Johan had glanced at his phone, seen Xander’s name on the screen, and swiped to reject the call.

“We have that in common,” Johan replied, easing back into his seat and crossing his legs coolly. “I can assure you that the issue has been addressed and it won’t happen again. Still, if you don’t want to do business anymore, I completely understand.”

Barrett took a thumbnail of canary and vacuumed it up his left nostril. Within seconds he was purring like a big, rich cat.

“We’re good,” he said.

Xander called again forty minutes later, and this time Johan answered. For him to call twice in the space of one hour, knowing the delicate nature of Johan’s work, it had to be important.

“Kitty’s dead,” he said.

Johan was on his way to West Hollywood, to meet with and win back the trust of a certain Academy Award–winning actor and director. He hit the brakes and pulled his car over—a Tesla Model S he’d appropriated from his father’s multi-car garage. The Mustang was too beaten up to make the right impression.

“She’s dead?” Questions bottlenecked in Johan’s mind, none of which he wanted to ask over a cellular network, but one found its way through: “How do you know?”

“Cop came to the house looking for you,” Xander replied. “He wanted to know where you were last night.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That we were partying in Nueva Vida, and we could prove it, too.”

“Okay. Good.”

“He was a real hard-ass,” Xander continued. “Showed me the photos.”

“Photos?”

“Of Kitty’s dead body. You should have seen her, man. All shot up.” Xander clicked his tongue and exhaled. “What a fucking mess.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Johan said. He shook his head, snapping back to the task at hand. “I’ve still got work to do.”

Five meetings in three hours, then a party at Boardner’s. Johan put the work in. He shone, got the job done, but Kitty was on his mind throughout. Dead Kitty. All shot up. It was almost two a.m. by the time he got home. He went straight to bed but couldn’t sleep. Something nudged the underside of his brain. The mental equivalent of sitting on his car keys.

Cop came to the house looking for you.

A cop? Singular? Didn’t homicide detectives usually work in pairs?

A real hard-ass.

Johan tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable spot, but that pressure on his brain remained. He finally climbed out of bed, poured himself a glass of water, then accessed the home security app on his computer. Within moments he had zipped through footage from the previous afternoon and paused the tape on a shot of the homicide detective holding his ID up to the cam at the main gate.