“What?”
“She’s not blond, and she’s not a hooker, despite what the cops want us to believe.”
“How do you know that?” Elsie hates how eager she sounds, but this is gold; Patricia has the details she needs.
“Eh.” Patricia waves a hand. “I used to help the crime guys at theTimeswhen they were short-staffed. They let me in on it.” She reaches for her coffee and takes a gulp. “I’m just enjoying making that guy’s hangover worse.” She gestures to Heston.
“What else do you know?” Elsie takes the seat next to Patricia, hoping she won’t be put off by her zeal, and pulls out her notebook.
Patricia chuckles at the sight of Elsie with her pen poised, and taps the bottom of a pack of Lucky Strikes.
“Cheryl Herrera. She ran track.” Patricia lights the cigarette, takes a drag. “Was about to go professional, by the sound of it.”
“Herrera?” Elsie’s pen moves fast. “How old?”
“Twenty-one. Final year of college.”
Elsie pauses her scribbling, swallows. “How did she die?”
Patricia takes another long drag on the cigarette, blows out the smoke.
“Strangled.”
Elsie grips her pen harder.
“Then whoever did it put an arrow through her eye.”
Elsie’s head whips up. “They…Sorry—what?” She cannot have heard that correctly.
“Mm-hmm.” Patricia nods. “Right in the eyeball.” She points at her own eye socket. “I’ll eat my hat if it’s the Kings. Too ostentatious.”
Elsie wavers, unsure what to write in her notes, hypnotized by the image of an eyeball, an arrow. This must be what the police were talking about when they said there was something unusual about the body.
She frowns. “If she wasn’t blond, why were the police calling her Blondie?”
“Yep. Not blond.” Patricia flicks ash into the remains of her coffee. “Dark hair, olive skin.” She looks briefly around the office, then tilts her head toward Elsie’s. “But whoever did it put a wig on her—blond.”
Elsie’s mouth gapes. Is this what it feels like to be a reporter? To know what the police know but aren’t telling anyone? It’s like a drug in her system.
“How do I find out more about her—about Cheryl?” she asks.
Patricia considers. “Buy me lunch and I’ll get you an address.”
Elsie bristles. She can’t do that. It would be breaking the one rule she set for herself when she started at theSignal. No friendships. She can’t let her colleagues get too close. They’d never understand how Albert hid it from her. They’d never understand how it makes you question yourself—that reckoning with your own sanity, what’s happening inside your own brain. Plus, if they find out about her past, she’ll be sacked, or shunned, her own story spread across the front page. No one would ever be convinced by an investigative journalist who’d failed to see what was happening right under her own nose.
She can’t risk Patricia’s finding out the truth about her. It would ruin everything she’s worked for since Albert’s arrest.
She should really wait for Hunter to get in. She should type his missives, fill his coffee cup.
But she’s not letting anyone else have this story.
“Thank you, Patricia. Thank you. I’ll just grab my coat.”
“Please.” The words come through a plume of fresh-puffed smoke: “It’s Patti.”
Seven
Margot reaches intothe cooler and pulls out a beer. She opens it with her teeth, then leans back on her beach towel, shielding her eyes from the sun with her battered copy ofValley of the Dolls.
