Kill and Tell by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Kayla Ross

The piercing scream almost made my heart stop. My body instantly went rigid with fear.

The sound took me right back to Wayne Tennet’s screening room where I’d heard Valentina Doyle give the same kind of cry…and found a dead body.

I’d been on edge ever since. Turns out that exciting experiences like being a hit-and-run victim on Sunset Boulevard and discovering corpses take their toll on a girl.

So I wasn’t all that amused by the deafening shrieks of the fan girls in the spectator seats at seeing Liam Hemsworth on the red carpet at the Teen Choice Awards.

I’d snagged this assignment by show-biz cliché—the regular entertainment reporter had gotten food poisoning that morning at a champagne brunch. It also didn’t hurt that I’d broken my stories during the ratings sweeps period. The station manager told me I was now “trending” higher than any of the other reporters.

So there I was—Omaha’s Kayla Ross—interviewing world-famous music, TV, and film stars as they made their way into the Shrine Auditorium. After I got all of three seconds of “Hey, howsitgoin’?” from Harry Styles as he walked past me, my director, Eddie—a Southern skinny-jeaned and goateed hipster dude with endless energy—told me to take a break. Only C-listers were in the queue for the next few minutes, so we were going to commercial.

As the makeup team refreshed my face, I looked up and saw Breelyn Doyle coming down the carpet with her arm in Omar Sabat’s. Though she had the same serious expression on her face as the last time I’d seen her, he was all smiles. He waved to the crowd and posed for photos as though he was a star, not a physical trainer who happened to date a celebrity’s daughter.

He caught sight of me and—after a quick glance at the cameras behind me—made a beeline in my direction.

“Hey, Kayla!” he shouted. “How’s it goin’? Are we live?”

“Sorry, Omar, we’re on commercial break,” I said.

“S’okay, we can hang!” He grinned.

I looked at Breelyn. She had on a simple white gown—the fabric was so sheer it looked computer-generated. There was a visible scar at the top of her forehead; I wondered why she hadn’t covered it with makeup.

“How are you doing, Breelyn?” I asked. “That’s not a professional question—I swear the cameras are off!”

I laughed, self-consciously, and she gave me a serene smile—like nothing could ever throw her. Her gaze drifted past me and out over the crowd. She looked at the fan mob intently, almost like she was memorizing each individual face. Without a word to me, she then started to move on down the carpet, but Omar held her back.

“Yo, Kayla,” he said, “our interview was off the hook! You know how many new Twitter followers I got after that? Maybe we could do a follow-up, huh?”

I glanced at Breelyn to see how she was taking such a crass attempt to cash in on her tragedy. She just reached out and calmly took hold of Omar’s arm—gently, but somehow I knew it was with an iron grip—and started leading him away.

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