Cade caught the door against the flat of his hand as it bounced back. “I didn’t actually mean for you to do it,” he murmured in an aside to Marlow. “It was just meant to be a threat.”
“What’s the point of being TAC if you don’t get to kick in doors?” Marlow asked. He pointed his chin toward the shocked assistant. “There’s no point trying to put pressure on her. She’s always got her back to the wall. I’ll pay to fix the door if it comes to that.”
He stepped around Cade and into the office. It was small and cluttered, files piled on the desk and folders stuffed with forms stacked haphazardly on the shelves. There was a window with a straggly spider plant on it, crisped from the sun.
No smoking gun.
Marlow hadn’t expected one, but it would have been nice. He walked over to the desk and started to look through the files. There was a frame by the monitor, LOVE spelled out in carved calligraphic white letters across the bottom of it. It was a picture of Haley, alive and smiling flirtily over a cocktail at someone.Notthe person who’d taken the picture, though. They’d been far enough away that the zoomed-in photo blurred at the edges when you looked at it closely.
“They were friends,” Farnham said from the doorway. The assistant hovered at her shoulder, nervous and fidgety. It hadn’t taken her long to find her boss after all. “That’s why he broke the rules so he could help her. People have pictures of their friends.”
“You made it back quickly,” Cade said. He didn’t bother to hide the edge in his voice. “Meeting go well?”
Farnham gave him a dirty look, dismissed the nervous assistant with a curt “You can go,” and then stepped into the room.
“Officer Marlow,” she said. “Shouldn’t you have spoken to Parker’s lawyer before you—”
“No,” Marlow said. He went through the desk drawers quickly—stationery, lip balm, assorted dried-out sharpies—until he reached one that was locked. “I don’t think so.”
He pulled a butterfly knife out of his pocket and flicked it open with a snap of his wrist. The drawer held for a second as he jimmied the lock with the blade, then broke with a dull crack. It took some muscle to pull it open. Inside was full of crumpled-up newspaper cuttings, a discarded dress with blood dried crusty and brown on the sequins. And photos. Lots of photos.
“This is what you found?” Marlow said as he lifted out another long-range photo of Haley. The equipment was better this time, and Haley wasn’t smiling. She was hunched over in a gray sweatsuit behind the gates of what Marlow was pretty sure was the rehab facility. Another of her with a hot dog. With a man, his face angrily scrawled out with a pen until the paper had torn. At the bottom of the drawer, Marlow unearthed a black journal, its pages full of cramped, tiny script that started every entry neatly and then got messier and larger. Every page had HALEY written on it at least once, in letters three times as large as the rest. “These photos. This diary. Is that when you realized what he’d done?”
Farnham stared at him for a second. Her face was set like flint, hard but brittle. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No,” Cade said. “She knew before that. That’s why you paid for him to be committed, right? And for Haley’s rehab—so he’d not feel he had to rescue her.”
Color stained Farnham’s cheeks, two bright, angry blobs of it like someone had pinched her.
“That’s private information,” she said, her voice strangled in her throat. “And I want you out of here. This is a private company, and we have—”
“Permission,” Cade said. “From Mr. Macroy.”
He turned the monitor around. His fingers tapped over the keyboard as he pulled the main screen up and searched for something. It didn’t take long. Parker didn’t seem to have tried that hard to hide it.
“Look at that,” Cade said as the still filthy interior of Macroy’s house appeared on the screen. “He tapped the security feed. Took photos of her there too.”
Farnham swallowed hard. “I had no idea,” she said. “I helped Parker when he had some… problems… because he was one of my kids. The same reason I helped Haley. Back then, I was a casting director. I put those kids in front of the camera. I felt responsible for what happened to them.”
Her hands pleated at her cuffs as she talked, neat, nervous motions that concertinaed the good silk into tiny folds. When she saw Marlow’s eyes on her, she stopped.
“I didn’t get why you went to bat for him so hard,” Marlow said. “No matter if you got him a job as a teenager or not, he’d put your job on the line. Your reputation with your boss.”
“I told you,” Farnham said. “I felt responsible because—”
“Because he was your son,” Cade said. The statement made Farnham’s face go slack and expressionless. “You had him when you were fifteen, and you left him behind with your sister when you were eighteen to come to LA. Eventually, he came to find you, and you weren’t going to give him up again. That’s why you got him that job onHaley’s Comet. This job too. Covered for him, over and over.”
Farnham closed her eyes and…relaxed. The high-strung tension that had kept her shoulders squared and her back straight seeped away, and she sagged into a more comfortable version of herself.
“Only about this,” she said. “Only ever about this. She ruined Parker, and she never even had to try.”
“This is what you found,” Marlow repeated. He tapped his finger on the desk. “That night.”
She nodded, a minimal dip of her chin. A tear ran down her face, and she wiped it away from her nose with one hand.
“He’d been better. Stopped… all that,” she said. “Or so I thought. Then I found out about this. I knew. I knew he wasn’twellagain.”
“He killed a girl,” Cade said.
