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“Well. Short answer – I don’t think so. His mother’s marriage certificate lists her maiden name as Kaya, but there’s simply no record of her existence before that. Every bio that Sallis has published says she grew up in Athens and met her husband at the opening dinner reception of his resort there. She was supposedly just out of school. Problem is, that event was invitation only and there’s no Kaya on the list. So say she came as a plus one. Ignore the question of who’d take a nobody kid to an important political event. Because that’s what it was – a dinner to schmooze the officials. It was a big deal for one of Greece’s own countrymen to bring his success back to his homeland. There would have been tight security. Elena would have been on the list, even as a date. Kaya has to be a fake name or that wasn’t where she really met Daniel Sallis. One of those is a lie. Which begs the question – why?”

Probably because where she really met him wasn’t suitable for discussing in polite company. I was jaded where very rich men were concerned, though. It was my experience that most of them bought their women. Why wouldn’t that be the case with Reeve’s father?

I hoped it was the case with Reeve as well or I was wasting my time at his resort.

But I didn’t say that to Joe. Instead I let his question hang.

“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.

After the Palm Springs resort pic came the transcription of Amber’s message. I’d typed it out so I could refer to it easily. The date on the answering machine had said August 17. Three whole months after she had last been photographed. Three whole months before I’d heard that cryptic message. I wanted to blame my mother for that, wanted to believe she’d been too lost in her head to remember to tell me she had a message waiting. But it was just as likely she didn’t tell me because I hadn’t visited her in months, and what was the urgency of calling me to ask about a blue raincoat?

I tried not to think too much about the lost months. It would be too easy for the guilt to overwhelm me.

The message was the last time anyone had seen or heard from Amber. She’d simply vanished after that. When Joe had called a PR representative of Reeve’s to inquire about how he might get hold of her, he’d been given a scripted response: “Mr. Sallis and Ms. Pries have ended their relationship. We are unaware of Ms. Pries’s current whereabouts.” The woman wouldn’t even say when they’d broken up, but when Joe asked if Reeve was seeing anyone now, he’d been given a definitive no.

Reeve was photographed mid-September at an event with another woman and again at a Halloween party with yet another woman, both unnamed. These pictures started a new row on the bed. Next to them, I placed the paper that I’d written the statement from Reeve’s PR on. On another piece of stationary I wrote the newest information: James Pries murdered – October. This I held onto as I studied everything laid out in front of me, hoping it would connect with something, anything.

But no matter how I tried to look at it, I couldn’t get James Pries’s murder to fit. Amber called me in August. Reeve was seen dating others by September. Common sense put her disappearance between the call and the first event he attended without her. Her father’s death was after that.