Pale as Death Read online

  From the dark depths of Hollywood’s past

  The crime scene is horrific: the corpse of a young actress, drained of blood and cut in two. LAPD Detective Sophie Manning’s new case is high-profile and difficult—there’s no evidence to work with. And it’s a disturbing echo of the infamous Black Dahlia killing. Sophie is burning the candle at both ends, desperate to catch the murderer before he strikes again, when she starts to experience inexplicable visits...from ghosts.

  Bruce McFadden has a particular talent that can help Sophie—he can speak with the dead. As a consultant for the FBI’s paranormal team, the Krewe of Hunters, he’s been tasked with Sophie’s case and they’re forced to partner up. But Sophie doesn’t want his help, and she doesn’t want to share his peculiar skill. And she certainly isn’t ready for love, despite Bruce’s attentions.

  As the killer taunts the police, Sophie and Bruce will discover that the threat is closer to home than they’d ever realized. Working side by side is the only way they’ll stop this deadly sequel.

  Praise for the novels of

  New York Times bestselling author

  Heather Graham

  “The queen of romantic suspense.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Graham is a master at writing stories that weave the paranormal with the everyday.... This book was a great read with twists and turns on every page that is classic Graham style.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Wicked Deeds

  “Graham is a master at world building and her latest is a thrilling, dark, and deadly tale of romantic suspense.”

  —Booklist, starred review, on Haunted Destiny

  “Intricate, fast-paced, and intense, this riveting thriller blends romance and suspense in perfect combination and keeps readers guessing and the tension taut until the very end.”

  —Library Journal on Flawless

  “Compelling and suspenseful...keeps readers guessing until the end.... Graham is a master at crafting stories that never feel old.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Dying Breath

  “Graham stands at the top of the romantic suspense category.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An incredible storyteller.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  Also by HEATHER GRAHAM

  FADE TO BLACK

  A DANGEROUS GAME

  WICKED DEEDS

  DARK RITES

  DYING BREATH

  A PERFECT OBSESSION

  DARKEST JOURNEY

  DEADLY FATE

  HAUNTED DESTINY

  FLAWLESS

  THE HIDDEN

  THE FORGOTTEN

  THE SILENCED

  THE DEAD PLAY ON

  THE BETRAYED

  THE HEXED

  THE CURSED

  WAKING THE DEAD

  THE NIGHT IS FOREVER

  THE NIGHT IS ALIVE

  THE NIGHT IS WATCHING

  LET THE DEAD SLEEP

  THE UNINVITED

  THE UNSPOKEN

  THE UNHOLY

  THE UNSEEN

  AN ANGEL FOR CHRISTMAS

  THE EVIL INSIDE

  SACRED EVIL

  HEART OF EVIL

  PHANTOM EVIL

  NIGHT OF THE VAMPIRES

  THE KEEPERS

  GHOST MOON

  GHOST NIGHT

  GHOST SHADOW

  THE KILLING EDGE

  NIGHT OF THE WOLVES

  HOME IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS

  UNHALLOWED GROUND

  DUST TO DUST

  NIGHTWALKER

  DEADLY GIFT

  DEADLY HARVEST

  DEADLY NIGHT

  THE DEATH DEALER

  THE LAST NOEL

  THE SÉANCE

  BLOOD RED

  THE DEAD ROOM

  KISS OF DARKNESS

  THE VISION

  THE ISLAND

  GHOST WALK

  KILLING KELLY

  THE PRESENCE

  DEAD ON THE DANCE FLOOR

  PICTURE ME DEAD

  HAUNTED

  HURRICANE BAY

  A SEASON OF MIRACLES

  NIGHT OF THE BLACKBIRD

  NEVER SLEEP WITH STRANGERS

  EYES OF FIRE

  SLOW BURN

  NIGHT HEAT

  * * * * *

  Look for Heather Graham’s next novel

  ECHOES OF EVIL

  available soon from MIRA Books.

  HEATHER

  GRAHAM

  Pale as Death

  To Gail and Kelly Stewart, the amazing parents of Kari Stewart, the beautiful girl—inside and out—who is about to become my daughter-in-law. Knowing them, it’s quite easy to see how she grew up to be such a kind, generous and wonderful human being.

  To Kari’s sister, Jessica; her husband, Adam; and their little ones, Teddy, Olivia and Arthur.

  And for Yevgeniya Yerekskaya, Derek’s wife, and the mom of Korbin; and Joseph Hunton, Bryee’s husband, dad of the little girl who will make her appearance before this book arrives on shelves, and for Zohe and Ellysse.

  We are so blessed with the people who have come into our lives!

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  The McFadden brothers—Bryan, Bruce and Brodie, all former military, now registered as private investigators

  Jackson Crow—FBI field director, Krewe of Hunters

  LAPD

  Detective Sophie Manning—a young detective who keeps catching high-profile and disturbing cases

  Detective Grant Vining—a career cop, and Sophie’s partner

  Captain Lorne Chagall—squad captain

  Henry Atkins—police photographer

  Lee Underwood—forensic science technician

  Dr. Chuck Thompson—medical examiner

  Other Players

  Kenneth Trent—director of the Hollywood Hooligans

  Jace Brown—boyfriend of one of the victims

  Ian Sanders—ex-boyfriend of one of the victims

  Grace Leon—aspiring actress

  Michael Thoreau—reporter from the 1940s who was covering the original Black Dahlia case

  Maeve and Hamish McFadden—celebrated actors of screen and stage, killed tragically in an accident

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  1

  Monday morning

  “I thought it was a dummy—I mean, a mannequin. You know, ones they use in store windows. I mean...oh, my God! There’s no blood... There’s red around the...around the places where she’s all chopped up. But still, I mean, this is Hollywood. I thought that someone was making a movie and...then the dog started barking, and I didn’t see any movie trailers or signs or...oh, God! She was real. She was once...she still is...like flesh and blood and bone...just...oh, God!”

  Detective Sophie Manning could imagine that the woman had thought the corpse was a mannequin, or at the very least, something unreal.

  But the dead girl was real.
It was only the extreme brutality of her death that made her appear as if she were not, as if she were some creation of the most brilliant and lurid mind working in a Hollywood special effects studio.

  Stripped naked. Sliced in half. Slashed. Chunks of flesh...gone. Intestines...under the buttocks.

  The woman who had discovered the body—pieces—on South Norton Avenue wavered suddenly, as if she were about to pass out and fall.

  The witness was a heavyset woman who was nearly six feet tall; Sophie prided herself on having achieved a full five feet four inches. Luckily, she spent half her life in the gym. Size-wise, she just met police requirements. She didn’t have a Napoleon complex—she was simply aware of her size, aware she had to keep up with “the big boys,” and was dedicated to her job, determined to be her best.

  The woman began to keel over.

  Sophie quickly caught her—bracing herself—and steadied her.

  “I’m so sorry!” the woman apologized.

  The witness was Claudia Cooper, and she lived around the block. Her dog was a teacup Yorkie, and Sophie had to hand it to the little creature—he was small, but he knew a dead body from a mannequin. The Yorkie’s name was Tsum-Tsum, and a crime scene tech was checking his tiny paws for blood.

  “It’s all right. I understand completely,” Sophie assured her.

  “You must see things like this all the time.”

  “Not quite like this,” Sophie assured her. “You’re human. So am I. And this is truly horrible and cruel and tragic. Let’s have you sit. Do you mind? There’s a patrol car right over there,” Sophie said.

  As she tried to help the woman, Sophie glanced across the bit of sidewalk and grass. Her partner, Grant Vining, was hunkered down by the body with the medical examiner.

  Vining was one of the finest detectives in LA—or anywhere, she thought. She was lucky to be his partner. Captain Lorne Chagall, the supervising officer for their team—an elite unit as it was, handling the most vicious and sometimes strangest cases in Tinseltown—had announced Grant Vining as lead detective, with her assisting, from the moment the call had come in. They’d been specifically handed the case because of their recent involvement in a case where the cast of a cult TV show had been targeted by a killer; Sophie figured they’d handled the high-profile murder without any major gaffes, and this new one was sure to draw media attention. The discovery of the corpse had been a little more than two hours ago, and somehow, reporters were all over it already.

  Naturally. The way the body had been found was gruesome, to say the least.

  Similarities to the old unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short—aka the Black Dahlia—were obviously intentional. The woman found dead this morning was discovered on South Norton Avenue near the place where the Black Dahlia had been found in a vacant lot. Just like Elizabeth Short, she had been killed elsewhere; she was all but drained of blood. She’d been severed in half, and remained in situ now as the investigation into her death got under way.

  Another eerie detail had been included.

  The victim’s face had been slashed on both sides from the corners of her mouth to the ears—creating a monstrous, Joker-like grin on the dead woman.

  It was a case Sophie had studied. Her dad had been a cop; she’d always known that she was going to join the force, too. Cold cases had been bedtime reading.

  Even so, the horrible murder of Elizabeth Short was still being pondered and mused on by the best of them—law enforcement and armchair sleuths. While there had been confessions galore, most were easily dismissed as false. No one had ever been able to prove who Elizabeth Short’s killer might be.

  “Are you all right now? Do you think that you can give your statement to the officer?” Sophie asked Claudia Cooper.

  The woman nodded vigorously. “You must catch him—whoever did this!”

  “Ma’am, I promise you, we—and every officer in LA—will be doing our best to capture this killer.”

  No way out of it—this was going to be sensational. Most likely, the killer assumed that he—or she—would get away with the murder. Just as they did back in the 1940s.

  Times were different now, Sophie thought. Forensic science had come a long way, for one.

  The Yorkie whined suddenly, as if aware of the terrible situation. Afraid. He hadn’t minded at all that his paws were under serious scrutiny. He seemed worried about his mistress.

  Yes, the whole city would live in fear. Women would be on extra high alert, wondering what they could possibly do to avoid the same horrible fate.

  Sophie led Claudia Cooper and her tiny Yorkie over to one of the patrol cars. The young officer quickly leaped to his feet to open the door to the rear for Claudia. He had his work sheet out; he nodded gravely to Sophie. He was ready to take the full statement.

  Sophie walked back over to where the pieces of the corpse remained in situ. Henry Atkins, police photographer, looked at her as she approached and shook his head, wincing.

  It was one of the worst crime scenes they’d ever seen, and they all knew it.

  “Finished. For now,” he told her bleakly. Henry had a basset hound look about him. Long jowls, pale blue eyes. He was in his early fifties, and she’d heard he was close to retirement.

  She nodded and looked around. Police officers were canvassing the neighborhood. Crime scene techs were busy gathering anything that might be evidence. A lot of what they would find would be chewed gum, bottle caps and smashed fast-food cups, but all of it would be collected. Any tiny piece might be of tremendous help in the investigation.

  She almost bumped into one tech, Lee Underwood. Young, blond, handsome and wire-muscled, he looked more like a surfer dude than a crime scene investigator.

  “Sorry,” he apologized.

  “My fault,” she told him.

  “I was just getting that butt,” he told her, pointing to what remained of someone’s cigarette—not more than the filter. “Cigarette butt,” he added quickly, as if his intentions might be questioned, even at such a scene. “I don’t think that any of this garbage will belong to the killer,” he said glumly. “This guy...” He paused, looking over at the body. “This guy went by the book—the Black Dahlia book. And, I think, some kind of forensic book. He won’t have made mistakes.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” Sophie said.

  He shook his head. “Yeah, so we say. But we’ll need good luck to find this guy’s.”

  He collected the butt with a gloved hand, smiled grimly, and moved on.

  Sophie hunkered down between Vining and Dr. Thompson.

  It was a difficult place to be.

  The corpse was simply so horrifically displayed.

  Just as she had been killed.

  Sophie couldn’t begin to imagine the terror the woman must have felt as the knife came toward her face. They weren’t scratches that created the Joker grin; they were deep gashes. There were so many other cuts on the body, as if chunks of flesh had been cut away.

  “Blunt force trauma?” she asked, looking up.

  Dr. Chuck Thompson—a big man with iron gray hair and a square ruddy face—nodded gravely. “I’ll have to get her to autopsy, of course. She wasn’t killed here—that’s pretty obvious. I’d say, though, that her head took a good beating. Enough to kill. And the knife wounds...they could have done it, too. I mean, obviously, she’s been bisected, but death—mercifully—came first.”

  Thompson was a dedicated man. He’d never married, and he was always ready to take on a case when others were begging out for one reason or another. He’d been in the county a long time, and stayed stalwart despite the work load. He’d seen a lot, she knew.

  He grimaced. “She was alive when the gashes were made,” Thompson said quietly.

  Death could often be cruel, but this woman had been brutally tortured.

  Grant Vining looked resolute. Like Dr. Thompson, he’d
been in his job for a long time. Despite the difference in their tenure, Vining always mentored instead of being impatient with Sophie’s comparative lack of experience. He also had a great capacity for listening. When other officers discovered something, he was grateful. He worked well with other cops, and with law enforcement officials from other agencies.

  “Whatever gets it closed,” he often told Sophie.

  Right now, he was pensive, and he shook his head and stated the obvious.

  “Black Dahlia,” he said. “Our officers are canvassing the neighborhood, but until we get something from them or from the forensic team, we’re just waving our stuff in the air.”

  He was right; Sophie knew it.

  As she listened to him, she noted that a good-sized crowd had grown around the crime scene tape.

  Many of those people were journalists. Some had out notepads; some were with network or cable stations, their microphones and cameras visible. Bystanders were taking pictures with their phones, too.

  “Sophie,” Vining said, just as the thought came to her that they’d need to make a statement soon. “They like a young pretty face better than they like mine. Tell them—tell them nothing.”

  “Gotcha,” she murmured, rising. She’d rather be with the press right now than with the corpse. She couldn’t help glancing again at the woman’s face, at the bizarre grin slashed into it. Once, she thought, judging by her youth and the handsome angles that remained of the face, their victim had been beautiful. Not so long ago, she would have laughed, and her eyes would have sparkled. But now she lay like a broken doll torn apart by a disgruntled and sadistic child.

  Did that actually describe the killer?

  Sophie walked toward the crowd. People began to bristle like a school of fish eager when a morsel of krill moved by.

  She kept her expression neutral.

  The press surged forward—with a talent for making their way through the more casual bystanders.

  Then Sophie noticed one man.

  He was different. It might have been in his curious and determined but unhurried manner, but it was mainly his dress. He was wearing a suit, but it wasn’t something many men would have on today—unless they were actors filming a period piece. It was a zoot suit, she thought. The slant of his hat, the cut of his jacket...he appeared to be out of time and out of place. He was in his mid to late thirties, she thought, dark-haired, and with a lean face that was both handsome and engaging.

 
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