I pull up the staff page for Moon Finch. There are nine executives working for the company and three executive assistants. Of the executives, five are male and one is female. I jot down their names on the notepad. It’s only a hunch at the moment, nothing more, but I have a feeling I don’t need to write down the woman’s name.
One by one I google their photos and study their faces. Faces that under normal circumstances I’m sure would look completely innocuous now take on all the shades of misdeed. Men who could be husbands, fathers, or brothers now become leering and capable of anything. I study the face of the man who appears to be the primary producer at Moon Finch, Ben Cohan, but it’s impossible to tell anything from looking.
I don’t recognize a single one of them, though I can see I have auditioned for some of their previous films. It’s funny who and what sticks in the mind and what refuses to be pinned down. After all, I now know I met Nick two years ago and I didn’t recognize him at all when I met him again this week.
If a production company of Moon Finch’s caliber was willing to offer Emily an opportunity of that magnitude, then I have to wonder what she had on them.
I turn to her emails for some kind of answer. Finding nothing in her inbox, I run the cursor down Emily’s neatly archived mail folders until I reach the computer-generated folders at the bottom of the screen. RECOVERED, DELETED, DRAFTS.
I dive into the DELETED folder, hoping that her trash hasn’t been recently erased, but I’m not in luck. The file is empty, as is DRAFTS. I don’t exactly know what the RECOVERED folder is but I click on it next.
The file is full. I stare at the emails, every email the same, all duplicates. Every single email is from Emily to Emily. There must have been an error in sending so she sent and re-sent over and over. There’s no subject in the subject bar, and every single email has two attachments. There’s eighteen of them, identical.
I open one. It’s empty except for the two attached files. One labeled: Bel Air.m4a. The other: San Fernando.m4a.
Emily sent two audio files to her laptop from her iPhone. One must be the meeting she recorded. I know a couple of the major studios are out in the San Fernando Valley where the second recording was obviously made. But the first recording, Bel Air, is a mystery.
Emily must have deleted the email that actually made it into her inbox, but her laptop somehow managed to recover copy upon copy upon copy of its duplicates here.
I tap on Bel Air.m4a and it opens in Voice Memos.
Its creation date is 1 January this year. My breath catches. Emily made an actual recording of whatever happened on New Year’s Eve. Whatever is on this forty-nine-minute-long recording must be the leverage Emily used to secure the offer of a lifetime.
23
New Year’s Eve
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13
I grab a cushion from the sofa, turn a fresh page in my notepad, and hit play on the New Year’s Eve audio file Bel Air.m4a.
At first there is only silence. I increase the volume and the room slowly fills with the comforting ruffle of white noise. The muffled sound of bass music through a wall, the reverb and screech of voices having fun in other rooms, with the scrape and rustle of a pocket in the foreground.
A party from the safety of a pocket or bag.
Now the sound of a voice close, the words not quite distinguishable. I pump up the volume further until a male voice comes into focus, the tone cloying, coaxing.
My blood runs cold. Oh God…I think I know what this is. I listen for the female voice, the female voice that must be there, and I pray it’s not Emily’s.
The sound of the door to the room opening causes a flood of party noise that is quickly muffled as the door closes. A second male voice asking a question.
Then a female voice closer to the recorder—a murmur, followed by a groan. I strain for words.