The car pulled out of its parking space and turned in the direction Amanda had gone.The driver knew Amanda's schedule as well as Amanda did.Better, actually, since Amanda didn't track her own patterns the way someone watching her would.The nightclub gig tonight, then home to the Koreatown apartment around one AM.The two roommates would both be working their own gigs, which meant Amanda would be alone.
Alone was good.Alone was necessary.
This had been done before.The driver knew how to make it look like what everyone expected.Another tragic casualty of an industry that chewed up beautiful girls and spat them out.The pills collected over months of careful planning.The note drafted and redrafted, full of the kind of desperate poetry that troubled young people wrote before they gave up.The staging that would suggest a slow spiral rather than a sudden end.
No one would question it.No one ever did.
These girls came to Los Angeles chasing dreams they didn't deserve to catch.They had no talent, no discipline, no understanding of what it actually took to make it in this industry.They just had pretty faces and Glimmer followers and the blind conviction that wanting something badly enough was the same as earning it.
Some people tried.God, how they tried.They did everything right.The diets, the castings, the smile that never wavered, no matter how many times the answer was not quite right.They believed in the dream with every fiber of their being, sacrificed everything for it.And what did it get them?
A breakdown.Months in a psychiatric facility.A career in ruins.
And now girls like Amanda Escalante waltzed into town and booked jobs without ever understanding what they had, without appreciating the opportunity they'd been given.They complained about the hours and the pressure and the competition, as if they'd earned the right to complain.As if the industry owed them something.
The industry owed them nothing.
And tonight, Amanda Escalante would learn that lesson.
A glance in the mirror confirmed no one had noticed.The silver Honda Civic pulled out of the parking lot ahead and headed toward Hollywood.The car behind followed at a careful distance.
The sunset was beautiful.Blood and gold spreading across the sky, the city beneath it glittering with promise and deception in equal measure.
A fitting backdrop for what was about to happen.
The accelerator pressed down, keeping Amanda's car in sight as both vehicles disappeared into the Los Angeles night.
CHAPTER ONE
The chain-link fence was new.Eight feet tall, topped with razor wire, stretching in both directions until it disappeared into the scrubland.Signs hung every fifty yards: PRIVATE PROPERTY.NO TRESPASSING.VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.Kari Blackhorse stood on the wrong side of that fence, watching strangers dig up bones that should have been hers to find.
Beside her, Ben Tsosie shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his jaw tight with frustration.They'd been standing here for almost two hours, watching FBI technicians in white coveralls move methodically across the desert floor.The May sun beat down on them without mercy, the temperature already pushing ninety despite being barely past noon.Beneath her uniform shirt, sweat trickled down Kari's spine, but she refused to seek shade.
If she couldn't participate in this investigation, she could at least bear witness to it.
"This is wrong," Ben said, not for the first time."We should be out there with them."
"I know."
"That boy was Navajo.His family is Navajo.This should be our case."
"I know, Ben."
"Instead we're stuck out here like a couple of tourists while the Feds trample all over everything."
Kari didn't respond.There was nothing to say that they hadn't already said a dozen times.The land where Evan Naalnish's remains had been found was no longer tribal territory.It had been sold to Devco Holdings fifteen years ago, three weeks after Evan disappeared.Which meant federal jurisdiction applied, which meant the FBI had taken over, which meant Kari and Ben were reduced to observer-status in an investigation they'd started.
The investigation Ben had started, technically.He was the one who'd found the body, who'd cut through this very fence in the middle of the night to search land that didn't belong to the tribe anymore.He'd done it alone, without telling anyone, knowing full well he could face charges for trespassing on private property.When Kari had asked him why he'd taken such a risk, his answer had been simple: "Because your mother believed something happened to that boy.And I believed her."
Her mother.Anna Chee.Dead now for nearly seventeen months, her body found in a remote canyon on a February morning, the official cause listed as exposure and disorientation.A tragic accident, according to the medical examiner.A beloved researcher who wandered too far from her vehicle and succumbed to the elements.
Kari had never believed it.Not from the moment she'd received the call, not through the funeral and the mourning, and the slow, painful process of going through her mother's belongings.Anna Chee had spent her entire life on this land.She knew every canyon, every wash, every landmark within a hundred miles.The idea that she'd simply gotten lost and died of exposure was absurd.
But what Kari believed and what she could prove were two different things.For months, she'd searched for answers, following threads that led nowhere, chasing shadows that dissolved in the light until she'd discovered what her mother had really been doing in the weeks before her death.
Anna hadn't just been a researcher.She'd been something of a self-made detective, too, and she'd found a pattern: seventeen deaths over five decades, all across tribal lands in Arizona and New Mexico.All ruled accidents or natural causes.All involving people who had discovered something, or were about to expose something, that powerful interests wanted kept secret.Indigenous people killed to protect corporate profits, their deaths disguised, dismissed, and forgotten.
Evan Naalnish had been one of those seventeen cases.A young man of twenty-four, an amateur geologist who loved exploring caves and rock formations, who'd disappeared during a solo hike fifteen years ago.His truck had been found at a trailhead with his wallet and phone inside.Search parties combed the area for weeks without finding a trace of him.And then, three weeks after he vanished, a company no one had ever heard of paid 3.2 million dollars for the land where he'd last been seen.Four times the market value, for what appeared to be worthless desert scrubland.
