Eleanor Lavelle was a ghost until she suddenly reappeared as an apparently upstanding citizen of Eagle Rock in January 1988. She opened a bank account. She landed a job with a construction company. She paid taxes. She bought a car.

Her employment with Tav-Con lasted for ten months before she left, presumably to prepare for life as a stay-at-home mom. Following the birth of her daughter, Alicia, Eleanor had gone on welfare and lived at an address in Eagle Rock until her death in the fall of 1992.

Jessica had no idea whether those years spent under the radar had anything to do with Eleanor’s violent end. If the things she did, the places she went, the people she knew were relevant in any way to her murder and the disappearance of her daughter.

A search for a current listing for Tav-Con in the Los Angeles area drew a blank. Five minutes later, Jessica had the reason why. The company had been sold in early 1993 to a rival construction firm, Premium Construction, for a not-too-shabby $6 million following the death of its owner, Lincoln Tavernier. The sale had been sanctioned by his daughter, Catherine, who had inherited Tav-Con after his passing. She’d later used some of the cash to set up her own advertising agency, according to various online profiles that all painted her as a successful, and formidable, businesswoman.

Jessica stood up and stretched and rolled her neck to relieve the knots of tension. She found a pack of Marlboro Lights and a BIC lighter at the bottom of her bag and walked over to the door with her cell phone.

She stood in the open doorway, lit a cigarette, and called the number for Catherine Tavernier’s advertising agency. After a short conversation with her secretary and a sixty-second burst of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at an unnecessarily loud volume, Jessica was surprised to find she had an appointment with the woman at four p.m. that very afternoon at an address in Pasadena.

Next, she tried the main switchboard of the LAPD’s Hollywood Station and was less surprised to discover that Detective Jason Pryce was unavailable, and they couldn’t give out his cell phone number, no matter how important her call was. She left her name and her own digits before emphasizing again that she needed to speak to him as soon as possible.

Jessica took a final drag on the cigarette, dropped the butt on the ground, and crushed it beneath the sole of her sneaker. The cell phone screen in her hand told her it had just passed noon. She had time to kill before the meeting with Catherine Tavernier. She grabbed her bag and car keys, tucked her gun into her waistband under her T-shirt, and pulled the door shut behind her.