“Yeah.” He scratched the side of his scalp. “Sorry.”
She felt bad—it wasn’t him she was chastising, but herself. She went to open the trailer door, and stopped. “What if it sets off an alarm?”
“Then we tell security we set it off to alert them that we got left behind.”
“That works.” She stepped inside the dark space, and he followed, lowering the backpack to the floor. She unzipped a pocket, pulled out a flashlight, and switched it on. “We should avoid turning on the light in case the guards come back.” The blinds were down, but light would sluice out through the gaps. “I only have one flashlight, sorry. Wasn’t expecting a sidekick.”
“A sidekick?”
“Oh, sorry, do you identify as the hero?”
“Happy to be your sidekick. I’ve never been a sidekick—they get the best lines. I’ll grab my trailer key.” He opened a desk drawer. “Can you shine your beauteous light my way?”
She obliged, and he picked out a key attached to a cardboard label. “Well, that’s not secure—it has my name on it.”
“No wonder someone stole your toothbrush.”
“You heard about that?”
“So that one’s true?”
“I’m forever losing toothbrushes. I have to buy them in bulk—they’re pretty much single-use items when I’m on the road. You wouldn’t want to know the shit that disappears from my hotel rooms and ends up on eBay.” He bounded out. The trailer shook as he clanged down the steps.
She swept the flashlight beam around. Desks lined each long wall, with TV screens and whiteboards above. Two computers hummed, alongside a printer, a box of walkie-talkies, neat piles of scripts, and trays filled with documents. Tucked under the desk were filing cabinets and a cupboard marked with a first-aid cross. At one end of the trailer was a bench seat, fridge and microwave, at the other, the welcome sight of a bathroom.
By the time Griffin returned, with two bottles of water and a shopping bag of snacks, Lana was flicking through incident report forms in a filing cabinet. He wore a gray T-shirt and jeans, and she got a hit of attraction, hot and liquid. She was a menace. She’d never seen him in his own clothes—he was already on set each morning when she arrived and still working when she left. How was it that he looked even more handsome clothed? It was as if, without the distraction of his perfect body, your eyes were directed to his beautiful face. Quality over quantity. Plus, it made him seem like less of a demigod and more like a regular guy—and if he was a god among demigods, he was a supreme being among regular guys.
He dropped into an office chair and rolled up to a computer, his face illuminated by the monitor’s blue light. “It’s password-protected,” she said. “My snooping didn’t get that far, unfortunately.”
“Let me try something.” He typed, “Griffin-Hart-is-an-asshole,” replacing some letters with dollar signs and numbers. It worked. He grunted. “I had hoped that particular rumor wasn’t true.”
He began clicking around, trying Vivien’s name in various search boxes, while Lana continued flicking through the accident reports. None mentioned Vivien, though she found one about Estelle Duman’s ankle. She moved on to the other filing cabinets, and then tried the same password on the other computer. It accessed the same system as the one Griffin was searching, but a lot of the programs and apps required passwords not saved in the keychain.
He yawned. She was tired too, and she hadn’t been fighting and kissing all day. As night fell, they pooled their snacks and ate them—his consisted of trail mix, bananas, beef jerky, cheese, and dark chocolate, hers of granola, bars, chocolate, chips andcandy. A couple of fruitless hours in, they heard a vehicle. Lana switched off her flashlight until it left.
“I don’t know what I expected to find,” she said, rolling her chair to his. “But we’re not finding it.” He’d taken to randomly opening folders on the desktop. “Wait,” she said, pulling in closer. “Open that one.” She pointed at a spreadsheet named “Carpooling groups.” It opened a table of names—andaddresses. “I once called Vivi on a Sunday night, and she was in a car with other crew, heading up here.”
Griffin searched for Vivien’s name. An address came up.
“That’s not where she lived with Julian,” Lana said. “Must be where she moved to next.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Seems like a nice guy. Grounded Vivi—for a while. He works in film, that’s how they met—camera operator.”
Griffin rubbed his face. “I don’t know if we’re gonna find much more.”
“Her address is a start.” Lana googled the address and loaded the street view. “Whoa, that’s a dump.” It was a single-level clapboard house with peeling paint, long weeds, and several crappy cars crammed into the driveway. “I wish there was a way to know for sure who tossed the phone.”
“The security footage!” Griffin opened a fresh browser window. “It’s kept on cloud storage. I had to identify a stalker once, and we had to trawl back a few weeks.” He found the web portal for the security site. “Jackpot—the password’s saved in the keychain. We can search by date. If we pick the camera outside the citadel’s north gate, we can fast-forward through the footage on the day the phone was tossed.”
The gate wasn’t as busy as the others, so it didn’t take long to zap through, pausing when they spotted movement. As they got to the late afternoon’s footage, Lana grabbed Griffin’s forearm. “Stop, stop! That’s her.” He froze the screen. Vivien wasspeaking on her phone, looking around. “She looks nervous.” Griffin pressed play, and Vivien wandered out of shot. He set it to fast-forward again.
“So she snuck out to make a call?” he said.
An hour of footage flicked by. Griffin smacked the keyboard to pause the feed, making Lana jump. “There she is, coming back. No phone. We should be able to track her path from that point on the other cameras.”
They found footage of Vivien collecting her bag from a crew tent, then boarding a bus. She walked quickly, head down, talking to no one. “She looks scared,” Lana said. “But that’s proof that if something happened, it wasn’t on set.”
