The problem with all of her mental notes was they somehow got erased the moment after she made them. She supposed she could start writing them down on actual paper, but she was afraid if anybody saw them, they’d think she was fighting early Alzheimer’s.
She got onto the bed, propped herself up on her pillows, and, against her better judgment, turned on the TV and was shocked to see her own face staring back at her.
The shootings in Calabasas were the top story on the KTLA 10:00 p.m. news. The reporting was mostly accurate and there were a few shots of her in the Chanel jacket, showing her cleavage and talking on her phone, the smashed Rolls-Royce behind her. She thought she looked like the least-endowed Kardashian pretending to be a cop. The report ended with a clip of Sheriff Lansing facing the press at LASD headquarters, where he gave a short statement.
“A sting operation in Calabasas snared the three assailants who were responsible for a string of violent home invasions. Two of the assailants were killed in a confrontation with undercover detectives, the third was shot by a security guard in the grocery store behind me. Thanks to the heroic actions of two law enforcement professionals and a brave civilian, a brutal crime spree has been put to an end.”
Eve thought Lansing was taking a premature victory lap. She had no idea if the spree of home invasions was over, so how could he be so certain? And she wondered what conclusion the media would draw tomorrow when they learned that Captain Moffett was reassigned in the wake of what Lansing had just hailed as a success.
Her iPhone rang. The caller ID read GODZILLA. Eve took a deep breath, clicked off the TV, and answered the phone.
“Hello, Mom.”
“You looked great on TV,” Jen said. Her voice was smoky and rough from smoking a lot of cigarettes. Men found her voice sexy but Eve worried it was a symptom of future lung cancer. “That’s the way you should dress every day.”
“I was undercover.”
“And now you’ve been outed as an attractive woman. No need to hide it anymore.”
Her mom usually criticized how she looked on TV, and that irritated Eve. But now her mom was calling to tell her she looked great, and that irritated her, too. It seemed to Eve that they were destined to always be caught in this irritation loop. That was why they rarely saw each other, even though her mother lived up the coast in Ventura, only about forty minutes away.
“I told you before, Mom, it’s not appropriate attire for a homicide detective.”
“Make it appropriate. You’ve come a long way already, making history in the department.”
“Which is why turning myself into a sex object now would be taking a big step backwards for me and all women in the department.”
“I don’t see how.”
Of course you don’t.
Her mom liked to show off her curves, which had both embarrassed and infuriated Eve when she was a teenager. Because whenever her mom, a single mother, dressed that way, it often meant that Eve, her younger sister, Lisa, and her little brother, Kenny, would wake up the next morning to find another strange man in their kitchen eating their frosted cinnamon Pop-Tarts.
“I want to be seen by my colleagues as a detective,” Eve said, “not as a woman.”
“That will never happen, so use the advantages that you have.”
“You want me to use my sex appeal to get my job done.”
“You’re lucky you’ve got it,” Jen said. “You can thank me for that. My genes kicked the shit out of your father’s. The women in his family looked like turtles who’d lost their shells.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that.” She knew her mom’s genes were strong. Both she and her sister had her mom’s vibrant blue eyes and her tenacity.
Eve had never met anyone on Vince Nyby’s side of the family. She barely knew him. Her father was an episodic TV director who’d seduced Jen, a nonspeaking background player on one of his shows, with promises of big acting jobs that never came. He got her pregnant and then immediately dumped her. His idea of paying child support was sporadically showing up on Eve’s birthday to give her a Barbie doll. He’d fathered a lot of children with a lot of women and Eve imagined he’d kept a box of Barbie dolls for the girls and a box of Hot Wheels cars for the boys, so he never ran out of meaningless, generic birthday presents for his unsupported offspring. Vince was in his seventies now, hoping to come out of retirement to direct the pilot of her TV series, which was being written by a woman he’d briefly worked with years ago when she was “a baby writer” and not the top showrunner she was today. Eve hated that he’d found a way to wriggle back into her life just to enrich himself.