“It could’ve been someone she didn’t know at all. A drunk person who wandered upstairs,” Taylor suggested. “Or someone who went up there with the intent to kill.”
“An heiress wouldn’t give the time of day to any drunk stranger just because they found their way upstairs. If they’d been arguing, people would’ve heard. If it was someone with ill intent, my guess is she would’ve been running away. Facing forward not backward. Or screaming for help, which, again, someone in the next room would’ve heard,” Saffi explained. “Considering it’s Hollywood, what’s the most common reason a person might kill?”
“Jealousy,” Andino muttered.
“But Irene hasn’t been cast in anything recently,” Taylor said.
“Could be a past grudge,” Andino offered.
“So that’s why you think they’re similar,” Taylor said, finally catching on as he turned back to Saffi.
“If they’re competing for the same roles, they have to be,” Saffisaid.
“So, you’ll be looking into actresses who not only look like Irene Singh, but who also knew her,” Taylor said. “That should narrow things down.”
The issue was, it didn’t feel narrow enough. “Was there anything else with Isaac Klossner?” Saffi asked. “Did you check his phone? His emails?”
“We just got sent this from the LAPD,” Taylor said, passing a file to Saffi over her desk.
A quick glance through revealed nothing of interest. Isaac’s emails were all either work related or junk. And other than a weekly call to a contact labeled “Mom,” those were all work related as well. Except—
“What are these?” Saffi asked, highlighting the three unknown phone numbers Isaac Klossner had gotten calls from this week.
Andino shrugged. “We haven’t gotten the chance to look into them yet. Probably telemarketers if I had to guess.”
Saffi typed the numbers into her search bar. Andino was correct for two of those cases. “Actually, one of them is from a phone booth,” she informed them. She showed them the map she’d pulled up, pointing to direct their attention. “There are four movie studios near this phone booth and it looks like only three of them were being used at the time of his death. While it’s possible someone specifically made the trip to use it, there’s an even better chance our suspect is someone who’d been filming on one of these three lots.”
“How did you find that so quickly?” Taylor asked.
“Pattern recognition,” Saffi said. “Every outlier has the same sense of otherness to it. Once you see a few, you start getting an eye for them.”
“That’s amazing,” Taylor said in awe.
“It’s just a theory.” Saffi shrugged. “If anything, it’ll let me rule out some suspects.”
After all, the most exciting part about creating a hypothesis was getting the chance to disproveit.
Chapter Ten
February 22, 2026
“I know whatyou did.”
Dimple froze. She was back at Irene Singh’s party, at Isaac Klossner’s apartment. Everyone in the room turned to her, ants crawling under her skin. In the distance, a body thudded against the ground.
Hadn’t she already put out this fire? Isaac and Irene were dead. And yet here she was again. Dimple’s head was spinning.
“What—” She had just begun formulating her response when she was interrupted.
“Cut!” Jerome Bardoux said from his director’s chair. “We’re moving on.”
Like a camera lens out of focus, the world tipped back into place. Dimple was on set. The man in front of her was not wearing an ill-fitting black suit. Nor did he carry a tray of alcohol. Everyone in the room was breathing, alive. Dimple inhaled deep, lies straining against the capacity of her lungs.
It was always disconcerting, coming out of such an emotionally charged scene. For how crowded movie sets were, it was difficult to think one could get swept away by a page of memorized lines. Dimple took in the bright lights and background chatter, grounding herself in reality.
“That was good,” Chris Porter said, sounding more shocked thanhe had any right to be. Dimple found she much preferred his somber on-screen persona to the way he presented in real life.
Insomniafollowed Dimple and Chris’s characters as they revisited the events of a night in their youth when everyone in their friend group except the two of them had died. The scene they’d just shot was the start of them realizing it had been their fault. They’d unknowingly slaughtered their friends in their sleep. Dimple released the breath she’d been holding.
