Chapter 12. Grey, the Detective
Grey, the Detective
PRESENT DAY
As soon as she was out of sight, Grey flattened her back against the wall and squeezed her eyes shut.
She could hear other members of the staff hurrying past her, but no one stopped to ask if she was all right.
That was better, anyway, because Grey needed a moment to calm her heart and order her thoughts.
When she’d looked across the table to find Scout Sage, of all people, sitting in her section, the wildest possibility had sprung to mind: She’s here for revenge.
Scout’s head of security had told her the now-disgraced Detective Ellis and Grey had been working to nail her for criminal conspiracy.
She’d found out where Grey moonlighted and had come to confront her—scream at her for violating her privacy, threaten her, hurt her, even.
The worst part would be blowing Grey’s cover.
“Hey,” said a gruff voice. When Grey opened her eyes, the manager of the Serpent Room hovered nearby, hand raised uncertainly, as if he were considering touching her shoulder. “You good, Hollis?”
Grey Hollis was the name she wore here. It was imperative that no one knew she was a cop. The staff at the Serpent had already proved how unwilling they were to talk to law enforcement.
“I’m fine,” Grey assured him, picking herself off the wall. “Just needed a second.”
John was a tall, burly man with bushy eyebrows and a matching beard, both of which had remained unchanged since at least 2016.
Grey knew because he was the single remaining employee of the Serpent Room from Alice’s time.
The rest of the people Alice had worked with had long since moved on, as bar staff were wont to do.
Working through them one by one, Grey had memorized the names and faces of every witness from her sister’s file and had found each of them in their new lives.
John lifted those bushy eyebrows and shot a glance toward Scout’s table. “Those girls giving you a hard time? They’re usually pretty well behaved. Lots of giggling and whispering. But I can pull you off their table, give it to Jenna—”
“No,” Grey snapped, then softened her voice. “Just a migraine. I get them sometimes.”
John remained hovering for a moment. In her first few months at the Serpent, Grey had worked to build a friendship with him.
They’d been downright chummy until the day she asked him about the disappearance of two girls from the club over a decade ago, presenting herself as a true-crime junkie with a thing for cold cases.
He’d clammed up immediately, told her he didn’t remember much, and now he kept his distance.
The Serpent had gotten in trouble after Alice and another employee, Daisy Chapman, disappeared, when it surfaced that Daisy had applied under a fake name and address, and the club had never run the necessary background check that would’ve caught it.
They’d been slapped with a fine from the California Labor and Workforce Agency, but that was the only punishment they saw.
The club hadn’t even changed its business practices, or else Grey couldn’t have gotten away with lying about her own name so many years later.
The mystery of who Daisy Chapman really was—what she’d looked like, where she’d come from, if there were people out there grieving her—was just one more question swirling in the black hole of her sister’s life.
“If you say so,” John said slowly, still scrutinizing her.
He gave her these searching looks sometimes, which made Grey worry he was seeing Alice’s face in hers and putting the pieces together.
“In that case, treat those girls well. They’re regulars.
But also, don’t be afraid to bump them from that table if a bigger name comes in. ”
Grey nodded. “Got it.” She could do this. Neither Scout nor the members of her entourage had seemed to recognize her on the first go—she’d read no cunning in the faces of the women whose photos she and Ellis had spread over their diner table and studied.
But if they were here for a confrontation, she would face it. That was what she was trained to do.
By the time she’d collected their bottles of Grey Goose, tequila, and club soda—an order the other servers called the Skinny Bitch Special—and climbed the short staircase to their table, Grey realized the women were all bent toward one another, their hushed voices lost in the drumbeat coming from the speakers.
John had mentioned they had a habit of whispering.
A spark of suspicion ignited in Grey’s mind—but she snuffed it out.
She’d been down this road before, and it had ended in disaster.
Unlike Ellis, she’d kept her job, but she was on thin ice with the captain.
The last thing she needed was to let her imagination run wild concerning Scout.
The woman in question glanced up, saw Grey approaching, and quickly squeezed her assistant’s hand, muttering something under her breath. The circle of women’s heads lifted, zeroing in on Grey, and they straightened in their seats, assuming blank expressions.
Goddammit. The spark of suspicion fanned into a flame.
“Back with your bottles,” Grey sang, using her brightest, emptiest voice, and slid the large tray onto the table. As she began to unstack tumblers and arrange the ice, the women cleared their throats and pretended to pick up their conversation where they’d left off.
“I miss when this place served absinthe,” said Cybele, in that French accent Grey recognized from studying the woman’s Instagram videos. “It was seedier back then. Way more fun.”
“You would,” said Isabel, with a roll of her eyes.
Grey was surprised the model remembered when the Serpent Room was an absinthe bar—it was the gimmick that had made the place popular when it first opened, back when Alice worked here.
But it hadn’t served the intoxicant for at least ten years, meaning Cybele must’ve come here when she was … Grey eyed her. Very young.
“Excuse me, we’re in California. Who needs absinthe when you have tequila?
” said a brunette woman with a British accent, sitting close to Cybele.
This must be Miranda Preston. She looked different than in the photos Grey had pored over—maybe she’d had work done—but the accent gave her away.
Miranda downed the last of her champagne and smiled at Grey. “Slide that bottle down here, babes?”
“I’m happy to stay and make your drinks for you,” Grey said, copying the bubbly tone that seemed to work for the club’s most successful bottle girls.
It worked. As Grey mixed drinks, the women returned to ignoring her in favor of talking to each other.
There’d been a learning curve when she first started, having to adjust to the service industry, the ways she was supposed to placate her VIP customers, brushing off their entitlement and boosting their egos.
It required an opposite set of skills from her police work.
But after twelve years of no answers in Alice and Daisy’s case, working at the Serpent was the only avenue she had left.
Grey needed to get a sense of what it was like to work at the club, all the details no one would report to the cops.
Were bottle girls routinely propositioned?
(No, it turned out.) Did any members of the staff run a side hustle selling harder stuff?
(Not that Grey could tell.) Were there rumors about Alice or Daisy passed down like urban legends among the servers? (No one had confided anything.)
Just as she was sliding Miranda’s tequila tonic to her, Isabel lifted a long blond hair out of her water glass and turned accusingly to Scout. “Again? Jesus, girl, you shed like a cat.”
“One time Scout borrowed my hairbrush and the amount of hair she left behind made me mistake it for a small rodent,” said one of the women Grey didn’t recognize, setting off laughter.
“It’s normal,” Scout protested, “you assholes.” But Grey suspected the truth. It was stress making Scout’s hair fall out. A physical tell she’d couldn’t mask.
Cybele reached across the table and tugged a lock of Scout’s hair. “It’s a wonder there’s anything left.”
A sudden thought hit Grey like a strike of lightning. The LAPD had Scout’s sister’s DNA in their system from her murder case, just languishing in some evidence room.
“If that’s all,” Grey said, voice high and sweet. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Without waiting for an answer, she turned from the table and jogged down the stairs, a whole new energy lightening her steps. Grey flashed on the image of Isabel holding Scout’s blond hair above her glass. She had an idea—something that wasn’t a routine part of a forensic search …
Grey shoved open the double doors to the employees-only back of the house. Career and sanity be damned. Her investigation into Scout Sage wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.