Senseless E-Book

Ronald Malfi

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 585

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A page-turning, supernaturally-tinged LA puzzle-box thriller – Zodiac with teeth, from the Bram Stoker Award-nominated and bestselling author of Come with Me. Perfect for fans of Riley Sager and Lauren Beukes. What do you see...? When the mutilated body of a young woman is discovered in the desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the detective assigned to the case can't deny the similarities between this murder and one that occurred a year prior. Media outlets are quick to surmise this is the work of a budding serial killer, but Detective Bill Renney is struggling with an altogether different scenario: a secret that keeps him tethered to the husband of the first victim. What do you hear...? Maureen Park, newly engaged to Hollywood producer Greg Dawson, finds her engagement party crashed by the arrival of Landon, Greg's son. A darkly unsettling young man, Landon invades Maureen's new existence, and the longer he stays, the more convinced she becomes that he may have something to do with the recent murder in the high desert. What do you feel...? Toby Kampen, the self-proclaimed Human Fly, begins an obsession over a woman who is unlike anyone he has ever met. A woman with rattlesnake teeth and a penchant for biting. A woman who has trapped him in her spell. A woman who may or may not be completely human. In Ronald Malfi's brand-new thriller, these three storylines converge to create a tapestry of deceit, distrust, and unapologetic horror. A brand-new novel of dark suspense set in the City of Angels, as only "horror's Faulkner" can tell it.

Leseprobe

CONTETNS

Cover

Praise for Senseless

Also by Ronald Malfi and available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Part One: High Desert

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two: One Year Earlier or, The Dead Wives Club

Chapter Six

Part Three: Hollywood Vampires

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Four: Demeter

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Acknowledgements

About the author

“Sensational! A spellbinding dive into the devil’s playground that is Los Angeles, where everybody is simultaneously hunter and hunted. Ronald Malfi is the real deal—you don’t read this book, you live it.”

JOSH WINNING, author of Burn the Negative and Heads Will Roll

“A brutal Rubik’s Cube of a book covered in blood . . .This vamped out, sun-bleached mobius strip is a masterclass in horror noir.”

CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN, author ofWake Up and Open Your Eyes

“A neon-lit pilgrimage to the worst parts of LA and the filthiest parts of the human soul, this intricate braid of horror, thriller, and procedural slowly tightens like a snare, holding you captive, forcing you to watch as the knife parts flesh. Brutal, clever, surprising, and as dark as the desert on a moonless night.”

DELILAH S. DAWSON, New York Times bestseller,and author of Bloom and Guillotine

“Senseless is a novel that demands to be read with the lights on, but even then, you’ll feel the shadows pressing in around you. It’s a dark, unnerving descent into the heart of human and inhuman monstrosity, and Malfi’s voice ensures every whisper, every heartbeat, echoes long after the final line.”

SHANE HAWK, co-editor of the internationallybestselling Never Whistle at Night

“Ronald Malfi’s Senseless is a stunning, yet grim, puzzle box to solve. Each twist and turn of captivating prose draws us closer to a mesmerizing conclusion. An absolutely exquisite horror thriller.”

CYNTHIA PELAYO, Bram Stoker Award®-winningauthor of Vanishing Daughters

ALSO BY RONALD MALFIAND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Come with Me

Black Mouth

Ghostwritten

They Lurk

Small Town Horror

The Narrows

ALSO BY RONALD MALFI

Bone White

The Night Parade

Little Girls

December Park

Floating Staircase

Cradle Lake

The Ascent

Snow

Shamrock Alley

Passenger

Via Dolorosa

The Nature of Monsters

The Fall of Never

The Space Between

NOVELLAS

Borealis

The Stranger

The Separation

Skullbelly

After the Fade

The Mourning House

A Shrill Keening

Mr. Cables

COLLECTIONS

We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone: Short Stories

RONALDMALFI

SENSELESS

TITAN BOOKS

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Senseless

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781803365664

Signed Hardback Edition ISBN: 9781835414590

Abominable Book Club Hardback Edition ISBN: 9781835414675

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803367606

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SEI OUP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: April 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Ronald Malfi 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Ronald Malfi asserts the moral right to beidentified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is availablefrom the British Library.

This one’s for me.

what do you have?

“Abandon all hope ye who enter here . . . ”

—BRET EASTON ELLIS, AMERICAN PSYCHO

PART ONE: HIGH DESERT

ONE

Once, when Bill Renney was a teenager, he had been bitten by a Southern Pacific rattler while partying with some friends in Antelope Valley. He hadn’t seen the thing at first, merely heard the ominous, inexplicable maraca of its tail, then felt the hammer-strike against the bulge of his left calf muscle. He had just set down an Igloo cooler full of beer and ice beside an outcropping of bone-colored stone when he felt the bite, and for a moment, in his confusion, he thought he had snapped a tendon in his leg. But then he saw the beast— four feet of sleek brown musculature retreating in a series of s-shaped undulations across the sand—and he knew he was in trouble.

His friends had loaded him into the back of a Jeep where someone tied a tourniquet fashioned from a torn shirtsleeve above the wound to slow both the bleeding as well as the progression of venom through his bloodstream. Renney pivoted his leg and could see blood spurting from twin punctures in the otherwise pale, mostly hairless swell of muscle, in tandem with his heartbeat, and the sight of it made him woozy. As the Jeep sped across the desert toward civilization, Renney could feel a burning sensation traveling from the puncture marks up his leg, combined with a moist, roiling nausea in his gut. By the time the Jeep pulled up outside the nearest medical facility, Renney was vomiting over the side.

The experience—now over three decades in the past—had left behind a pair of faint white indentions in the tender meat of Bill Renney’s left calf. It had also left him with a healthy respect for the desert, and for all manner of creatures that resided there.

On this morning, the desert was alive. As he drove, large black flies swarmed in the air, and he periodically turned the windshield wipers on to swipe their smudgy, bristling carcasses from the glass. Beyond the shoulder of the road, the occasional coyote would raise its head and scrutinize the passage of Renney’s puke-green, four-door sedan as it rumbled along the cracked, sun-bleached pavement. When he finally eased the sedan to a stop, he could see the boomerang silhouettes of carrion birds wheeling across the bright blue tapestry of the sky.

Two L.A. County Sheriff’s Department SU Vs and a few Lancaster cruisers were parked on the shoulder of the desert highway, their rack lights on. An ambulance sat at a tilt off the blacktop, next to a solitary green road sign that read, simply, LOS ANGELES COUNTY LINE. Two paramedics and a uniformed officer stood before the open rear doors of the ambulance, their faces red and glistening from the heat of the early morning, the chrome plating on the ambulance reflecting the sun in a spangle of blinding light. Farther up the road was an old Volkswagen bus, sea-foam green except for where the scabrous patches of rust had taken over. One more officer stood there, talking to a young couple who looked like Woodstock refugees. Beside the bus, bright pink road flares sizzled in the center of the roadway, but they were nothing compared to the sun that blazed directly above the desert.

Bill Renney popped open the driver’s door of his unmarked sedan and swung his feet out onto the blacktop. With a grunt—he really needed to get back to the gym and lose the burgeoning spare tire that had been expanding around his waistline this past year, ever since Linda had passed—he bent forward and tucked the cuffs of his pants into his socks. Much like everything else out here in this desolate wasteland, the ants could be merciless.

He got out of the car, swung the door closed, then casually swept aside his sports coat so the officer and the two medics standing by the ambulance could glimpse the gold shield clipped to his belt, right beside the nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson M&P. The officer nodded at Renney then went back to talking to the paramedics. Flirting, Renney thought.

He nodded, too, at the uniformed officer standing with the couple beside the VW bus. The couple was young, the guy maybe in his early twenties, sporting ratty Converse sneakers and a tank top with marijuana leaves embroidered across the front. He had what looked like tribal tattoos on his biceps and the feathered blonde hair of a surfer. The woman standing beside him looked even younger— nineteen at best, if Renney had to guess—and she was wearing a loose, cable-knit shawl over a neon-green bikini top, and, despite the rising heat of that early morning, appeared to be shivering. They were both in handcuffs.

Renney stepped between the two SUVs and out onto the valley floor, where the blacktop gave way to hard-packed sand, spiky tufts of sagebrush, sprigs of desert parsley, and the prickly pompoms of scorpionweed. The sun was high and bright and directly at his back, stretching his shadow out ahead of him along the rippling contours of the earth, and making it appear as though he were traversing some alien landscape. He could feel the intensity of the morning sun as it bore a hole in the center of his back.

He was suddenly craving a cigarette.

A group of uniformed officers stood beyond a scrim of sagebrush. They were maybe thirty, forty yards from the road, but their collective stare as Renney approached was undeniable, even from such a distance. Renney could see that they were all wearing paper masks over the lower half of their face, just like people did back when that whole COVID shit started.

“Detective Renney,” one of the officers called to him, the man’s voice slightly muffled behind the paper mask.

Renney checked his watch as he advanced toward the officers and noted that it was just barely after seven in the morning. He took another step, and a horde of blowflies was abruptly congregating around his head; he absently swatted at the air in an attempt to disperse them, bobbing and weaving his head like a prizefighter. Another step, and a prong of sagebrush grazed his thigh, thwick, causing him to jump and take a quick step to the side. He searched the ground at his feet for any signs of snakes.

“Watch out for the anthills, too,” one of the other officers called to him, pointing toward Renney’s shoes.

Renney froze in midstride. He glanced down again and saw crumbly mounds rising up from the desert floor like booby traps. Beyond the anthills, a set of tire tracks wove a clumsy arc across the floor of the valley. He made a mental note of the tracks as he stepped over them, careful not to disturb any potential evidence.

“We called dispatch first, but Politano here suggested we ask for you by name,” said the muffle-voiced officer who had warned him about the anthills.

“Which one’s Politano?” Renney asked.

A young-looking male officer with short, raven-black hair raised his hand. “That’d be me, sir. I remembered you from last year. Your name, I mean. We met briefly at a press conference.” His voice was also muffled behind the paper mask; Renney realized now that they were wearing them to keep the blowflies out of their mouths.

“Right,” Renney muttered, although he did not recognize the young officer with the mask on. “So, what’ve we got?”

“She’s maybe in her early to mid-twenties, if I had to guess,” said Officer Politano. “We didn’t check for any ID or anything. Frankly, sir, we didn’t want to do anything until you got here.”

Officer Politano nodded down at the reason Bill Renney had been summoned all the way out here so early this morning.

There was a body on the ground. Adult female. Caucasian. Beneath the unforgiving glare of the sun and through a cloud of frenzied flies, Bill Renney could make out a turquoise halter top, and a pair of faded denim shorts that were frayed to tassels at the hems. What at first looked like a bruise on the left thigh was actually a tattoo of a rose, with a tendril of thorns running down the length of that pale, fly-bitten leg. The feet were bare, but a bit of gold jewelry caught a sunbeam and sparkled along one slender ankle. The woman’s head was turned at an angle away from Renney, so that he only saw the nest of dusty, knotted blonde hair at the back of her head. The one arm that he could see from his vantage was crooked in a position that propped the left hand into the air. All five fingers from that hand were missing, the wrist and forearm stained in striations of dark blood.

A sinking sensation overcame Bill Renney. It felt like he was suddenly plummeting down an elevator shaft.

Jesus Christ, he thought. What the actual fuck?

“Those two up by the road spotted the body about an hour ago,” said Officer Politano, who nodded in the direction of the VW bus and the young couple in handcuffs being questioned by the police officer at the shoulder of the highway. Politano lowered his mask and Renney saw that he was indeed young and fresh-faced, and he thought maybe he did recognize him after all. Maybe from Palmdale, although he couldn’t be sure. “They were driving by, doing a little day-tripping, when they saw vultures circling something on the ground,” Politano went on. “Guy said he could tell it looked like a person out there, and his girl agreed. He got out and had a look. Then the girl, she called it in on her phone. We asked them to wait for us to arrive, and they did. The girl said they kept honking the horn to keep the vultures away, which mostly worked.”

“Why are they in bracelets?” Renney asked.

“Well, they gave us permission to search the van. We found some coke.”

Renney stepped around to the other side of the body.

He wanted to see the face.

“The body probably hasn’t been out here for very long,” Officer Politano continued. “A few hours, tops. The vultures haven’t done a job on it yet.”

No, the vultures hadn’t, but this close to the body, Renney could see large red ants coursing up and down the corpse’s pale thighs, flossing between the exposed toes with their dark blue nail polish, and creeping in a conga line across the bloodstained front of the turquoise halter top. The blowflies, too, had collected in the corpse’s hair, so plentiful that Renney could hear their orchestral hum.

He knelt beside the dead woman’s head.

Jesus Christ.

A second officer cleared her throat and said, “We thought maybe coyotes could’ve—”

Renney shook his head. Said, “No.” Said, “Coyotes didn’t do this.” Then he turned his head and spat tiny flies from his mouth.

“I didn’t think so, either,” said Politano. Something clicked in the back of the young officer’s throat as he said this. He’d kept his mask down around his neck, as if in solidarity with Renney.

The dead woman’s nose and eyes had been removed, leaving behind a trio of empty, bloodied sockets. This gave the corpse’s face a disconcerting jack-o’-lantern appearance, albeit one smeared in a crimson sheen of dried blood. Ants swarmed all over while some large beetle with an iridescent carapace lumbered along the rise of a stone-white cheekbone—the only part of the corpse’s face that was not covered in blood. Renney was cautious not to touch the ants as he reached down and brushed aside a tuft of tangled blonde hair. Blowflies exploded in a smoggy cloud and disseminated into the air.

Son of a bitch, Renney thought, just as a nasty muscle tightened in the center of his chest.

The woman’s left ear had been removed, as well. Both ears, Renney assumed, although he could only see the one side of her head at the moment. There was dried blood along the neck, too, and the skin there had purpled, but the flies were not making the area easy to study.

“I saw this and I thought of that other one,” said Officer Politano. “That woman from last year, I mean.”

Last year, Renney thought, and he could feel a cool sweat dampen his brow. Son of a bitch.

“The fingers look like they were sliced off with a knife or a razor or something, maybe bolt cutters,” Officer Politano continued, then he glanced at the other officer, and added, “Not coyotes.”

Renney said nothing, but Officer Politano was correct. Same with the nose—it had been removed, along with all the cartilage, from around the nasal and vomer bones. The eyes had been gouged out of their sockets, while the one missing ear that Renney could see had been sliced away like someone sliding a sharp, hot blade across a brick of butter.

“You were the lead on that case?” the female officer asked him.

“I was,” Renney said, thinking now, I am. “Is that a helicopter?”

“What, sir?”

Renney raised an index finger above his head, in the approximate direction of the sound of incoming rotors. He did not take his eyes off the body.

“Oh,” said the officer. “Yes, sir. They’re searching the area.”

“Radio in and tell them to keep away. I don’t want them blowing sand all over the place.”

“Yes, sir,” said the officer, and then she was jogging back to one of the SUVs.

“Any footprints in the vicinity?” Renney asked the remaining officers.

“Only the guy’s footprints from when he came out here to have a look at the body,” said Officer Politano, once more nodding in the direction of the Volkswagen bus and at the young couple in handcuffs. “Prints matched the treads on his sneakers. We took photos. No one else’s that we could see.”

“Night winds blow the sand around, cover things up. How far out did you check?”

“I personally canvassed about a hundred square feet around the victim before you got here.”

“They see anyone else out here while on their drive?”

“The couple in the van? No. Not a soul, sir.”

“What about any vehicle tracks in the sand? You guys find any?”

“No, sir.”

“I noticed some tire tracks over by those anthills.”

A beat of silence simmered in the air between the officers.

Renney looked up at their dark silhouettes plastered against the inferno of a blazing desert sun. He lifted an arm to shield his eyes from the glare. Sweat rolled down his face.

“That was me,” confessed one of the other officers, who had also removed his paper mask now—another guy Renney thought he recognized from Palmdale. Or maybe Lancaster. These young guys all looked the same. “I drove out here when we first arrived on scene, sir, but then thought, well . . . I mean, I went back up to the road . . . I realized I’d compromised the scene, sir, I just . . . I wasn’t thinking . . . ”

“Someone go unhook those two,” Renney said, jerking his head in the direction of the Volkswagen and the two hippies.

“Uh, sir,” stammered one of the officers. “They had about two grams of cocaine in their—”

“I don’t give a shit about the coke. Unhook them and ask them to come down to the station to give a proper statement. Do it before they manage to rub together whatever brain cells they still have between them and ask for a lawyer.”

“Understood,” said the officer, already moving back toward the road.

Renney looked back down at the corpse’s mutilated face. From the inside pocket of his sports coat, he pulled out a pair of latex gloves and tugged one on. He brushed away the swarm of ants along the lower half of the corpse’s face, then pressed his thumb to the chin. He gently lowered the jaw until the mouth hung open, then peered into the cavity.

“Tongue’s gone, too, isn’t it?” asked Politano.

“It is,” Renney confirmed. Indeed, it had been severed, leaving behind a pulpy, bloodied stump. Not as neat and clean as the removal of the nose, ears, and eyes. Harder to get at, he supposed. As he stared at what remained of the tongue, a rivulet of ants spilled out from one corner of the corpse’s mouth, and Bill Renney yanked his hand away, the thumb of his latex glove sticking briefly to the dried blood on the chin before releasing with an audible snap.

“She’s cut up the same way as that other woman from last year,” said Officer Politano, and it was not phrased as a question. Something clicked once more in the young man’s throat. “Isn’t that right, detective?”

Renney exhaled audibly as he rose to his feet. His armpits felt swampy, his throat dry. He still craved that cigarette. As he dusted the sand from his knees, Officer Politano’s handcuff chain rattled, and the hairs on the back of Renney’s neck stood at attention. He glanced around for any evidence of approaching rattlesnakes.

“Detective Renney?” Politano said, perceptibly clearing his throat. “She’s in the same condition as that other woman we found out here a year ago. Isn’t that right, sir?”

“It would seem that way,” Bill Renney admitted, and to his own ears, it sounded like a confession.

* * *

The chief M.E. with the County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner was a tall, sterling-haired man in his late fifties, named Falmouth. He reminded Renney a little bit of Pierce Brosnan without the accent. According to Falmouth, the parts of the victim that had been removed—her nose, eyes, ears, tongue, and the fingers and thumbs of both hands—had been done so postmortem. There had been two implements used to remove these bits: a crude blade, like some dulled hunting knife or razorblade, had been employed to dig out the eyes, and carve away the nose and ears. Possibly the tongue, too, Falmouth concluded. The fingers and thumbs, on the other hand (“No pun intended,” Falmouth muttered stoically), appeared to have been removed with an altogether different implement—something, according to the medical examiner, like a set of bolt cutters. Just as Officer Politano had surmised, Renney noted.

“Tell me,” Renney said. “Tell me—what are the differences between this body and the one from last year.”

“Quite a few, actually,” said Falmouth, “from a forensic standpoint, at least. For one thing, the cause of death is different. The woman from last year died from exsanguination—blood loss from her wounds. This victim, however,” he said, and he peeled back a layer of white sheet to expose the corpse’s face, now mostly swabbed clean of the dried blood by rubbing alcohol, yet still looking skeletal with its missing pieces, “died of asphyxiation. Look—see here?”

With one latex-gloved finger, Falmouth addressed a vague gray outline around the corpse’s nasal cavity and mouth. To Renney, it looked like dirt or some other debris.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Remnants of some adhesive,” said Falmouth. “Something sticky had been placed over her mouth and nose, causing her to suffocate. After she was dead, her killer went to work on her.”

Renney leaned closer and examined the gray flecks of adhesive around the corpse’s mouth and nasal cavity. He hadn’t noticed them back in the desert when he’d first studied the body, given all the dried blood and blowflies swarming around the corpse’s face, but he could see it clearly now.

“All adhesives contain long chains of protein molecules that bond with the surface of whatever they’re sticking to,” Falmouth explained. “I’ve already scraped some off, sent them to the lab.”

Renney nodded.

“There are ligature marks around the wrists and ankles, too,”

Falmouth went on. “This woman was bound at some point. That differs greatly from the body we examined last year, as well, which showed no signs of that victim being bound or even held against her will.”

“Can you tell what was used to bind her?”

“I’ll have the lab confirm that, as well, but I’m guessing some sort of rope, based on the fibers I extracted from the abraded flesh. At least on the wrists, anyway.”

“Her feet were bare when we found her. Maybe you can check the soles of her feet to see if you can determine what sort of location she might have been kept in?”

“Already have. Just your basic dirt and grit, I’m afraid.”

“Right,” Renney said.

Falmouth reached over the body splayed out on the stainless-steel table and gently turned the corpse’s head on its neck. Renney imagined he could hear the tendons creak. The blonde hair had been shorn away close to the scalp, and despite the Braille-like topography of the skin due to countless insect bites and exposure to the cruel elements of the desert, Bill Renney could clearly make out the ragged cut around the ear canal.

“All these amputations are a little hastier than the ones on the previous victim,” Falmouth explained. “See how the flesh pulls away, as if the ear was only partially severed but then torn the rest of the way, maybe by someone pulling at it? Do you see how it was ripped here? The way the flesh pulls down toward the jaw line, like a hasty rip. These little loose strands of jagged flesh?”

“Yeah, I see,” Renney said, following Falmouth’s latex-gloved finger as it traced the wound.

Falmouth lifted one of the corpse’s arms by the wrist. “Same with the fingers. The cuts from last year were made precisely at the junction of the middle and proximal phalanx. These amputations are hastier; the implement used cut straight through the bone and not at the joint.”

Renney stared at the irregular shards of bone poking up from what remained of the fingers.

“The woman that was found last year had all these elements removed from her in an almost surgical fashion. The person who had done that had been careful. Precise. Artful, almost. A scalpel was used, was my conclusion, except for the fingers, where I believe the assailant had utilized something more proficient to break through the carpometacarpal joints—something like a sturdy hunting knife or something of that ilk. The amputations on this victim are much cruder, which I find interesting, since they were removed postmortem where her assailant could have taken his time.” Falmouth shrugged, placing the wrist back on the table, then added, “But those differentiations could just be circumstantial.”

“Meaning what?” Renney asked.

Falmouth arched his slender, steel-colored eyebrows. “Meaning the killer could have been in a hurry this time, for whatever reason.”

“What about any fingerprints or DNA left behind?”

“No fingerprints from the assailant that I’ve been able to find, which just means he could’ve been wearing gloves. I’ve swabbed the body for trace DNA, found some hair follicles and evidence of desquamation—the shedding of dead skin cells—but so far there haven’t been any hits. It’s possible the assailant isn’t in the system.”

“That’s a big difference from last year, too,” Renney said, although more to himself than to Falmouth. The crime scene last year had been impossibly clean, with no trace DNA left behind. “So, do you think this is the same guy who killed that woman last year?”

“Anything’s possible,” said Falmouth, spreading his arms. “The details of how the first victim was found were—”

“Those details never made it to the press,” Renney finished. “Right.”

“Exactly. So, in my estimation, to have all these same . . . elements . . . removed in such a similar and specific fashion, not to mention the location where the body was found—”

“Yes,” Renney said, cutting him off. “I understand what you’re saying. A copycat killer wouldn’t know those details because they were never public.”

“It’s just that even with the discrepancies, Bill, the similarities are all there. I wouldn’t bet on a coincidence, is what I’m saying. But you’re the detective.”

Renney pointed to a darkened, mottled tract of flesh along the victim’s thigh—something that hadn’t been there when he had first come upon the body in the desert, because now the rose tattoo was incorporated into that bruising, which hadn’t previously been the case. He would have noticed. “What’s all that?” he asked. “Are they bruises?”

“This?” Falmouth said, tracing the pattern of darkened flesh along the victim’s thigh. “We call this discoloration a ‘postmortem suntan.’ Dead skin cells react differently to the sun’s U V light.”

“I once dated a girl like that,” Renney said. The comment made Falmouth chuckle, but Renney could still feel some expanding discomfort uncoiling in the center of his chest. He kept hearing Falmouth’s words echoing in his head: It’s just that even with the discrepancies, the similarities are all there . . .

“I would conclude that this body was left in the desert sometime just before dawn,” Falmouth said. “The coyotes and vultures hadn’t gotten to it yet. Bugs will do damage at any hour, but birds and mammals tend to wait a while to make sure what they’re going after is actually dead. Still, you’re looking at maybe a three- to five-hour window, at best. Probably less.” Falmouth cleared his throat then added, “The desert is unforgiving to a body.”

Renney thought of the countless bovine skeletons that littered the desert floor, straight out to the Mojave, all the way out to Las Vegas. Thought of the pinwheels of vultures that were always visible somewhere on the horizon, waiting patiently for some poor thing to expire.

That terrible muscle in the center of his chest constricted again.

Fifteen minutes later, as Renney walked slowly down the long, tiled, echo-chamber corridor of the DMEC, he happened to glance up at a television mounted on brackets to the wall. On the screen was a newscaster standing before the solitary green road sign that read LOS ANGELES COUNTY LINE, an expanse of high desert in the background. The chyron at the bottom of the screen said: BODY OF FEMALE VICTIM FOUND MUTILATED IN ANTELOP VALLEY.

“ . . . where, less than a week ago, the body of an unidentified young woman was found mutilated in the spot you see right over my shoulder,” said the reporter. “For the people who live out here, they are reminded of an eerily similar murder from the year before— that of thirty-two-year-old Melissa Jean Andressen, whose body was discovered in this very stretch of desert.”

A still image of Melissa Jean Andressen appeared on the screen, and Renney recognized the photo as the same one the department had circulated to the media in the days after her body had been discovered last year—an attractive woman in tennis whites, dark hair as full as a lion’s mane around her head, smiling beatifically. Her eyes were green and radiant and heavily lashed. She had been very pretty, Renney thought.

“Andressen’s killer was never brought to justice, despite the efforts of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the hefty reward posted by Andressen’s husband, prominent Hollywood psychiatrist Dr. Alan Andressen.”

Melissa Jean Andressen’s photo was replaced by one of her husband. Alan Andressen was smiling, too, only there was something reserved about it—as if smiling did not come naturally to the man. Renney supposed that was true, although he knew it was unfair to pass such judgment, since he’d only known Alan after the murder of his wife, when the man was at his worst.

“For a while,” the reporter continued, “Dr. Andressen was the only suspect in the murder of his wife, but he was ultimately cleared by police early in the investigation. Now, with the discovery of this new victim, locals and police alike are starting to wonder if the two murders may not be connected. As for any specific similarities that might connect these two murders, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has not released any details to the media. Sarah Sullivan, Channel Eleven News.”

The broadcast switched to sports, but Renney hardly noticed. There was a tunneling in his vision now, coupled with an eerie auditory exclusion. He’d been in two shootouts during his tenure on the force, and the way time seemed to slow down and stretch, providing only a pinpoint of light at the end of his narrowing vision, like staring down a long tunnel, was very similar to how he now felt.

He stood there, sweating.

* * *

Her name was Gina Fortunado, twenty-six years old, originally of San Bernardino, California, but recently having resided in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Los Angeles. A schoolteacher, single, and a graduate of UCLA, she was last seen by some girlfriends the day before her body was discovered, while they all had lunch at some vegan joint on Alameda Street. No one that Bill Renney could readily identify—including the girl’s parents, who still lived in San Bernardino—had seen her since.

He visited her parents at their modest, single-family home on Magnolia Avenue—a cheery stamp of property bracketed by towering palm trees and with a cluster of vehicles in the driveway. The house was hot, the windows stood open, and electric fans turned their heads in nearly every room. Gina’s parents had filed a missing persons report after several days went by with no contact from her, and her father—a tall, quiet man with a deeply seamed face and gray, pensive eyes—positively identified his daughter by the photograph of a rose tattoo on her thigh. During Renney’s visit, Gina’s mother sat in the living room surrounded by daughters and nieces, her eyes foggy and distant, her movements like those of an animatronic slowly losing power. There was a grandmother there, too—a wizened apparition who rocked ceaselessly in a chair by the window, a string of rosary beads in her gnarled white hands. When the father meandered into the living room to sit beside his wife, Renney wandered around the house, gazing at photographs of Gina and her sisters, Gina and her cousins, Gina in a high school cheerleading outfit, Gina at the beach, Gina leaning against the hood of someone’s Camaro. She had been pretty and bright-eyed.

“She wanted to be an artist.”

Renney turned around, startled by the voice. It was one of Gina’s sisters, looking at a particular image hanging on the wall from over his shoulder. He followed her stare to a framed watercolor painting of a blossoming red rose.

“She painted that?” Renney asked.

“When she was only seven. Isn’t it spectacular?”

“Very impressive.”

“She couldn’t make a living as an artist. That’s why she went into teaching.” Her gaze left the painting and settled on Renney. He could feel the weight of her stare pressing against him like something tangible. “Who would do such a terrible thing to my sister?”

“I’m going to find out,” Renney said, and then he left that place.

* * *

Several nights later, Bill Renney arrived home to find a man standing on his porch. He called out to the man as he slowed his gait moving up the walkway toward the front of the house: “Hello? Can I help you? This is a private residence.”

No response.

Renney was cradling a soggy paper bag of fast food against his chest, but managed to slide a hand toward his hip, where his service weapon remained concealed beneath his sports coat. There had been a string of burglaries in the neighborhood lately, and Renney supposed it was only a matter of time before his number was called.

The man said nothing—and it was certainly a man; Renney could tell by the cut of the figure’s silhouette—but instead this person drifted along the length of the porch, momentarily vanishing among the shadows collected at the corner of the house, where the light of the lamppost on Canyon Road was unable to reach. But then the man reappeared, and proceeded to descend the porch steps, stopping halfway down when he spied Renney staring back at him.

Renney paused in midstride.

About a year had passed since he had last laid eyes on Dr. Alan Andressen. Yet it wasn’t the passage of time that prevented him from immediately recognizing the man, but rather Alan Andressen’s overall appearance. As Alan stepped nearer to the light of the streetlamp, Renney could see that the man had lost too much weight, and that his clothes—Lakers sweatshirt and wrinkled chinos—hung from his frame as if from a clothesline. A few more paces, closing the distance, and Renney could make out patchy, unshaven jowls, and dark crescents beneath the man’s sleep-deprived eyes. Alan’s mouth was a firm slash, and something in those weary eyes glittered wetly.

“Doc,” Renney heard himself say. “What are you—”

“I saw the news,” Alan said. “Is it true?”

With the exception of a dog barking its head off somewhere in the distance, the street was otherwise quiet at this hour. Still, Renney did not want to be standing here in the open having this conversation.

“Listen, Alan—”

“You should have called me.”

“For what reason? To upset you?”

“Christ, Bill. Is it true? What they’re saying on the news about that girl?”

Renney fished his house keys from his pocket. “Come inside and we’ll talk,” he said, moving around Alan on his way to the porch.

It was a two-bedroom bungalow in Van Nuys, bookended by used car dealerships and pawn shops, and within spitting distance of both the 405 and the 101. The house had seemed perfectly adequate before Linda had died, but it now felt too hollow and empty to Renney, particularly in the evenings. After Linda’s death, he had considered getting a dog to help fill the void, but he concluded it wouldn’t be fair to keep some poor animal locked up in a house all day (and sometimes all night, too, given Renney’s chaotic work schedule). In the end, he had settled on a fish tank, one of those fifty-gallon jobs, and he had sprung for the saltwater tropical fish because they had struck him as more festive than the typical freshwater ones.

He dumped the greasy pouch of fast food on the half wall that separated the living room from the kitchen, then went directly to the tank, lifted the lid, and sprinkled some fish food onto the surface of the water. A school of striped cardinalfish recalibrated their position in the tank and made a beeline in the direction of the food. The soft burble of the filter brought Renney a modicum of peace, if for only a moment.

His and Linda’s wedding photo hung on the wall beside the fish tank, a glossy eight-by-ten in a cheap frame. In the photo, Linda looked young and resplendent in her white gown, the shape of her collarbones like the carved slats on a cello, no evidence of the cancer that would ultimately claim her looming in her future. He didn’t look so bad himself in his rented tux—about twenty pounds leaner and missing the silver streaks that now grew like kudzu at his temples. Kissing your white spots, Linda used to say when they’d first started sprouting, and she would kiss him there.

When he turned around, he found Alan standing in the open doorway. In the stark light of the foyer, Alan looked nearly skeletal, and not just because of the amount of weight he’d lost since Renney had last seen him. The man’s skin was the pallor of bread dough and his hair had receded quite a bit, expanding the real estate of his pale, sweat-dappled forehead. His mouth looked too wide for his narrow face, as if his teeth had grown, somehow.

“Shut the door,” Renney told him. He set the container of fish food down and went into the small kitchen, where he opened the fridge and took out two bottles of Coors Light.

The front door squealed shut, but when Alan didn’t appear in the kitchen doorway or over the half wall, Renney ambled back out with both beers to find him still standing in the foyer, staring at him. The man’s eyes looked like burnt flashbulbs. He had his hands on his hips, and his shoulders came to abrupt points beneath the fabric of that oversized Lakers sweatshirt. He looked like a haunted house.

“I couldn’t find any specific details online,” Alan said. “Only whatever cursory bullshit they’ve been saying on the news.”

“We’re keeping the details pretty quiet for the time being.”

Alan rubbed the heel of one hand across his forehead. “Was she cut up the same way? Was it the same?”

“You don’t look well,” Renney said, by way of deflecting the question.

“Don’t give me that shit. What the fuck’s going on, Bill? Was her face all cut up? Her fucking fingers removed? Tell me.”

“There are . . . some similarities, yeah,” Renney admitted. The words felt hot, like they came out of his throat on a gust of steam. “The body parts, the way she was cut up, yeah. Pretty much the same.”

“Goddamn. Then you know what that means,” Alan said, his voice shaking. Renney could see the anguish on his face, a year’s worth of unmitigated grief compounded with the burden of this new information, each emotion stacked precariously atop the next, like some terrible Jenga tower. “It can’t be a coincidence. No details were ever released to the public . . . ”

“That’s right,” Renney said, though his tone was tempered. “We never released the details of your wife’s murder to the press, Alan— the way she’d been . . . the, uh, specific details, is what I’m saying. No one outside the police department, the medical examiner’s office, or the district attorney knew what condition your wife was in when we found her.”

“So it’s the same fucking guy.”

“Alan, let’s not jump to con—”

“To have this girl show up in the same way, all cut up like that, in what’s pretty goddamn close to the same location . . . ” Alan went on, ignoring him, and then his voice cracked and he could not complete the sentiment.

“It’s unusual, sure, but I guess anything’s possible,” Renney said, realizing they were Falmouth’s words coming out of his mouth. He wasn’t so sure he could believe them, however. Not now. Not about this.

A humorless laugh trembled out of Alan Andressen’s throat. “Fuck’s sake, Bill. After everything that’s happened, you can’t just be straight with me?”

Renney sighed. There was a bead of sweat tracing down the center of his back, right between his shoulder blades. He was still clutching a beer bottle in each hand, but he suddenly had no taste for it. He extended one to Alan, but Alan just shook his head then glanced away from him.

“Listen to me, Alan. The man who murdered your wife is dead. This is entirely something else.” Renney himself didn’t believe this—he wasn’t sure what he believed at the moment—but he didn’t want Alan spiraling deeper into a hole. He didn’t trust where that might lead. “I spoke at length with the coroner. There are more discrepancies than similarities. Whoever killed this woman, it was a hasty job, nothing like what happened with your wife.”

“Yeah? So, what? This is all just some big coincidence?”

“It could be,” said Renney.

“Well, I don’t believe in coincidences. Not like this. It’s too similar. It’s too close. Which means my wife’s killer is still out there.” Alan’s voice had gone reed-thin and slightly hoarse. “That the son of a bitch has been out there all this time. And if that’s true, then what you and I did last year—”

“Stop,” Renney said. “Just stop it.”

Alan turned and stared at him again. The flesh beneath his eyes looked nearly black, like someone had slapped him around a day or two ago. “Look at me, Bill. Look me straight in the eyes and tell me this isn’t the same guy who killed my wife.”

“Like I said, I spoke to the coroner—”

“Ah, fuck it. And fuck you, too. I know you don’t believe that bullshit. You’re just fucking patronizing me, like I’m some goddamn child you can manipulate. I know what this means, and I don’t have to spell it out for you, either.”

“Get what happened last year out of your head. This girl’s death has nothing to do with your wife’s murder. That guy is gone. Move on.”

Alan’s face tightened. His mouth became a lipless slash. “Yeah, right,” he said, his voice low and breathy. “Real easy for you to say.”

“It’s been a year, Alan. You don’t look any better.”

“You should have fucking called me,” Alan said.

A moment later, Bill Renney was standing alone in his house, feeling the emptiness of the place pressing down on him like a physical thing.

TWO

Ethan Hawke was standing by the buffet table holding a bottle of soda water and talking to a young actress whose name Maureen could not immediately recall. There was music on the stereo—Loverboy, “Working for the Weekend”—and the chatter of guests’ conversations created a lively hum in the air. Maureen herself was drinking a vodka tonic with extra lemon—her third of the evening, just to take the edge off—and she was planted in one corner of the living room that mostly kept her out of everyone else’s way.

She’d spent that morning instructing the caterers where to set everything up, clearing out extra space in the fridge, and fretting over the placement of the glassware on the wet bar and the linen napkins and silverware on the buffet table. By the time Greg had come in from the golf course, tanned and cheery, she had already rearranged the silverware about a dozen times—so compulsively, in fact, that the caterers had relocated themselves to the far side of the room where they had watched her with a collective expression that suggested she might be a little unhinged.

She just wanted everything to be perfect.

On the surface, it was a party to celebrate Maureen and Greg’s engagement. But Greg Dawson was a man of many layers, and one look at the guest list informed Maureen that this party was, at its core, much more strategic than it might appear at first glance. That was Greg Dawson’s style: allowing for things to appear capricious and indulgent and lacking in discretion on the surface, when in reality there was an elaborate and disciplined choreography at work behind the scenes. Structures, delicate as strands of DNA, laid one atop the next, an entire procession of calculations, of chiming silverware and glugging pours of booze, of mouths breathing in synchronicity, each mouth a train tunnel bored into the side of a mountain, languages traversing invisible, breathy tracks, a distance to these people that signified a closeness, a party, a sense of—

Her mind was whirling again. She forced herself to take a deep breath and calm down.

The party was free-flowing now, with upwards of eighty guests, each one strategically curated from Greg’s Hollywood rolodex. He had split from Miramax the previous year, before he and Maureen had met, to form Canyon Films with two old law school friends; at the moment, he and these two partners were in the homestretch to get Canyon Films’ latest feature, Hatchet Job, financed. A screenplay was in the bag, an established director had thrown his hat into the ring, and Greg Dawson was owed enough favors from a few well-known actors all over town to feel confident that he could get some above-the-line talent onboard, too. He just needed the last few straggling investors to commit . . . and he had determined, in that inimitable Greg Dawson way, that his and Maureen’s engagement party might just prove the perfect tool to get the job done.

She watched him throughout the night, from what felt like a safe distance: a man well past middle age, confident, a thing that could be shiny and appealing when necessary, staunch and direct a moment later. She admired his grace—was that even a male trait, something to be admired?—and registered his progression throughout the party with the same steadfast dedication and scrutiny as a Navy admiral tracking an enemy sub. Greg Dawson lives here. Greg Dawson goes here. Greg Dawson exists here. Stranger, still: I live here. I go here. I exist here.

Vodka tonic number four.

It was a gorgeous night, cool for so late in the summer, so most of the guests had migrated out onto the back patio and were having drinks by the pool underneath the stars. From where Maureen stood, still taciturn in her corner of the living room, she could see through the open sliders David Duchovny charming one of the young female caterers beside the manicured hedgerow that overlooked the lights of Los Angeles. A few feet away from Duchovny, someone popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, and Maureen watched the champagne geyser and gush in a milky spume down the length of the bottle. A man in a silk jacket leaned toward another and whispered something into this man’s ear, some passable secret shared, handed off, conspiratorially, beneath a dangling, luminous network of Chinese lanterns.

Greg was across the room now, talking with a handsome couple by the stationary wet bar. As with most of the guests that evening, Maureen thought she recognized the couple, but she couldn’t put names to their faces. (She was not “Hollywood,” which, Greg had said on more than one occasion, was what he found fascinating about her—“Well, that and your lovely caboose,” he’d add, and then he’d laugh.) As she stared at them, Greg turned and caught her eye, gave her a sly wink. Energy crackled in the air, bridging some invisible gap between them. She liked looking at him from a distance, knowing she was the one going to bed with him at the end of the day. She liked thinking that such a well-respected, talented, energetic man found something equally as appealing in her.

Greg collected his drink from the bartender—a lowball glass of bronze liquid swaddled in a damp cocktail napkin—and pointed in her direction, just as casually as you’d please. The handsome couple looked over at her, their faces bright. The man eyed her head to toe while the woman smiled vacuously at her. Greg said something to them from the corner of his mouth, his eyes on her, too.

Maureen smiled back, then instantly felt unsettled and on dangerous display, like something targeted in the crosshairs of a hunting rifle. She took a swallow of her drink and made a beeline for the kitchen.

Two young women in starched whites were placing smoked trout croquettes onto a silver tray, while a third woman was arranging crystal stemware on the countertop beside a case of Dom Pérignon. There were two rows of Sterno cans on the counter, as well, slightly misaligned; Maureen set her vodka tonic on the kitchen table, then drifted over to the Sterno cans and proceeded to tidy up the rows. There was an odd number of cans, and that realization caused her back teeth to tighten. Agitation funneled through her like a sickness. She quickly began to rearrange them, making three perfectly even rows, five cans in each, one two three four five, then found herself navigating toward the crystal stemware, so many glittery flutes, and not even an attempt to set them in clean, precise rows, just discarded haphazardly on the countertop, their randomness an affront to Maureen’s senses. She could almost hear their discordance, like a sour note being played repeatedly on a piano.

She began to line the champagne flutes into perfect rows—so precise that their circular bases touched, creating a diamond shape at their center, and that the tops of the flutes were all equidistant from one another. Yet there was a design in the crystal, a pattern that rolled like an ocean wave, multiple prisms refracting the lights of the kitchen, and Maureen suddenly needed those ocean waves to align, to roll into one another, peaceably, so that to look upon the entire collection of champagne glasses was to look upon a consistent and satisfying rolling ocean wave that—

The women from the catering company were staring at her as if she’d lost her mind.

“I’m sorry,” she said, taking a step back from the rows of champagne flutes. She realized she’d left fingerprints on some of the glasses. “You’re all doing a wonderful job. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Thank you. Thank you all.”

She grabbed her drink off the kitchen table then retreated back out into the living room.

Pat Benatar was on the sound system now, and Ethan Hawke had meandered over to the wall of Greg’s vinyl record albums. A woman in a tiara and sandals was gesticulating wildly before a group of swarthy men, her false eyelashes as lavish as palm fronds. She had a conspicuous mole in the center of her chest, right between her breasts, which looked almost strategically placed to draw attention to that particular section of her body.

Maureen looked toward the other side of the room and spotted a slender, attractive woman in a tapered black suit, with short, dark hair sculpted to her head, standing by herself in one corner. She wasn’t drinking or eating anything, and in fact, was simply staring at Maureen through the crowd. Maureen nodded and smiled at her, which was when the woman began drifting through the throng in her direction. The men at either side of her appeared to part without noticing, as though some mental telepathy had just taken place. As she approached, the woman narrowed her dark eyes and leveled a finger at Maureen, a gesture that was simultaneously intimate yet indulgent.

“I know you,” said the woman.

Maureen blinked, and said, “Oh? Yes, you do look familiar. Have we met before?”

“No, we haven’t met,” said the woman. “But you’re Maureen Park.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve read your book.”

It was almost as if she’d misheard the woman.

“My book? Really?”

“Yes. It was angry and visceral and daring and wholly feminist. You made me cry at the end, too, by the way, but I also shouted and laughed out loud. Just when I thought you were going for the throat, you went for the heart. But then, to my surprise and delight, at the very end, you circled back around and went for the throat again. It was very well done.”

“Really? Wow, thank you. That’s very kind of you to say.”

“A shame you haven’t written more.” The woman smiled. She wore a gold cross on a slender chain around her neck which, Maureen noted with some intrigue, hung upside down.

“I could swear we’ve met each other be—”

“Looks like you’re about to be swept away,” the woman said, cutting her off. She was staring over Maureen’s shoulder. “We’ll talk again. Congratulations on the engagement.”

Maureen thanked the woman, then watched her float back through the crowd until she lost sight of her.

“Hey.”

Maureen spun around, startled, and nearly spilled her drink on Greg.

“What’s with the jitters? You doing okay?”

“Peachy,” she said, and took a drink. “I just met a fan.”

“I’m your biggest fan, you know,” he said, slipping an arm around her and giving her a squeeze.

His tan looked good on him, healthy, and made him appear younger than his fifty-eight years. He wore a rose-pink linen shirt and casual slacks, thatched loafers with no socks, and a gold Chopard wristwatch that cost more than Maureen’s first car. He was in good shape, which was the first thing Maureen had noticed about him when they’d first met, only a handful of months ago, he on one side of a bar, she on the other.

He administered a swift kiss to the top of her head, a gesture that somehow made her feel both cherished and insignificant at the same time. That was Greg Dawson’s specialty: the subtle insinuation of juxtaposition into everyday life. She supposed it was something she might grow weary of in time, but that realization didn’t bother her now. “You’ve been standing in this corner all night, babe. You look like you’re in the penalty box.”

“That’s not true. I was just in the kitchen, checking on the food.”

“That’s the caterers’ job. People are going to think you’re the help.”

“I don’t know what to say to half of these people,” she confided.

“Oh, Maur,” he said. “Half of them are dull, and the other half only talk nonstop about themselves, which makes them dull and lacking in self-awareness.”

“I just want to make a good impression.”

“You’re the classiest woman here, Maureen.”

She nodded in the direction of the young, handsome couple Greg had been talking to moments before, still standing by the bar. They looked like cake toppers. “Who’re they?”

“David and Sophia Gilchrist. He’s a nobody. She’s the money. Her old man was some hedge fund guru.”

“I’m starting to think maybe you need some actual friends in your life.”

“Hey. These are my friends.”

She frowned at him. “They’re acquaintances with deep pockets.”

“Maybe you’re right. But listen, this is an important night, all right? It means a lot.”

“Don’t stress out about the finances, I’m sure you’ll get everything you need. These people adore you. You’ve got them practically digging in their wallets right now.”

“No, Maur, I mean it’s an important night for us. You’ve been hiding from everyone all evening, me included, when all I want to do is show you off. Let everyone meet my beautiful bride-to-be. You look lovely tonight, by the way.”

Earlier that day, she had gone upstairs and crawled into a battery of dresses, each one more unflattering (and expensive) than the previous one. In the end, she had settled for a pair of black Tuleh slacks, a sleeveless taupe blouse, and a pair of open-toed slingback shoes. Glancing down at herself now, she noticed that the polish on her toenails could have used a touch-up, and there was an unsightly crease in her left pant leg.

“These people just make me uncomfortable,” she said.

“I told you to invite some of your friends, too.”

Maureen’s friends—her real friends, the ones she grew up with—were all back in Wyoming, and anyway, she’d stopped being close with them long ago. But she did feel bad for Greg, who was very sweet and handsome and who was trying very hard, and she wanted to make him look good in front of these people. She could have tried harder, she supposed; could’ve invited the girl from the yogurt place or maybe some women from her Pilates class, not that she knew any of them well at all.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ve been a wallflower. Introduce me to some of these deep pockets, yeah?”

He laughed, and she could smell cigarettes on his breath, a habit he’d told her he’d quit. “Shhh, don’t call them that. It’s our secret.”

“Mum’s the word, baby love,” she said, and pantomimed zipping her lip.

They went out through the open sliders and into the night. The air smelled of chlorine from the pool, and the music was louder out here on the wireless speakers hidden from sight within the hedgerow. Greg led her over to a group of men and women standing beside the outdoor bar. The men were dressed as if they were at a luau while the women looked a bit classier—all sharp edges, designer apparel, and sidelong glances.

Introductions were made in a frenzy, and with the exception of Barry Whitlock, the screenwriter who’d penned the Hatchet Job