After She's Gone (West Coast 3)

Which gave her a lot of time to think.

She turned on the radio and her favorite LA station was starting to fade, the long road north stretching out for hundreds of miles, the future uncertain.

Rhonda Nash didn’t put much faith in “hunches” or “gut feelings” or hypothetical “theories.” She was a cold, hard facts kind of cop and those feelings spilled over into her private life, which probably explained why, at nearly forty, she’d never married though she’d gotten close a couple of times. It was just that her bullshit meter was nearly always on alert and a lot of men she’d dated didn’t pass the test.

So when she found a connection in a case she was working on, some little piece of evidence that tied parts of the ongoing investigation together, she experienced a little sizzle of anticipation, a spike of adrenaline that fired her blood and, as was the case in the disappearance of Allie Kramer, propelled Nash into action.

Nash had been contacted by Jonas Hayes, who worked homicide in LA. A woman’s body had been discovered in a parking lot near a club in Venice Beach. She’d been identified as Holly Dennison, who not only had worked with Allie Kramer and Lucinda Rinaldi on Dead Heat, but who had been found wearing a mask, a distorted image of Allie Kramer.

The pictures were disturbing, a set of digital photos of a woman’s dead body wedged between a couple of cars in a parking lot. The first set showed pictures of the corpse wearing the mask. The second set was the victim without the mask, a woman’s face with fixed gaze and ashen skin tones, Holly Dennison, a set designer, who like Rinaldi, had worked on Dead Heat. A third set was of close-ups of the mask, front and back, and the one-word message scrawled on the picture’s back.

All in all, weird as hell.

The cause of death wasn’t yet official, but a single gunshot wound to the torso, a through and through, made an educated guess simple.

Why had the mask been placed on the victim’s face? What connection, other than the obvious movie link, did Dennison have to Allie Kramer?

Now, Nash hurried out of the station house in Portland and felt the slap of cold April rain. At four in the afternoon, rush hour was already in full swing. Cars, trucks, vans, bikes, and buses clogged the city streets, inching from one red light to the next, each vehicle angling around the others in an effort to find a way out of the heart of Portland.

Making her way along the crowded afternoon sidewalk, Nash pulled up the hood of her coat and tried to imagine how Holly Dennison, a dead woman in LA wearing a grotesque mask of Allie Kramer, fit into the case. The connection was obvious. Almost too obvious: the message on the mask’s back side.

A single word: Sister.

Bingo. Connection.

Who was Allie Kramer’s sister?

Cassie Kramer.

Who fought with Allie on the night she disappeared?

Cassie Kramer.

Who felt betrayed by her sister’s involvement with her estranged husband?

Cassie Kramer.

And who just happened to be in LA when the murder of set designer Holly Dennison occurred?

Cassie Kramer.

But why would Cassie leave such an obvious clue, almost framing herself? Even though she’d recently been a patient in the mental ward of Mercy Hospital, Cassie seemed coherent. She had a documented quick temper, but was she really homicidal? Could she have found a way to make her sister disappear? Was Allie Kramer, like Holly Dennison, already dead? Then why hide one body and leave the other to be found?

Things weren’t adding up.

There were still too many inconsistencies.

Another reason to head to LA and sort a few things out.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Double T, in a baseball cap and rain jacket, fall into step with her.

“Did I hear right?” he asked as they reached the corner. “You’re flying to California tonight?”

“In three hours if I can make it to the airport in rush hour.”

“Could set you up with a police escort. Make sure you get to PDX in time.”

“Funny guy.” She checked her watch. Told herself there was plenty of time. “You know there’s been an Allie Kramer sighting down there.”