We Won’t Stop Until They Find Her #2
Bex had told Vic they needed an army. What she’d meant was this entourage: a crew to carry out counterintelligence and analysis more powerful than the machinations of men still pushing the same buttons of power they’d been pushing for thirty years.
Bex and Sam had enlisted these digitally savvy young minds to ferret out who was responsible for the Star Spy item and the Maldives fakes.
They required their communication skills and their ability to triumph even while being underestimated.
Vic’s thumbs on her phone had never moved faster, and within the hour Sam and Bex were in Beverly Hills, in Piper’s parents’ cabana, with their army, dressed in their sparkles, deploying the resources of their combined furor, which was considerable.
They also had a security guy, a driver, and Colin Worth, who’d called Sam up and asked what he could do.
Colin was here to bear witness and represent his friend while Macie stayed with Ramona’s parents.
Vic, Frankie, and Logan were still at Bex’s house, reaching out to the remaining cast and crew of The Howling for any crumbs of information that might help the search team.
A young man with shiny gold extensions braided into his long hair walked up to where Sam sat as still as possible so that the current star of a wildly popular BBC Regency romance show could finish covering her face with setting spray and testing the lace edge of her brunette wig.
Bex and Sam would be in disguise tonight.
It had been almost too easy. Vic’s crew, and their crews, leaned on Christian to host a party.
Piper had a friend who’d once had Sloan slide into her DMs, and this person was willing to follow up and invite Sloan to the Swan mansion.
Sam had scarcely been able to follow the rapid-fire developments, but she knew the details didn’t matter.
What mattered was that all of Vic’s friends wanted to do the right thing for Ramona.
The right thing at this moment involved a party at the Swan attended by Christian, Sloan, and hopefully, Chad.
“It’s go time,” the young man said. “Bex is ready. Sloan is already there, holding court with our forward line. We need to go before he gets handsy.”
Sam nodded and stood, glad for the coverage of her designer tracksuit on such a cool night. The sneakers from someone’s elite footwear collection were keeping her weary feet warm and dry.
The goal of the Swan Mansion Party Mission was to gather as much information, digital or otherwise, as possible.
Maybe Christian was in league with Chad and Sloan and digital receipts could be procured from either Christian or Sloan’s devices.
Maybe there were other players in the circle Sam and Bex still didn’t know about.
Maybe Christian and Sloan would talk openly at the party, or even argue in front of their spies.
Maybe they would slip away and someone could listen in. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
If there was anything to find, Piper and her crew would find it and report back.
Meanwhile, Sam and Bex would lay low, disguised as Piper’s friends, and gather any information that the others might not think to collect.
If Chad didn’t show, Plan B was to track him down and throw everything they had at him. But they trusted Ashleigh enough to heed her advice about Chad. They would avoid him until they saw no other way forward in their investigation.
Colin approached and held out a pair of oversized sunglasses to Sam. “These are from Ramona’s collection. A gift from Jackie O. Ramona always said they were lucky. They’ll go with your party look.”
Sam smiled. “Thank you. They’ll also disguise the fine lines around my eyes that I refuse to get Botoxed.”
Colin tried to smile back but had to firm his chin against trembling. “Christian never uses Face ID on his devices. He doesn’t trust it. All his passwords are 6969.”
“Why are old people so weird?” Golden Braids wrinkled his nose. “Not, like, you guys. Not, like, genuinely old people, I don’t think. But, like, old people who think they’re still not.”
Colin put his hand on Golden Braids’s shoulder. “A conversation for another day.”
“Come on my channel,” he replied. “We can talk about real Hollywood.”
This is real Hollywood, Sam thought. It has always been like this.
Bex came over. Sam had seen how hair and makeup could transform Bex before, on stage and on screen, but she wasn’t sure she would know this woman if they had a conversation in line at Whole Foods.
Her wig was short, blond, waved in finger curls with edges.
Bex’s eyebrows were gone, slicked under makeup in favor of dark, stylized wings with lots of glitter.
Her lush mouth was disguised with an exaggerated cupid’s bow, and she was dressed for action in tuxedo pants and shirt.
She looked like a Manic Panic pixie dream butch and fit right in with the glittering New Hollywood crew.
It wasn’t unaffecting.
“Ready?” Bex’s voice was getting hoarse from all the commands she’d been dispatching. She made a formidable general. She was going to have to go on total voice rest for a week, wearing one of her warm neck wraps and drinking the foul-smelling tea that her voice coach made.
“I am. We’ll stay back at the perimeter of the party.
The first objective is to get access to Christian’s phone or devices for intel.
If there’s nothing about Ramona on there, we can rule him out as a suspect.
Sloan is trickier, but everyone has instructions to make sure the party goes all night.
That gives us time to keep the players in our Venus flytrap while we find out whatever we can.
Tonight, L.A. belongs to us. The media is on to us, Bex and Sam back together again.
We’ve been seen all over town. But in disguise—”
“—we find out what happened, once and for all.” Bex grinned.
The other partygoers piled in with the driver to meet up with those already at the mansion. Sam and Bex got into the car Colin had loaned them for the night, a nondescript electric hatchback that Sam felt was particularly freeing.
When they walked up from the end of the drive to the grand entrance, the house was spilling light all over the grounds. Despite the rain, a few of Sam and Bex’s undercover partygoers were outside standing under the portico. Vaping, but actually waiting for them in order to whisk them inside.
Once they were in, they were led down a dark hallway to what looked like a study by a young pop star who had recently won three Grammys. “Wait here,” she said. “Someone already has info for you.”
She melted back into the crowd and returned moments later with the daughter of the Dodgers’ right fielder.
“Guys.” The new arrival stepped close to Sam and Bex, still holding the pop star’s hand. “Sloan has scratches on his neck. Fingernail scratches.”
Bex frowned. “That’s concerning. But I suppose there’s no way to tell if they’re from a scuffle on Baldy, from filming a tough scene, or if he got them in a bar fight last night.”
“Wait.” Sam pulled off her sunglasses and dove her hand into her silky tracksuit pocket for her phone. “There might be a way.”
Sam went to her photo album. Bex looped her arm through Sam’s and inched closer. She smelled like hairspray and waxy-floral cosmetics. Like show business. Like hers. “The pictures you sent me from the parking lot!” Bex said. “Of course.”
Sam found them. She tapped, pinched, and zoomed.
“There they are! Bright red scratches. Fresh. And look!” She turned the phone around.
“Chad has them, too, on his forearms. If only Chad or only Sloan had fresh scratches, the injuries could be chalked up to something like the bar fight you mentioned,” Sam said.
“But the odds are slim that they would both randomly be scratched up at the same time for an innocent reason.”
“I’ll tell Piper to connect with wardrobe and makeup, or even an assistant or dresser who was on the mountain. Someone would have taken their costumes. Someone would know about the scratches. Have seen them. Maybe Chad or Sloan gave an explanation for where they came from.”
“Good. And text Vic to reach out to wardrobe at Theomina. Whoever put Chad into his chroma-key suit might have seen his scratches, too. We want to confirm and document as much as we can.”
“We’re going back out there.” The singer pulled the baseball player’s daughter back into the party.
Sam looked at Bex as the importance of what they’d just learned started to sink in through the jittery buzz of her adrenaline-and-fatigue-soaked brain. “She might have fought them. Ramona.”
Bex bit her lip, nodding. “I hope she’s still fighting.”
Sam shoved her sunglasses back on. “You up for some spycraft?”
“You bet.”
They leapfrogged from group to group, and the crowd seamlessly moved around them to keep them from being noticed.
The party was getting bigger as rumors flew through town of something interesting going down at the Swan.
Sam used the advantage of Ramona’s Jackie O sunglasses to peer around for Sloan, but she didn’t spot him.
She hadn’t seen Christian, either. She really needed to know if Christian was involved, and if he was, how deeply and why.
Could the men of the Ice Crew have decided together to hurt Ramona?
Why? What was at the bottom of all this?
“Sam,” Bex whispered. Her voice didn’t register at first. Sam was looking past the bar, certain she’d spotted a fedora. “Sam!” Bex squeezed her hand.
She turned to look, and Bex pointed to a gallery wall over a white grand piano. “Third row. Right in the middle.”
Sam’s belly flipped when she saw what Bex had spotted. “You’re kidding me. It’s nearly the same picture!”