He stopped. Goose bumps broke out across his back. He turned, his eyes fixed on me. “What kind of trouble?”
“The police think Scout killed a woman named Elizabeth Drake. They haven’t charged her yet, but it’s coming.”
Thank god he looked stunned. “What do they have on her?”
“They found Scout’s hair in the woman’s bathroom pipe, and one of her lyrics written in blood on the bedroom wall.” I winced. I’d worked hard to shove down memories of the bloody, oozing hole in Georgia’s head, to keep from seeing it whenever my thoughts turned idle. But this case was dredging them back up.
Brooks squinted into the sun. “Hair is bad, but it’s not definitive—it proves she was there, not that she killed anyone. And they must think she’s pretty stupid, to leave her own lyrics at the scene.”
“Cockyis the word the detective used. Scout suffers ‘delusions of invincibility’ on account of being a semi-famous pop singer.”
He whistled. “Harsh. What was the lyric?”
“I eat traitors like you for breakfast.It’s a line from ‘Midnight Mass.’” I frowned. “The murdered woman, Elizabeth Drake, used to be Reese Griffin’s assistant—”
“Griffin?” Brooks shifted his board higher on his hip. “That guy’s a monster. Remember he was at the Christmas party?”
I nodded, tight-lipped. I hated remembering that party. “They’re arguing that Scout killed Elizabeth Drake as a punishment for aiding and abetting a serial rapist.”
Brooks cocked an eyebrow, giving me a glimpse of the old him. “Because Scout, who once cried when she chipped a nail, is a rogue vigilante?”
Tread carefully, I warned myself. The unsettling part wasn’t howfar-fetched the accusations were, but how closely they circled the truth. Of course, Brooks didn’t know that, nor could he ever. “In her defense,” I said, “it was a really expensive manicure.”
He blew out a breath.
“Will you help us figure out who really killed this woman, and why they’re trying to frame Scout?”
For a moment, Brooks stood there, studying my face. Had he always wielded this level of intensity? I struggled against the urge to shield myself. Finally, he said, “You told me you were in trouble. But it sounds like it’s actually your employer.”
I took a deep breath, inhaling salt and sunscreen and the vegetal scent of kelp. “I can’t tell you everything. But I promise, if Scout goes down, so do I.”
Brooks shook his head. “Ten years go by, and you’re still the exact same girl. Too much and not enough at the same time.”
The words socked me in the stomach.
“I’m sorry, Iz. It’s the LAPD’s case. I have no jurisdiction.” He set off once again for his car.
“Brooks—”
“And that’s only one of a thousand reasons I shouldn’t get involved,” he continued, talking over his shoulder. I watched helplessly as he unlocked his black SUV, threw his board in the back, and climbed in the driver’s seat. The SUV was new. I wouldn’t have expected it from him—it was so FBI. But that was stupid. It had been ten years. Of course he’d changed.
I ducked my head, wiping the unexpected wetness from my eyes. Foolish to think I could come to Brooks, appeal to our history, to the moral compass that had once been such a big part of him—
“Iz?”
I looked up. Brooks peered at me through his open window. “That lyric on the wall.”
I scrubbed any sign of tears from my face. Cleared my throat. “Yeah?”
“What if it wasn’t directed at the dead woman? If someone’s framing Scout, what if the message was meant for her?”
Chapter 19Rosie, the Journalist
PRESENT DAY
Rosie spent one whole year of her life researching and writing a groundbreaking piece on Scout Sage. And now, days after publication, she curled into a ball on her couch and, in an act of self-flagellation, clicked through the comments on her article for the thousandth time. What was supposed to have been the greatest accomplishment of her journalistic career had careened into a crash-and-burn disaster.
She’d done everything right. Put in a year’s worth of work, successfully pitched her story to an editor atThe New York Times—The New YorkmotherfuckingTimes! Because screw theLos Angeles Times, those ungrateful bastards, she was following in Ronan Farrow’s footsteps. She’d endured mind-numbing rounds of fact-checking, a process that reminded her of Dante’s nine circles of hell. And in the end, she’d published a story a TV reporter had referred to only yesterday as the “breakout story of the year.” She, Rosie Wright, a no-name municipal affairs reporter living in a five-hundred-square-foot studio apartment, delivered the breakout story!
