The Disappearing Act(90)

They never found Marla’s body. They found something else instead.

Once I got back to London, I checked my report number every day until it was removed from the system. Case closed. No body was found in the ravine beneath the sign on that day. No body, no crime.

Marla disappeared one last time.

But Emily Bryant’s body was found. In Lake Hollywood. Apparently, another anonymous tip-off. Nothing to do with me. God knows who called it in, but the LAPD dredged the lake. I remember wondering if Ben himself might have done it to finally close the circle. How he could be sure of maintaining his innocence I do not know. Though without Emily, her recordings, or her best friend I’m not sure how much ties him to her.

They found Emily’s body in a weighted suitcase 180 feet beneath the surface of the reservoir. A homicide investigation was opened.

The story was on the news for a few days. Her postmortem showed the cause of death to be an overdose of heroin; she was dead long before she entered the water. Some speculated that she had been an addict, that she could well have overdosed accidentally or deliberately with someone who then tried to dispose of her body. But Emily was no drug addict. Looking at her glowing headshot on the news, that much must have been clear to everyone.

I waited on tenterhooks for an international call, every day expecting to hear Officer Cortez’s voice, but the call took another month to come through.

I had begun to relax, to think that somehow I was irrelevant to Emily’s story. After all, she was long dead before I even arrived in LA.

It was hard for the coroners to pin down exactly how long Emily Bryant had been dead, though, having only the rate of her decomposition to go by, the lower temperatures this year apparently slowing down decomposition while the high level of bacterial life present in the lake water may have potentially sped it up.

I read everything that surfaced online, becoming once again an expert on Emily. I worked out the time line, her disappearance, my arrival, my departure. My first phone call with Cortez about Emily would have come five weeks after her actual death, making me an unlikely suspect or witness. Though my story of a look-alike might be far more concerning.

When Cortez finally called me she walked me back through what I had told her in February. I reminded her of the part of the story where she herself assured me on the phone that the police had ID’d Emily in her apartment and told me she was fine. Placing the blame right back on the LAPD’s doorstep.

Cortez asked me who the friend of Emily’s was that I had spoken to about her disappearance. I told her I could not remember her name. I kept my answers vague, the time and the distance from those seemingly unimportant events doing most of my work for me. I do not know if Cortez managed to get footage from the Ellis Building of Joanne pretending to be Emily, but it seems unlikely. Lucy told me they wiped the tapes after a month. I’m pretty sure the footage of Joanne would only be another dead end for the LAPD. Joanne didn’t know who hired her. Even if Cortez traced the bank account that paid Joanne, I’m sure it would only lead back to Emily’s bank account anyway. Marla had access to everything through Emily’s computer and phone.

Who knows where that laptop and phone are now. It’s unlikely Cortez found them back in Emily’s apartment, and who knows where Marla was staying. I try not to think of Emily’s empty rooms, those wilted plants, the bowl full of moldy fruit. My emails and texts to Emily are all lost along with those audio files.

I gave my statement to Cortez again: twice. Leaving out anything to do with Marla and anything that might incriminate me.

That call was a month ago and I haven’t heard a thing more. I check the news less these days. I try to forget. But every now and then I get scared. I expect another call, from Cortez, the call that unravels everything I’ve said and lands me in something I can’t ever get out of.

And there’s another thought that haunts me, the fact that Marla’s body was never found. I think of the nighttime animal noises up in Griffith Park and perhaps that’s my answer, but there’s a tiny part of me that wonders if, somehow, Marla got away. If somehow her fall was broken on the way down and somehow, she tumbled to safety and then woke the next day, severely injured but alive. I know it’s not possible but there’s a magic and a terror to thinking she might still be out there, a ghost in a city of visitors.

It must have been true, what Marla told me about her childhood, because no one has missed her. There were no reports on Marla. Emily’s family was plastered across the papers after her body was discovered, photos of her grieving father. He had filed his own missing persons report on Emily a week after Marla fell. That whole time he’d thought she was fine because Marla was texting him back as Emily. And when she stopped Emily’s dad noticed. Cortez must know someone was impersonating Emily but without real evidence, or even a name, Marla’s trail must have gone cold.

But Marla didn’t kill Emily. Moon Finch killed Emily. It’s odd being able to see things from the other side. I watched with interest as a few weeks after Cortez’s phone call Moon Finch was quietly bought out by another company. Ben Cohan and his business partner, Mike, moved on who knows where. Did they cut their losses or were they pushed? I don’t know if without that recording, or a witness, any of it could even be traced back to them. The most I can hope for is that what happened with Emily and then Marla scared them enough that they’d think twice before doing anything again.