CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Kari called Carter from the car as she navigated L.A.
traffic with one hand and held her phone with the other.
She barely waited for the detective to answer before launching into everything she'd learned—the words tumbling out in a rush, the connections she'd made, the terrible picture that was finally coming into focus.
"Mama," she said. "The models call her Mama.
That's what M stands for. Not a man's name, not Pemberton's middle name—it was Diana all along.
She's been killing girls who try to leave her, who try to establish boundaries, who don't need her anymore.
And she pointed us toward Pemberton to throw us off the trail. "
"Holy shit." Carter's voice was sharp with the particular anger of a cop who'd been played. "She sat right across from you at that café and fed you a line about Pemberton while Tayen was probably already tied up somewhere."
"She knew I was getting close. The conversation spooked her—that's why she called in sick today, why she's not answering her phone. She's running."
"Or she's cleaning up loose ends." Carter's tone made the implication clear. "If Tayen's still alive—"
"We need to move fast. I'm heading to her apartment in Koreatown now."
"I'll meet you there. Twenty minutes. And Blackhorse—don't go in alone. If this woman has killed five people, she's got nothing to lose."
Kari agreed, though she wasn't sure she meant it. How was she supposed to sit around and wait, knowing Tayen might still be alive and in danger?
Diana's apartment building was a nondescript mid-rise in a working-class neighborhood, the kind of place where aspiring artists and recent immigrants lived while they scraped together rent.
The building's best days were behind it—paint peeling near the entrance, a few cracked windows, a few missing bricks.
Kari found a parking spot on the street and sat watching the building, looking for any sign of movement in the third-floor windows that Vanessa had identified as Diana's.
Nothing. The windows were dark, the blinds drawn. If Diana was home, she wasn't showing any signs of life.
Carter arrived fifteen minutes later, pulling up behind Kari's rental car with a screech of brakes. They approached the building together, badges ready, and convinced the building manager—a tired-looking woman in her sixties—to let them into Diana's third-floor unit.
"She in some kind of trouble?" the manager asked as she led them up the stairs. "Always seemed like a nice girl. Quiet. Paid her rent on time."
"We just need to ask her some questions," Carter said, her hand resting on her weapon.
The manager knocked on the door, waited, knocked again. No response. She unlocked it with her master key and pushed it open.
The apartment was empty. More than empty—it felt abandoned, stripped of the small personal touches that made a space feel lived-in.
Dresser drawers hung open, their contents scattered on the floor as if someone had grabbed what they needed in a hurry.
The closet door stood ajar, revealing gaps where clothes had been hastily removed from hangers.
In the bathroom, toiletries were missing from the counter, the medicine cabinet left open and mostly bare.
"She ran," Carter said grimly, holstering her weapon. "She knew we were getting close and she bolted."
Kari moved through the apartment, looking for anything that might indicate where Diana had gone. A stack of mail on the counter was addressed to Diana Shepherd, nothing useful. No notes, no calendars marked with appointments, no indication of a secondary location where she might be hiding.
"If she has Tayen, she needs somewhere to keep her," Kari said, thinking out loud. "Somewhere private. Somewhere isolated. You can't hold a person captive in an apartment building where neighbors might hear her screaming."
She pulled out her phone and called Vanessa Caldwell. The woman answered on the second ring, her voice tight with anxiety.
"Detective? Did you find her?"
"Her apartment is empty. She packed up and left in a hurry." Kari paced the small living room, her mind racing. "I need you to think, Vanessa. When Diana first came to L.A., before she could afford an apartment, before you hired her—where did she live?"
"I... I don't know. A motel, maybe? Some kind of transitional housing?"
"Think harder. She came here with nothing but a dream and a suitcase. She had a complete mental breakdown, spent six months in a psychiatric facility. When she got out, she was broke and alone and had nowhere to go. Where would someone like that end up?"
Silence on the line. Kari could almost hear Vanessa thinking, rifling through memories of conversations from years ago.
"There was something," Vanessa said slowly. "When I hired her, in her personnel file. A previous address she listed. I remember thinking it was strange at the time—it wasn't a residential address. It was a business."
"What kind of business?"
"A storage facility. SecureStore, I think it was called.
Somewhere in the Valley." Vanessa paused.
"I asked her about it once, and she got very quiet.
Almost defensive. She said she'd been living in a storage unit for a few months after she got out of the hospital.
It was all she could afford. She slept on an air mattress surrounded by boxes of her old life—all the things she couldn't bear to throw away but couldn't stand to look at either. "
Kari's heart rate spiked. A storage facility. Private, isolated, climate-controlled. The perfect place to hide someone you didn't want found.
"Do you have the address?"
"Hold on. Let me pull up her file." The sound of typing, of papers being shuffled. "SecureStore Self-Storage, 14500 Vanowen Street. Van Nuys."
Kari hurried to the door, Carter right behind her. "Thank you, Vanessa. Let us know right away if she shows up at work or tries to contact you."
The drive to Van Nuys took thirty-five minutes in afternoon traffic, every red light feeling like an eternity. Carter called for backup while Kari drove, her knuckles white on the steering wheel as she wove through lanes of slow-moving cars.
"Blackhorse." Carter's voice was careful, the tone of someone about to deliver bad news. "You know what the pattern is. Diana doesn't hold people captive. She kills them and stages the scene. If Tayen's been missing for days..."
"I know."
Carter went on anyway. "Based on everything we've seen, Tayen is probably already dead. We might be driving to find a body, not a rescue."
Kari's jaw tightened. She knew Carter was right. The logical part of her brain had already run the calculations—days missing, a killer who acted quickly and cleanly, no ransom demands, no contact. The odds weren't good.
But she thought about Lola, waiting by the phone. About the promise she'd made to find Tayen and bring her home.
"I have to know for sure," Kari said. "Either way, I have to know."
Carter nodded and didn't push further. She understood. Sometimes you had to see it with your own eyes before you could accept it.
SecureStore Self-Storage was a sprawling complex of identical orange buildings, row after row of metal doors stretching back from the street like a small city of secrets.
A chain-link fence surrounded the property, with a gate that required a keycode to enter.
The kind of place where people stored furniture and holiday decorations, the accumulated debris of lives in transition.
They pulled into the parking lot and found the facility manager, a heavyset man in his sixties. He was sitting in a small office that smelled of stale coffee and cigarette smoke, watching a security monitor with half-closed eyes.
"Diana Shepherd," Carter said, flashing her badge. "She rents a unit here."
The manager squinted at her badge, then turned to his ancient computer, typing with two fingers. "Yeah, got her. Unit 247. Been renting it for about six years, never missed a payment." He looked up. "She in some kind of trouble?"
"Does she rent any other units?"
More typing, slower this time. The manager's eyebrows rose. "Matter of fact, she does. Picked up a second unit about three years ago. Unit 892. Bigger one, ten by twenty. More isolated, too, it's in the back section of Building F, near the loading docks. We don't get much foot traffic back there."
Kari and Carter exchanged a look. A second unit. Bigger, more isolated, away from prying eyes. Rented three years ago—right around the time the deaths started.
"We need access to both," Carter said. "Now."
The manager handed over a master key and a printed map of the facility, the units circled in red marker. "247 is in Building C, second floor—take the stairs on the left. 892 is in Building F, ground level, all the way in the back corner. You want me to come with you?"
"Stay here. More units are on the way—direct them to Building F when they arrive."
They moved into the facility, the afternoon sun casting long shadows between the rows of storage units.
The place was quiet, almost eerily so—just the distant hum of traffic from Vanowen Street and the occasional clang of a metal door somewhere in the complex.
The buildings loomed around them, identical and anonymous, each metal door hiding its own secrets.
"I'll take 247," Carter said. "You take 892. We'll cover more ground that way. If you find her, call for backup before you try to breach."
Kari nodded and broke off toward Building F, her hand resting on her weapon.
The buildings were labeled with large letters, faded by sun and time, the units numbered in sequences that followed their own internal logic.
She made her way through the maze of identical corridors, past doors that all looked the same, counting down the numbers as she went deeper into the complex.
The back section of the facility was quieter than the rest, more isolated.
The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed with a faint electrical hum.
The units here were larger, designed for businesses or people with substantial belongings to store.
And they were farther from the office, farther from the street.
Farther from anyone who might hear a scream.
Unit 892 was at the end of a long corridor, its orange door identical to all the others except for the heavy padlock securing it. Kari approached slowly, listening for any sound from inside.
Nothing.
She tried the master key on the padlock. It turned smoothly, the lock clicking open. She removed it and gripped the handle of the roll-up door, her other hand on her weapon.
The door rattled upward, flooding the interior with light.
Inside, bound to a chair with duct tape over her mouth, was Tayen Chee. Her eyes went wide when she saw Kari—not with fear, but with desperate, overwhelming relief. She was alive. Dehydrated, terrified, but alive.
"Tayen." Kari rushed forward, pulling out her radio to call Carter. "I found her. Unit 892. She's alive—"
She heard the footstep behind her a fraction of a second too late.
Something hard connected with the back of her skull, and the world dissolved into darkness.