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As I stared around the room, the screen of Jonathan’s laptop flashed to the front page of Paige’s now-forgotten blog. Then it began to scroll downward.
Finally, it stopped on the very post that Wyatt and I had read, the one about Diana Del Mar.
I studied the page.
“What?” I asked out loud. “What am I looking for?”
The screen scrolled down by itself, revealing the comments — well, the single comment. I looked at the commenter’s name — G.A. Green — and then copied and pasted it into the search bar.
Nothing.
I sat back, thinking, and then clicked on the hard drive icon. I was crossing all sorts of boundaries, breaking all sorts of rules, but I didn’t care. I was too close now.
I browsed the names of Jonathan’s folders and even poked through some of the contents, but nothing jumped out at me. I was about to quit, but then I clicked on a folder labeled Development Notes, revealing a single file called Special Projects Status Report.
My heart flip-flopped.
The document consisted of a simple chart with six rows of information.
I sca
An uneasy vibration began to thrum somewhere inside me. I knew those names from somewhere.
The second, third, and fourth columns contained simple two-letter pairs, four-digit numbers, and then a letter/number combination.
The top line, Scales, read BL, 0517, B32.
My focus shrank to a pinprick as I read down the list, as fast as I could make myself. I couldn’t stop, because if I stopped I would lose my mind.
Fisher:FF, 0609, K29.
Green:PP, 0818, and a blank column.
Bernard:LJ, 1031, H14
Frowe: TR, 0318,V9.
Before I made it to the end, I clicked the mouse to close the document. I couldn’t bear to look at it any longer.
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
BL was Bria
That was when it hit me — the memory of where I’d heard the names Scales, Fisher, Bernard, and Frowe before: in the articles I’d read about the murders. They were the names of the bogus talent agencies that the girls had written in their calendars.
So my stepfather, who owned all of the movies that had inspired the killings, also had weird, almost hidden files pertaining to each of the victims.
And Paige Pollan was one of them. 818, the number she’d been trying to tell me all along, wasn’t part of a phone number — it was a date. Her date. August 18. Green must have been the name Jonathan used when he booked her “audition.” He’d hand-picked her off the Internet after finding her blog post about Diana’s movie.
I hung my head, a wave of nausea passing over me. Paige must have thought she was so lucky, to be discovered by a talent agent.
And all along, she‘d been one of the Hollywood Killer’s victims. Only for some reason, no one had made the co
More pieces fell into place. The script page, the vision … Paige was calling my attention to Diana Del Mar’s movie. A movie that had never been made — not by a real director, anyway.
But the Hollywood Killer had given it a try. After all … where better to find a forgotten Diana Del Mar script than in Diana’s own house? And who would have better access than the man who lived in the house?
Don’t jump to conclusions, I scolded myself. All of this information could have been collected from the news. Maybe Jonathan is interested in the murders the way Wyatt is. And Wyatt isn’t the murderer.
For a moment, I froze and listened, sure I could hear footsteps coming down the hall toward me. Then I realized that it had been the sound of my own heart, thudding against my chest. Nausea came over me in a wave, and I leaned back in the chair, staring at the dark wood beams on the ceiling.
This isn’t happening.
There had to be another explanation. There had to be.
But there was one way to know for sure.
My heart in my throat, I opened the file again — following a hunch I prayed was wrong.
But it wasn’t wrong.
The row at the very bottom of the chart was labeled Lovelock.
And the columns that followed it read MD, 0424, D20.
Marnie Delaine. Yesterday’s date. Then I got a sickening, poisonously bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I rose out of the chair and walked down the hall to the library. To the shelf full of movies that started with D.
There it was — an empty space, about twenty discs in. Right between Deterrence and Devil in a Blue Dress.
The perfect place for a movie called Detour.
I turned to walk out of the room, but before I made it three steps, everything went white.
I can’t stop crying.
“Tori,” he says, and I can tell he’s ru
I try to tell him I don’t care about acting anymore. I just want to go home.
But I know he won’t let me. He gets frustrated and turns away, muttering angrily to himself.
I gaze at the line of razor-thin light high in the corner of the room. I don’t remember how I got here — he drugged me, after we met at the abandoned building he’d claimed was his office. But now I know the room as well as my own bedroom. I’ve been here for days, with nothing to do but sit and look around … and cry.
I should stop crying. Not because it makes me a bad actress, but because it makes him mad. Still, he can’t hate me that much, can he? He gave me a present — a necklace. It’s gold, with a little half-moon charm hanging down from it —
Willa?”
The touch on my arm tore me out of the vision. I realized I was on the floor in the hallway, and Reed was standing over me.
“What happened?” he asked, frowning. “I kept calling your name, but you look so dazed.”
“I fell,” I said, wincing as I stood up. Judging by my aching tailbone, it must have been a pretty hard landing.
Reed insisted on helping me to the kitchen and getting me a glass of water. I thanked him, but I was too distracted and upset to make conversation.
All I could think was the granite-hard truth: Jonathan is a murderer. My stepfather is the Hollywood Killer.
I had this horrible feeling that I was being watched and forced myself to turn around. When I looked out the window, I almost fell over.
The pool was filled with brilliant red liquid, swirling so dark and thick that you couldn’t see past the surface.
I balled up my fists, thinking, It’s not real. The pool isn’t full of blood.
It was Paige, sending another sign. Of course she’d be sending the warnings fast and furious, now that I knew her killer lived in the house with me.