There didn’t seem to be any personal photos or documents on the computer and she wasn’t able to access his Gmail account without his password. He seemed to use the device primarily as a porn delivery system. She opened his web browser and checked his history. It was, as she expected, a long list of porn sites.
Disgusted, Eve switched to the virtual drive of Greg Nagy’s computer. His laptop was filled with drafts of his own screenplays and the withering critiques he’d written of the scripts he was hired to read for various studios. The only scripts that he seemed to like were period dramas and historical films that were totally outside the action-adventure genre that he was writing in.
She opened a couple of his scripts to see if his own writing lived up to the high critical standards he used to judge other writers. They didn’t. His work was formulaic crap, mechanically rehashing the clichés and tropes of the genre without any originality or cleverness. It was as if they were written by a software application rather than a person.
The rest of his drive was stuffed with pirated movies, mostly AVI and MP4 files of recent superhero fare, and thousands of personal photos, the bulk of which were automatically downloaded from his phone each day and stored on iCloud. His pictures went back a decade. She randomly scanned through hundreds of photos from the last year, hoping to spot Dalander, Colter, or Simms in one of them, but she had no luck. She saw a lot of Nagy’s family, their dogs, selfies of Nagy, and pictures of food that he’d eaten, which she assumed he’d also uploaded to his social media accounts.
Eve logged on to Facebook and Instagram, searched for his accounts, but found they were all private.
By this time, it was after 2:00 a.m. and she felt tired and queasy.
She dropped two Alka-Seltzer tablets into a glass of water, guzzled it down as a nightcap, and went to bed, falling to sleep instantly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Eve was awakened by her phone, which wasn’t unusual. It was how she was awakened every morning. But it was ringing at 6:00 a.m., ninety minutes early. The caller ID read: MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE.
Her mouth was dry, so she quickly swallowed a few times, licked the inside of her cheeks and around her teeth to generate some saliva, and answered the call, trying to sound alert instead of half-asleep.
“Ronin.”
“This is Emilia Lopez. I’m the deputy medical examiner handling the autopsy of the McCaig baby.”
There was a strange urgency in Lopez’s voice. Had Eve, in her inexperience, made some horrible procedural error? She felt a stab of anxiety in her chest. “What can I do for you?”
“You need to get to Anna McCaig’s house right away, with some paramedics, though she’s probably bled to death by now.”
“What?” Eve sat up in bed, fully alert now, and whipped away the sheets.
“I found a portion of her ovaries and uterus still attached to her baby’s placenta. I called the hospital to check on the mother’s condition and learned that she left the ER yesterday before she was examined,” Lopez said. “If she’s still alive, she’s unconscious and bleeding out. Don’t wait for her to answer the door. Break it down.”
How could the paramedic have missed such a serious injury?
There was no time for Eve to ask Lopez that now. The answer could wait.
“I will.”
Eve dressed quickly in yesterday’s clothes, grabbed her gun, her badge, and her keys, and hurried out the door, calling the dispatcher on the run to send paramedics and an ambulance to Anna McCaig’s house.
But she knew she’d get there first. She lived less than two minutes away from Oakdale and she sped up to the gate, where a male guard was on duty.
Eve rolled down her window, held up her badge, and yelled, “Sheriff’s Department! Open the gate and keep it open. Paramedics are right behind me.”
As if on cue, they could hear the sirens coming. The fire station was at the corner of Parkway Calabasas and Calabasas Road, nearly as close to Oakdale as her hotel.
The guard opened the gate and Eve tore up the road to the house, came to a skidding stop at the curb, put the car in park, and left the engine running as she rushed to the door. It was mostly glass, like the one at the sting house. She pounded on the door with her fist.
“Mrs. McCaig! This is the police.”
There was no answer.
Following the ME’s advice, Eve kicked out one of the glass panes, then reached inside and opened the door. The paramedic unit pulled up behind her car. A man and a woman spilled out and grabbed their equipment from the back of the truck.