Crash and Burn (17 page)

“Morning,” Krista said.

The woman wore one of those hot-pink Mexican dresses with flowers embroidered across the front. Krista’s grandmother used to buy them by the dozen down in Tijuana.

“Pretty hibiscus.” She nodded at the woman’s shrubs. “I can never get mine to bloom like that.”

“Coffee grounds,” she said sagely. “You’re looking for Lily?”

“You seen her around lately?”

“It’s been two weeks, at least. And like I told the other gal, I haven’t seen her car, either.”

She probably meant Missy. “Tall? Blonde?”

“Dragon nails? Yeah, that’s her. She gave me her business card. Said she worked for Lily’s attorney.”

Rather than picking a dry bone, Krista dug out one of her own cards and asked the woman to call if she saw or heard from her neighbor.

She stopped on the way to her car and turned back. “One more thing. That her orange tabby?”

“Sure is. He lives outside, mostly. Sleeps under my porch when it rains.”

Krista glanced at the cat, who was now watching her from the top of the driveway. “Anyone feeding him?”

“He’s been coming around here some.”

Back in her Impala, Krista checked the wit sheet again. Walker kept the sheets for every witness involved in his cases, whether he planned to put them on the stand or not. At the top of Lily’s sheet, someone—probably Missy—had crossed out the original contact info and jotted notes in the margin.

Krista motored eight blocks north to the original address. She’d looked up the apartment earlier and learned it was a two-bedroom unit that had been leased to the same woman for three years—presumably Lily’s former roommate.

Krista hiked up the outdoor stairs. Her sandals slapped against the metal, making a hollow echo with every step. When she reached the top, the door to 202 swung open and a young woman stepped out. She wore a yellow mini-dress, white platform boots, and false eyelashes. Her blond hair was up in a beehive.

“Excuse me. I’m looking for Lily Daniels?”

Big eye roll. “
Yes
, I used to be her roommate, and
no
, I don’t know where she is.”

Missy strikes again.

“I take it you’re Amber Sandusky?”

“God, not so loud.” She glanced around. “It’s
Swift.
Sandusky’s not exactly the name you want on your head shots.”

An actress. Krista wondered if she was on her way to a casting call.

“Look, I’m late for work—”

“I’ll be quick. Lily’s due in court this week, and I’m trying to locate her.”

She thrust out her chin. “If you do, let me know. She owes me six hundred bucks and an antique pearl ring.”

Krista blinked at her. “You think she stole from you?”

“Someone sure as hell did, and she’s the only who knows where I hide my stuff.” She pulled her cell phone from her purse and checked the messages. “I knew I should’ve gotten my locks changed.”

She looked up again. Beneath the pancake makeup, she was a pretty girl. She looked a bit like Lily, only shorter and with a doughy middle.

“Sounds like you two aren’t on great terms,” Krista said.

“That’s an understatement.”

“You know a relative who might have heard from her?”

“Not really. She doesn’t keep up with them. They’re back in Louisiana.”

“Where, exactly?”

“I don’t know—Belleview or Belleville or something?” She huffed out a sigh. “Listen, I know your next question, and I don’t know who her boyfriend is. The other lady asked that, too. I will say this, though. She posted on Facebook the other day, so I don’t think she’s
missing
or anything. She probably just went out of town or something. Or took off with some guy.”

“She have a habit of taking off?”

“Lately? Yeah. It’s one of the reasons she moved out.
One
commercial and she became a total flake. Started blowing through money, shopping all the time, stiffing me for rent, acting all
above
everyone. I finally kicked her out.” She jammed the phone in her purse. “Freaking spray tan ad and you’d think she was Meryl Streep.”

“What about co-workers? How’d she pay her bills before she got the acting job?”

“She waited tables at Sushi Go-Go.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m headed there now, and I’m running late, so—”

“If you happen to hear anything, please call me.” Krista handed her a business card. “I need to find her by tomorrow.”

She scoffed. “Good luck.”

“You think she’d blow off a court date?”

“Depends what’s in it for her.”

“How about staying out of jail? Ignoring a subpoena’s a serious offense.”

“Whatever. One thing you
can
count on, Lily’s life is all about Lily.”

~ ~ ~

Krista studied Lily’s picture as she trekked up the stairs to her office. Amber Swift hadn’t provided a ringing endorsement of her ex-roommate’s character, but Krista kept her mind open. Former friends and lovers often had axes to grind.

Mac was still at his computer, but he’d been out, judging by the venti Frappuccino parked at his elbow. He couldn’t work the coffee machine either.

“Scarlet call in?”

“Nope.” He glanced up at her. “I ran that list for you. Came up blank.”

Krista had asked him to run a list of utility companies to see if Lily had shut off any of her services. People were amazingly cheap, even when they were on the lam, and they sometimes had their security deposits forwarded to a new address.

But the utility info jived with what she’d seen at the house. So far nothing indicated Lily had moved, only that she was away from home temporarily.

Mac handed her a yellow legal pad, where he’d jotted some notes.

“I checked that cell phone, too, and it’s been de-activated for more than a month.”

“We should try social media. I know she has a Facebook account, maybe Twitter.”

“You have any account info? It’s not exactly a unique name.”

Krista pulled a color copy of the driver’s license photo from her rapidly expanding file. “She might be using a headshot as her profile pic. If it’s a candid picture, she might be holding an orange cat.”

Krista went into her office and sat down at her computer. She logged onto a database called “Who Reps?” that she and Scarlet subscribed to. Given their location, it had proved useful over the years. She found Lily’s agent in only a few clicks. Berle Braxton, presumably the woman who’d left the note on the front porch.

“Got a hit on Twitter,” Mac called from the other room, and Krista got up from her desk to go see.

“Username ‘Lilykins99,’” he recited. “And you were right about the headshot. It’s a black-and-white. Very Lana Turner.”

She looked at him.

“What? She starred in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
with Spencer Tracy. She was one of the original scream queens.”

“I didn’t know you were a film buff.”

He shrugged. “Classic horror.”

She tried to get back on track. “When was Lily’s last update?”

“I’m getting there. Lemme see…. Shit, New Year’s Eve.”

“Not a regular then.”

Krista went back to her desk and sent the agent’s contact info to her phone. She grabbed a Mars Bar from her bottom drawer and gathered her purse.

Straight up noon. Twenty-four hours and counting, and Lilykins was still missing in action.

“Where are you going?” Mac asked.

“Century City. Call me if you get anything,” she said as she rushed out the door.

~ ~ ~

The morning’s smooth takeoff turned into the afternoon’s crash and burn.

Berle Braxton of Braxton Creative wasn’t at her office.

Krista finally got through to a Marie Daniels in Belleview, Louisiana. But the woman hadn’t seen or heard from her daughter since she’d “run off to that God-forsaken land of fruits and nuts” and she seemed happy to keep it that way.

Krista fought rush hour traffic to make another pass by Lily’s house, but she spotted no red Kia in the driveway—only Julia Meyers in her Mexican dress, puttering in the yard again.

Krista’s shoulders were in knots by the time she made it back to Huntington Beach. She checked her mirrors as she drove. All day she’d had a vague feeling of unease and had been glancing around, half-expecting Brad Stark’s angry mug to put in an appearance. But she hadn’t spotted him, and there was nobody tailing her as she pulled onto her palm-lined street.

Anyone who knew Krista’s personality would never guess she lived in a canary-yellow cottage with a white picket fence. She’d inherited the place when her grandmother died and hadn’t bothered to change much about it after she’d moved in. She pulled into the carport and went around to the front, bypassing the outside staircase that led to the second-floor studio apartment, which she rented out.

Krista stepped through the front gate and the sweet smell of jasmine drifted over her. She plucked her mail from a birdhouse-shaped mailbox painted yellow to match the cottage. As she unlocked the front door, Spencer squawked his greeting.

“No place like home! No place like home!”

She dumped the mail on the armchair and walked over to the giant cage that occupied a corner of the sunroom.

“Hey, Spence.”

He flapped over and she fed him some cashews through the mesh cage. Grandma Dot had always predicted the macaw would outlive her, and she’d been right. He cocked his head and looked at her. He was a beautiful bird with brilliant blue and gold plumage and a shiny black beak. If he’d stayed in the Amazon, he could have been a real ladies’ man.

“Give us a kiss,” he screeched.

She fed him another nut, then plopped onto the sofa and kicked off her shoes. She stared glumly at the ceiling, munching cashews before mustering the energy to unfold the notebook computer sitting on the table where she’d left it last night.

She dusted off her hands and logged onto Google to enter Lily’s name.

“Where you at, girlfriend?”

She scanned the results, but no new leads. She checked her email. Nothing new from Mac.

Dread tightened her stomach as she pictured the note at Lily’s house. It was one thing to run off with a guy for a few days or to ignore emails from a pushy lawyer. But Krista didn’t know a lot of aspiring actors who ignored their agents. That bothered her.

It bothered her almost as much as DeSilva’s off-handed comment that Lily was not “make-or-break” to the case. Lily Daniels was critical to Walker’s case, or no way in hell would he fork over six grand to find her.

Krista hopped onto Google to learn more about the case.

OC Teen Charged in Doctor’s Slaying.

She skimmed the
LA Times
article. Alan Sheffield, a trauma surgeon at Cedars-Sinai, had been found dead behind a Dumpster in Anaheim, shot in the face. It had taken authorities two days to ID the victim, whose wallet was missing, along with the keys to his Mercedes. Both the wallet and the car had turned up in the possession of Marco Saurez, eighteen.

According to police records, Saurez confessed to the murder after his arrest at a convenience store in Newport Beach, where he’d been using Sheffield’s gas card. Saurez’s court-appointed lawyer entered a plea of not guilty. It wasn’t long before Drake Walker took over the case and started making noise about a jailhouse beating and a coerced confession.

Krista looked up the article’s author, John Wayland. He was listed as a staff writer. Those were slowly becoming extinct, just like the newspapers they worked for.

She read the final sentence again.
On trial for his life.
Wayland seemed to have sympathy for the kid, and she wondered if he knew something he hadn’t put in the story.

Krista’s phone chimed. She recognized the number of an admin she knew over at Walker & Associates. DeSilva had been dodging her calls, and she’d asked her friend to keep an eye on him and let her know when he left.

“Hey, the meeting ran long,” she told Krista. “He just took off a few minutes ago.”

“Any guess where he was going? Home? The gym?”

“Well, he was with Hessman, so my guess is Coppertank.”

Krista checked her watch. Seventeen hours and counting.

“Thanks for the tip.”

~ ~ ~

Coppertank was a trendy microbrewery in Huntington Beach that attracted a combination of tourists, locals, and beer snobs.

Krista found DeSilva at the bar, flirting with a surfer chick who was spilling out of her tube top. She laughed at something he said before slipping away to join some friends at a nearby table.

DeSilva spotted Krista, and the look on his face said he wasn’t happy to see her. She didn’t mind—she got that a lot.

“Where’s Hessman?” she asked, grabbing a stool.

He nodded toward the end of the bar, where the newly divorced defense attorney was hitting on a young brunette.

“I’m fresh out of favors, Krista.”

“I don’t need any.”

“Right.”

She flagged the bartender. DeSilva’s beer looked like motor oil. Krista ordered something pale with a wedge of lemon.

“I just need some info. Tell me about Lily.”

He glanced over her shoulder at the door. “You’ve got a file.”

“File’s thin. Like maybe they left out a few hundred pages? Come on. What’s her role in this thing? What’s Walker worried about?”

The more Krista knew about the dynamic in play, the more she knew about where to look for this witness.

DeSilva’s gaze settled on her. Maybe he realized the sooner he gave her something useful, the sooner she’d get out of his way.

“Marco Saurez is facing sixty to life. You know who his cousin is?”

“Who?” Her beer arrived and she took a sip.

“Roberto Garcia. Goes by Chollo. Walker got him off a drug rap two years ago. Would’ve been his third conviction.”

“So he’s been inside.”

“Spent most of the last decade inside. Doesn’t want the same for his cousin.” He tipped back his beer. “And anyway, he might not be guilty. There’s talk of police coercion.”

“Where have I heard that before?”

“True, but this kid turned up for his hearing with his ribs kicked in. Walker’s got pictures of it.”