After She's Gone

by Lisa Jackson

  “Hey, loser!” a male voice catcalled from the street, and Mitch froze. “This ain’t a latrine, for fuck’s sake!”

  Go to hell. Still, he finished quickly, tucking his cock into his pants as he looked over his shoulder. The fucker was walking on, jogging across the dark street to a car that was parked on the other side. “Dickhead,” he mumbled under his breath as the car’s lights blinked and its horn gave off a soft honk when the sanctimonious prick hit the remote unlock button to his van. Probably a “soccer dad.”

  Making sure his fly was completely zipped, Mitch moved furtively and quickly rather than hear about his public urination from another ass, or a mugger, or worse yet, a cop. He made his way around the front of the Chevy, careful not to step in his recent puddle, and then nearly tripped again when the toe of his boot hit something soft and giving.

  He caught himself and looked down.

  In that instant he felt the blood drain from his body.

  He was staring at a woman lying faceup on the pavement.

  “Hey!” Startled, he jumped backward a step. He blinked. Tried to focus.

  What the hell was wrong with her?

  Tentatively he asked, “Are you okay?” But he knew she wasn’t. Hell, he wasn’t certain she was even alive. Freaked beyond freaked, he backed up and tried to think. All he could do was stare at her.

  Spiky black hair stood on end around a face that was distorted, as if it were eerily melting off her body. Horribly disfigured.

  Jesus Holy Christ!

  Fear slithered through him. His throat went dry. If he hadn’t just peed, he would have pissed himself right then and there. He backed away fast, around the Chevy again.

  Oh, God. Oh, shit. Oh, hell!

  Frantically he scrabbled in his pocket for his phone, yanked it out, then promptly dropped it on the wet asphalt. The damned cell skated away from him, but he managed to scoop it up while scraping his fingers on the rough pavement that was still wet and warm with his own damned urine.

  He didn’t care.

  Heart thudding with fear, the alcohol in his bloodstream seemed to dissipate as he heard a footfall behind him. He turned quickly, fear making his breath come in quick, shallow breaths.

  “I need help,” he said to the darkness, but the parking lot was empty, the footstep all part of his wild, frenzied imagination. “Help! Someone! I need help here!” he yelled.

  With shaking fingers, he ignored the acrid stench of piss and punched in 9-1-1. His gaze slid back to that white, grotesque face.

  “Nine-one-one,” an operator answered. “Please state your name and nature of your emergency—”

  “Get someone here. Now! Do you hear me? Get them here.”

  “Sir, if you would tell me where you are and what’s happening—”

  “I don’t know what’s happening. But she’s dead! She’s fuckin’ dead!”

  “Who’s dead, sir?” the firm voice asked. “Where are you?”

  “I don’t know her . . . She’s a . . . freak. Oh, my God, just send someone!” In a full-blown panic he looked around, trying to focus on a street sign but he couldn’t think straight. “Shit, where am I? By the Pinwheel. The bar. In . . . Venice on Pacific and . . . crap, I don’t know what the cross street is. But she’s in the parking lot. I’m telling you, there’s a fuckin’ dead body on the floor—I mean on the ground. I was taking a whiz, for fuck’s sake, I nearly tripped over her.” His voice was rising and he backed away from the body, the freaking dead body. “Get someone here,” he screamed. “NOW!”

  CHAPTER 17

  Detective Jonas Hayes stared down at the body.

  At three in the damned morning.

  He’d seen a lot of weird shit in his years on the force in LA, but tonight’s crime scene was right up there with the most bizarre.

  Three police cruisers blocked the entrance of the parking lot, their light bars strobing the area in bright flashes of red and blue, making the scene even more eerie. The air was as still as it ever got in this part of town, little traffic, the smell of the ocean faint in the luminescence of streetlights and a few thin clouds. The ME was on his way, several techs already working the parking lot, looking for trace evidence and snapping pictures. Even at this unholy hour a handful of onlookers had gathered, mostly barflies who had been kicked out as the establishments had closed. The looky-loos talked among themselves, speculated drunkenly, probably were piecing together what was going on due to a passing interest in CSI, Law & Order, or in one older guy’s case Murder, She Wrote or Dragnet or some such crap.

  Hayes paid them no mind as he took in the crime scene.

  The victim’s purse held a driver’s license for Holly Dennison, though ID hadn’t been completely established as the victim, left sprawled on the pavement, a gunshot wound to her chest, had been wearing a mask, a bizarre twisted image of Allie Kramer, the missing movie star who had recently disappeared. The dead woman’s identification was still unconfirmed, but probably could be surmised. If she was Holly Dennison, her most recent employment had been with Galactic West Productions as part of the set crew for Dead Heat, the movie starring the missing Allie Kramer.

  As Hayes had been working on the disappearance of Dead Heat’s lead actress, he recognized her head shot, even though the picture was distorted, the eyes cut to allow vision . . . maybe. Had Holly been wearing the mask before she was killed, hence the eyeholes? Or had the mask been placed over her head postmortem?

  But why?

  And who?

  “Who found her?” he asked one of the beat cops who was standing guard near the entrance of the lot.

  “Guy by the name of Mitch Stevens. He’d been at the Pinwheel next door and according to the barkeep had been cut off and thrown out. He’d come over here to take a leak and literally stumbled over her.” The cop hitched his head to a small group standing near a parked Camaro with a bold racing stripe. Two cops were talking to a twenty-to-thirty-year-old who looked like he wanted to be anywhere but in this parking lot.

  “Stevens have trouble with the law?”

  “Nah. Clean as a whistle,” the cop said. “A couple of parking tickets. That’s it. Nearly tripping over the vic must’ve scared him sober because he’s freaked, coherent, and just wants to get the hell out of here.”

  Hayes nodded once. “I want to talk to him.”

  “Figured.”

  “Let him cool his jets for a couple of minutes.”

  “Got it.” The beat cop motioned to the corpse. “Who would go to all this trouble?”

  “That’s what we have to find out.” Hayes crouched near the body and waited until the crime scene photographer had taken pictures of the dead woman from different angles.

  As the digital camera flashed, Hayes saw more distinctly the dark red stain on her T-shirt, a thick bloom that soaked the cotton then ran off her rib cage to pool on the pavement beneath her. Had she known her attacker? Was it a stranger? What the hell was with the mask?

  Life-sized, the altered photograph had been laminated and cut precisely around Allie Kramer’s hairline and held in place with what looked like a thin elastic band. Pieces of the victim’s hair had been arranged around the mask, to make it appear more lifelike. Some thought had gone into the process, but not a lot of effort. The picture could have been downloaded from the Internet, then maybe an app used to distort the image before the resulting art was enlarged to the size of a human head, printed, laminated, and cut. The elastic holding the mask in place could have been purchased at any fabric, craft, or other store, if it hadn’t been retrieved from Grandma’s sewing kit that had been stuffed in the attic.

  Yeah, the artwork was crude, almost something that could have been created by a kid in grade school. Hayes had better pieces displayed on his refrigerator by his own daughter, Maren, when she was in the third grade.

  Strange as hell.

  But he’d seen worse.

  Hayes pulled on a pair of gloves, then lifting the vic’s head carefully and not moving the position
of the body, removed the mask by unwinding bits of hair clinging to the elastic band holding the mask in place and pulling it away from her face.

  Carefully, he turned the mask over.

  A single word had been scribbled across it in erratic, blood red letters: Sister.

  “Gawd A’mighty!” the beat cop whispered. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Don’t know,” Hayes admitted, but his mind was racing. Was Holly someone’s sister? He’d check that. But his gut told him the word Sister had to do with the mask itself, that of Allie Kramer. It was common knowledge the rising star had a less-famous sister, another daughter of Jenna Hughes, and Hayes already had notes about her as she was the last person known to have seen her sister before Allie Kramer’s disappearing act. He only hoped Cassie Kramer could shed some light on the whole blasted affair.

  Leaving the mask with a crime-scene tech, Jonas straightened and walked toward Mitch Stevens. The man visibly shrunk into his own skin at the sight of him. It wasn’t uncommon. Jonas Hayes was a six-foot-four African-American who had once been a running back for UNLV. Though heavier than in his football days, he was fit and, he knew, more than a little intimidating, which he sometimes used to his advantage.

  “I’m Detective Hayes,” he said to the shorter man who managed a weak, fleeting smile. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “Nothin’,” Stevens said. “I mean I was just mindin’ my own business, takin’ a whiz, y’know, and I like was zippin’ up and there she was. Fuck!” His eyes strayed reluctantly toward the corpse again.

  “You with anyone?”

  “No. Shit. Just me.” He was trembling. “I told the other cop, I was just . . . you know . . . relievin’ myself. Jesus!” He shrugged and reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and lit up again. “I mean, it’s weird as hell, man,” he said as he sucked on the Camel as if nicotine would be his salvation. He exhaled in a cloud and added, “Weird as fuckin’ hell.”

  Somehow, some way, Cassie finally fell asleep in the wee morning hours and didn’t wake up until after seven. She’d been frustrated by not being able to reach anyone on the phone again and wondered if she’d been blackballed by everyone who worked on Dead Heat, or knew Allie. It had gotten so bad she’d almost called Brandon McNary and told him she had reconsidered and they could work together on trying to locate her sister, but she’d resisted.

  So far.

  Surfing the Internet hadn’t helped much either. From hours on the computer, she’d learned little more about red cross earrings, or nurses’ uniforms from fifty years prior. She’d also searched Santa Fe, New Mexico, but she had no idea what she was looking for there. She’d even Googled her sister and hoped she’d find some crumb, a little speck of knowledge about Allie that she hadn’t known before.

  Her searches weren’t entirely altruistic, of course. Though she desperately wanted to locate her sister, to find out what had happened to Allie, there was another side to it. The more she delved, the more she realized what a great screenplay she could write, and she’d scribbled notes to that effect.

  But of course the screenplay was secondary, she told herself. Allie’s whereabouts and well-being came first.

  Last night after getting home late, she’d stayed up until her eyes had blurred. She’d felt as if she’d been running in circles when she’d finally dropped off, most likely because the night before had been such a madhouse with its outré nightmares, glowering black cat, and uneasy feeling that someone had been inside her home.

  This morning, aside from running later than she’d hoped, she felt a little better, a bit more ready to take on the world, and, she reminded herself, start over. She showered, twisted her hair onto her head, dabbed on lipstick and mascara, and grabbed her roller bag in case she needed a quick change. She would come back for the rest of her stuff, which was half packed into three more suitcases, after her appointment at Salon Laura. Though she was set to have her hair trimmed by another stylist, she hoped she’d be able to track down Laura Merrick. She had a gut feeling Laura could help her, no matter what the stylist had said.

  She stepped outside to the brilliance of another sunny LA day, then nearly stumbled as she caught sight of Trent-Damned-Kittle leaning his jean-clad hips against the passenger side of her car. She blinked, slack-jawed, but there he was in faded jeans, a black T-shirt, cowboy boots, and aviator sunglasses. Two days’ growth of beard shadowed his jaw. The twist of his blade-thin lips was the only sign that he’d seen her. Worse yet, the black cat that had scared the liver out of her two nights before had the audacity to sun himself on the Honda’s roof. At the sight of her, the cat scrambled down to the hood, then leaped away to slink quickly into the shrubbery.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Cassie asked tightly, walking straight up to him, dragging the roller bag behind her, its wheels scraping on the uneven asphalt.

  “Waitin’.”

  “For?”

  “You.”

  She swatted at a bee that buzzed near her head. “Well, you found me.”

  A dark eyebrow cocked, silently asking why else would he be camped out here.

  “I thought you were in Oregon on your ranch or . . . whatever.” She glared at him. She didn’t need the aggravation of her husband, make that soon-to-be-ex-husband, this morning.

  “I was. Flew down late last night.”

  “And . . . what?”

  He hitched his chin toward a Ford Explorer parked next to the owner’s garage. “Spent a few hours there. In the rental.”

  “You slept in your car?” she asked as she stopped a few feet from him and squinted, trying to read his expression behind the shades. “You could have knocked on the door.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded, agreeing. So damned affable. All an act. “And you could have not answered. Just like you didn’t respond to my calls and texts.” He stretched to his full height, casting a shadow across the hedge. “This way I figured you’d have to talk to me.”

  “I still don’t have to talk to you.”

  “I’ll buy coffee.”

  “Don’t try to charm me.”

  “You’re still pissed.”

  “Extremely so. But I don’t have time to discuss it or anything else. I’ve got an appointment at nine.”

  “Somewhere close, or . . . ?” He glanced pointedly at her roller bag.

  “Hair. With Laura. This is just the first bag I packed for the trip back to—” Hell. Why was she telling him anything?

  “To where?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe not.”

  She checked her watch. “What did you want to say?”

  “I want to work things out.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked automatically. “No—wait.” She held up a hand. “I’m not in the mood for this.”

  “I came down here for you.”

  “Come on.” Enough. Tugging on her bag she made her way to the driver’s door of her Honda. She didn’t know what Trent’s game was, if he even had one, but she didn’t have time for it, not now, most likely not ever. “Go to hell.”

  “You keep saying that,” he said, infuriatingly unconcerned.

  “I really have to go.” She tugged the door open, then tossed her bag into the passenger seat.

  “And you’ll be back?”

  “For the rest of my things.”

  One eyebrow raised. He didn’t believe her.

  “You don’t trust me,” she charged, and slid into the driver’s seat.

  “I think it’s the other way ’round.”

  “I have a reason.” She yanked the door shut.

  “You never gave me a chance to explain.”

  Rolling down the window, she said, “Look, Trent. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. You had plenty of chances and I’m not doing this.”

  “Cass—” His voice was low and when he said her name like that it just killed her inside.

  “Don’t. Just don’t, okay?” A thunde
rstorm of emotions was threatening her, but she couldn’t deal with them so she pulled herself together and turned on the ignition. As the little car sputtered to life, she added, “I said I’ll be back and I will.”

  “I’ll be waiting.” For the briefest of seconds she thought of canceling with Laura and having things out with him, once and for all, but she changed her mind. This was her one chance to catch up with the person who could be Allie’s closest confidante, and she wasn’t going to blow it on rehashing the problems in her marriage with Trent. At least not at the moment. Telling herself she was being a damned fool, she found her new key on her ring, unwound it from the others. “Go inside. I’ll be back in an hour, maybe two.” She handed him the key and didn’t let her fingers linger on his. “If you want coffee, you’ll have to go get a cup at Starbucks or Java Buzz, two blocks south. There’s nothing in my place. Now, I’ve really got to go.”

  She didn’t wait for him to argue, just tore out of the lot. A glance into the rearview mirror showed that he was still standing where she’d left him. Long legs shoulder-length apart, jaw rock hard, shaded eyes turned in her direction.

  She dragged her gaze away from his all-too-sexy image. That was the trouble with him, he was innately sensual and didn’t seem to know it, that’s why he was so attractive. She let out a sigh. She’d sworn that she was over him, but, obviously, she’d been lying to herself.

  CHAPTER 18

  At three minutes to nine, Cassie stepped through the doors of Salon Laura.

  The spa-like business was located a couple of blocks off Rodeo Drive, tucked into the first floor of a stucco and glass building in the high-rent district. Behind a sleek black counter a big-eyed, too-cool-to-smile receptionist, whose platinum hair was short and carefully mussed, told her what she’d already guessed, that, “No, Miss Merrick isn’t in today, but I see you have an appointment with Verna.”

  An appointment she didn’t need.

  Cassie wanted to speak to Laura.

  “But Laura, er, Miss Merrick is coming in, right? I thought that’s what she said.”