CHAPTER 2
Malcolm
The red rain falls inside a dry building.
That is the first thing everyone outside film sets gets wrong. They think weather is weather. They think night is night. They think blood is blood.
Nothing here is real until someone gets hurt.
Then everyone starts pretending it was.
I stand under the rig with a tablet in one hand and a radio clipped to my belt, watching red water drip from the ceiling of the recreated hallway. It runs down cheap wallpaper, gathers at the baseboards, and slips beneath the door at the end of the set.
The door is painted the wrong shade.
I told them that three weeks ago.
No one listened because no one pays security to have opinions about color, even when color is the entire point.
The original door had been deeper. Not bright red. Not poster red. A tired, ugly red that looked brown in bad light and black through smoke. The kind of red that sat in your memory like rust.
This one looks expensive.
That bothers me more than it should.
A production assistant in a headset hovers six feet away from me, holding a clipboard with both hands. He is twenty-four, pale under the work lights, and trying to decide whether I’m the kind of man who throws things.
I’m not.
I check them.
“Mr. Reed?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry. Malcolm. Mr.—Malcolm.” He swallows. “Victor wants everyone off the active set except department heads.”
“Victor can want a safer set.”
“He said—”
“I heard him.”
The kid’s badge reads LYLE. His shoes are new. Too clean for a night shoot. He looks at the red water creeping toward a coil of cable taped near the wall.
At least he has enough sense to look nervous.
I point with the tablet. “Get electric to pull that line back.”
“That’s for the flicker gag.”
“That line gets wet, the gag is a lawsuit.”
“I can tell them.”
“Tell them now.”
He moves fast, half slipping on the plastic sheeting that protects the soundstage floor. The radio at my belt cracks with three voices at once.
“Copy on holding background.”
“Where’s Avery’s stand-in?”
“Wardrobe needs the red coat back if we’re not rolling.”
A pause.
No one answers the coat question.
For half a second, every noise in the stage separates itself. Water tapping plastic. Generator hum. A grip laughing too loudly at nothing. Someone ripping tape with their teeth. The low drone of the air system pushing cold through a building full of people pretending they aren’t afraid.
I press the radio button.
“Wardrobe, say again.”
Static.
Then a woman’s voice, small and careful. “We need the red coat back for continuity.”
Continuity.
I close my eyes for the length of one breath.
The word is a bad joke told by the wrong mouth.
“Wardrobe, stay in your trailer,” I say. “Do not send anyone to retrieve anything unless I clear it.”
“Copy.”
“Security two, lock wardrobe exterior. Log everyone in and out.”
A click. “Copy, Malcolm.”
My phone sits heavy in my back pocket.
Clara hung up on me seven minutes ago.
I don’t blame her. That is the problem with guilt when it has had eleven years to mature. It stops asking to be forgiven. It starts making lists.
Things Clara has the right to do:
Hang up.
Hate me.
Tell me to go to hell.
Refuse to stand on this lot while men with money put a fresh girl in an old coat and call it art.
Things Clara does not have the luxury to do:
Stay away.
I hate that I know her well enough to be sure of it.
The stage door opens behind me, and the temperature changes before the man enters.
Not physically. Victor Hales brings climate with him.
Polished, expensive, fifty-dollar-candle calm.
He walks onto a set where a young actress is missing and manages to look mildly inconvenienced, like the day has become inefficient.
His suit is dark blue. No tie. Studio casual, which means a jacket that costs more than Lyle’s rent and sneakers pretending not to be sneakers.
“Malcolm,” he says.
“Victor.”
His gaze sweeps the set, the red water, the crew huddled near the fake staircase. “Why are my people standing around?”
Because Avery Lorne vanished from a closed set under your production’s watch.
Because someone used my security grid like a hallway map.
Because the coat is gone.
Because a woman I once failed has been dragged back into this.
I say, “Because we’re not shooting.”
Victor’s smile tightens. Not gone. Men like Victor don’t lose smiles. They adjust the wattage.
“We’re not shooting until Diana returns from the police call,” he says. “That’s not the same as shutting down half the stage.”
“It is if the active set is evidence.”
“Evidence of what, exactly?”
I turn the tablet toward him.
He glances at the paused camera feed and then back to me. He doesn’t look long enough. That tells me he already knows what he is meant to see.
“Camera four went black,” I say.
“Equipment fails.”
“Camera four, seven, and the hallway overhead all went black at 1:38 a.m.”
His nostrils flare once. Small. Almost nothing.
“Power issue?”
“No. Local feed interruption.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning someone blocked the signal or cut the internal routing.”
“Could be a glitch.”
The tablet edge digs into my palm.
“That word costs money when lawyers use it,” I say. “It doesn’t find Avery.”
Victor’s gaze moves past me to the red door. “We don’t know that there’s anything to find yet.”
A crew member near the stairs stops pretending not to listen.
Victor notices. His voice drops.
“Walk with me.”
I don’t.
That is childish.
I know it while I do it.
His eyes come back to my face. For the first time all night, irritation shows through the polish.
“Fine,” he says softly. “Stand there like a guard dog if you need to. But understand the stakes. We have an actress unaccounted for, a studio already nervous about insurance, and a set full of people with phones. If this becomes a circus before we have facts, Avery’s name gets dragged through every trash outlet in the country by sunrise. ”
He is not wrong.
That makes me dislike him more.
“We call LAPD formally,” I say.
“Her agent asked us to wait.”
“Her agent asked because someone scared her.”
Victor’s eyes narrow by a fraction. “Did someone?”
I hold his stare.
There are men who ask questions because they want answers. Victor asks them to measure how much you know.
“I’m not your publicist,” I say.
“No,” he says. “You’re the man in charge of security on the night a twenty-six-year-old woman disappeared.”
There it is.
The first knife, wrapped in fact.
The old one slides in behind it.
You were the man near the door.
You were the man with the radio.
You were the man who signed the report.
I feel the past in my left shoulder first. Old injury. Bad landing off a balcony rig on a pilot no one watched. It aches when weather shifts, when I sleep wrong, when Clara’s name shows up in a message I don’t understand.
Pain is useful. It gives the body somewhere to put memory.
“Then get out of my way,” I say.
Victor’s smile returns. Lower wattage now. “I’ve always appreciated your directness.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“No. I’ve appreciated that it can be used.”
I look at him then. Really look.
He has aged well in the way wealthy men are allowed to age: sharper, calmer, called distinguished by people paid to need him.
Eleven years ago, he was a younger executive with a producer’s badge he wore too high on his chest and a habit of saying we’re losing light as if light were a child trapped under a car.
I remember him by the red door.
He says he wasn’t there.
The report says he wasn’t there.
Reports can be dressed better than bodies.
A side door bangs open, saving me from saying something useful too early.
Diana Sutter strides in with wet hair, a black coat over clothes meant for sleep, and the facial expression of a woman who has already killed three people in her mind and found the experience lacking. The director of the reboot does not slow for Victor. She comes straight to me.
“What do we have?”
Victor turns. “Diana, we’re handling—”
“I asked Malcolm.”
I like her for that.
Not enough to trust her.
“Cameras down for four minutes,” I say. “Avery last seen entering Stage 14 at 1:31. Stand-in saw her near the red door at 1:34. Feed cuts at 1:38. Comes back at 1:42. Avery gone. Coat gone. Her phone is off.”
Diana’s face loses color in layers. She looks at the door, not the cameras. That matters.
“Who was on stage?”
“Closed set. Essential crew only. Twelve people on paper. Fourteen in the badge logs.”
Victor says, “Badge logs are often messy on night shoots.”
“No,” I say. “People are messy. Logs tell on them.”
Diana rubs a thumb under one eye, smearing a bit of mascara she did not remove before coming here. “Do we have the two extra names?”
“One partial read. One credential from archival access.”
Her hand stops. “Archival?”
Victor’s jaw flexes. He covers it by looking at his watch.
Good.
A tiny ugly satisfaction moves through me. I let it pass. Satisfaction makes men sloppy.
Diana steps closer. She smells like rain outside, not stage rain. Real street water and car leather. “What archival credential?”
“Old production unit.”
“From the original?”
“Yes.”
Victor laughs once. Too light. “That’s impossible. Those credentials were deactivated years ago.”
“Then someone used an impossible credential.”
The words sit between us.
Diana looks at Victor.
Victor looks at me.
The stage keeps raining fake blood.
My radio crackles again.
“Security one, west gate has press sniffing around.”
Victor’s head snaps toward the sound. “Already?”
I press the button. “How many?”
“Two cars. One guy with a long lens. Says he’s waiting for a friend on crew.”
“Move him off studio property. Get plates. Don’t touch the camera unless he crosses the line.”
“Copy.”
Victor takes out his phone. “I need to call communications.”
“You need to call police,” Diana says.
His attention cuts to her. “And hand them an unfinished panic? No. We need a clean sequence.”
“Avery is missing.”
“I know what she is.”