Chapter 4. Grey, the Detective
Grey, the Detective
PRESENT DAY
No one had ever volunteered to partner with Grey on a case before.
In fact, there was usually a decent amount of grumbling among the venerable detectives on the fifth floor of the LAPD headquarters whenever Captain Xie made the assignment.
So Grey was more than a little surprised—possibly even touched—when Detective Carmen Ellis asked to work the Drake case of her own free will.
Detective Ellis, a short, stout woman in her fifties, walked the halls with an athlete’s swagger.
She had close-cropped caramel hair that was turning silver at the ears and beautiful almond-shaped eyes that begged for a swipe of mascara, a thought Grey would never voice aloud.
Floor Five was the detectives’ domain, a busy bullpen crowded with desks and investigators in a mix of shoulder holsters, suits, and, for those working the hard cases, days-old stained shirts.
The entire floor smelled like old coffee and echoed with a hundred competing conversations.
It was grubby, but to Grey, it was home.
Despite volunteering for the assignment, after Ellis moved her laptop to the empty desk opposite Grey’s she didn’t seem eager to work as a team.
Twice, when Grey asked her to look into something, the older woman raised her brows and muttered under her breath in Spanish.
Grey brushed it off, telling herself it couldn’t be easy taking orders from someone half your age, and the important thing was, Ellis seemed invested in the case itself.
She kept sighing and tapping her nails on the desk, frustrated by the longer-than-usual wait for Drake’s background report.
“Screw it,” Ellis finally said. “You young people put every detail of your lives on the internet, right?”
Grey leaned back and chewed her pen. “Elizabeth Drake doesn’t have social media. I already checked.”
“That’s strange, huh?”
“Could be.”
“Well, the records department can eat shit for making us wait,” Ellis concluded. “Let’s see what my friend Google has to say.”
After a few minutes of silent searching, she shook her head. “No trace of this woman. How hard is it to scrub yourself off the internet?”
It seemed like a facetious question, so Grey ignored it.
Then Ellis whistled long and low. “Okay, that’s more like it. Come here.”
Grey moved to Ellis’s desk and read over her shoulder.
The detective had pulled up a gossip blog called Hollywood Anonymous, an old thread about someone commenters called “the disgusting snake Elizabeth Drake.” According to the messages, this Drake had been a willing accomplice to her boss, Reese Griffin, for years, serving as his girl Friday.
Grey’s heart beat faster. “You think it’s our Drake?”
Ellis whistled. “Can you imagine? People would go nuts.”
Everyone in America knew the story of Reese Griffin, former president of the Griffin Company, and his catastrophic downfall.
Two years ago, The New York Times had published a massive exposé detailing accusations against Griffin by more than a hundred women, encompassing everything from sexual harassment to rape.
It revealed Griffin to be a monster hiding in plain sight at the highest levels of Hollywood.
There’d been marches in the streets after the story came out, and Grey herself had been one of the officers sent to bring Griffin in.
He was currently serving twenty-five years in a California prison, and his name had become synonymous with “sexual predator” in the cultural lexicon.
Elizabeth Drake was in charge of Griffin’s scheduling, someone had written on the blog.
Think about all the appointments she made with young actresses who thought Griffin wanted to interview them for a role.
She knowingly sent those girls to be assaulted.
And she never showed remorse—she even testified in his defense during trial. Can you imagine?
“If there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” Grey read aloud, “then Drake’s reserved herself a VIP box suite.”
Grey’s inbox pinged, and she dashed back to her desk to find Drake’s background report. “Hang on. We just got the official write-up.”
“The moment of truth.”
Grey printed two copies, one for her and one for Ellis, and they eagerly skimmed. There it was in black and white, courtesy of the IRS: Their victim’s last employer was the Griffin Company.
“Well shit.” Ellis managed to pack a world of weight into the word. “No wonder our vic didn’t have social media. She’d be run off with pitchforks.”
“Her job title was assistant to the president. So it’s definitely the same woman.”
“Get a load of that salary,” Ellis said. “Two hundred thou a year for an assistant? That can’t be the going rate.”
“Maybe it is if you expect your assistant to schedule your assaults and then help cover them up,” Grey said.
The two detectives sat in silence for a moment, until a deep voice boomed: “Yo, Holloway!” Detectives Mogren and Connolly, two beefy guys with buzz cuts who looked like they’d been stuffed into their suits, ambled by.
“That body you caught in Bel Air—she strip at the Serpent Room with you? Is that why you two look so much alike? Same brand of body glitter?”
“I don’t strip, Mogren.” Grey kept her tone neutral. “I serve overpriced drinks to dopes who tip me for my company. Most of them look a lot like you, actually.”
Mogren flipped her off, but the guys were laughing as they strode off. Grey turned back to find Ellis staring.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” Grey assured her. “I’m taking way less shit on this case than I expected, given the way Drake and I look. Guys must not be on their A game.”
“Why do you strip at that club?” Ellis sounded like she was asking against her better judgment. “You got a celebrity fetish? I know that place is big with the Hollywood types.”
Grey bit back the correction that—once again—she didn’t strip, and instead trotted out her familiar lines.
“Student loans are a bitch, and the city isn’t exactly paying us top dollar.
Working at the Serpent Room is easy money.
Besides, I get some of my best thinking done in dark rooms full of synth. ”
It was bullshit, but Ellis nodded thoughtfully. With a glance at the other woman’s manicure, the one part of her appearance that was unabashedly feminine, Grey couldn’t help adding: “Hell, in this economy, a girl needs a second job just to stay in gels.”
“I know that’s right,” Ellis murmured, and the two of them exchanged quick smiles.
Grey cleared her throat. “Anyway, will you send me the link to that gossip blog? Sounds like there were a lot of people out there who hated our victim.”
“I don’t blame them,” Ellis said. “She betrayed her own kind.”
“I guess we figured out why Drake’s killer called her a traitor,” Grey ventured, “like the message said.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, that means our suspect pool just got blown wide open. There are twenty thousand members of this gossip forum alone—”
“Message?” Ellis interrupted. “What message?”
“Page nine of the crime report,” Grey said. “The killer left a message in blood on Drake’s bedroom wall. Turned out to be a lyric from a pop song.”
Ellis whipped through the pages. Either Grey was imagining it, or her face suddenly paled. “You know, I actually have to go,” she said, standing. “I promised a friend I’d meet her for lunch.” And just like that, the other detective took off, the report still clutched in her hand.
Grey blinked at Ellis’s empty desk. She’d packed a sad salad, assuming they’d work through lunch, but good for Ellis for having a life outside the job, she guessed. Grey couldn’t relate.
Hours later, near quitting time, paperwork on Drake’s Bel Air bungalow finally came back. The owner was Reese Griffin himself, and he’d purchased it right before the start of his trial.
“I wonder if Griffin gifted Drake the house in exchange for her testimony,” Grey mused.
“Let’s track down everyone who used to work at the Griffin Company.
If this murder is connected to her job, I bet the other employees can tell us if anyone stood out as a threat.
Hell, maybe some of them are receiving threats, too. ”
“Sounds good,” Ellis said, rising so quickly she knocked a pile of papers off her desk. “I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow. Right now, I’ve got to get home to feed my dog.”
To Grey’s surprise, Ellis dumped the papers back on her desk, grabbed her messenger bag, and hightailed it to the elevators.
That made two abrupt exits in one day. Grey might’ve been the homicide department’s black sheep, but even she knew it was standard practice to stay late the first few days after the start of a case, when you had the best shot at catching the perp.
She sniffed under her arms and, finding no reason why she might’ve scared Ellis off, rose to make herself another pot of coffee. Apparently, even with a partner, she was doing this alone.
Two days later, Ellis was still evasive.
Since she couldn’t depend on her, Grey had put together a list of former Griffin employees and called them all herself.
Unfortunately, everyone she’d tracked down—most of whom had been reluctant to even admit they’d once worked for the Griffin Company—reported they’d witnessed widespread flogging of Griffin employees online, but no threats in real life.
They were shocked to hear about Drake’s murder and couldn’t think of anyone who might make the leap from online harassment to real-world violence.
“Except for all those women Elizabeth sent to get raped by Reese,” a former VP had joked.
“They might have a motive.” He’d immediately backpedaled. “Sorry. That was in poor taste.”
Poor taste, but he wasn’t wrong. Out of the entire suspect pool, the women Griffin had assaulted had the strongest motive for revenge.
And according to the Los Angeles Times, Griffin’s lawyers had recently filed an appeal, claiming procedural errors in his trial.
If they won that appeal and Griffin’s conviction was overturned, the public fallout would be massive.
Could Drake have been killed by one of Griffin’s former victims, enraged at the thought that her boss might be set free?
It was just Grey’s luck to catch a case where the victim was a monster and the suspects were the people she was rooting for. Even worse, Grey kept seeing Drake’s bloody face whenever she closed her eyes, a twin to her own, and feeling that tug of connection, of complicity. It made her sick.
So by eight thirty that night, even though darkness had fallen in a foggy haze outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of LAPD headquarters, and the fifth floor was empty, Grey sipped her last mugful of coffee, resigned to reading through Griffin’s trial records alone.
Then she heard a raised voice. It sounded like it was coming from one of the conference rooms closest to Captain Xie’s office.
She put down her mug and glanced around.
The voice echoed again. Now there was no doubt it belonged to the captain.
Unable to resist, she snuck down the hall. As she edged around the corner, the person on the receiving end of the captain’s ire started pleading. Grey recognized the voice at the same time that she caught sight of the woman through the conference room glass: Ellis.
She sucked in a breath. Ellis had gone home hours ago, once again citing the need to take care of her dog. What was she doing back here? And why had she sought a private audience with the captain?
The possibility came to her immediately: Ellis was going behind her back, either to beg the captain to take her off Grey’s case or ask that she replace her as the lead, due to her seniority.
Her face flamed. How stupid she’d been to think she and Ellis had a budding camaraderie.
Her own father had been betrayed by his fellow detectives, and what had she done?
Gone and set herself up for more of the same.
She was thinking about how to defend herself when the captain rose from his chair, cutting Ellis off.
“Enough,” he boomed. Grey startled back.
“If you try telling me one more time that a pop star is sneaking around Los Angeles committing murders, I will cut you from the force—I don’t care how many years you’ve given us.
Get your shit together, Ellis. Take a leave of absence, see a therapist. This is your last warning.
” With that, he strode out of the conference room, letting the glass door bang shut behind him.
Grey darted around the corner so he wouldn’t see her. Her pulse raced. What the hell—Ellis thought a pop star had killed someone? She couldn’t mean Elizabeth Drake?
Ellis was now beelining down the dimly lit hall.
Grey narrowed her eyes. She couldn’t risk the captain overhearing, so she waited until Ellis pressed the button on the elevator, then ducked into the staircase and sprinted down five floors until she burst, out of breath, into the lobby, right behind the other detective.
“Ellis,” she called, her voice reverberating. The woman spun, eyes wide.
“Holloway, what are you doing here?”
“What am I—” Grey laughed. “What are you doing here? And what the hell did the captain mean about a pop star?”
Ellis cringed. “I wasn’t going behind your back, I swear.”
Grey crossed her arms. “Then explain.”
Ellis scanned the lobby. Only the night guard sat behind his desk, but she still shook her head. “Not here.”
Grey wasn’t having it. “If this is about the Drake case—my case—tell me right now. Or I’m asking the captain to take you off. I’ll work it alone if I have to. I practically am already.”
Ellis tensed. “Fine.” She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. Despite her reservations, Grey leaned in, too. “I’ve noticed a pattern, okay? And Drake’s case fits it.”
“What kind of pattern?” Grey scanned Ellis’s face for any sign she was putting her on. But the other detective seemed genuine.
“Cases where the motive seems to be revenge. In particular, against high-profile people who’ve hurt women.”
“Like Drake,” Grey said.
“Exactly. Before her, there was a director who dropped dead out of the blue. And before him, there was a network executive’s son.”
Grey frowned. “And you’re saying these cases are connected how?”
“I can almost prove it,” Ellis insisted. “I just need more time.”
“Prove what?”
The lights from a passing car illuminated Ellis’s face through the lobby windows. Her expression was full of pure, unadulterated conviction. “That there’s a group of women working together in Hollywood, seeking revenge on the people who’ve wronged them.”
Grey laughed. Ellis was messing with her after all. Or this was some prank, organized by the other detectives. Imagine—
“And they’re led by Scout Sage,” Ellis said. “She leaves her lyrics at every scene.”
Grey stopped smiling.