Ellis’s hopeful expression vanished. “You don’t believe me.”
“Of course not.” Shaking her head, Grey pulled a ten out of her wallet, threw it on the table, and rose from the booth. “The captain was right. This is nuts.”
She squared her shoulders and cursed herself for wasting so much time on Ellis’s bullshit when she could’ve been doing actual case work.
“What happened to women sticking together?” Ellis called to her back.
Slowly, Grey turned to glare. “Don’t you dare say that to me.”
“Scout leaves coded messages in her songs,” Ellis insisted. “See for yourself. And there’s something they do with their hands, a signal—she does it in all her videos, I don’t know why yet—”
Ellis was still babbling when Grey walked out.
Hours later, Greystared at her popcorn ceiling, unable to sleep. With a groan, she leaned over her bed, picked up her laptop, and settled it on her legs. To her great annoyance, every time she closed her eyes, she heard Ellis’s plaintive voice, pleading, “What happened to women sticking together?”
The laptop was getting old, and it scalded her through her pajamas as it whirred to life and coughed up an internet browser. As Grey enteredScout Sagein the search engine, she sincerely hoped she was chasing facts instead of being hoodwinked by a seductive story she half wanted to believe.
The LAPD had claimed that her dad, despite his near-religious respect for logic, had fallen prey to a conspiracy theory after Grey’s older sister went missing, and the consequences had ended his career. Grey knew she’d be cut from the force with lightning speed if anyone thought she’d inherited her dad’s weakness, her stellar clearance rate be damned.
Still, like a moth to flame, she clicked on a playlist of music videos.
Grey had to hand it to Scout: The singer was luminous in front of a camera. Grey had seen snippets of Scout’s music videos before but had never given them much thought. Now, scrutinizing Scout as a suspect, it was interesting what a rare sweet spot she hit. She was conventionally beautiful, and here she was on Grey’s laptop screen, enjoying the kind of spotlight few people ever received, and yet she still seemed approachable, an everywoman. Her music wouldn’t win awards for inventiveness—she was no Björk—but that seemed to be her appeal. Her lyrics were self-deprecating, honest, funny. It was a winning formula, building celebrity out of relatability, making a beautiful musician seem down-to-earth, like the kind of girl you could run into at Target. Genius, actually, wrapping a striver in such a humble cloak. Scout was the kind of woman juries were loath to convict.
Takes one to know one, maybe; Grey knew a thing or two about the usefulness of being underestimated.
She opened Scout’s Wikipedia page. The singer was twenty-nine, born in New Jersey—Grey never would’ve guessed, she seemed so California. Apparently, years ago, Scout had a short-lived role on a teen show calledThe Weird World of Wenda Word, playing a mean cheerleader. Funny, since it seemed like she’d become the poster girl for nice girls ever since—Wiki said she’d even cameoed in an anti-bullying campaign called “Nice Girls Finish First.” Somewhere along the way, she’d turned around her image.
Grey scanned the page. Six studio albums, a handful of singles that had hit the charts, but still no big breakout. It looked like she was heading out on her first-ever international tour soon. Grey had soaked up enough, living in LA, to know that these days, musicians made the bulk of their income from touring. So, Scout was looking for an infusion of cash.
She filed that away for later, then looked up Simon Markham, wanting to put a face to his name. There were only a few pictures of him from red carpets, a large, lumbering man with dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a thickness around the middle he covered with oversized button-downs. He was ruddy-skinned and obviously British in a wayGrey had a hard time articulating. In one of the photos, he had his arm slung around his wife, Kathryn Burgeon, who was petite with a wide smile, intelligence shining from her eyes. Grey tried to decode tension or unhappiness between them but got nothing, other than they seemed like an odd couple.
His Wikipedia page was sparse—only a couple of paragraphs mentioning his marriage to Kathryn, death due to overdose, and a short list of documentary projects. In the Career section, Grey saw he’d worked as a crime scene photographer for the LAPD after first arriving in the States, which Wiki described as “one of many odd jobs he’d taken on” to support his filmmaking. Okay, so everyone in the entertainment industry was pretty much always looking for an infusion of cash.
Grey returned to Scout’s music videos. And for a while, there was nothing. It wasn’t until the fifth video, for a new ballad called “My Sacred Monster,” that the hairs on the back of Grey’s neck rose. As the songstress writhed in black and white on an unmade bed, her full lips mouthing each word, the camera cut to an image of an old-fashioned TV, rabbit ears standing tall. The TV played a pivotal scene fromIron Maidens, Kathryn’s Oscar-winning film.
Grey sat up in bed, a chill running through her despite the heat from the laptop. She checked the date on the video: It had premiered four months ago. Two months after Simon was found dead inside his home.
The video cut to Scout standing in front of a bathroom mirror, singing morosely to her reflection, the portrait of tragic beauty. She opened the medicine cabinet to shelves lined with pill bottles, then swept them to the floor as the song hit its crescendo. The bottle tops flew open, pills scattering across the tiles. Scout swung the mirror back into place and it cracked down the center, a jagged line of lightning, splitting her face in two. Suddenly, the reflection on the bottom transformed into someone else’s lips, someone else’s jaw, turning Scout into an unsettling composite of different women. The woman in the glass tapped her forehead, then her chest, then each of her shoulders in quick succession, before Scout was back to writhing in bed.
Grey punched the pause button. The blood drained from her face.That was the sign of the cross, performed so quickly it was almost buried in Scout’s other gestures. Was that what Ellis had meant by a hand signal? And the nods to Kathryn Burgeon: her film playing on TV, the pills in the medicine cabinet. True, it could all be a coincidence—or maybe Scout had simply wanted to pay homage to a female trailblazer. That was plausible. In one of the interviews quoted in her Wiki, she’d told a journalist her friends were the loves of her life, that they’d do anything for one another.
How far did that loyalty extend?
“This is ridiculous. You’re going insane.” Grey leapt from her bed so fast her laptop tipped over and shut itself, leaving her in the dark. She was reading too much into the video. Scout was a minor celebrity trying to claw her way into the big time, for Christ’s sake. When would she even find time to be a feminist vigilante?
Grey groaned, pressing her hands into her eyes. Either Ellis had infected her with this conspiracy like a communicable disease, or—God help her—she’d stumbled onto something with potential, and that was why Grey’s brain wouldn’t turn off.
“Crazier things have happened, right, Alice?” Grey spoke the words aloud, as if her older sister could hear. Alice used to say that whenever Grey came to her with a far-fetched idea:If I practiced all summer, do you think I could make the cheerleading squad? Do you think if I pulled my grades up, I could get a scholarship to college?“Crazier things have happened,” Alice would always say, with her enigmatic smile. “Why not?”
To Grey, Alice had been half princess, half substitute mom. Their real mom had taken off a few years after Grey was born, for reasons their dad couldn’t bear to discuss. The only time Grey had ever gotten anything close to an answer was one night when she was ten. Alice and their father had been fighting again, this time about Alice blowing her curfew. Red-faced, her sister had screamed that their dad was suffocating her, the same way he’d done to their mom. He’d flinched like he’d been slapped, but Grey had burst into tears. Alice had deflated immediately, sweeping Grey into her arms and assuring her that it wasn’t true, that she’d spoken a lie out of anger.
Alice had always been her protector. She was funny faces acrossthe dinner table and the warm voice reading bedtime stories and the deft fingers, nails always painted bright, carefully combing her hair into braids before school. It wasn’t until after Alice went missing that Grey would hear different accounts of who her sister had been. A hard partier, witnesses said, a wild child. The picture of Alice that had emerged made everyone, even their father’s colleagues in the LAPD, whisper that maybe she’d brought her fate on herself.
But whatever Alice’s faults were, Grey had loved her to the ends of the earth.
She sank back into bed. At the very least, there wassomeconnection between Elizabeth Drake’s killer and Scout Sage, even a tenuous one, because the killer had referenced Scout’s lyrics. Maybe the perp was simply a fan, or maybe Ellis was right that there was more to the story. She stifled a deep sigh and reached again for her laptop. It was going to be a long night.
Six hours later,running on nothing but coffee and fumes, Grey marched down the fifth-floor hallway of the LAPD office.
