‘I honestly don’t remember being on the set that day,’ Patrick said.
I hadn’t called him from Nate’s and I hadn’t called him from the car. I wanted to see my boyfriend’s face when he explained his presence in an almost definitely incriminating video on a day he had told me directly that he hadn’t been present. So we were in his office at Dunwoody Inc., sitting on the sofa facing each other, with Angie in the chair behind Patrick’s desk. She resisted the impulse to put her feet up on his desk, which I knew must have taken a great deal of willpower on her part.
‘I saw you with my own eyes,’ I told him. Like I could have seen him with someone else’s eyes. ‘You were there and you were looking up right at the crane where James Drake fell and died. How could you forget that?’
Patrick shook his head in wonder. ‘I have no explanation.’
He turned toward Angie. ‘Please call the studio and find the call-in sheet and the log for that day,’ he told his executive assistant. ‘I want to see if my name is on the sheets, because I’m sure that I finished shooting the week before this happened.’
Angie, now in full assistant mode, nodded and pulled her phone from her purse. Quietly I heard her start to make inquiries. She had not had to consult any database for the phone number. That’s Angie.
‘You didn’t just drop by to watch?’ I asked, suggesting a way that the lie could be innocent. ‘It was a pretty big stunt. People like to watch that stuff.’
‘That’s just my point,’ Patrick answered. ‘If I were there for something like that, I’d certainly remember it. And you know me, Sandy. My memory is not faulty.’
That was true, but his perception was sometimes skewed. Patrick didn’t like anyone, especially me, to see him in a bad light. ‘Maybe you came by first thing in the morning and then left before the accident happened,’ I suggested.
That was a convenient out and Patrick refused to take it. He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t have done that, and if I had, I’d remember it. I wasn’t there, Sandy. Could it have been my stunt double? I mean, he is paid to look like me.’
‘They’re looking for the log-in sheet,’ Angie reported. ‘Back to us within ten minutes.’ She put her phone back on the desk.
‘Thank you, Angie.’ Patrick is, it should be noted, nothing like Robert Reeves as a boss.
I had made a copy of the file Nate had on his hard drive and showed it to Patrick. ‘Does that look like your stunt double?’ I asked. ‘Because if it does, maybe I’ll move in with him.’
Patrick looked up. ‘So you’re moving in?’
‘One thing at a time. First let’s find out if you were actually on the set or not.’
Angie’s phone buzzed and she picked it up.
‘That’s not Henry,’ he said, looking at the screen. ‘It’s me all right.’
‘So you were there.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Angie had one hand on her ear and the other ear to the phone. ‘The studio’s records are not definitive. Patrick’s card was scanned at the entrance to the set but then never scanned out, and he clearly isn’t still there.’ That was evident, I thought. If he were still on the set of Desert Siege, I wouldn’t have seen him again after his trial. And my life, while certainly less complicated, would not have been as interesting.
‘Check on the set of Torn,’ Patrick told her. ‘See if they have a record of me being on set that day because I think I was. And if so, what time.’ Angie nodded.
A completely random thought that had nothing to do with the case occurred to me. ‘Why is it called Torn?’ I asked Patrick. ‘You’d think Split would be a better title for a character with multiple personality disorder.’
‘Torn tested better,’ he said. Of course it did. ‘I don’t understand it. I have no memory of being in Griffith Park that day. I’ve only been there a couple of times, mostly when you and I went to the observatory, Sandy.’ (That had been a lovely evening, for the record.) ‘You tend to get noticed in big spaces like that and there’s nowhere to hide.’ That’s Patrick being modest; he loves the attention and sometimes goes out in public just to be noticed. Don’t let him fool you.
My cell phone rang and I was surprised to see the caller identified as LAPD. Not Trench, because his line is in my contacts. Just the cops. You get a twinge in your intestines when you see that, but pretty much everyone I care about in Los Angeles was here in the room with me. Not that it helped my intestines. Those things just can’t be reasoned with.
I picked up the call. ‘This is Sergeant Roberts.’ Trench’s assistant. His aide-de-camp. The Watson to his Holmes. You get it. And that’s how bad things had gotten: Trench had something he wanted to tell me and he didn’t even call himself.
‘Hello, Sergeant.’ I’m pretty sure Roberts’s first name is ‘Sergeant’.
‘Ms Moss, I’m calling because Lieutenant Trench’ – the coward – ‘has some information he wanted me to pass along.’
‘What’s that?’ No doubt Trench had found some new way to prove to me that I was an annoyance and a hindrance but felt it was beneath him to pass that along in person. I wondered if Roberts ever got tired of being in his shadow. But it would probably have been a bad idea to ask.
‘He said to tell you that the two men who abducted you yesterday have been arraigned and released on their own recognizance. He said that if you have not taken security measures you might want to do so, and if you have you should probably increase them.’
I looked over at Angie, who in her third job after being Patrick’s executive assistant and Nate’s intern was also my security detail. She was on the phone with the production office at Torn.
‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure to do that.’
I disconnected the call because I didn’t want Roberts (and by extension Trench) to hear me cry. But my face must have registered the way I felt.
‘What’s wrong?’ Patrick asked immediately.
‘Nothing,’ Angie said. ‘We have records of you being on the set of Torn the day the crane dropped Jim Drake into a ditch.’
But Patrick was intent on me. ‘Sandy?’ he asked.
‘I think we need to call in the Marines,’ I said.