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He’d learned this neat trick from a short stint training with some local parkour enthusiasts. Having spotted a group of them in his regular park while out on a walk with Bud, he’d befriended them, noticing how they were some of the fittest people he’d ever seen, prone to performing insanely agile feats with their bodies. While he couldn’t do the flips they could or run up vertical walls, this trick had come in handy many times over.
He moved toward the metal object lying on the ground.
Half buried in the grass, he wouldn’t have noticed it if not for Bud’s amazing sense of smell. Taking out a plastic bag that he kept for such occasions, he slid his hand into it, using it as a glove as he carefully retrieved a soda can that had been crushed in such a way that he couldn’t see what brand it was.
All he could tell was the can was red with white lettering — which didn’t narrow it down much. Turning to examine it from all angles, he noticed that the metal hadn’t corroded at all, which meant only one thing.
It had been left very recently.
Rising to full height, he glanced at his watch before peering into the sky until his eyes found the sun. Where they were standing right now was due west of the house, right about where the shots of Lexi could have been taken. The angle of the pictures had been low, which meant the photographer hadn’t been standing on anything other than the ground.
“Good find, Boy.”
Bud woofed pleased with himself as Kane slipped his hand through the fence and rewarded him with a few of his favorite treats.
He studied the hedge, which reached several feet above his head. Unlike the fence, there was no way anyone could have jumped it. How had they gotten around this hurdle?
He found his answer further down, where light seeped through a gap in a section of the hedge. It wasn’t wide, maybe a foot and a half, enough for an average person to slip through. He examined the edges of the hedge to find they had been sawn through.
Being above average size himself, Kane had to suck in his stomach to slip through the gap. He made it — just — though the effort might have cost him some skin. Through to the other side, he saw a line of tall oak trees that all but hid the hedge.
The photographer had been smart, choosing a spot that was hidden from any cars that might have passed by on the road by a thick tree trunk. There wasn’t any sign of the shorn off hedge itself: he assumed they had taken it away to draw less attention to this site.
All of that premeditated thinking caused a tightness in his chest.
This wasn’t some silly prank at all.
Whoever was doing this was deliberate and careful.
Pocketing the crushed can, he jumped back over the fence to resume the rest of his search.
9
Lexi was having a tough time focusing on her volunteer work.
Since that explosive meeting in the library, all she could think about, all she could see in her head were those pictures.
She felt unclean and exposed, but the worst of it was the shame that had overtaken her body. It didn’t matter that someone had done this to her: in the court of public opinion she was going to be found guilty.
It was happening already.
She knew she shouldn’t look — it was the first rule of having famous parents — but she hadn’t been able to stop herself. The comments section of the articles featuring the photographs were filling up with vitriol. There was name-calling and slut-shaming with some even theorizing that she had been kept out of the public eye just for this big pay day.
There were people who actually thought this was a stunt for money, and while there were many fame-hungry seekers who did exactly this, Lexi wasn’t one of them.
And the thing that burned most of all: while she knew the photographs had been ofher, she wasn’t stupid enough to believe it wasabouther.
It never was.
Whenever something happened, it always had to do her parents, more usually her mom, but her father too had seen his fair share of drama.
Growing up, it almost seemed that no one had been very interested in her. At times, that even applied to her own parents.
Even when she was a child, Lexi had been unusually sensitive to the wants and needs of her mother, and perhaps that was the way she had engineered it: Mandy had chosen a man who worshipped her above all else, then raised a daughter who did the same. Like the rest of the world, Lexi had lived off her mother’s smile and approval.
Yet, despite how she adored her, Lexi wasn’t blind to her mother’s faults.
In this line of work, self-absorption came with the territory coupled with long spells of absence, much of which couldn’t be helped as it was part of Mandy’s job not only to disappear off to far-flung locations to shoot the movies, but also to promote them. And the occasions when she’d brought Lexi with her were few and far between.
