“Well. That’s all I have right now. Do you have anything else you need to tell me?”
It was my opening, my chance to tell him that I’d decided to go after Reeve on my own. The smart thing would be to tell him, to tell someone.
But could I really do this if anyone else was involved? Reeve had too many resources. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d find out if I pulled Joe into the mix, and the last thing I wanted to do was endanger anyone else. “Nope. That’s all I’ve learned too.”
Joe sighed. “Then you’ll hear from me when I have more.”
“But Emily.” He caught me just as I was hanging up. “Remember the girl is as far as I go. I’ll do what I can to find your friend, but if all roads lead to Sallis, I’m out. That’s a death wish.”
He’d given me a similar warning the day he’d agreed to work my case. “You won’t find anyone who will take on a man like him. And if you find someone who says they will, run.”
I was tired of running. And, fuck, maybe I did have a death wish.
I’d known that Amber had started seeing Reeve long before her phone call. I’d seen a picture of them together in the Star Tracks section of People. It wasn’t even a magazine I read very often, and when I did, I skipped over the section that featured photos of celebrities out in the world doing celebrity things. The fact that I’d seen it at all had been a giant fluke. It was a few weeks after the first episode of NextGen had aired, and both critics and audiences were hailing it as the best new show of the season. Paparazzi began waiting outside the studio and showing up at network events. Though my face wasn’t that recognizable, I’d find them hanging around my neighborhood on occasion. Sometimes I’d catch a flash out of my peripheral vision, a cell phone held up in my direction. I’d heard from a costar that I was in that week’s People, so I picked it up.
In my tiny one-bedroom apartment on the hillside of West Hollywood, I had poured myself a glass of wine and curled up on my couch before opening the magazine. Her photo caught my eye first – ironically it was directly opposite where mine was featured. The shot had been taken at a star-studded gala event held at Reeve’s hotel in Santa Monica. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his tuxedo, much like they had been when I’d arrived at the Cherry Lounge, and she clung onto his arm flashing her perfect smile.
She looks thin, I’d thought, and she’s dyed her hair a lighter blond. Funny, I had too.
I was transfixed for a long time before finally reading the caption. SALLIS’S LATEST FEMALE COMPANION, it read. It didn’t even mention her by name. Until that moment, I’d thought I’d come so far from where I’d left her half a decade before. Seeing us paired on two facing pages like that, where even in a photo I could see the who I was compared to the who she was, I realized that I hadn’t gone anywhere. Her with no name, me with no face. At least she had a “companion.”
After I hung up with Joe, I opened the room safe and pulled out the accordion file organizer that held all the information I’d gathered regarding Amber, including the clipping from People. That was where all of this had really begun – when I’d seen her face and realized that she was still alive. Not that I’d thought she was dead before that. She’d just been dead to me, and in that photo she’d been resurrected. I didn’t pay any more attention to her after that than I had before, didn’t look for her on the Internet or try to track her down. But, still, something was different. Memories surfaced more easily. Her name was closer to the tip of my tongue. Her face seen in crowds she wasn’t in.
After making sure the deadbolt was locked and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was on my knob, I laid everything out on my bed as I searched for it now. When I found it, I studied it, wondering when exactly it had been taken. I always referred to it in my mind as “January 27” since that was the edition of the magazine, but that wasn’t the date of the photo. Reading through all the copy on the page, I discovered a reference to New Year’s Eve that I hadn’t noticed before.
It was just a year ago, then. One year. NextGen had aired just after the holiday as a midseason replacement show, changing my life entirely. Had Reeve Sallis done the same for Amber?
On a whim, I decided to put everything in chronological order so that I could cement her timeline in my head. I placed the People photo in the top left corner of my bed. A few seconds later, I changed my mind and scooted it in so I could put something before it.
Joe’s research had found the piece of information that I wanted to put first. She’d been living in a hotel. A Sallis hotel. On October 19, a little more than a year before I’d heard her message, she’d let her room go and there was no record of any address after that.
“Because that’s what she does,” I’d told him. “She pegs the man she wants. She gets near him. She moves in. October nineteenth is when she moved in with Reeve.”
“Huh. She moves fast,” Joe had said.
I intended to move faster.
Using a piece of the hotel stationary from the bedside table, I wrote down, August 30 to October 19 – hotel. This I placed in the first spot on the bed.
Besides People magazine, Amber had only been photographed with Reeve a few times, and those I’d had to search the Internet for hours to find. I’d printed them all for my file, and now I laid them out on the row in no particular order since none of them referenced a date except one. I put that one last. It was captioned MEMORIAL DAY AT THE PALM SPRINGS RESORT – the very place I was staying. It was the last reference to a location that Joe and I had been able to find for her. Though he’d said he’d only investigate Amber, Joe had gone so far as to learn that Reeve’s Beverly Park home had been undergoing renovations and had been completely uninhabited for most of the previous year. Joe figured Reeve had been resort hopping during that time. Currently, he was in the process of tracking down Reeve’s travels for the summer months, trying to determine where he’d gone and if Amber had been with him. It was a slow task since Reeve traveled a lot, always using his own jet. Private flight manifests weren’t always easy to find, it turned out, nor were they always accurate.