I should have. It would have been better for both of you—for all three of us—if I had.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE DETECTIVE

  “Initial autopsy report is complete.” Farah read out the text from Dr. Martin, then bit into a ham and provolone sandwich with extra banana peppers.

  “Hell yeah.” Kevin looked at his watch. “That was fast. Is that all it takes? A Grammy nomination and you get fast-tracked on Dr. Martin’s slab?”

  “Grammys are music, you doofus.” She plucked a fallen pepper from the wrapper and popped it into her mouth, savoring the sweet flavor. “But yeah, a Grammy winner would probably also get their chest cracked within the hour.”

  Kevin winced and rubbed a hand protectively over his own wide chest. “We swinging by there before we head back?”

  Farah nodded and half rose, taking a final bite of her sandwich before she surrendered it to the trash. “They’re at the coroner’s office at Beverly Hills. Technically, it’s on the way.”

  “Let’s do it.” Kevin grinned, and he had a chunk of Doritos stuck to the front of his left incisor. She gestured to the spot, and he used the tip of his tongue to hunt down the morsel.

  By the time they made it to the BH station and pulled on booties, hairnets, and gloves, Dr. Harry Martin was waiting for them, his clipboard in hand, the two bodies side by side in the largest autopsy room. Harry waited for the door to click shut behind them; then he pulled the privacy window over the door’s window and started right in.

  “First, let’s talk about the woman. I have nothing yet on identification,” he announced, walking over to the closest body. “Her fingerprints are on rush, but you know how long that takes. I tried the new facial-recognition tool, but a slack face has different structure points than a live, and closed eyes were another missing data point for the analysis. Still, I attempted it twice”—he held up two fingers in case they didn’t speak English—“both with failed results.”

  With two bodies, the smell in the room was stifling. Farah tried to breathe through her mouth and mentally urged Harry to hurry up.

  “She’s an average middle-class mom.” He pulled the sheet off, fully exposing her body. “Five two, a hundred and forty-five pounds. I would guess between thirty-one and thirty-four years old.”

  The same age range as Nora Kemp, but there was nothing similar between this woman and Nora, other than their skin color. This woman had a tattoo of a dolphin on her ankle, a half-closed belly button piercing, a brassy dye job, unpainted fingernails, and red toenails. Farah walked down the length of her, looking for signs that would point to her lot in life. Her legs had about two weeks of growth on them, her pubic area looked unmaintained, and she had pale legs. It was odd for California, for a town where everyone, even older women, wore shorts.

  The woman wasn’t fit but wasn’t overweight and probably approached exercise with the same lack of enthusiasm that Farah had. She leaned closer, looking past the stab wounds, and noticed a series of stretch marks on the side of her closest breast. “She had children?”

  The medical examiner nodded. “At least one. And no recent intercourse, in case that’s pertinent to the investigation.” He lifted her arm by the wrist and turned it upward. “You can see the damage from the binding. She struggled hard against it, and for a while. At least an hour, maybe two.”

  The wedding ring rubbed Farah the wrong way. It was a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. Somewhere, she had a husband. Where was he? And what was Trent Iverson doing with a married mother?

  “Anything else we should know?” Kevin asked, and she could tell from his stiff posture and constipated expression that the smell was getting to him too. An autopsy always carried the scents of decomposition, blood, and feces, and with two on the table, it was overpowering.

  Harry didn’t seem to notice it. “Not yet. Looks like your average woman, if you ignore the four stab wounds in her torso. But then again, maybe that’s what makes her notable. Definitely not a druggie or prostitute.”

  Kevin turned to the second body. “What about him?”

  “Well, identification should be easier. He is an identical twin, so that makes it fun.” He smiled under his face mask, the corners of his cheeks lifting, and anyone who found anything fun about dead bodies was always suspect to Farah. He pulled back the sheet to the waist, and Farah was grateful that she was at the non–exit wound side of Trent’s head.

  “How do you verify one twin from another?” Kevin asked.

  “In this case, I was able to get medical records for Trent. It’s very interesting, I have to say.”

  Interesting was something that always caught Farah’s attention, especially in an autopsy. “In what way?”

  Harry waved them to the side, where a large light box displayed four X-ray images. “Trent hasn’t been to the doctor in almost a decade, probably due to his affection for narcotics, but these are X-rays and an MRI from when he was younger.” He pointed to each of the screens. “Dislocated shoulder. Snapped rib. Cracked jaw.”

  “Okay.” Farah couldn’t see what was interesting about this. “Does his body not match the damage?”

  “Oh, it does. I took the liberty of running a full-body X-ray on him.” His eyes twinkled. “Figured the department could afford it.”

  “And?” Kevin said impatiently. “We got things to do, Doc.”

  “Oh, don’t spoil my fun. You’ll like this, I promise.” He swapped the jaw X-ray with a full-body image of a skeleton, presumably Trent’s. “Lookee here.” He used the tip of his pen to point to various parts of the X-ray. “Shoulder. Rib. Jaw. Match, match, match.”

  Farah stared at the screens and tried to understand what he was getting at. “Yeah? So? They match. It’s Trent Iverson. What’s your point?”

  “Look at the other damage.” He zoomed in on an arm, then a leg. A hip, then another rib. “It’s like he’s been in a car crash, but one that isn’t on his medical record. There’s damage all over, an excessive amount for any individual.”

  “Wasn’t he . . .” Farah turned to Kevin and wished that Anaïca were here. She was an encyclopedia of celebrity events. “There was a car crash, wasn’t there? Drunk driving, somewhere in the Hills?”

  “Yeah, but he walked away from that one. Literally. Cops found him at a bar on Sunset, ordering drinks for the entire place.”

  “How old are these injuries?” Farah asked, staring at the screens.

  “Hard to tell. Some are adolescent, some maybe from his teens. Some look treated, some aren’t.”

  “But you can definitively say that it’s Trent Iverson?”

  “Other than the obvious visual identification—yes. We took fingerprints and DNA, just to cover all of our bases, but I think anyone with working vision could identify him.”

  Kevin swore. “I liked the guy, but I can’t say I didn’t see a short life span coming.”

  Dr. Martin paused. “You know him?”

  “Not personally, but the LAPD has dealt with him a lot. He’s a junkie of anything he could get his hands on. I don’t know what kind of demons he was trying to outrun, but he wasn’t happy with them.”

  The doctor gestured to the woman. “Maybe it was the demons that cause you to tie a woman to a chair and do that.”

  “Maybe so.” He leaned forward and peered at Trent. “Handsome fuck, even dead.”

  “What about the connection between the two? Any information there?” Farah interrupted.

  “So far . . . it looks like murder-suicide, at least from the bodies and what I saw at the scene. I’ll let CSI confirm trajectory of the gun for suicide, but just eyeballing things—no red flags. He obviously had the strength to stab her, and the angle of his wound is consistent with a self-inflicted shot to the head.” He raised his hand and pantomimed the action, pointing his finger to his temple and mimicked pulling on the trigger.

  Kevin shook his head sadly. “What a waste.”

  “Eh. For the fans, yes. But look.” Harry turned to the woman and pointed at the deepest of the stab wounds. “These are clean and decisive. The locations are designed for pain, not immediate death. She was dying, but that wasn’t the goal. He wanted to torture her while keeping her alive, and he knew what he was doing.”

  “So, what, you’re saying that he had beef with her? That’s why he did this? This is a crime of passion?” Kevin asked.

  No, that wasn’t what he was saying. Farah caught on immediately, and knew what was coming as Harry shook his head and spoke gravely.

  “I’m saying this isn’t the first time he’s done this. Trent Iverson has killed before.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THE HUSBAND

  Back home, Kyle took a shower and changed into workout shorts and a T-shirt, then stood in the middle of their bedroom and considered his next steps. Officer Meeko’s instructions had been clear—figure out if Kerry packed anything strange—but it seemed odd to look through his wife’s stuff.

  Still, maybe she had left him a note, or there was something odd in her drawers, something that he wouldn’t understand or think about until he saw it.

  He started with her dresser, which was quick and easy, because she was a neat freak. Kerry used a board to fold their shirts, guaranteeing they were all the same width in the stack. Her socks were rolled and color coded. He did find a lace thong in her underwear that he hadn’t seen her wear in years, and he put it on top of all her baggy cotton ones as a suggestion.

  With that done, he moved to the double closet that they shared. Best he could tell, she’d taken their suitcase, plus the small plastic Transformers one that Miles used. Her makeup bag was gone, but all their shampoos and soaps and that really spendy hair straightener that he’d gotten her for Christmas two years ago—those were all here.

  He looked under their bed, behind the dressers, in shoes, on the top shelf of the closet, and behind boxes. All the places that someone might hide things, but there wasn’t anything, other than a few mothballs and dust.

  We don’t always know everything about our spouses. Trust me on that. The cop had sounded so confident, like there was no doubt that Kerry had some big secret that she was keeping from Kyle, but that wasn’t what their relationship was like.

  That wasn’t what Kerry was like.

  But there were two possibilities here. Either his wife was up to something or something bad had happened to her. To her and Miles.

  He’d rather suspect Kerry of something than consider the latter.

  He moved into the office and flipped on the light. The small square room held a pale-blue wooden desk, two file cabinets, a fabric sewing-board thingy, and some rolling storage organizers. The walls were covered in a floral wallpaper left over from the previous owners, and the carpet smelled faintly of dog piss from their old Chihuahua, who’d preferred this room over the yard when it came to using the bathroom.

  He sat down in the rolling chair and looked through the papers on top of the desk, feeling a little guilty. Unlike her clothes drawers, which had been in their shared bedroom, this sort of snooping felt more personal, like he was spying on her. And maybe, in a sense, he was. But she was missing. Any digging that he was doing was only to see if he could help find and keep her safe.

  The explanation didn’t sound right, and he would need to practice it again before she got home. Kerry had a tendency to flip out over certain things, and he was pretty sure that this would be one of those triggers.

  Her computer was his old one, passed down and still with the same operating system and password he had used: Warlock99$. He skipped over it for now, since the detective had said to focus on what she did or didn’t bring with her. Opening the top two drawers of the desk, he saw both were filled with neatly organized office supplies, but the third drawer was different. At first glance, it was full of file folders, but when Kyle picked up the first one, he realized it was really just covering up what was beneath it.

  Pill bottles, dozens of them. He sifted through the sea of orange bottles to see how deep the pile went, and his hand disappeared to the wrist. He closed his fist around a bottle and brought it up.

  KERRY ANN PEPPER

  ENULOSE, 10MG

  USE 1-2X DAILY, AS NEEDED FOR CONSTIPATION

  The prescription was almost two years old, and the bottle was pretty full. Which made sense, because Kerry didn’t have any problem passing stools, at least none that he was aware of. And she wasn’t the sort to go to the doctor for herself, except for her annual female exam.

  He set the bottle on the desk and picked up another. This one had Miles’s name on it and was also full. He set it to the side and pulled out another one, then another.

  He began to divide them into two lines, one for Kerry and one for Miles. When he was finished, both lines stretched about twenty bottles long.

  This didn’t make sense. Why would she not give Miles his medicine? And why wasn’t she taking her own?

  Kerry didn’t have any aversion to medicine. If anything, she was OCD about it. She set timers, carried pill organizers in her purse, and always had something on hand to manage Miles’s unpredictable health.

  His cell phone vibrated from behind the second row of bottles, and he reached for it, knocking one over in the process. It was the cop, and he answered the call right away.

  “Hello?”

  CHAPTER 27

  THE DETECTIVE

  As the final remnants of rush-hour traffic clogged Santa Monica Boulevard, Kevin’s department-issued Tahoe rolled to a stop at the security gate of Hugh and Nora’s Beverly Hills neighborhood. The wide-gated entrance was staffed by three uniformed officers who looked straight out of central casting, all ex-military and all with faces that only a mother could love.

  They waited in the rightmost lane of the entrance as their IDs were checked and scanned. At the rear of the SUV, a guard raised the lift gate and checked their back seat.

  “You do this every time?” Farah asked the man with the ID scanner.

  “Every time, unless it’s an emergency vehicle.”

  That would explain why they were waved through this morning with just a flash of their badges, after the 9-1-1 call. “You ID both passengers and drivers?” Farah asked.

  “Yep, unless a homeowner is driving. It’s quicker if you’re on the approved list, which requires a background check.”

  “We’ll need a list of everyone on the Iverson approved list,” she said.

  “Not unless Dottie authorizes it.” He turned his head and called for a woman, who walked over in a monogrammed golf shirt and khaki pants. She came to Farah’s side of the car and leaned toward the window with a warm smile that contradicted the security team’s stern manner.

  “Hi there.”

  The woman turned out to be viciousness wrapped in grace, and despite her steadfast refusal to turn over any information without a warrant, Farah found herself smiling back by the end of the exchange, the woman’s manner infectious.

  “Now, I can pull everything quickly,” Dottie reassured them. “You get that warrant in hand, and I’ll turn over tag numbers, vehicle photos, entry and exit logs, driver’s license photos . . . anything that warrant says. But we just can’t violate every visitor’s—and the homeowners’—privacy, just because of an incident.”

  “Trent Iverson’s not protected anymore,” Kevin pushed back, leaning over the armrest so that he could see into Dottie’s face. “Deceased, we have full right to his information.”

  The pep left her body, and Farah was suddenly reminded of the fact that this death was still somehow under wraps. “Oh,” she said quietly. “We didn’t know. I mean, we suspected that it might have been—” She huffed out a breath. “Well. In that case, I’ll pull Mr. Trent’s file, but you need a warrant for the rest, okay?”

  Kevin raised his hands in surrender. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “And that information is confidential,” Farah added. “So please don’t—”

  The woman shook her head stiffly. “Won’t leave my lips on my mother’s soul.” She patted the top of the doorframe and turned away, heading to the guard station.

  They were instructed to pull to the side, and a silver Rolls-Royce moved past.

  “Maybe it’s not so odd that Hugh and Nora don’t have private security or cameras,” Farah remarked, watching as the next car was stopped. “This takes neighborhood security to a whole nother level.”

  “Yeah, I heard the entire eight-mile border of the neighborhood is fenced with infrared cameras and motion-activation alarms. No one can get in or out without being seen.”

  Farah thought of her own street in Bell Gardens. Last week, she had opened her front door to head to work and found a man sleeping on her front porch. Their house windows had bars, and they used one of the old-school Club steering-wheel locks on Ty’s car. Compare that with the Iverson garage, where keys to the Ferrari and Bentley were in easy reach on hooks inside the four-thousand-square-foot, climate-controlled garage. She made the observation to Kevin, who chuckled.

  “Yeah, but you aren’t paying eighteen thousand dollars a month in HOA dues. So there’s that.”

  Farah let out a low whistle. “So that’s the price of all of this? I’ll keep stepping over strangers on my front porch, thanks.”

  “Yeah.” They watched as Dottie approached, a stapled set of papers in hand.

  “I did the last three years. Not sure how far back you wanted me to go.” She passed the pages through the window to Farah, who flipped through them quickly. “Those are just entry and exit logs, plus any call records from him.”

  “You keep records of any call to the gate?”

  Dottie nodded. “Records and notes. They’re organized by the phone number that originates the call. So these are only calls Trent made to us, not any call that mentions him, though we could pull those too, with the right warrant.” She held out a second set of pages. “And this is the entry and exit logs for the entire neighborhood for the last twenty-four hours.” She gave Farah a stern look. “You didn’t get this from me, understand? They’re sorted by homeowner address, but given that the Iverson property is unsecured, I thought it might be relevant to know everyone that was inside the neighborhood gates during the time of the incident.”