Chapter Nine
As the sun began to rise, Saffi concluded that there wasn’t much additional information to be found in the paperwork.
Most of the knowledge she had now were things she could have—and had—already guessed.
In her early years, this would’ve made her impatient.
And that meant making mistakes. Now, however, she only felt excitement—the kind she hadn’t felt for a case in half a decade.
Saffi was still getting to know the major players and the setting that brought this mystery to life.
This was the calm before the first breakthrough.
The building itch under her skin that reminded her that she was on the precipice of something big.
It never lasted long, so she tried to savor it while it did.
Regardless, now that she had something to discuss, she’d finally let Andino and Taylor know she was taking up residence in their office building.
For the first time since stepping foot in it, Saffi took in the space.
The interior design started and stopped with an antiquated ticking clock on the wall, but the furniture was new and the appliances fully functional.
A mounted television she hadn’t immediately noticed stared down at her.
She felt a pang of something foreign. Perhaps a reminder of what could’ve been hers in another life.
It was ridiculous. Saffi wasn’t the type to stick around long enough to build a foundation. She’d never wanted that in the first place. But she might as well set it to her liking for as long as she was here.
Someone knocked on the door, but Saffi, in the middle of pushing her desk closer to the window, didn’t answer.
She opened the shutters, allowing in daylight.
Despite not hearing a reply, Taylor pushed the door open and stepped inside, Andino shuffling in behind him with crossed arms and a scowl.
It suddenly struck her how familiar this was, as though she’d never left at all.
The emotions hit her all at once: relief, comfort, fear. Andino and Taylor’s looks held five years’ worth of questions that Saffi didn’t have the mental capacity to decode. She was saved from speaking first when both men looked away, distracted by the rearranged furniture.
It may have felt like no time had passed, but the years gone by were evident in their faces.
They’d all been in their early twenties when she left, and now they were closer to thirty.
Taylor had the beginning traces of smile lines etched into his dark skin, Saffi was glad to see, whereas Andino was developing an eyebrow crease and frown lines across his pale forehead.
Taylor’s hair had been shaved short, but Andino still styled his with copious amounts of gel.
Similar, but different.
“I see you didn’t waste any time making yourself at home,” Andino said.
That was when she realized Andino was wearing a suit.
It hadn’t struck her as odd because of how at home he looked in it.
Before, it was all casual wear, which was at times synonymous with what he wore to the gym.
Neither she nor Taylor had ever been able to get away with that.
Whether Taylor had finally worn him down or he’d grown up at last, things were different now.
Owning a business must’ve played a part in it.
“Have you eaten?” Taylor asked. That was when she noticed the take-out containers he was holding.
“No,” she said. “Have you?”
Taylor distributed the meals, Saffi on one side of her desk while the men took an armchair each on the other.
The packaging screamed overpriced touristy spot.
For a smug moment she wondered if they were trying to show off, to prove that they’d made it big too.
It was unnecessary—Saffi was well aware they were doing well for themselves.
The fact that none of their furniture had any missing legs was proof enough.
Saffi took a bite of her food—vegetarian. They’d remembered.
Back in Arizona when they were interns, still in college, the three of them had worked together at a single cramped desk.
Chipped tiles, broken furniture, and flickering lightbulbs had been the extent of their interior design.
Every day was a comfort and a chaos: fist-fighting over who had to go pick up lunch, heated debates over far-fetched theories, consuming lethal doses of caffeine. It had been home once.
Saffi had been the first of the three to obtain her license and be offered the full-time private investigator position.
She’d been so smug at the time. Andino and Taylor had been promoted together a few months later—they always did things in pairs.
But even once they’d gotten their own offices, the three of them still spent their lunch breaks—or rather, their one-of-them-remembered-they-needed-to-eat-to-survive breaks—poring over case files together.
And then Saffi had fucked up and left the country and Andino and Taylor started their own PI agency not long after. A few years later, when Saffi had grown curious—and perhaps a little drunk and lonely—she’d looked up their old workplace. Stronghold Private Eye in Arizona.
It didn’t surprise her to find that it had been shut down, but it did catch her off guard. A similar feeling to misplacing your birth certificate.
Taylor cleared his throat awkwardly when they were finished eating. “So,” he began, “how’ve you been?”
“Busy,” Saffi replied. “You?”
“Good, good,” Taylor said, nodding.
He gave Andino a look, elbowing him in the side when he didn’t respond. The fact that he thought she wouldn’t catch the motion, especially when five years ago she was the one who’d invented the game of secretly elbowing Andino during boring meetings, was insulting.
“Um, yeah, good,” Andino said, coughing. “Great even.”
The three of them stared at one another for a moment.
“So, what do you think?” Taylor asked, gesturing to the case files strewn across her desk.
The relief washed over her. Cases, she could manage. Small talk was another beast. “It definitely was not an accident.”
They both stared at her. “You know?”
That was not the reaction she’d been expecting. “Know what?”
They exchanged glances. “There’s been another death,” Taylor said. “Irene Singh was murdered. There is no question about it anymore.”
Saffi leaned forward in her chair, intrigued.
“At the start of the investigation, a waiter who was there the night of Irene Singh’s death called in a tip.
He insisted that if something happened to him sometime within the next week, then we needed to check his online drive,” Taylor explained.
“Not long after that, he fell down four stories and has since passed.”
So he died in the same way the actress had. A coincidence? It was possible, but not likely. “I assume you checked the drive?” Saffi asked.
“It was wiped clean,” Andino said.
Saffi hummed. “It was definitely murder. At this point, anyone with a brain could tell you that much. Probably the same killer who got the actress. Why didn’t you check his computer before he died?”
“We were getting calls like that all month. Two separate people claimed they gave birth to Irene Singh’s reincarnation—two!” Andino said. “It was obviously an accident; we had no reason to believe the waiter was anything more than paranoid or attention-seeking.”
“Obviously an accident, huh?”
“Shut up,” Andino grumbled. “I’m still pissed off we did all those interviews for nothing. The killer probably left the premises the second the murder happened. It’s what I would do.”
“Not likely,” Saffi said.
“Would you like to elaborate on that?” Andino asked, a hint of irritation poking through. Saffi had forgotten how fun he was to rile up.
“You can’t control the narrative from outside the room,” she said thoughtfully.
“This person is so methodical, they killed the waiter too. They could’ve stopped at deleting the evidence, but that wasn’t enough for them.
It’s about control. And they’ll do anything to keep it. That’s what makes them so dangerous.”
“Wait,” Andino began skeptically. “If you didn’t know about the waiter, how did you know it wasn’t an accident?”
“Singh fell backward,” Saffi said, “down the stairs in a house she’s lived in for over a decade. She wasn’t that drunk. She must’ve been speaking to someone. She must’ve been pushed.”
“How do you know she fell backward?” Andino asked.
Saffi retrieved a photo from the file and set it down on the coffee table facing the two men.
“The dress has a tear in the back,” Taylor said in understanding. “Probably ripped it with her heel before she fell.”
Saffi leaned back in her chair. “Our killer is someone the victim knew, but not in a positive sense. A rival, probably. And if I had to guess, I’d say the victim and the killer are very similar.”
“Why do you say that?” Taylor prompted.
“In some of the interviews it was mentioned that the second floor of the mansion is off limits. It’s a well-known rule. But the perpetrator went up regardless. I doubt anyone with a lot of respect for the victim would blatantly ignore the rules like that.”
“It could’ve been someone she didn’t know at all. A drunk person who wandered upstairs,” Taylor suggested. “Or someone who went up there with the intent to kill.”
“An heiress wouldn’t give the time of day to any drunk stranger just because they found their way upstairs.
If they’d been arguing, people would’ve heard.
If it was someone with ill intent, my guess is she would’ve been running away.
Facing forward not backward. Or screaming for help, which, again, someone in the next room would’ve heard,” Saffi explained.
“Considering it’s Hollywood, what’s the most common reason a person might kill? ”
“Jealousy,” Andino muttered.
“But Irene hasn’t been cast in anything recently,” Taylor said.
“Could be a past grudge,” Andino offered.
“So that’s why you think they’re similar,” Taylor said, finally catching on as he turned back to Saffi.
“If they’re competing for the same roles, they have to be,” Saffi said.
“So, you’ll be looking into actresses who not only look like Irene Singh, but who also knew her,” Taylor said. “That should narrow things down.”
The issue was, it didn’t feel narrow enough. “Was there anything else with Isaac Klossner?” Saffi asked. “Did you check his phone? His emails?”
“We just got sent this from the LAPD,” Taylor said, passing a file to Saffi over her desk.
A quick glance through revealed nothing of interest. Isaac’s emails were all either work related or junk. And other than a weekly call to a contact labeled “Mom,” those were all work related as well. Except—
“What are these?” Saffi asked, highlighting the three unknown phone numbers Isaac Klossner had gotten calls from this week.
Andino shrugged. “We haven’t gotten the chance to look into them yet. Probably telemarketers if I had to guess.”
Saffi typed the numbers into her search bar.
Andino was correct for two of those cases.
“Actually, one of them is from a phone booth,” she informed them.
She showed them the map she’d pulled up, pointing to direct their attention.
“There are four movie studios near this phone booth and it looks like only three of them were being used at the time of his death. While it’s possible someone specifically made the trip to use it, there’s an even better chance our suspect is someone who’d been filming on one of these three lots. ”
“How did you find that so quickly?” Taylor asked.
“Pattern recognition,” Saffi said. “Every outlier has the same sense of otherness to it. Once you see a few, you start getting an eye for them.”
“That’s amazing,” Taylor said in awe.
“It’s just a theory.” Saffi shrugged. “If anything, it’ll let me rule out some suspects.”
After all, the most exciting part about creating a hypothesis was getting the chance to disprove it.