CHAPTER 23
Clara
The ambulance takes Malcolm away with its lights on and no siren.
That feels worse.
A siren would mean emergency. Noise. Permission to panic. Lights without sound are for quiet danger, for bodies that might survive if everyone stops making a scene.
I stand near the studio gate in wet shoes, torn coat, throat scraped raw, and watch the back window disappear between security trucks and press vans.
Through the glass, I catch one last shape of him: pale face, bandaged head, one hand wrapped, eyes turned toward the small window like he is trying to keep me in sight after being told not to.
Then the ambulance turns.
Gone.
Good.
He is going to the hospital. Good.
He is out of my way. Good.
He is not bleeding on a control room floor while Gavin uses him as a microphone. Good.
My body disagrees with every reasonable thought. It puts pressure behind my ribs, heat in my face, a tremor in the fingers wrapped around a borrowed phone.
I hate the body.
The body is a gossip.
Alvarez stands beside me, talking into his radio with clipped violence.
Behind him, the studio lot looks like a crime scene trying to host a press junket: yellow tape, black SUVs, uniforms, golf carts, production assistants crying near craft services, and cameras aimed at anything with a pulse and name recognition.
On the other side of the gate, a reporter shouts, “Clara! Did you build the room?”
The question hits the air and lands on my skin.
Not did you survive?
Not is Avery alive?
Did you build the room?
The story is already leaving without me.
I turn away before my face becomes another image for someone else to caption.
Diana steps down from Avery’s ambulance right before the doors close, still wrapped in a trauma blanket, one foot bare on asphalt, the other back in her ruined shoe. She looks like a director after a storm, which is to say furious that the weather ignored her call sheet.
“Avery’s going to Cedars,” she says. “Guarded transport. She tried to tell the paramedic she had notes on his bedside manner.”
“She’s okay enough to complain?”
“She called my third act ‘emotionally constipated.’ I almost kissed her forehead and then remembered my brand.”
My mouth tries to move.
Not a smile.
Something adjacent and badly funded.
“Good,” I say.
Diana looks me over. The wet pants. The torn coat. The shaking I am pretending is temperature. “You look like the abandoned version of a person.”
“Is that your medical opinion?”
“My medical opinion is that everyone should sit down and eat something beige.”
“Molly would call that trauma catering.”
“Molly is frighteningly correct too often.”
The borrowed phone buzzes in my hand.
Unknown number.
No.
Not unknown.
Gideon Park.
I answer. “Tell me nobody touched the fake murder collage.”
Gideon’s voice is calm in the way lawyers get calm when they are considering being expensive enough to qualify as weather. “Nobody touched the fake murder collage.”
“I don’t like how obedient that sounded.”
“Molly is standing in the hallway with both hands in the air because I told her touching evidence would make me personally disappointed.”
Molly yells in the background, “I hate that it worked!”
A small piece of me returns to my body.
Not enough.
Enough to breathe once without scraping.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“Police forensics arrived. I have kept studio legal outside. Victor’s counsel is making proprietary-materials noises.”
“Did he bring studio security?”
“Yes. Two of them. I asked whether they were here to preserve evidence or remove it. They began using longer sentences.”
“Mistake.”
“Common one.”
I look toward the press line. One camera has found me again. The operator adjusts focus. I can feel it like a hand.
“What’s in the room?” I ask.
Gideon pauses.
That pause is new.
I do not like it.
“Gideon.”
“The staging is amateur in design but precise in targeting. Photos of Laurel. Avery. Nate. Malcolm. You. Old call sheets. Printed forum posts about your breakdown after Laurel’s death. A fake manifesto. A hard drive. A burner phone. Red string.”
“Crooked red string.”
Molly yells, “Thank you!”
Gideon lowers his voice. “There is also a framed still from the original Blood House. It appears to show you outside the red door.”
My hand tightens around the cracked credential in my pocket.
“Appears?”
“The image may be edited.”
“It is edited.”
“You haven’t seen it.”
“They don’t need truth. They need recognition.”
Silence.
Then Gideon says, “Yes.”
That one small agreement lands harder than a warning.
“I’m going to Marla’s,” I say.
Gideon’s silence changes flavor.
“Clara.”
“Don’t use the tone.”
“The tone is appropriate. Your office has been staged to frame you. Media is already reporting it. Police will need a formal statement. You should not move around Los Angeles like a woman trying to make a prosecutor’s morning easier.”
“The Stage 14 note points to Marla’s.”
“I understand the narrative logic.”
“Do not say narrative logic to me right now.”
“I also understand police logic, evidentiary logic, and the logic of not allowing a newly framed woman to walk into a second location chosen by the people framing her.”
“Then I won’t walk in alone.”
Alvarez looks over.
He hears enough.
Good.
I want him to.
Gideon says, “Is Alvarez there?”
“Yes.”
“Put me on speaker.”
I do.
Gideon’s voice enters the lot, clean and dry and unfazed by sirens. “Detective, if Ms. Vane goes to Marla’s, she does so as a cooperating witness under law enforcement supervision, not as a suspect fleeing a staged scene.”
Alvarez gives the phone a tired look. “Good morning to you too, counselor.”
“It is not good, and I have concerns about the morning’s custody of evidence.”
“I’m sending units to Marla’s.”
“Uniformed units first will make the location visible.”
“Visible beats dead.”
I look toward the gate.
The reporters are growing restless. A production assistant steps too near one of them and immediately regrets having legs.
“Visible also alerts whoever moved the drive,” I say.
Alvarez turns to me. “I’m not sending you alone.”
“I didn’t say alone. I said not a parade.”
Diana lifts a hand. “I have a robe in my car and a face the press dislikes enough to follow. I can be the parade.”
“No,” Alvarez says.
“No,” I say.
Diana looks offended. “I offer myself as strategic nonsense and this is the thanks I get?”
“You’re going to the hospital with Avery,” I say.
“I am not family.”
“You’re annoying enough to count.”
Her face changes.
Just a little.
I should not have said something that kind while standing near cameras. It leaves fingerprints.
She looks away first. “Fine. But if she criticizes my shot composition while hypothermic, I’m billing you.”
“Send me the invoice.”
Alvarez takes the phone from me. “Park, I’m moving Vane with two plainclothes and no lights. You keep the office contained. If anyone tries to remove anything—”
“They will meet civil procedure in a bad mood,” Gideon says.
“Great. Terrifying. We’ll call when we reach Marla’s.”
He hands the phone back.
Gideon is still there. “Clara.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. You think you are walking toward evidence. You are also walking toward a memory someone knows how to use against you.”
My throat tightens.
The smell of wet metal from the shuttle set still clings to me. Under it, smoke. Coffee gone stale. Blood that may be Malcolm’s, maybe mine, maybe only imagined because today has become too generous with categories.
“I know that too,” I say.
“No,” Gideon says, softer. “You know it intellectually. Take someone who knows it practically.”
I look at Alvarez.
At the police cars.
At the press.
At Diana by Avery’s ambulance.
At my own hands.
Then I think of Malcolm in the ambulance, telling me the lighter was mine before it was Laurel’s. Not to save himself. Not cleanly. Not well. But finally.
Take someone who knows it practically.
I hate that the first person who comes to mind is unconscious-adjacent and being medically ambiguous in the back of an ambulance.
“I have Alvarez,” I say.
Gideon exhales. “That will have to do.”
Molly grabs the phone from him. “Do not drink the coffee at Marla’s.”
“Molly.”
“I’m serious. It tastes like regret and city permits.”
“I’ve had it.”
“That was before your immune system became mostly crime water.”
“I’ll avoid the coffee.”
“And don’t do your thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you see a clue that hurts your feelings and forget you have organs.”
I look down at my wet shoes. One lace is untied. Ridiculous. I do not remember tying it after the tram. I do not remember many things, apparently.
“Noted,” I say.
“I hate when you say noted. It means you plan to disappoint me with precision.”
“I’ll disappoint you messily.”
“Thank you. Growth.”
I hang up before the small sound in my chest turns audible.
Alvarez gestures toward an unmarked sedan.
“Now?” I ask.
“Before half the press decides Marla’s sells answers with terrible coffee.”
We move.
No lights. No siren. No explanation to the cameras.
The sedan smells like vinyl, old gum, gun oil, and someone’s citrus hand sanitizer. I sit in the back because Alvarez makes me, which I object to for three seconds and then lose because my legs betray me by shaking when I fold into the seat.
He notices in the rearview.
He says nothing.
I appreciate him for that and resent him for witnessing it.
The studio slips behind us.
Los Angeles appears too normal.
A woman walking a dog with a pink harness. A delivery truck double-parked with its hazard lights on. A man in scrubs buying coffee from a cart. Morning sun catching on windshields like nothing happened under it.
My phone is dead. My coat is torn. My office is a staged shrine to insanity. Malcolm is on his way to a hospital with my warning in his ears and his blood on his skin. Avery is alive. Laurel is still dead.
The city continues.
Rude.
I rub the cracked edge of the credential with my thumb.