She got up from the floor, deciding that was all the self-pity she could handle for now, and crossed the room to the window. It was just after five, still a few hours from sunset, when her street would be struck with passion colors, which always filled her with warmth and appreciation. No passion now. An elderly neighbor was practicing kung fu forms in his front yard, and Luke Kingsley was sitting on his front step, eating a banana.

She waved but he didn’t see her.

Kitty had turned the internet over in the days following their eventful meeting. She read accounts and interviews, watched news stories, scoured forums, viewed countless photographs. The most haunting—and damning—was Luke’s shirt, splashed with his wife’s blood. Kitty recalled the depleted look in his eyes (although that may have had more to do with the carbon monoxide poisoning) after she’d dragged him from his garage. I didn’t do it, you know, he’d said, and there’d been such a sadness—such a desperate quality—to his voice that she wanted to believe him.

Detective Tera Montecino of LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit had not been of the same mindset. “We’re following multiple leads, questioning witnesses,” she’d said during an intense and emotional press conference. “If Lisa Hayes is alive, we’ll find her. If she’s dead . . . we’ll find her. And then we’ll bring the guilty party to justice. I don’t care how many movies he’s made.”

This was three years ago. So far, neither Detective Tera Montecino, nor anybody else in the LAPD, had found Lisa Hayes.

But did Luke kill her?

The sadness in his voice was one thing, but that bloodstained shirt was tough to overlook, not to mention the tabloid-fodder nature of Luke and Lisa’s relationship. They had argued constantly, colorfully, publicly. There was cell phone footage of them being ejected from Musso & Frank’s, with Lisa taking open-handed swipes at Luke while calling him a “small-dick motherfucker.” One night, Lisa called the police to their house in Sherman Oaks, claiming Luke had tried to drown her in the pool. Luke insisted he was trying to save her. Both were drunk off their asses.

“He doesn’t look like the killing type,” Kitty said to Connie, her older sister, during one of their weekly Zoom chats.

“They said that shit about Ted Bundy,” Connie replied. “Motherfucker was a killing machine.”

“I know, but—”

“Woman goes missing, you can bet your sweet ass her man is behind it,” Connie interjected fiercely. “Same when they’re killed. Ninety percent of the time it’s the husband or boyfriend. Maybe ninety-nine. That’s some factual shit.”

Female homicides connected to a significant other were closer to fifty percent. Kitty had already looked it up.

“You stay the fuck away from him, Kitty.”