Gated Prey (Eve Ronin #3)(36)



Her curiosity got the better of her. She took out the script, flipped to the first page, and began reading:

EXT. LOS ANGELES—DAY

From above, the city is a big, flat swath of urban sprawl that smacks up against the Santa Monica Mountains, which look like an island of dry, green wilderness in a sea of bleak concrete and asphalt.

EVE’S VOICE

The law in the City of Los Angeles is enforced by the police department.

As we get closer, heading northwest, we can see that the Santa Monica Mountains are bordered by the city to the south, Pacific Coast Highway to the west, the San Fernando Valley to the north, and the Sepulveda Pass to the east.

EVE’S VOICE

But here in the Santa Monica Mountains and the surrounding communities, the law is enforced by the Los Angeles County Sheriff and his deputies.

WE PUSH IN ON:

EXT. MULHOLLAND HIGHWAY—DAY

The winding two-lane road snakes along the razor’s edge of the mountains and dips into the canyons. The farther northwest we go, the more perilous and empty the road becomes.

WE FIND:

A FEMALE BICYCLIST

speeding down the sharp curves. She’s in her late twenties, lean-bodied and totally focused, clad in razor-slim sunglasses, an aerodynamic helmet, and skintight, sculpted spandex, all worn for efficiency and practicality, not fashion. Though she wears it very well. She is one with her bike and the road, lost in the speed. This is EVE RONIN.

She couldn’t read any further. There was nothing about what she’d read that was particularly objectionable, but it still made her nauseous.

Or perhaps it was her dinner. Or the combination of both.

So she tossed the script aside, opened her laptop, and found the email from CSU with the links to the encrypted virtual drives created from Colter’s and Nagy’s laptops. She started with Colter’s computer and it didn’t take long for her to discover that Duncan’s guess was right: it was full of porn. Colter had downloaded hundreds of porn movies from the internet. She opened some of the files, watched a few minutes, and saw it was generic XXX stuff, nothing illegal, at least not in California.

There didn’t seem to be any personal photos or documents on the computer and she wasn’t able to access his Gmail account without his password. He seemed to use the device primarily as a porn delivery system. She opened his web browser and checked his history. It was, as she expected, a long list of porn sites.

Disgusted, Eve switched to the virtual drive of Greg Nagy’s computer. His laptop was filled with drafts of his own screenplays and the withering critiques he’d written of the scripts he was hired to read for various studios. The only scripts that he seemed to like were period dramas and historical films that were totally outside the action-adventure genre that he was writing in.

She opened a couple of his scripts to see if his own writing lived up to the high critical standards he used to judge other writers. They didn’t. His work was formulaic crap, mechanically rehashing the clichés and tropes of the genre without any originality or cleverness. It was as if they were written by a software application rather than a person.

The rest of his drive was stuffed with pirated movies, mostly AVI and MP4 files of recent superhero fare, and thousands of personal photos, the bulk of which were automatically downloaded from his phone each day and stored on iCloud. His pictures went back a decade. She randomly scanned through hundreds of photos from the last year, hoping to spot Dalander, Colter, or Simms in one of them, but she had no luck. She saw a lot of Nagy’s family, their dogs, selfies of Nagy, and pictures of food that he’d eaten, which she assumed he’d also uploaded to his social media accounts.

Eve logged on to Facebook and Instagram, searched for his accounts, but found they were all private.

By this time, it was after 2:00 a.m. and she felt tired and queasy.

She dropped two Alka-Seltzer tablets into a glass of water, guzzled it down as a nightcap, and went to bed, falling to sleep instantly.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


Eve was awakened by her phone, which wasn’t unusual. It was how she was awakened every morning. But it was ringing at 6:00 a.m., ninety minutes early. The caller ID read: MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE.

Her mouth was dry, so she quickly swallowed a few times, licked the inside of her cheeks and around her teeth to generate some saliva, and answered the call, trying to sound alert instead of half-asleep.

“Ronin.”

“This is Emilia Lopez. I’m the deputy medical examiner handling the autopsy of the McCaig baby.”

There was a strange urgency in Lopez’s voice. Had Eve, in her inexperience, made some horrible procedural error? She felt a stab of anxiety in her chest. “What can I do for you?”

“You need to get to Anna McCaig’s house right away, with some paramedics, though she’s probably bled to death by now.”

“What?” Eve sat up in bed, fully alert now, and whipped away the sheets.

“I found a portion of her ovaries and uterus still attached to her baby’s placenta. I called the hospital to check on the mother’s condition and learned that she left the ER yesterday before she was examined,” Lopez said. “If she’s still alive, she’s unconscious and bleeding out. Don’t wait for her to answer the door. Break it down.”

How could the paramedic have missed such a serious injury?

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