“As a matter of fact I did. My mother. Why the hell do you care?”

“Because someone killed my neighbor last night.”

He blinked, then leaned forward, clasping his hands in front of him. “What the hell does that have to do with me?”

“PW Enterprises. Your company?”

“Yeah. So?” “Someone from your company threatened to kill me if I didn’t stop printing stories about them in my paper. Two nights ago, someone broke into my home. Last night, my neighbor was murdered in my living room. Quite a stretch to claim coincidence, huh?”

At the word “murdered,” Pines’s lawyer began shoving papers into his briefcase. “That’s it, this conversation is over!”

“You’re kidding, right?” Pines asked me. “This is some kind of joke to get me to give you some shit quote to print in your paper, right?”

I shook my head from side to side. For Mrs. Carmichael’s sake, I wished it were just a joke.

Pines swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously up and down. “How do you know the caller was with PW?”

“I traced it to a number owned by your company.”

He shook his head. “That could be dozens of people. I started PW to back my last movie. The one before didn’t do so great at the box office, so I needed to recreate myself. Financially speaking.”

I nodded. That was standard op in Hollywood. Production companies came and went faster than the Santa Anas. “Go on.”

“That’s it. We’ve got an office on the Sunset Studios lot manned by a couple assistants and an intern. But anyone could have used the phones. The place isn’t even locked during the day.”

Which meant any one of my celebrity suspects could have had access. Katie was a regular at the studios, and Jennifer was there every day. Blain could have conceivably called in a favor to an actor friend on the set. And even if Pines was telling the truth, as I’d pointed out to Cal, he could have easily had an assistant do his dirty work. I felt myself mentally slumping in my chair, feeling like I was taking one step forward only to take two back again.

“Let’s go back to the case at hand,” Allie said, scribbling in her notebook. “You’re being charged with possession of child pornography. How do you—”

But Pines’s lawyer held up his hand. “We cannot comment on an open case.”

Allie shut her mouth with a pretty little pout. Then shifted tactics. “How do you feel about the public calling you a pedophile, Mr. Pines?”

“Look, honey,” Pines told her breasts, “people like to rubberneck at accidents. They all wanna see what’s going on. Doesn’t mean they’re gonna go crashing their cars into each other on purpose, now, does it? Just because I like to look now and then doesn’t make me some child molester.”