Kari wanted to argue, but the words wouldn't come.Carter was right—there was no concrete evidence that Tayen had been taken against her will.No signs of struggle at her apartment, no witnesses to an abduction, no ransom demands.Just a young woman who'd gone dark on social media the same day her friend had died under suspicious circumstances.
It could be a coincidence.It could be fear.It could be Tayen running away again, the way she'd run from the reservation two years ago, the way she'd run from her aunt and her past and everyone who'd known her before.
But Kari didn't believe that.Couldn't believe it.Something had happened to Tayen, something connected to Amanda's death and Jennifer's death and all the other young women who'd died in suspicious circumstances over the past five years.The pattern was too clear, the timing too convenient.
She just couldn't prove it.
"I'll keep looking," Kari said."On my own if I have to."
"I know you will."Carter stood, gathering her jacket from the back of her chair."Call me if you find anything solid.Anything I can actually act on.Until then, I'll keep this file open and check in when I can."
After Carter left, Kari sat alone in the coffee shop, staring at the empty chair across from her.She thought about the messages on Jennifer's phone, the desperate attempts to create distance from M.She thought about Diana's suggestion that Pemberton might be involved, and the solid alibis that seemed to clear him.She thought about Tayen, somewhere in this vast sprawling city, possibly alive and hiding, possibly already dead and waiting to be found.
And she thought about her mother, who had spent years investigating patterns of suspicious deaths among indigenous people, who had seen connections that everyone else dismissed, who had been so close to exposing something when she'd died under circumstances that everyone had accepted too easily.
Kari wasn't going to accept anything easily.She was going to keep digging, keep questioning, keep pushing until she found the truth.Even if everyone else had given up.Even if she was the only one who still believed there was a killer walking free among the beautiful people of L.A.'s modeling industry.
She pulled out her laptop and opened a search window.She'd talked to everyone who knew Tayen, everyone who knew Amanda, everyone who worked at the agencies.But she hadn't dug deeply into the backgrounds of everyone she'd talked to.She'd taken people at their word, accepted their stories, trusted their presentations of themselves.
Maybe it was time to verify what she'd been told.
She started with Jessica Vance, typing the name into a search engine and scanning the results.Press releases, industry profiles, a few society page mentions from charity events.A career that stretched back thirty years, documented every step of the way.Nothing that raised any red flags.
Next she searched Vanessa Caldwell.More of the same—a modeling career in the nineties, a transition to talent management, a scandal involving a married Hollywood actor that had been tabloid fodder fifteen years ago but seemed to have no connection to violence or death.Caldwell's life was an open book, thoroughly documented by entertainment reporters and industry publications.
Then she typed in Diana Shepherd.
The search returned almost nothing.A staff listing on the Image Management website.A bare-bones LinkedIn profile with minimal information.No social media presence, no news articles, no digital footprint of any kind from before she started working at the agency.
Kari frowned at the screen.Everyone had a digital footprint these days, especially people who worked in image-conscious industries like modeling and entertainment.High school photos on Facebook, old tweets from a decade ago, mentions in local newspapers from their hometown.But Diana Shepherd seemed to have materialized out of thin air when she started at Image Management.
Which meant either she was extremely private—obsessively so—or Diana Shepherd wasn't her real name.
Kari thought about what Diana had said at the cafe.I came to L.A.with dreams of my own, once upon a time.Small town girl from the Midwest.
The roommates had said something similar.Diana was from a small town, understood what it was like to feel lost in the big city.But which small town?What had her name been before she came to L.A.and reinvented herself?Why was there no record of her existence before she started working at Image Management?
Lots of people reinvented themselves when they moved to California.Lots of people left their old identities behind and became someone new.That was half the mythology of this city—the idea that you could come here and be whoever you wanted to be.
But Kari's instincts were prickling now, the way they'd prickled when she'd first learned about the pattern of deaths among Elite Vision models.Something wasn't adding up.Something about Diana's story didn't quite fit.
She opened a new search window and started digging deeper.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The motel room felt smaller at two in the morning, the walls pressing in as Kari hunched over her laptop, the glow of the screen the only light in the darkness.She'd been at this for hours, following digital threads that led nowhere, searching for any trace of Diana Shepherd before she became Diana Shepherd.The ice in her glass of water had long since melted, and her eyes burned from staring at the screen, but she couldn't stop.
Something was wrong with Diana's story.Something fundamental.And Kari was going to find out what.
The woman was a ghost.That was the only way to describe it.In an age where everyone left digital footprints everywhere they went, Diana Shepherd had somehow managed to materialize out of thin air approximately six years ago.Before that—nothing.No high school yearbook photos on Facebook, no old tweets or Glimmer posts from her twenties, no mentions in local newspapers from whatever small Midwestern town she claimed to be from.
Kari had tried everything she could think of.Social media archives using the Wayback Machine.Modeling industry forums where aspiring models discussed agencies and scouts.Gossip sites that chronicled the rise and fall of would-be stars with vicious glee.
She'd searched for Diana Shepherd, Diana S., D.Shepherd, and every other variation of the name she could imagine.She'd looked for women matching Diana's approximate age—mid-thirties now, so late twenties when she started at Image Management—who had worked in modeling in the mid-2010s and then vanished from the industry.
Nothing concrete.Or rather, too much noise and not enough signal—hundreds of young women who had come to L.A.with dreams and disappeared back into obscurity when those dreams didn't pan out.There was no way to know which of them, if any, had become Diana Shepherd.
She shifted her approach, searching for scandals and breakdowns instead of specific names.The modeling industry had no shortage of those—young women who cracked under the pressure, who made scenes at fashion shows or had very public meltdowns that ended up on gossip blogs and entertainment sites.Most of them faded quietly into history, their fifteen minutes of infamy forgotten as the next scandal took their place.
