CHAPTER 4
Malcolm
Clara holds the lighter like she wants it to hurt her.
That is the part I see first.
Not the initials. Not the scratched silver. Not the way the object turns Avery’s trailer into a grave with better lighting.
Her hand.
The white pressure around her knuckles. The flat calm in her face. The kind of calm that means her body has closed every door it can find and locked me outside with the rest of the world.
“Tell me why Laurel’s lighter is in Avery’s bag,” she says.
There are answers that would make the room easier.
I don’t know.
Someone planted it.
We need to preserve evidence.
All true.
None enough.
The trailer light buzzes above us, thin and electrical. Outside, radios crackle, people move, a siren grows closer through the studio gates. Inside, Avery’s shoes sit crooked by the sofa and three sugar packets line the table like someone built a tiny altar to Clara’s worst habits.
I look at the lighter in her fist.
The last time I saw it, Laurel was alive.
No.
That is not true.
The last time I saw it, Laurel was not.
Memory has bad timing. It arrives through the body before the mind can dress it.
Smoke in my mouth. Wet floor under my knees. The red door swollen in its frame. Clara screaming herself raw somewhere behind me while a medic tried to keep her sitting. Laurel’s lighter on the floor near a strip of black tape, half hidden under torn fabric.
A hand closing around it.
Not mine.
My throat works once.
Clara sees.
Of course she sees.
“You recognize it,” she says.
“Yes.”
“From her funeral?”
“No.”
Her eyes sharpen.
There. Mistake one.
I should have lied cleaner if I intended to lie. I’m out of practice with her. Or I was never good at it and she was too hurt to catch every seam.
She steps closer, still holding the lighter. “From where?”
“Clara.”
“No. Don’t soften your voice like I’m about to do something inconvenient with my feelings.”
“I wasn’t softening it.”
“You were lowering it. That’s worse. That’s the voice men use when they’re about to put a chair under you.”
Avery’s trailer seems smaller with her anger in it. Not louder. Clara does not need volume. She can make a whisper take up walls.
I keep my hands visible at my sides because the old part of me wants to take the lighter away before her palm breaks open around it.
That part is an idiot.
That part never learned.
“I saw it on set the night Laurel died,” I say.
The words land.
Clara’s face changes by not changing. Her eyes stay on mine. Her mouth stays calm. Her hand tightens anyway.
“In the hallway?” she asks.
“Near the door.”
“You told the inquiry you didn’t go near the door until after the cut.”
“Yes.”
The air between us goes very still.
I hate myself for noticing the script page open on the table behind her. Scene 16. Scene 18. No seventeen. A missing number sitting between us like evidence.
Clara’s voice stays even. “That’s interesting.”
“It’s not the whole—”
“I’m sure it isn’t. Men usually save the whole story for when the damage is vintage.”
I deserve that.
The problem with deserving pain is that it doesn’t make the timing useful.
Outside, Diana’s voice cuts through the lot. “Nobody leaves until security clears them. I don’t care if your agent is having chest pain.”
Someone answers her too quietly to hear.
Clara does not look away from me.
“Did you take it?” she asks.
“No.”
“Did you see who did?”
A beat too long.
Her face tells me she counted it.
“I saw someone pick it up,” I say.
“Name.”
“I couldn’t see the face.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It was smoke, rain, emergency lights, people moving. I saw a hand.”
“Man? Woman?”
“Gloved.”
She laughs once, without humor. “Incredible. A haunted glove. Very Hollywood.”
“Clara.”
“Don’t say my name because you don’t like the shape of the conversation.”
My left shoulder starts aching. Old injury, stress, guilt. It doesn’t matter. Pain is a clock. It tells me I have limited time before I make another bad choice for a reason that feels noble.
I look toward the open trailer door. Teresa stands outside at the base of the steps with Diana.
Victor is farther back, pretending not to watch while watching with every inch of his expensive posture.
LAPD hasn’t reached us yet. Security logs are being printed.
Avery is still somewhere on this lot or near enough to use it.
The lighter is not the emergency.
The lighter is bait with history attached.
I turn back to Clara. “Whoever put that in Avery’s bag wanted you to ask this exact question.”
“No, Malcolm. They wanted me to know someone stole from Laurel’s body.”
Her voice cracks on the last word.
Not much.
Enough to put a hand inside my chest.
She hates that it happened. I hate that I heard it. We share that small ugly thing and neither of us wants it.
“She wasn’t buried with it,” I say.
Clara goes motionless in a way I do not trust.
“What?”
I choose each word like a step across a bad rig. “The lighter wasn’t recovered in the personal effects returned to her family.”
Her face loses a degree of color.
“No.”
“I checked the inventory later.”
“Later when?”
“After the inquiry.”
“You checked Laurel’s personal effects inventory?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because I had seen the lighter near the door and then seen it disappear.
Because I thought if I found one object out of place, I could prove something bigger than my own failure.
Because by then the studio lawyers had already turned the night into a diagram nobody could bleed on, and I needed one hard thing to tell me I wasn’t crazy.
Because I knew Clara would ask one day.
I say, “Because it bothered me.”
Her smile is small and cold. “How uncomfortable for you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant. That’s the problem.”
I look down at the lighter again. “It may have been in evidence briefly. It may have been taken before inventory. It may have been logged under a prop number instead of personal effects.”
“That’s a lot of may.”
“Yes.”
“And you never told me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
The word is simple.
The answer is not.
I could tell her about the studio’s attorney standing in a hospital corridor with a folder and a voice like locked glass.
About the draft statement that placed Clara near the door in a way that made her sound reckless.
About the way her hands shook when she tried to sign discharge papers.
About my choice to remove one version of blame and create another version of silence.
Not here.
Not with Victor twenty feet away and Avery missing.
Not because I am afraid she’ll hate me.
She already does.
Because the full truth has edges that can cut the case apart before we know where Avery is.
“I made the wrong call,” I say.
Her eyes stay on me.
“That’s the label. I asked for the contents.”
“Not now.”
“There it is.”
“Clara, Avery’s alive.”
“That doesn’t absolve you from answering.”
“No. It tells me which fire gets water first.”
She steps closer until there is less than a foot between us. The lighter is still in her hand. I can see the metal denting her skin.
“This is not you deciding what I can carry.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“No.” The word comes out rougher than I intend. “Not well enough. I’m trying.”
She blinks once.
There. Not forgiveness. Not even sympathy.
A disruption.
I’ll take it because I’m worse than I want to be.
Her fingers open. Slowly. The lighter sits in her palm, silver against red pressure marks.
“Evidence bag,” she says.
My body wants to move too fast. I make myself take the kit from my jacket pocket and open it on the counter. Gloves. Paper envelope. Seal. Chain-of-custody label.
Clara watches every motion.
Good.
Let her.
I hold out the envelope.
She does not drop the lighter in. She places it inside like she is setting down something alive and dangerous. The metal clicks against paper.
The sound is too small for what it costs.
I seal it.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“Fine.”
“Also don’t be wounded about being told don’t. It makes me want to throw furniture.”
“I’ll manage my visible devastation.”
Her eyes flick to mine.
For half a second, the shape of our old rhythm moves through the trailer and makes no sense in the middle of all this. A bad joke. A familiar answer. Something that should have died with the easy version of us.
Clara looks away first, which means she felt it too and resents me for it.
Fair.
A radio on my belt crackles.
“Malcolm, Casey. Got the trailer access pull.”
I press transmit. “Go.”
“Last official entry before Avery: wardrobe at eighteen forty. Teresa Hall. Then Avery at twenty-one twelve. Then no logs until after midnight.”
“After midnight when?”
“Zero one twenty-nine. Old credential. Original unit category. No name attached.”
Clara’s head turns toward me.
I keep my eyes on the trailer table. “Repeat.”
“Original unit category. Looks like an archive pass. System shows active for nine seconds and then drops.”
“Door used?”
“Avery’s trailer.”
“Only here?”
A pause. Paper shuffles on Casey’s end. “Checking. Same credential pinged Stage 14 at zero one thirty-seven.”
One minute before the cameras cut.
Clara’s expression goes empty with focus.
I hit the button again. “Any location after that?”
“Negative. But I’ve got an error flag on the wardrobe annex. Manual override. No badge read.”
“What time?”
“Zero one forty-one.”
During the blackout.
The sequence begins arranging itself in my head, not clean enough to trust.
Avery enters Stage 14. Camera feed cut. Old credential hits Stage 14. Avery taken or moved. Credential pings her trailer. Lighter and sugar packets planted. Coat possibly taken from wardrobe by manual override. Someone uses old access without a name.
A ghost with a working key.
I hate ghosts. They make people stop looking for hands.
“Lock the credential class,” I tell Casey.
“Already tried. System says none active.”
“Then pull the old database offline.”
“That needs IT.”
“Wake them.”