butt propped up on one of those inflatable tire-like devices so there was no undue pressure on her wound, that Special Agent Joel Marcus first came into her room—and boom, into her life.
“Little did I know,” Joel often joked, “how much I’d enjoy seeing that ass up in the air in the future.”
She half smiled at the memory as Stephanie pushed open the door and called out, “Alison? Honey?”
No answer.
Without conscious thought, Elena started reaching for her piece, but of course, it was back in the car. Stephanie Mars hurried inside the house. Elena came through the door right behind her. Stephanie veered left and moved faster. Elena turned her head in that direction and was about to follow.
But the younger woman had stopped moving. She slowly turned back toward Elena.
The younger woman’s beautiful face broke into a smile, just as Elena felt something cold press against the back of her skull.
Their eyes met—Elena’s sad brown and the young woman’s wild green.
And Elena knew.
She thought of Joel when she heard the click and hoped, in the moment before the gun exploded, that she’d be with him again.
Chapter
Thirty-Two
Ash stood over Elena’s dead body.
She’d landed facedown, head turned to the side at an unnatural angle, eyes open. Blood flowed out of the back of her head, but Ash had already put down a tarp to make cleanup easier. Dee Dee put a hand on his arm and squeezed. He looked up at her and saw that smile. A man knows his great love’s various smiles. That was what they said—the smile when she was happy or the smile when she was genuinely laughing or the smile when she peered into the eyes of the man she loved, all that.
Ash knew this smile—the smile she saved for extreme violence—and he didn’t like it.
“Is it different for you?” Dee Dee asked him. “Killing a woman instead of a man.”
Ash was not in the mood. “Where’s her phone?”
“It’s still in the glove compartment.”
Ash had put a battery-operated jamming device in the glove compartment, so if someone was tracking her whereabouts—and he suspected that they might be—they’d be getting a no-signal. “Pull the car around back and bring me the phone.”
Dee Dee put her hands on either side of his face. “You okay, Ash?”
“I’m fine, but we have to move fast.”
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and hurried outside. Ash started to wrap the body in the tarp. They’d already dug a hole, so that no one would find her. When Dee Dee brought him Elena’s phone, he would send out a few “I’m fine” texts to anyone looking for her. It would take a few days, probably more, before someone started seriously investigating Elena Ramirez’s disappearance.
By then, Ash and Dee Dee would be done with the jobs. There’d be no clues.
“Ironic,” Dee Dee had said when Ash told her the plan. And while the actual meaning of the word “ironic” seemed elusive to Ash—he remembered people saying that Alanis Morissette had gotten it wrong in that song—it seemed to fit here. Elena Ramirez had been hired to find a “missing” Henry Thorpe. But Thorpe had been dead the whole time. And now, Elena Ramirez would be “missing” too.
Dee Dee came back into the house with the phone and jammer. “Here you go.”
“Finish wrapping her up.”
She mock-saluted him. “You’re in a mood.”
Ash bent down next to the body and picked up Elena’s hand. There should still be enough electrical impulse traveling through her body, so that her thumb could still unlock her phone. He pressed the phone against the pad.
Bingo.
The phone’s wallpaper was a photograph of Elena smiling widely, her arms wrapped around a far taller man who was smiling just as wide.
Dee Dee looked over his shoulder. “Do you think that’s her Joel?”
“I’d suspect so, yes.” Ash had listened to the whole conversation in the car because Dee Dee kept her phone on. “Do you even have an Aunt Sally?” he asked her.
“No.”
He shook his head in amazement. “You’re good.”
“Do you remember our middle school production of West Side Story?”
Ash had worked building the sets. She’d been one of the Sharks girls.
“I should have been Maria—I killed the audition—but Mr. Orloff gave it to Julia Ford because her father owned that Lexus dealership.”
Dee Dee didn’t say this with anger or pity. She was being accurate. Ash was enamored, no doubt about it, but Dee Dee had real star quality. You could just see it. Everyone in the auditorium, even though she’d just