Chapter 1

Grey, the Detective

PRESENT DAY

The moment Detective Grey Holloway arrived at the palm tree–ringed Bel Air mansion now crawling with cops, a hush fell. A millisecond of silence, like a glitch in a movie, and then the whispering started. Since Grey was used to being a pariah among the LAPD, she simply ducked under the crime scene tape and pushed her way inside the house, past the curious eyes, reminding herself that she belonged. She’d been assigned to this case by Captain Xie himself, who’d told her over the phone, in his usual brusque manner, that he needed her, specifically, for a reason he then failed to name.

It wasn’t until Grey caught fragments of the whispered conversations that she began to realize there might something different about the gossip today. “She looks exactly—” someone hissed as she walked past, followed by a hushed “how creepy,” and then, “—just like the dead girl.”

Frowning, Grey followed the line of evidence techs as they marched upstairs. They stood in a ring in what appeared to be a bedroom, peering at something on the floor. It was unprofessional, that motionless staring, and for a moment, Grey thought of reprimanding them. Then she slipped past the wall of their shoulders and understood.

The body splayed out in a pool of dried blood could’ve been her twin. Looking down at the woman’s face, frozen in a death mask of horror, was like looking into a dark mirror, stumbling onto the scene of her own death in a parallel dimension. All the techs grew quiet, studying her as intensely as she studied the woman.

Was this why Captain Xie had wanted her—because Grey looked uncannily like the victim? If so, how bizarre.

That was a question for later. Right now, she was in charge of bringing the scene to order. She took a deep breath. “I want all investigators to clear the room. Go downstairs and help with cataloging.”

As they dutifully scattered, leaving her with the body, Grey focused on her senses. It was her grounding ritual whenever she entered a new crime scene, a practice that allowed her to gather her first impressions before other people could cloud her thinking. She’d learned that regulating her mind was just as important as regulating her subordinates—and that part was paramount for any detective, but especially for one as young and female as her, with her unfortunate wide-set Disney-princess eyes and the vocal fry she couldn’t rid herself of, no matter how hard she tried.

She crouched beside the body. The victim appeared to be in her late twenties. She was wearing a sage-green workout set Grey had seen only last weekend in the window of an Alo store on Rodeo Drive. Underneath the matted blood, the victim’s hair was a balayage masterpiece, blond streaks painted with precision, even better than Grey’s. Grey had come by her tan honest, thanks to days in the sun tracking leads, but the victim’s skin was the telltale orange-taupe of La Mer’s self-tanning line, and her astonished eyes, cerulean beneath the spiderwebs of broken blood vessels, were framed by lush lash extensions—probably mink—giving her the appearance of a doll from a nightmare. The blood streaking the victim’s skin was so pungent, the air so thick with iron, that the one beat cop still lingering in the corner was subtly gagging. Underneath that blood, Grey was willing to bet that the woman’s skin was flawless, the product of pricey facials and nightly retinol. No doubt, the body on the floor was worth a small fortune.

So the victim was wealthy, on top of being young and attractive. Despite what movie studios would have people believe, young, rich, glamorous murder victims were rare, and sure to draw vultures. Grey would have to issue a gag order to keep details from leaking to the press.

She slipped on latex gloves, lifted one of the victim’s stiff hands, and gritted her teeth. They were wearing the same nail polish: “Fiji” by Essie, a distinctive ballet pink. Christ. Forget the press. The other detectives were going to eat this up. She’d never hear the end of it: Detective Barbie’s murdered twin.

The beat cop stepped closer. “I usually need a minute to process, too,” he said, mistaking her gritted teeth for disgust. “Dead bodies can be a lot.”

Grey rose and glanced at his name tag. J. GOMEZ. “You’re the one who moved her?”

Officer Gomez flushed. Captain Xie had given Grey a small amount of information on her way to the scene: After receiving several worried calls from the victim’s mother, the LAPD had dispatched Gomez to conduct a routine wellness check. Failing to get a response to his knocks, the overeager cop had pushed his way inside, searched the home, and found the victim lying face down in her bedroom, a bullet hole to her right temple. Lack of experience combined with natural human instinct had compelled him to flip her to get a look at her face, thereby disrupting the integrity of Grey’s crime scene.

“I’m sorry,” Gomez mumbled. “It won’t happen again.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” she said softly. She’d decided early in her career that there was no reason, other than tradition, to be an asshole to the people below her. Even when those people were young male officers suffering from a case of misplaced chivalry. “Why don’t you head downstairs and assist the techs with cataloging?”

His shoulders slumped at the dismissal. Of course, Grey also saw no reason to reward careless mistakes.

The officer was still shuffling downstairs when she heard a familiar voice. “Freaky, isn’t it? How much the vic looks like you.”

Grey turned to find Dr. Clifton Miles from the medical examiner’s office passing Gomez on the stairs, trailed by two of his assistants. Grey liked Cliff. He was older, probably close to retiring, but unlike many of the older men she’d encountered on the job, he’d always taken her seriously.

“It’s all they’re talking about downstairs,” Cliff added with a rueful smile. “They’re taking bets on whether the two of you are sisters or cousins. You aren’t related, are you?”

“No.” The threat of gossip left Grey unmoved. Law enforcement had never been her plan, but her father’s early death from a broken heart—officially ruled a heart attack—had left her no other option. She’d gone straight into the police academy after graduating summa cum laude from UCLA. Since then, her focus had been so single-minded that after the requisite four years as an officer, she’d ascended to the rank of detective by the tender age of twenty-five. Now, with two years as a detective under her belt, she’d already been elevated by Captain Xie to the prestigious robbery-homicide division, a department most detectives spent their careers trying to reach. Grey’s clearance rate thus far was an unprecedented 100 percent.

And it turned out the only thing people hated more than witnessing the rise of an enfant terrible was witnessing the rise of a female enfant terrible, especially one who supplemented her meager law enforcement salary with shifts at an infamous Hollywood nightclub, working the VIP tables. By now, she’d heard every variation of “She’s sleeping her way to the top” and always longed to reassure the whisperers that vengeance was an effective enough motivator—no need to involve sex. But of course she didn’t. Grey knew that once you were labeled “one of those girls,” the kind more likely to end up on the gruesome side of the crime scene tape, there was no going back. After all, one of those girls was the whole reason her father had gone crazy and she’d had to become a cop in the first place.

Now she studied her doppelgänger on the floor. “All dead women look alike, if you think about it,” she told Cliff. “Like a man’s worst fear and his darkest fantasy combined.”

“Jesus. You quoting someone?”

“Myself.”

“Are you supposed to be the other dead woman in this metaphor?”

“It’s an analogy.”

Cliff chuckled. “You’re an odd duck, aren’t you, Detective?”

He wasn’t wrong. Rumors about Grey’s after-hours nightclub gig had spread like wildfire. From her male colleagues, it seemed to elicit either teasing or an infantilizing protectiveness, both of which were embarrassing for everyone. If she had a dime for every time she’d been called Detective Barbie or Detective Stripper, or every time she had to halt her stride for an officer who wanted to awkwardly open a door for her, she’d be rich enough to sack every man in the LAPD and replace him with a canine detective, the very definition of “don’t tempt her with a good time.” But because Grey expected those reactions, they rarely got under her skin.

What did was the way other female officers treated her. Women were still a minority in the force, and in Grey’s ideal world, she would’ve preferred solidarity, no matter how kumbaya that made her sound. But a lot of older female cops had come up in an era of policing that equated femininity with weakness and machismo with respect. Unfortunately, Grey was a bottle-service moonlighter who wore a lot of pink. She understood that she and her colleagues were all just products of their times, and while she might wish differently, there was no forcing friendship. So she’d resigned herself to keeping her head down, her mouth shut, and her clearance rate unimpeachable, and to hell with the whispers.

“What do we know so far?” she asked Cliff, redirecting.

His voice took on the well-oiled rhythm of a man who’d given this rundown plenty of times. “Victim’s name is Elizabeth Drake. Thirty-three years old. Her mom called from the family home in Iowa. Said Drake moved out here years ago to work in the industry but was currently unemployed. Claimed there was no history of mental illness.”

“Drake, huh?” The name stirred something. “I swear I’ve heard that before.”

“Sounds familiar to me, too,” Cliff agreed. “We haven’t found any signs of forced entry, other than your Officer Cowboy getting rough with the door, so the killer might’ve known Drake or had a key. She was shot in the temple, at close range. The bullet hole is small, so we’re looking at a lightweight handgun, maybe a nine millimeter.”

“Easy to handle,” Grey observed. “And conceal.”

“You know what’s not?” Cliff gestured to the streaks of blood and gore that had turned the wall into a Jackson Pollock painting. “The shooter was close enough to get sprayed.”

Grey turned to one of Cliff’s assistants. “Check the bathrooms to see if the shooter washed up and left any DNA. And go downstairs and tell Officer Gomez to start knocking on neighbors’ doors. We need to know if anyone saw or heard anything unusual around…” She glanced at Cliff.

“My best guess is she’s been dead anywhere from twelve to twenty-four hours. I’ll know more once I get her on my table.”

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