By the time she’d collected their bottles of Grey Goose, tequila, and club soda—an order the other servers called the Skinny Bitch Special—and climbed the short staircase to their table, Grey realized the women were all bent toward one another, their hushed voices lost in the drumbeat coming from the speakers.
John had mentioned they had a habit of whispering. A spark of suspicion ignited in Grey’s mind—but she snuffed it out. She’d been down this road before, and it had ended in disaster. Unlike Ellis, she’d kept her job, but she was on thin ice with the captain. The last thing she needed was to let her imagination run wild concerning Scout.
The woman in question glanced up, saw Grey approaching, and quickly squeezed her assistant’s hand, muttering something under her breath. The circle of women’s heads lifted, zeroing in on Grey, and they straightened in their seats, assuming blank expressions.
Goddammit. The spark of suspicion fanned into a flame.
“Back with your bottles,” Grey sang, using her brightest, emptiest voice, and slid the large tray onto the table. As she began to unstack tumblers and arrange the ice, the women cleared their throats and pretended to pick up their conversation where they’d left off.
“I miss when this place served absinthe,” said Cybele, in that French accent Grey recognized from studying the woman’s Instagram videos. “It was seedier back then. Way more fun.”
“You would,” said Isabel, with a roll of her eyes.
Grey was surprised the model remembered when the Serpent Room was an absinthe bar—it was the gimmick that had made the place popular when it first opened, back when Alice worked here. But it hadn’t served the intoxicant for at least ten years, meaning Cybele must’ve come here when she was… Grey eyed her. Very young.
“Excuse me, we’re in California. Who needs absinthe when you have tequila?” said a brunette woman with a British accent, sitting close to Cybele. This must be Miranda Preston. She looked different than inthe photos Grey had pored over—maybe she’d had work done—but the accent gave her away. Miranda downed the last of her champagne and smiled at Grey. “Slide that bottle down here, babes?”
“I’m happy to stay and make your drinks for you,” Grey said, copying the bubbly tone that seemed to work for the club’s most successful bottle girls.
It worked. As Grey mixed drinks, the women returned to ignoring her in favor of talking to each other. There’d been a learning curve when she first started, having to adjust to the service industry, the ways she was supposed to placate her VIP customers, brushing off their entitlement and boosting their egos. It required an opposite set of skills from her police work.
But after twelve years of no answers in Alice and Daisy’s case, working at the Serpent was the only avenue she had left. Grey needed to get a sense of what it was like to work at the club, all the details no one would report to the cops. Were bottle girls routinely propositioned? (No, it turned out.) Did any members of the staff run a side hustle selling harder stuff? (Not that Grey could tell.) Were there rumors about Alice or Daisy passed down like urban legends among the servers? (No one had confided anything.)
Just as she was sliding Miranda’s tequila tonic to her, Isabel lifted a long blond hair out of her water glass and turned accusingly to Scout. “Again?Jesus, girl, you shed like a cat.”
“One time Scout borrowed my hairbrush and the amount of hair she left behind made me mistake it for a small rodent,” said one of the women Grey didn’t recognize, setting off laughter.
“It’s normal,” Scout protested, “you assholes.” But Grey suspected the truth. It was stress making Scout’s hair fall out. A physical tell she’d couldn’t mask.
Cybele reached across the table and tugged a lock of Scout’s hair. “It’s a wonder there’s anything left.”
A sudden thought hit Grey like a strike of lightning. The LAPD had Scout’s sister’s DNA in their system from her murder case, just languishing in some evidence room.
“If that’s all,” Grey said, voice high and sweet. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Without waiting for an answer, she turned from the table and jogged down the stairs, a whole new energy lightening her steps. Greyflashed on the image of Isabel holding Scout’s blond hair above her glass. She had an idea—something that wasn’t a routine part of a forensic search…
Grey shoved open the double doors to the employees-only back of the house. Career and sanity be damned. Her investigation into Scout Sage wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Chapter 13Juliet, the Model
PRESENT DAY
It took an excruciatingly long time, but once the bottle girl finally left them, Scout clanged a tube of YSL lipstick against her champagne flute. One by one, the beautiful women stopped laughing and fell silent, almost reverent. When their eyes found Juliet again, she felt like she was in the middle of a conclave.
“Juliet has the floor,” Scout said, meeting Juliet’s eyes. “Tell us why you need help.”
“You’re playing with fire, Scout,” Cybele protested, but Miranda hushed her.
Juliet bit her lip. This was it—her moon shot. “It’s my agency. Topflight Modeling. Or, I guess, the man who runs it, Danny. I signed a contract with him years ago when I didn’t know anything about the business. My parents…” She looked through her empty champagne flute. “They didn’t know, either. We met Danny back home in Mississippi when he was on a scouting trip. He swore he could find me work in LA if I was willing to move.”
The heat in her cheeks spread like wildfire. “He said I had the makings of a supermodel.” Juliet remembered what he’d told her that day in the mall, when he’d stopped her in the food court:You’re better than pretty—you’re interesting. “I was stupid enough to believe him.”
“How old were you?” Scout asked.
“Thirteen.”
Murmurs broke out around the table.
