“Jason! I’m being serious.” I saw Carl’s face, bloodied and crying for mercy. Fash and the gun. “If she wants to harm you, she’ll find a way. I know what she’s capable of.” And not just her. Suddenly I lost it and started crying. “This is all my fault.”
“Whoa, hey, wait a minute,” he said. “Slow down. Nobody’s going to hurt me. Least of all that crazy bitch.” I looked up at the epithet. It was the same word I had called her when Jason and I were fighting about his ex, but it sounded different now that I knew who we were talking about. More evil, more powerful.
“She called me last night,” I said. “She figured out where I was staying.”
“If your phone was bugged, that would be easy to do. But it’s easy to fix too. We’ll take your phone somewhere, get it wiped. You can stay here.”
“Why? Why is she doing this?” I sobbed. “Why does she hate me so much?”
He took my hands between his. “It’s me she hates. She can’t stand the idea of me being happy. It’s just her rotten luck that she stumbled on the person who makes me happiest and sent you straight into my arms.” At this, I sniffed and hiccupped. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Dana. Not while I’m here.”
But he didn’t know what Amanda had on me: the wig, the evidence at three different crime scen
es. “What are we going to do?”
“We turn the tables on her.” I looked at him questioningly. “Let’s be smart about this. She doesn’t know we know about the spyware. That gives us an edge. If you scrub your phone, she’ll figure out we’re onto her. As long as she thinks she’s in control, it’ll buy us time. Plus, she won’t be able to resist getting in touch as long as she still can. That gives us a way to track how crazy she’s getting.”
“And records for the police.”
“Yes, if it comes to that.”
I hoped it wouldn’t. “In the meantime, we can use it as a decoy.”
“Exactly. We’ll pick you up a burner before we get started.”
“Where do we start?” I had a feeling I knew what he was going to suggest.
18
We started with Runnr.
Jason wanted to stash my bugged phone in the glove compartment of my car, but my paranoia had swollen over the past hour like an allergic reaction to a bee sting, and I felt sure Amanda’s tracking software would know the difference between the house and the street in front of it. While Jason went to Best Buy for a disposable phone, I searched the house and found some leftover insulation in the recording studio’s closet. I tried to cut it up, but ordinary scissors couldn’t get the job done, so instead I wrapped the whole irregular-size piece around the phone and then sealed it tightly with black electrical tape. When I was finished, I had made a giant, spongy pillow completely covered in black. I set the lumpish thing in the studio closet and closed the door to the room in relief just as Jason got back with the burner.
“It’s all set up and ready to go except for your security thumbprint,” he said.
“Wow,” I said, checking the smartphone out. I was expecting something more in the flip-phone vein. “I didn’t even know they had that feature.”
“It was a little extra, but I wanted you to feel safe,” he said, blushing.
“What do I owe you?” I reached for my purse, acutely conscious that I had only a couple of twenties. This phone looked more expensive than a couple of twenties.