Plenty of Motive
It made Sam break out in a cold sweat to be in the same room with Sloan Lennox.
He sat in a large white upholstered chair, looking at his phone, and all she could think was this was the man they’d been talking about since they started looking for Ramona. This was a man who might have killed two people.
She moved closer to Bex until she could feel her steady presence along the side of her body.
Fergus, Vic, and Frankie were keeping to the background, eyes on the party. Despite the weak dawn light at the very edge of the horizon, there was still conversation and laughter. Their army had come through, keeping everything going.
Christian was near a bar that served the pool. He broke away and sauntered over, exactly like Christian Stanstedt normally would have when two new people came into his lair. But he winked at them.
Sam hoped this gamble paid off.
“What do these people want?” Sloan had looked up from his phone. He addressed the question to Christian.
Close up, Sam could grudgingly admit that as far as the camera was concerned, the misfit look of Sloan’s youth had mellowed into something more marketable. He was fit—Sam could give him that. He had the physique of a bantamweight boxer and held his body just as aggressively.
The scratches on his neck were a scabbed maroon.
Christian leaned over and whispered in Sam’s ear. “Chad’s through there, in the pool.”
She nodded. She could see him in the water from where she stood. She walked over to where Sloan sat and offered her hand. “We haven’t met.”
Sloan looked at her hand, then looked away, but Sam continued to hold it out until he was uncomfortable enough to clasp it briefly with his own.
Ha.
“I’m Sam Farmer,” she said. “That’s Bexley Simon.”
He tried not to react, but he brought his bottle of beer to his lips a little too quickly to hide his surprise, and it knocked against his teeth.
“Bananas, right?” Christian collapsed into a nearby chair. “I met them the other day. Everyone in town’s talking about these two.”
“Hadn’t heard.” Sloan glanced in the direction of the pool.
“Oh my God!” Bex exclaimed in her preternaturally loud Bex-voice. “Is that Chad Bevington in the pool? Sam promised we could meet.” Bex caught Chad’s eye and waved enthusiastically. “It’s me, Bex Simon! We heard you were looking for us!”
Chad did a double take and started pulling himself out of the water.
“Chad and I worked together,” Sam told Sloan in a confiding voice. “Theomina. But also, he paid to have us followed earlier this week.”
Sloan glared at Christian. “What the hell’s going on?”
Chad appeared in the doorway, a towel around his middle. He looked back and forth from Sam to Bex, his furrowed forehead dashingly familiar.
Sam ran her fingers along the loosened edges of her wig and slid it off. Her skin was sticky with rain-damp hairspray. “We were tired of the media talking about us wherever we went. Decided to try a thing tonight.”
“What’s this, Christian?” Chad asked. Sam recognized his faux-pleasant tone as one he used when he was trying to recover.
She’d seen him go too far with crew more than once, melting down over some small matter he couldn’t control, and then just at the moment he realized he’d made a scene, he’d flip a switch.
Sam had grown to prefer his tantrums and sniping over this manic civility that felt like a threat.
“Chad,” Sloan said. “They know about your private investigator.”
Chad waved a hand, smiling. Sam’s gaze went to the ring of fading and scabbed scratches circling both his forearms. “Fuck. You caught me,” he said jovially.
“Look, hon, no hard feelings. I got spooked after I told you that Sloan and I were guesting on The Howling. Until it airs, we aren’t supposed to be seen together.
I needed to make sure you weren’t going to leak. ”
“You want me to believe you had us tailed by a private detective to keep from violating your NDA with StudioHonor?” Sam lifted an eyebrow. “I know you’re neurotic, Chad, but that’s taking it a bit far even for you.”
The word neurotic hit him like a slap. It took him three seconds to recover.
Sam counted. “I’d think you would be happy I’m careful.
Theomina’s a big movie for both of us. We can’t afford any bad press when the fast-food chains are about to start bidding on licensing.
Right now is the time to tread carefully and keep that bottom line healthy. ”
A threat. Interesting. Sam was starting to understand she held the full house on this gamble. Chad didn’t know what she and Bex had discovered over the past few days. He didn’t know they knew about Juliette, the documentary, Ramona’s rescue, Logan’s confessions, any of it.
The last of her stage fright melted away like a Theomina-branded bath bomb, and she took a seat in the last of the empty overstuffed lounge chairs.
“It’s nothing personal,” Sloan said, with a glance at Chad, who loomed over him, dripping pool water onto the arm of Sloan’s chair. “He’s just trying to protect some things we have in the hopper. Business.”
“Sure. Maybe I would believe that if it weren’t for Ramona being missing.”
“Jesus H., this again?” Sloan made a strained chuffing sound. “Can’t wait to hear where they find her this time.”
Chad was the better actor. His smile was almost the right mix of sad and bemused. “I feel sorry for Ramona. She really used to have something no one else had. Something special.”
“But then the stress got to her, is that right?” Bex asked. “She went back to the drugs. Probably she left town to get her fix in private.”
“You’ll find her driving a Yugo down the Pan-American Highway,” Sloan said. “Something batshit like that.”
“Yeah.” Bex bobbed her head, tilting it to untangle a lock of red hair from her wig. Once she had the wig in her hand, she pursed her lips at it as if something Sloan said had confused her. “The only thing is, Sloan, you were the last person to see Ramona.”
Chad crossed his bare arms with a frown. With the pool water glistening on them, it was an affecting reminder of his power.
“Because I gave her a ride home Friday, you mean.” Sloan sounded like he was scrabbling for a good handhold on a crumbling ledge.
“Mm.” Bex leaned over to drop her wig on the chair next to Sloan’s thigh. “More because she wasn’t in the van, at all, on the way back down the mountain.”
Chad’s voice boomed over Sloan’s head. “Who told you that? They’re lying.
She was in our van. It was just the three of us and the driver.
” He squinted into the middle distance. “But, you know, maybe that was a bit of a cry for help. She said something in the van about being ready to ‘tell her story.’ She wasn’t making a lot of sense.
She got aggressive with me, accusing me of killing Juliette again.
You know she went to the cops with that?
Drunk? There’s a reason that tragedy was closed so quickly.
I hate it, hate it, when she throws that at me.
It’s disrespectful to Juliette. Sloan helped smooth things over. ”
“I said I’d take her home,” Sloan offered.
“Because we’re friends. I can handle her.
Ask anyone.” He was talking a little too fast. “I got her calmed down, real easy, but when the valet brought my car, she wasn’t where I told her to meet me.
She must have taken an Uber. I know that was her plan earlier.
She’d grabbed one to work that morning.”
“Sloan, Ramona wasn’t in the garage that night.” Bex sounded apologetic. “No one saw her there.”
He shrugged, his eyes dark and almost filmed over with a lack of expression. “I have nothing to say about that except she was.”
Sam was over this. Sloan’s story sounded like a monologue he hadn’t rehearsed enough, and she felt the way she’d imagined Theomina would at the end of her tiresome adventures.
Even bloody-minded from the beatings she’d taken at the hands of her enemies, hollowed out by grief, Sam couldn’t convince herself these men could possibly win.
They believed in nothing. They had no principles.
“Search and rescue found blood at the site where The Howling filmed Friday,” she announced.
“They found Ramona’s smashed phone. And we spoke to Logan Widi. ”
The party went quiet behind her.
“Who?” Sloan’s too-smooth forehead seemed to lower in his confusion. Sam watched Chad’s eyes. They’d been the only part of him she could see when he wore his chroma-key suit, and she’d grown accustomed to reading the nuances of his emotions.
She watched recognition dawn. His hands twitched when he figured out he didn’t know how much Logan had told them.
Chad was the one who’d sent the bribe to Logan.
He’d probably paid Ashleigh Chambers to find out the private information that he used to threaten Logan and his wife.
Blood rushed to the base of his throat, creeping up his neck.
“One of the crew had a nosebleed.” He couldn’t quite pull off good humor anymore.
“Ramona lost her phone. She’d asked me to help her find it, but we weren’t able to locate it in the brush.
It’s dense up there. The shoot was grueling.
They had us in the trees, rocks, and vegetation.
” He glanced down at the faint lines on his bare arms. “I got scratched up.”
“A crew member got a nosebleed, Ramona lost her phone, you got scratched in the bushes, she lost her mind on the way down in your van, and Sloan was a pal and offered her a ride home, but she took off without a word. No one’s seen her since, and her friends and family are so worried, so certain that this isn’t like Ramona at all, that they got West Valley Search and Rescue and the LAPD involved.
” Sam crossed her legs. “That’s the tall tale you’re going with? ”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Chad said. “I have a sense you know about Ramona’s most recent field trip because you imagine you’re one of her friends. Chris can tell you where friendship with Ramona leads.”