Chapter 11 Stalking Monsters and Monsters Stalking #2
Piper’s eyes filled with tears. “What do you want to know?”
Bex rose from her stool and settled on the futon beside the young actor.
“We’re trying to figure out all of Ramona’s movements from the end of the workday on Friday to Monday morning when she didn’t come in.
” Her voice was the same gentle one she’d used to soothe Vic’s scrapes and bruises.
“Did anything unusual happen at Friday’s shoot?
What time did you wrap on Friday? How does everyone usually leave the studio?
Does Ramona go straight home in her own car, or does she have a driver?
What are her habits? Those are the kinds of things we need to know. Anything you can think of.”
The tip of Piper’s nose had turned pink. “I guess as far as habits, she doesn’t talk to anyone much. She texts a lot on her phone and makes a lot of script notes. This season, especially lately, she sometimes hangs with her boyfriend.”
Sam didn’t check, but she was sure the shocked expressions on Bex, Vic, and Fergus’s faces were the same as her own. “Ramona has a boyfriend?”
“Yes? Or maybe not. She’s pretty guarded about her personal life. Respect.” Piper dove her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone again. “Here.” She swiped on the screen, then handed it to Vic. “That’s him. I was taking a picture of someone else, but you can see him standing next to her.”
Vic took the phone. Sam watched as the edge of her pale blond hairline went red. The sides of her face flushed, splotchy and hot. She handed the phone to Sam.
When Sam saw the man in the background standing next to Ramona’s chair, her goose bumps reactivated. “Jesus.”
“Who is it?” Bex leaned against Sam and looked at the picture. “Vic, isn’t that the man who was in Colin’s security cam footage?”
“It is.”
Sam’s hand started trembling. “Archie Blasingame. Ramona’s boyfriend—that’s the same Archie Blasingame who made a documentary about the Ice Crew that never got released.
Colin told me Ramona’s been watching footage from it and taking notes.
It was Archie who went to her house looking for her the day she was supposed to be on set. ”
“Oh my God,” Bex breathed.
Piper was staring at her phone now that Vic had handed it back. Her thumb tracked slowly up the screen. “Ramona normally changes out of her costume and goes home. There’s a parking garage. She has an assigned spot. I’ve seen her get into her car. She doesn’t use a driver.”
“On Friday?”
“We weren’t here. We shot on the mountain—which, I wasn’t the one to tell you that.
” Piper covered her mouth with both hands for emphasis.
“Seriously. It can’t leak. If it does leak, it can’t be me who leaked it.
No one knows where the shoot was. No one knows who the guest stars are.
The NDA was scary. The studio wants the episode to shock the audience. ”
“What mountain?” Fergus asked.
“Baldy.”
Mount San Antonio, known locally as Mount Baldy, was a ten-thousand-foot peak on the border of San Bernardino County. It would take at least ninety minutes to get there from the studios.
“They sent us up in vans,” Piper explained. “Trucks had gone the night before with filming equipment, and some of the crew had been there all day Thursday. We do a lot of wilderness exteriors.”
“Were you up at the peak or more in the foothills? Do you know if it was west, the flat, the bowl, the notch?” Fergus leaned his elbows on his knees, his tone casual.
He was trying to make sure Piper stayed comfortable so that she didn’t freak.
Sam had seen him use the same supercool affect while teaching anxious people how to hurl themselves off a cliff wearing a nylon glider.
She did the same thing. When emotions rose around her, Sam shifted into a lower gear. It was why she had a reputation for being unflappable. She’d never thought about it as something she and Fergus had both learned growing up in the high-energy, high-emotion Farmer household.
“Not at the top,” Piper said. “It’s like in the wilderness, with the giant rocks. Where the river is?” She pulled her braid back over her shoulder, then picked her phone off the futon. “I have some more pictures.” She swiped them open and handed her phone to Fergus.
He studied the photos. “It’s hard to tell, since most of these are closeups of your costars, but looking at the foliage and the terrain, yeah, I think it must be somewhere in the watershed. There’s a big wilderness preserve.”
“Yes! That was it. It was the worst shoot. We only had the day, because the studio was paying out the nose for the permits to have such a big crew up there, and it all had to be cleared with the government.”
“To make sure the filming wouldn’t have a negative impact on the environment.” He bobbed his head agreeably, looking right into Piper’s eyes.
“Yeah, although I don’t see how we could. It’s just a huge wasteland of nothing up there. We had rehearsed on the lot—at least, some of us did. The principals were going to work more improvisationally. You know, with the natural environment.”
“By ‘the principals,’ you mean Ramona, Chad, and Sloan,” Sam clarified.
Piper slapped her hands to her cheeks. “Who told you about Chad and Sloan?”
“Chad did. I had a reshoot for Theomina with him on Monday morning over in Building D, and he let it slip.”
Piper immediately relaxed. “As long as it’s not me. The three of them had their own crew and cameras. The rest of us were in a different area.”
Fergus crossed his legs, clasping his knee. “On Friday, the sunset would have been around seven forty-five, so—”
“How do you know that?” Piper interrupted.
“I have an outfitting and paragliding business, so it’s pretty much my job to know when the big light turns off. Did they use lighting rigs on the mountain, or were you leaving before sunset?”
“They had lights, but they were all gelled with different colors, and there were some digital light effects. We had to wait in the vans for almost an hour while they wrapped with Ramona and—you know who. I seriously can’t say it.
” Fergus’s guide persona had relaxed Piper into speaking more fluently, her memories flowing now.
“They went long, and then the trucks had to finish loading. Finally, all the vans with cast and crew drove down together. Everybody was packed in, and it took forever. We had to go slow since the trucks were in front of us.”
“The vans dropped you somewhere here?”
“At the parking structure, where the valet office is. The night valet retrieved our cars while we waited next to the office.”
“Did you notice anything about Ramona that seemed unusual?”
“She wasn’t in my van, so I didn’t really get a chance to notice her at all. Sloan gave her a ride home. Chad was on his motorcycle.” Piper shook her head. “That’s what I can remember.”
Had Sloan been the one who picked Ramona up on Friday morning, then taken her home that same night? Or taken her somewhere else?
Sam added the question to her list of things to find out.
“So just to recap the timeline, you wrapped at sunset,” Fergus said.
“Ramona, Chad, and Sloan finished shortly after, and everyone waited in the vans for the trucks to get done breaking and packing the set. Then you drove back here to the parking garage, stood around waiting for your cars, and Ramona left the studio with Sloan around … ?”
“It was almost midnight by then. Almost Saturday,” Piper told him.
“Got it.” That was helpful. Bex had retrieved her notebook from her bag a while ago, no doubt marking out with bullets whoever they would have to follow up with, but Sam committed the basics to memory.
Ramona had left her house by some unknown means early Friday morning for the studio.
She’d been transported to location in a van, worked all day on Mount Baldy, returned to the studio parking garage with the full cast and crew, and then left the parking garage with Sloan close to midnight Friday night.
Colin and Macie hadn’t seen her over the weekend, and no one Macie talked to had heard from her.
Her location tracking was unavailable. She didn’t go to work on Monday morning—the same morning that Sam had been at the studio reshooting for Theomina with Chad and later saw him in the parking lot with Sloan.
The same morning Archie Blasingame went to Ramona’s house looking for her.
Star Spy had heavily implied that Ramona was in L.A. this afternoon—which must mean the studio was scrambling to figure out what the hell was going on—while Ramona’s private Instagram account put her in the Maldives.
It was Tuesday night.
Sam was officially terrified.
“You’ll find her, right? That’s what you guys do. Help people like us.” Piper’s arms were wrapped around her body.
“Yes.” Sam put every bit of her famous calm reassurance into the affirmative. “We will.”
She sounded like Theomina. Fighting monsters and trying not to cry.
After saying their goodbyes, they left Piper to her work and exited the studio together. Vic was doing something on her phone. “Wait,” she said. “I just looked it up quick. Archie Blasingame is married.”
“But not to Ramona.” Sam wondered how many gotchas this day was going to have.
“No.”
Was he an affair partner? A friend? An enemy?
Bex stopped on the path to the parking garage. “Let’s try Macie again. There’s just too much. As it is, I’ll be writing in my notebook all night.”
Sam had tried calling Macie from the Rivian on the drive from Santa Monica, but they hadn’t answered. Now Bex retrieved her phone from her bag. Sam spotted missed-call notifications on her screen. It appeared that at least one of the people Bex had been dodging was her manager.
Bex put her phone on speaker. After a few rings, Sam heard Macie’s worried voice. “Hello? My God. I’m so sorry I missed you earlier.”
Bex’s voice was sure and steady as she caught Macie up with the latest developments in the investigation.
“Listen,” Macie said after Bex had filled them in. “That Star Spy item is bullshit. Ramona doesn’t sign autographs. She hasn’t for ages.”
“Thanks for that,” Sam said. “It didn’t sound right, but it’s good to know you think so, too.”
“Yeah, and the other thing. Ramona’s not having an affair with Archie.
They’re just friends. We both met him when he was working on the Ice Crew documentary that never happened.
Later, she helped him get work on some of her other projects.
They’ve always had each other’s backs. My guess is that if Piper was seeing him with Ramona on The Howling set regularly enough to think he’s her boyfriend, it means Ramona needed a bit of support there. ”
Sam let out a long breath. “That helps, too. It means we need to talk to Archie. I’d like to hear what he has to say before we try to question Chad or Sloan.”
“The other thing is that I did call and talk to Ramona’s parents,” Macie said. “I don’t want to mess up your investigation or anything, but—”
“No,” Bex interrupted. “That’s a good call. What do they want to do?”
“They’re talking to a few different people close to law enforcement, trying to figure out how they can file a missing person report without causing a media circus. They want you to keep asking questions. In the meantime, they’re going to fly out here.”
They ended the call with Macie sounding somber. The light was fading. As they made their way to the parking garage, Sam tried not to think about what could have happened between the last minutes of Friday night, when Ramona got a ride home from Sloan Lennox, and Monday morning.
They reached the lot. The Rivian looked humongous in its narrow space. She was temporarily confused when a set of bright LED headlights beamed at their group like a giant laser, but then Fergus started running toward the lights, waving both arms and yelling, “Hey!”
As the headlights swung away, Sam recognized the car. It was the woman who had been stalking them all day. Fergus had caught up to it and was jogging alongside the sedan. He smacked the top of the sedan, then sprinted to stand in front of it, blocking it from leaving.
“Fergus!” Sam yelled.
The sedan stopped. Its headlights went dark. Fergus approached the driver’s side and knocked on the window, and it eased down.
Sure enough, it was the same woman with the dark bob who Sam had seen at Urth Caffé, then again outside the parking garage and at the beach. She’d followed them to Culver City.
“Who the fuck are you?” Fergus asked, with surprising calm. “Because this lot is covered in cameras, and you’ve been following us. You can’t do that. We’ll call the police.”
“What’s going on?” Bex grabbed onto Sam’s forearm.
“That’s the woman who’s been tailing us,” Sam said. “Who I told you Fergus filmed.”
Bex made a noise that prompted Sam to put an arm around her. “Oh, she’s getting out of her car. I don’t feel great about this.” Bex leaned over and grabbed Vic’s hand and made her stand behind them, ever the big sister.
“Please, don’t get excited!” The woman slowly eased from the driver’s seat, keeping her hands palms out. “My name’s Ashleigh. Ashleigh Chambers.”
“We don’t know an Ashleigh Chambers,” Fergus said. “But you seem to know us, so we’re going to need more than that before I reconsider calling nine-one-one.”
The woman pushed her car door shut with her bottom. She was curvy, older than Sam and Bex, though she probably regularly passed for younger. Her French bob was inky black, and so was her sharp winged liner and lash extensions.
“Do you know her?” Bex asked in a low voice.
“No.” Sam watched as the woman pulled a wallet out of her cropped blazer, the pocket too tiny for a weapon.
“My ID is in here.” She handed the shiny red bifold wallet to Fergus, who opened it. He looked back and forth between the wallet and the woman.
Then he turned around and held up the wallet, showing Sam, Bex, and Vic that it contained an ID.
“Looks like Ms. Chambers is a private investigator.”