No One Needs to Know (32 page)

“Oh, look at this closet!”
Dolly was saying on TV.
“How many shoes do you have?”

Shawna laughed.
“Dolly, a woman stops counting after two hundred pairs . . .”

“Dolly, I think our waitress wants to go home,” said her editor, Gary Korabik.

“Well, I don’t want to go home yet, so it looks like she’s shit out of luck,” Dolly said with a glass of wine in her hand.

They were the last customers in Daniel’s Broiler. The restaurant’s beautiful wood and stone interior seemed cavernous. It was so quiet without anyone else in the place. From their booth, Dolly and her editor had a view of the boats docked in the Lake Union marina. Dolly was enjoying herself. It helped that Gary was a lean, handsome forty-year-old with wavy black hair. He wore a black suit with a jazzy tie. He’d flown in from New York to wine and dine her and discuss her book.

Dolly was still on a high from the amazing day she’d had. She’d shown everyone that this old gossip queen had the journalistic chops to cover a hard-hitting news story. The copycat killings were a gold mine for her. She would include the new murders in her book—along with behind-the-scenes coverage of
7/7/70.
She’d play up the “cursed production” angle, too. She’d already made it known that she didn’t intend to treat screenwriter Lance Taylor’s car smashup as just an ordinary accident. This was going to be a definitive study of the Styles-Jordan murders and their aftermath.

“Do you know that right now, they’re rerunning the interview I did in May with Gil and Shawna?” Dolly pointed out, ignoring the fact that the restaurant had turned off the background music and undimmed the lights. “I’m going after Gil Garrett for an exclusive interview about Elaina Styles. He discovered her, you know. They were lovers—only she couldn’t tolerate the way he went around screwing anything that moved.” She shook her head and clicked her tongue against her teeth. “But you know, despite his roving ways, Gil was crazy about Elaina. I don’t think he ever really got over her. He was furious at her when she married Dirk. In fact, between you and me, I think he married Shawna on the rebound.”

“Well, that’s fascinating,” Gary said, sounding distracted. He took a sip of his decaf. “Listen, Dolly, I hate to harp on this. But Legal needs to know exactly what you’ve uncovered that’s going to have the police reopening the case. I mean, before you ‘rip the lid’ off these killings, you need to run it past us. We could be looking at some potential lawsuits, or subpoenas, or God knows what other kind of trouble. Can you at least give me a clue as to what you’ve found? Throw me a bone that I can share with Legal.”

“I’d like another Merlot,” Dolly said. In one gulp, she drained what was left in her glass.

“The bar’s closed,” Gary said.

“For me, they’ll reopen the bar,” Dolly declared. Every restaurant she set foot in had to bow to her whims—or she’d Twitter that the place was terrible. She had that kind of clout. The people here knew it, too.

“Dolly, I have a confession,” Gary said, slumping against the seatback. “I’m still on East Coast time, which makes it about a quarter to three for me. I’ve been without sleep for twenty-two hours and I’m exhausted. I really need to call it a night. But first, could you please give me an answer on this? Can you tell me
anything
about the new information you’ve uncovered?”

She glared at him. “I’ll reveal my findings when I’m good and ready. If you—or
Legal
—object, well, I’m quite willing to dissolve our contract and find another publisher.”

The truth was she didn’t have any groundbreaking, lid-ripping news about the forty-four-year-old murders. Despite all the hype, neither did the movie. She had the goods on
7/7/70
’s “happily married” director, David Storke, who was once arrested for soliciting a cop in a public restroom. His studio at the time had managed to sweep the whole mess under the rug. But Dolly had used her knowledge of the incident to coax him into letting her see the heavily guarded screenplay. It was hard-hitting and well written, but there were no big revelations.

For her book,
Slain Star, The Elaina Styles Story,
Dolly had hired a couple of peons to research all the police files on the case. She didn’t expect them to come up with anything new either. But she had her old interviews with Elaina and Dirk. She also planned to include some postmortem photos in the book—for shock value.

Though disingenuous, all her talk about the book’s “shocking revelations” seemed to be working. In fact, Dolly had even received a few death threats about it—some untraceable texts, and a couple of letters. She’d had her share of hate mail and death threats before. But this time she thought about hiring a bodyguard, and of course, making her publisher pay for it. If nothing else, it would be nice to have someone to run errands and fetch things for her twenty-four/seven.

“You’re killing me here, Dolly,” Gary said. “If something in that book turns out to bite us in the ass, we really need to know about it in advance so we can be prepared. Help us help you.”

“I’ll think about it,” she sighed. “And I can’t believe you’re paraphrasing
Jerry Maguire
to me. Now, if you won’t buy me another glass of wine, you can at least walk me to my car . . .”

The parking lot, right off the marina, was nearly empty. Gary escorted her to her rented Cadillac ATS and opened the car door for her. But he didn’t wait around after that. Dolly was still setting up her navigation system to direct her back to the Fairmont Olympic Hotel when Gary ducked inside his own rental and took off.

Dolly knew she’d had at least three glasses of wine. So she popped in a breath mint—just in case a cop stopped her. Then she started for the parking lot’s exit. Her phone rang, and she reached for it, figuring it was Gary. “Yes?”

“How much do you really know about the Elaina Styles murder case?” a woman asked on the other end.

“What?” Dolly said, annoyed.

She was still at the lot exit—with the nose of her Cadillac ATS in the empty street. She glanced at the caller ID, and saw the number was blocked. Whoever it was, they had a lot of nerve calling her this late.

Dolly pulled out of the lot. “Who is this?” she barked. “How the hell did you get my number?”

For a moment, there was no response.

“Hello?”

“Who am I?” the woman finally said. “You don’t know me, Dolly. But I work with the man who’s in the backseat of your car right now.”

Dolly squinted in the rearview mirror. A man sat up in the backseat.

She let out a startled cry and dropped her phone. She started to swerve, and the car’s left front tire skidded against the curb. Dolly slammed on the brake.

The man grabbed her shoulder. “Calm down,” he said quietly. “If I wanted to kill you, old lady, I would have done it by now . . .”

“What do you want?” she asked. Her heart was pounding.

“First, I want you to take your foot off the brake and get this car moving again,” he said.

Dolly glanced around, and spotted only one other car in the area—about a quarter of a block ahead in the oncoming lane. She kept a steady grip on the steering wheel so the man couldn’t see her hands shaking. She pushed down on the accelerator, and stole a glance in the rearview mirror again. With a streetlight glaring in back of them, his face was swallowed up in the shadows. Dolly took a couple of deep breaths. “My—my purse is right up here on the front seat,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I have about two hundred dollars and my credit cards . . .”

“I don’t want your money,” he replied. “I want you to pick up the phone—if you can reach it . . .”

Dolly noticed her cell had landed on the passenger seat, beside her purse. With a trembling hand, she grabbed it. “Okay, now what?” she asked, feeling sick to her stomach.

“Put it on speaker mode, and then set it down there in the cup holder.” He patted her shoulder.

She took her eyes off the road for a few moments while she switched her phone to speaker mode. Then she placed it in the console’s cup holder. “What—what’s going on?” she asked. “What do you want?”

She’d been addressing the stranger in the backseat. But it was the woman on the other end of the phone who answered: “What we want, Dolly, is for you to tell us what you know about the Styles-Jordan murders. What’s this big discovery you’ve made?”

“I haven’t discovered anything,” Dolly admitted.

“You said there will be arrests.”

“I was just trying to drum up interest in my book.”

“What exactly have you uncovered? You said the police will have to reopen the case.”

“I was hyping my book, for Christ’s sake!” Dolly insisted, tears in her eyes. “I swear, I don’t know anything—”

“Turn right here at the light, just after the Eastlake Market,” the man said.

Biting her lip, Dolly was obedient. They started up a steep hill. Ahead, just past another traffic light, there was a freeway wall and a cross street.

“Take another right,” the man said. “And then stay on the road. It’ll veer left and go under the Interstate.”

She did what she was told and navigated the curve in the road. Emerging from under the freeway, Dolly spotted a grassless, hilly park beneath I-5—with stairs and winding trails around the tall concrete support beams for the highway. Though clean and well lit, the colonnade still had a stark eeriness to it. “Where are you taking me?” she asked nervously.

“Right here,” said the woman on the phone.

“Pull over, and park it,” the man told her, his hand on her shoulder once more.

Dolly steered over to the curb and came to a stop. Shifting into park, she glanced at the pockets of darkness in the dirt-and-concrete park. There didn’t seem to be another soul around.

“Lower your window,” said the woman on the phone.

It was too much, having these two barking orders at her. Dolly was used to being the one issuing orders. Frazzled, she reached for the switch on the armrest. The descending window hummed. She looked in the rearview mirror again. “I’ve just about had enough of this,” she said. “Goddamn it, what’s going on . . .”

“We’re going to take a little walk . . .”

Dolly swiveled toward the open window. A pale, homely, long-faced woman with black hair was staring back at her. She had her hand on the car door. A long leather cuff covered her arm—from her wrist halfway up to the elbow. “Get out of the car, Dolly,” she said, past the noise from the highway above them.

Opening the car door, she reluctantly climbed out from behind the wheel. “I’ve already told you, I don’t know anything. I don’t have any new information, I swear . . .”

The woman took hold of her arm and led her across the street—toward a slope covered with trees and shrubs. Dolly noticed a small stairwell that wound up the hill through all the foliage. “I demand to know where you’re taking me,” she said.

The woman said nothing, and kept pulling her toward the bottom of the steps.

Dolly glanced over her shoulder at the man following them. She finally got a good look at him. The black V-neck T-shirt he wore hugged his muscular frame. His arms were covered with tattoos. He was about thirty, and swarthy. His black hair was cut so short—with a hairline so perfectly straight across—it almost looked drawn on with a magic marker. His shadow-stubble handlebar mustache had the same painted-on effect. He looked a bit silly, trailing after them with her purse in his hands. But then he started rummaging through it.

Dolly suddenly realized who these people were. She mustered up her courage and turned to the woman. “So where are your ski-masks and Trent Hooper T-shirts?”

The horse-faced woman said nothing. She just nodded toward the stairs.

Dolly had thought it was just a short stairwell, but now she looked up at a seemingly infinite six-foot wide concrete stairway that ascended through the lush woods. She couldn’t even see the top of it. “Come on, walk off your dinner,” the woman said finally.

Dolly hesitated. “Are you insane?”

“Move it, old lady,” growled the man behind her.

She took a deep breath and started up the stairs. “What the hell is the point to all this?” she asked. “Just how far do you expect me to go? What is this?”

“These are the Howe Street Stairs,” the woman said, still clutching Dolly’s arm. “They’re a landmark around here. There are three hundred and eighty-eight steps. But if you answer my questions, you won’t need to go all the way to the top.”

“I’ve already told you—”

“You’ve said on several occasions that Lance Taylor’s car accident in Maui was no accident at all.” The woman’s grip tightened, almost cutting off the circulation in Dolly’s arm. “What did you mean by that?”

“I was talking about the cursed movie production,” Dolly explained, already feeling winded. “He was the first—
calamity
associated with the film. It’s good press, more hype, that’s all.”

“
Calamity,
” the woman said, with a tiny smile. “I like that word.”

“She’s got a little stun gun in her purse,” the man behind them announced. “Actually not so little, it’s got three-point-five million volts.”

“Give it to me,” the woman said, pausing on the steps.

Dolly tried to catch her breath. Ahead, there was a small landing with a light post and a park bench. “Can’t we—can’t we sit down?” she asked meekly.

The woman pocketed the stun gun, and then forged on, pulling at her arm. “What do you know about Cheryl Wheeler?” she asked.

“Who?”

“The woman who runs the food truck, she’s catering the movie shoot.”

“Oh, her,” Dolly said, her throat going dry. She still couldn’t see the top of the stairs. They seemed to disappear in a black gap between the shadowy trees and shrubs. “I hardly know her. Why? Are you—are you friends of hers?”

“Something like that,” the woman said. “Has she been talking to you?”

“I—I had a run-in with her last week,” she answered, her voice weak. She struggled for a breath. “Other than that, I haven’t talked to her—”

“I have her hotel key card,” the man interrupted.

Dolly glanced over her shoulder and saw they’d climbed at least a hundred steps. She clutched the banister to combat her vertigo—and sheer exhaustion. She could now see the cityscape and the headlights of the cars on the freeway.