Lana managed to swallow. Maggie watched the tortured movement in her jaw and smiled. “You don’t want to do this. Blackmail is one thing—but this is murder.”
“You have no idea what we have and haven’t done. Yes, this is a scenario we would rather avoid—who wouldn’t? But we’ve always been aware that the stakes could escalate. We’ve always been willing to do whatever is necessary. We gave you plenty of opportunities to step back.”
“The detective. She warned us off.”
“Up until the moment you appeared in your sister’s room, this was recoverable. Now, it’s not. You’ve left us with no choice.” Maggie gestured to someone out of Lana’s sight. More footsteps, heavier. Three figures loomed into view—Griffin, his hands bound, two giant men hauling him. “No,” Lana whimpered. He looked small. How could Griffin Hart look small? A woman followed—Sweetie, aiming a gun at Griffin.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Lana, defeat weighing his tone and his face.
“To the world, it will look like a murder-suicide,” Maggie continued, beckoning the men. “A stolen Chevy Chevelle to which our hero-turned-villain is sentimentally attached, driven off a cliff into the Pacific, his lover in the passenger seat. No skid marks. Again, by the time the car is found—after an anonymous tip-off—the bodies will be too decomposed to establish cause of death. You will become Hollywood legend, baby. Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Griffin Hart. I will miss you though. You were my favorite hobby—and a profitable one.”
The men shoved Griffin onto an armchair, identical to Lana’s. One had a gun. “How much money do you want?” Griffin said.
Maggie shook her head. “You had your chance to walk away. You both know too much, as does Vivien—and Darnell. It’ll be a sensation the likes of which Hollywood has rarely seen.”
“You got him too, didn’t you?” Griffin asked. “Your car was outside his house yesterday. This fan told me he sawmycar, but he meant my car fromBlind Corner. The Chevy. You were there.Youkidnapped Darnell,yousedated him?”
“Oh, but I’m harmless, remember?” Maggie checked her watch. “Your sister will arrive shortly, Lana. We were keeping her alive in case Walter Shepherd needed extra motivation to pay his installments after his poor wife dies, but he might not have anything left by then. The old gal keeps hanging in there. He really does care about his daughters, you know. It’s nice that he got to meet you. Something for him to remember for the rest of his miserable, cheating life.”
“How did you even know about all that?” Griffin asked.
“It’s been rumored for decades. A few years ago we had the idea of lifting DNA from a nephew of his and creating a fake profile on the DNA sites. We didn’t get a likely hit until Vivien showed up on the site. We did give her a chance—a sizeable cut of the money if she gave us material proof of the connection.”
“But she went to the police,” Lana said.
“Fortunately, our representative in the LAPD was able to deal with that.”
“Detective Keisha Graham. But Vivien figured out she was involved.”
“That was unfortunate.” Maggie glared at the doctor. “Keisha let something slip, and it seems Vivien took it upon herself to do some sleuthing. But then she made the crucial error of bringing her ‘evidence’ to poor old Walter at the hospital—lucky for us. We mopped her up, along with her laptop and ‘evidence.’ The only missing link was her phone.”
“That’s why you signed up as an extra?” Lana’s mind was clearing, the demister finally working. “To look for her phone?”
“No, I had already been kicked off, but Sweetie went in. She failed to find the phone, but she did manage to install spycameras. Our clients are always hungry for stories about the love affair between the great Griffin Hart and the effervescent Estelle Duman. Imagine our surprise when we saw another woman in Estelle’s trailer—on the same night the phone was switched back on. And when we identified that woman as the sister of our sleeping beauty—andfigured out Griffin had been left behind on set… It was all happening! So we scrambled a plan. Yee-haw! We hadn’t expected the celebrity goon squad to turn up, but they drove you right into our hands. Of course, we didn’t get the phone, but you kindly confirmed it had been wiped.”
“We told you nothing,” Griffin said.
Maggie’s lips pursed. “Not intentionally.”
“Vivien’s phone,” Lana said, the pieces clicking into place. “You had it set up to record, somehow.”
“That was my doing, when I posed as an extra. A simple matter of sneaking into the crew tent and installing an app. I’d earlier watched her switch it on, and memorized the unlock pattern. When you found it and turned it on, the recording began again, and started uploading to the cloud.”
“That was how you taped Vivien’s meeting with Walter Shepherd,” Lana said. Her voice was getting easier to control, her tongue not so in the way.
Griffin quietly cursed. “And our conversation about Toby.” He met Lana’s gaze with a silent apology. When he wanted you to, you could read his every emotion.
“We had hoped that sending out that little story would drive a wedge between you, but unfortunately for everyone, it didn’t work.” Maggie strolled up to Griffin and touched his cheek. Lana could tell it took a lot of effort for him not to flinch. “What a shame that someone this beautiful has to die so young—and when the world is reeling from Toby Fong’s untimely death. Of course,hedied a tragic hero.”
The look on Griffin’s face was pure hate. “And all this—killing people, destroying so many lives—formoney?” Lana wished she could shut Maggie up, but Griffin seemed to want to keep her talking, buy them time, however futile. But then, this all dated right back to his friend’s overdose. This woman had preyed on him when he was young and broken, and he’d never fully recovered.
“Money? You misunderstand. Money is only part of it. People should know that their so-called heroes aren’t what the mythmaking machine makes them out to be. You do the crime, you do the time.”
“So, what—you’re a vigilante?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. We’ve exposed all sorts of crimes and despicable behavior—harassment, drugs, the casting couch…”
“And Toby Fong, what did he do?”
