“Scout, is that you?” Deirdre Cole, our director onThe Weird World of Wenda Word, walked by and did a double take. “Girl!” She sloshed her champagne. “How did you getintothis party?” Before Scout could answer, Deirdre wrapped her in a hug.
I met Scout’s eyes over Deirdre’s shoulder. On set, our director was buttoned up, scolding us if we made even the slightest flub. Tonight, she seemed wasted.
“And you.” Deirdre waved a hand at me. “I know you, too.”
“Isabel Cruz,” I reminded her, trying not to feel wounded. “I’m another one of your actors.”
Brooks thrust out his hand. “And I’m Brooks, president of Isabel’s fan club. I’m here as part of a Make-A-Wish date.”
Deirdre blinked, trying to gauge whether Brooks was joking, then gave up and turned back to Scout. “You have to tell me how two itty-bitty actresses scored invites to this party when Wenda herself wasn’t invited.” Wenda Word was our show’s star. “I had to talk her off a cliff. She’s convinced it means she’s getting fired. She’s going to be so pissed when she hears you were here.” Deirdre sighed. “Seriously, whose dicks did you suck?”
Brooks coughed, but Scout and I gave her our best innocent smiles.
“You know what? You’re going to tell me over shots.” Deirdre waved us toward the bar. “In exchange, I’ll introduce you to my DGA friends, and that bitch who’s headlining CBS’s new procedural. She’s young and skinny, so I hate her, but don’t breathe a word. We’re not allowed to hate women anymore.”
“Well, she sounds terrible to me,” Scout said. As soon as Deirdre took off, she turned to me and squealed. “Izzy, it’shappening!”
I linked my arm through hers. “The beginning of the rest of our lives.” On a whim, I grabbed Brooks’s chin and kissed him. “Tell me to break a leg, fanboy.”
He grinned. “Break a leg. Or preferably that woman’s.”
The three of us strode toward the bar, grateful to be plucked out of obscurity and to leave Dakota and Emmy, the depressing wonder twins, behind. A thrill surged through me. From our high schoolUs Weeklysessions to this glamorous Hollywood Hills mansion, destiny itself was at work, the Fates spinning the threads of our lives into a glorious tapestry.
Scout had been right, as always: Tonight would change everything.
Chapter 4Grey, the Detective
PRESENT DAY
No one had ever volunteered to partner with Grey on a case before. In fact, there was usually a decent amount of grumbling among the venerable detectives on the fifth floor of the LAPD headquarters whenever Captain Xie made the assignment. So Grey was more than a little surprised—possibly even touched—when Detective Carmen Ellis asked to work the Drake case of her own free will. Detective Ellis, a short, stout woman in her fifties, walked the halls with an athlete’s swagger. She had close-cropped caramel hair that was turning silver at the ears and beautiful almond-shaped eyes that begged for a swipe of mascara, a thought Grey would never voice aloud.
Floor Five was the detectives’ domain, a busy bullpen crowded with desks and investigators in a mix of shoulder holsters, suits, and, for those working the hard cases, days-old stained shirts. The entire floor smelled like old coffee and echoed with a hundred competing conversations. It was grubby, but to Grey, it was home.
Despite volunteering for the assignment, after Ellis moved her laptop to the empty desk opposite Grey’s she didn’t seem eager to work as a team. Twice, when Grey asked her to look into something, the older woman raised her brows and muttered under her breath in Spanish. Grey brushed it off, telling herself it couldn’t be easy taking orders from someone half your age, and the important thing was, Ellis seemed invested in the case itself. She kept sighing and tapping her nails on the desk, frustrated by the longer-than-usual wait for Drake’s background report.
“Screw it,” Ellis finally said. “You young people put every detail of your lives on the internet, right?”
Grey leaned back and chewed her pen. “Elizabeth Drake doesn’t have social media. I already checked.”
“That’s strange, huh?”
“Could be.”
“Well, the records department can eat shit for making us wait,” Ellis concluded. “Let’s see what my friend Google has to say.”
After a few minutes of silent searching, she shook her head. “No trace of this woman. How hard is it to scrub yourself off the internet?”
It seemed like a facetious question, so Grey ignored it.
Then Ellis whistled long and low. “Okay, that’s more like it. Come here.”
Grey moved to Ellis’s desk and read over her shoulder. The detective had pulled up a gossip blog calledHollywood Anonymous, an old thread about someone commenters called “the disgusting snake Elizabeth Drake.” According to the messages, this Drake had been a willing accomplice to her boss, Reese Griffin, for years, serving as his girl Friday.
Grey’s heart beat faster. “You think it’s our Drake?”
Ellis whistled. “Can you imagine? People would go nuts.”
Everyone in America knew the story of Reese Griffin, former president of the Griffin Company, and his catastrophic downfall. Two years ago,The New York Timeshad published a massive exposé detailing accusations against Griffin by more than a hundred women, encompassing everything from sexual harassment to rape. It revealed Griffin to be a monster hiding in plain sight at the highest levels of Hollywood. There’d been marches in the streets after the story came out, and Grey herself had been one of the officers sent to bring Griffin in. He was currently serving twenty-five years in a California prison, and his name had become synonymous with “sexual predator” in the cultural lexicon.
