For all her warmth and charm, Dee was a private person, a keeper of secrets, or she couldn’t have stayed with Janis. Whatever Janis wanted to tell me about Brenae Brasil would wait until Janis was ready, but I chafed at her secrecy after the night I’d had. I’d thought there was a mutual trust between us, from our confidences this summer. I’d come all this way. I paced the expensive room, unable to sit down. The rug was soft and deep on my bare feet; a long mirror, framed in dark wood, reshaped my figure, taller, slimmer. Inside, however, I felt raw and scraped and determined, a wintry version of me. I’d returned to L.A. because of the offer Janis had dangled—but now I wondered what I was signing up for. Janis wasn’t an editor. She was a rich, influential woman, used to getting her way. Say there was a real story behind Brenae’s death; would it be my story, or my benefactor’s? What power would I have to shape my reporting, to pitch magazines? I slumped down on a chair by the empty desk. The room got small. The air tasted clean but close. In the silence, I didn’t know what I was listening for. Cars on the road outside? The accommodations were too pricey for that. But the presence of the road—that I heard, not as a noise, but as a lapse in the night’s total stillness.

Kim Lord’s paintings had taught me one thing: women died violent deaths all the time, in agonized and humiliating ways, and you shouldn’t publicize any one of their severed lives unless you searched inside yourself and questioned why.

I rose, soaped and rinsed my body twice in the sparkling white bathtub, drank two glasses of water to avoid a hangover, and crawled into the dead center of the soft, smooth king, unable to touch any of the edges. The distance felt good, but I got up anyway, checked the door’s lock for a third time, then switched off the light.

I woke up an hour later, completely alert, my heart racing, as if someone had shouted in my ear. I clicked on the light, but the room was empty and quiet. I turned off the lamp again and closed my eyes. I couldn’t sleep. In my mind’s eye, I saw the gun touching Brenae’s lips. The milk dribbling from her chin. The footage had been so tender and lush. So deliberate. Who had been holding the camera? It had to have been someone she trusted.