Wanting Sheila Dead(84)

“Her real name’s Harrigan,” Sheila said. “Her father does entertainment news for Fox. He’s a right royal prick, too.”

Since Grace actually agreed with this, she let it go. Olivia hurried away, and somebody said “Action.”

The small blond woman turned to the camera and smiled. “Good evening! This is Deirdre Damien with Entertainment News Tonight, and I’m here with the latest winner of the phenomenally popular reality show, America’s Next Superstar! Our guest beat out literally hundreds of other girls just to make it on air, and then she beat out another thirteen to take home the top prize. Here’s Grace Alsop, and I’m very excited to have her!”

Deirdre Damien, Grace thought. What a name. She turned to the camera herself. It was very important not to leave dead air. Not ever.

“Good evening, Deirdre,” she said. She smiled.

“Well,” Deirdre said. “Let’s start at the beginning. Your name isn’t really Grace Alsop, is it? That’s your stage name.”

“That’s right,” Grace said. “My original name is Grace Harrigan.”

“Well, now,” Deirdre said. “There are some people, quite a lot of them really, who say you changed your name so that people wouldn’t know that you’re your father’s daughter. Your father is the entertainment news director for Fox, isn’t he?”

“That’s right,” Grace said. “But I don’t think I was hoping nobody would know. It isn’t a hard thing to find out. I was just hoping to be judged on my own merits and not because my father is important in the industry.”

“Was it his importance in the industry that bothered you,” Deirdre said, “or the fact that Fox is known to hire only very bigoted people to work for it? Is your father a homophobe?”

“What?” Grace said.

“Or maybe it’s race,” Deirdre said. “I know a lot of people at Fox are supposed to favor a return to segregation. Didn’t your father once say that President Obama looked like a monkey with a Harvard accent?”

“Not in front of me, he didn’t,” Grace said. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was trying desperately to think. She had expected to be accused of being a spy. She hadn’t expected this. She had no idea where this was going to go.

“A lot of people are concerned that America’s most popular reality show has thrown up a winner who may not be open to the aspirations of all Americans,” Deirdre said. “I’d like to know what you’re going to do to make sure that people know you aren’t really like that. Do you intend to do some outreach? Some community service? Maybe you’d be interested in dating an African American man.”

Grace had been watching entertainment news all her life. She knew that it never threw up interviews like this one. It didn’t even come close.

“Actually,” she said, “I’ve got something else I’m working on at the moment. I don’t know if you know it, but there was a murder during our filming for this show.”

Deirdre looked confused. Grace shot a look at Sheila Dunham. Sheila was sitting far forward on her chair. Her hands were knotted together. They looked like claws.

“I’m committed,” Grace said, “to proving that the police and the public are wrong. I’ve started a crusade to prove that Sheila Dunham did not murder that girl, and that she’d never kept her in a house in Malibu as a slave.”





SEVEN



1


It was the lack of sleep, Gregor thought, that was making him behave so . . . erratically. It didn’t sound to him like the right word. He emerged onto City Ave like a night flying bat suddenly thrust into daylight. Everything looked too bright, even though it wasn’t bright at all. It wasn’t raining, but there were clouds covering the sky, black ones, promising even more rain. He didn’t used to be subject to insomnia. Even during his earliest days at the Bureau, he had been able to sleep at night. There were people who thought he was a little odd that way. How could you sleep after you’d pulled the body of a kidnapped twelve-year-old out of a back-road ditch at four o’clock in the morning? How could you sleep when you knew there were children missing, girls dead in basements, piles of paper supposed to be full of leads piling up on your desk and falling off it in the night?

The FBI handles more than one kind of crime, and when Gregor had first joined it he had signed on to work on the financial stuff. That made sense, because in those days special agents were expected to be either lawyers or accountants, and Gregor had been an accountant. It would be better to say he had trained as an accountant, at the Harvard Business School. He’d never actually worked as one. Still, given his background, he had expected to be put to work on organized crime and fraud investigations. Instead, he had found himself working on kidnappings. He could still remember going home on the night he had received his first assignment—going home to his first wife, Elizabeth, and being completely astonished at what he was expected to do.