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say so. But I’m gonna retire down there, you watch me. Get a condo with an ocean view, drink margaritas on the beach, fish when I want to.”
When pigs fly, she thought, but decided not to argue further. As the officer waved them through, Settler eased into the uneven flow of traffic, the lights of the city swimming through low-hanging November clouds, the streets wet and shimmering, Christmas lights and decorations visible in storefronts, as the season was fast approaching.
Martinez and Settler were heading back to the station. They’d spent most of the day in the hotel room from which the victim, who had registered as D. Storm, had leaped.
“You were saying,” Martinez prodded. “About our jumper? Didi, whatever.”
“Storm.” She took a quick left, beating the light as she headed back to the station. “Didi Storm is, like, everywhere right now, even trending on the Internet, I think.”
“Why? Again, who is she?”
“Back in the day, she was a celebrity impersonator.”
“I thought guys did that,” Martinez said, wiping the condensation from the inside of the passenger window. “You know what I’m talkin’ about, the dudes with the fake boobs and wigs and makeup. I never have figured out how they hide their junk. Can’t be easy.”
“Well, you’re right. It’s not easy being a woman,” she said dryly.
He snorted, but his lips twitched in his goatee. “Especially for a guy.”
“Don’t be so sexist.” She turned on the defrost to clear the windshield. “Women can be impersonators, and Didi Storm had her own show in Vegas, years back. She wasn’t an A-lister, but she did okay, and then she disappeared.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because as I said, she’s everywhere right now. Not literally, of course, but there’s a book out, kind of a tell-all about her life that hypothesizes about what happened to her, if she’s alive or dead, that kind of thing. And with the book come articles online and in papers. A buzz.” She went on to explain about the unusual case, rumored to have involved the selling of babies, explosions rocking the desert, and Didi Storm’s disappearance.
“Okay.”
“I have a copy.” With her eyes on the road, she reached behind the passenger seat and into her open bag to pull out the hardback of I’m Not Me, with the subtitle The Untold Didi Storm Story. The cover was a closeup of Didi’s face, one side made up to look like Marilyn Monroe, her perfect features appearing to be ripped in half as part of the artwork, the other side a stripped-down picture of Didi Storm.
“You read it?”
Signaling for the next turn, she nodded. “Uh-huh. Finished it last night.”
“Good?”
“Kept my interest, and now . . .”
“Yeah. That’s weird, isn’t it? The book comes out and then . . . huh.” He scratched at his goatee. “I thought for a second when I saw the victim, she was damned Marilyn Monroe—”
“Who’s been dead over fifty years.”
“Even so, at least I knew who she was. This Didi Storm?” He was shaking his head and lifting his shoulders. “And for sure, I wouldn’t buy any book about her.”
“You wouldn’t buy a book unless it was about fishing.”
“Well, yeah. Maybe.”
“There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. But other people, like me, would pick it up because her case is interesting. And that’s not all, there’s even talk of a made-for-TV movie about her.”
“How do you know?”
“Because when you were busy wrapping things up with the M.E., I checked the Internet on my phone.”
He was finally engaged, his eyebrows drawing together. “So why would she jump now? If she’s suddenly famous, why—”
“It’s not her,” she said. A snarl of traffic was visible ahead, and she cut across two lanes and took a sharp turn to avoid the congestion. The street was narrow and steep, cars parked on either side as huge skyscrapers knifed into the low-hanging clouds.
“I thought you said it was. And there’s the wig.”
