High Fall (4 page)

Bleeker folded the phone before he could hear the click of the camera operator breaking the connection. He pushed away the fury and disgust in the man’s voice. He’d have plenty of opportunity to hear that again, from plenty of mouths. Half of Hollywood would call him a ghoul for using the footage. The other half would label him a fool if he didn’t.

“O
MIGOD, SHE’S DEAD DOWN
there,” a man yelled. “The stunt woman—she went off the bluff wrong! Fell all the way to the beach!”

As one, the crowd of onlookers turned toward the cliffs. Kiernan stood stunned. Dead? Sweat coated her skin, and yet she felt icy cold. Her stomach churned with guilt. She’d half hoped Lark Sondervoil would take a wrong step, maybe blow the landing on the Gaige Move. She’d only wanted Sondervoil to not quite nail it—nothing worse than that. She hadn’t wanted the girl to
die.

She was shaking so hard, she had to press her arms against her ribs to steady them and squeeze her throat closed against a wave of nausea.
Nineteen years old!

Across the cordons on the set, people were moving as if on remote control, or racing around aimlessly like the remote had shorted out. Beside her Yarrow, the motorcyclist, leaped the outer cordon, then the inner one, both times landing on his good leg. He raced up to the director just as the man was putting his walkie-talkie in his black shirt pocket. “What the hell’s going on here, Bleeker?”

Bleeker glanced quizzically, then started toward the trailers.

Yarrow grabbed his arm. “Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten me, Bleeker. We’ve worked together too damned much for that shit. Trace Yarrow. Now tell me, dammit—is she dead?”

Bleeker’s small brown eyes narrowed; he looked down at Yarrow and shook his head. “Nearly four hundred feet down a sandstone cliff, where the softest thing is brush that would scrape your skin off—what do you think?”

“What the hell happened?”

“She went right into the high fall. She was supposed to stop”—he seemed to be pleading—“to hook on to the wire—”

“You’re blaming
her,
Bleeker?
You’re
the second unit director here! You’re responsible. Where’s the union rep?”

Bleeker stared, his head shaking again, but slowly, dazedly.

Yarrow grabbed his lapels. “Oh, no. You’re not going to get away with it this time. Not like Greg Gaige, when he—”

Bleeker seemed to come alive. He shook free. “Get off the set, Yarrow. You’ve got no business here. And don’t go laying this on me. Lark was supposed to be on the wire. She chose not to. The set was supposed to be empty—no one here but the crew—and she sends teasers out to every media outlet in San Diego. If she got spooked by the crowd, it’s her own fault. The girl was out for publicity.” He took a breath and said with disgust, “She was a daredevil.”

“
Daredevil!
Listen, you—”

“No! I don’t have time for this. We were already days behind schedule. By the time this business is cleared away, we’ll be weeks late.”

Two guards started toward the pair. Bleeker turned and strode off. Yarrow glared after them, then stomped back across the cordon next to Kiernan. “No stunt double would go off a cliff without a wire! Something’s real fishy here. They’re covering up. Just like when Greg died in the fire gag.” He turned toward the bluff. “I’ve got to get out there and see—”

What
about when Greg died?
she wanted to ask, but there was no time for that. She grabbed his arm. “No, you don’t. The cops will be here any minute.”

“They don’t know anything about gags. They won’t know what to look for. By the time they have a clue about what they’re after, they’ll have trampled it into the ground.”

The people around them who had stood alone in stunned silence now clumped together in threes and fours, murmuring, pointing to the bluff, eyeing the set, moving a step toward the bluff, but unwilling to leave the spots they’d staked out. On the set, the security guards backed away from the crowd, toward the unlit banks of lights and the cameras they were protecting. The production assistants she’d seen scurrying around the set huddled, hanging on to each other, their backs to the bluff. The shrill rise of a distant siren sliced through the nubby sounds of the bluff. Two men—directors? producers?—walked together by the cordon. The shorter one shook his head. “How far behind schedule is this whole business going to throw us?”

Kiernan jammed her teeth together to keep from shouting,
Hey, a woman is dead, and all you care about is your schedule?
A stunt woman, a
gymnast
, like Lark Sondervoil spends her whole adolescence practicing, half the time with bruises up and down her legs, her wrists or ankles so badly sprained they have to be taped, with shin splints, pulled hamstrings, broken bones, concussions, every day risking landing on her neck and never walking again, all to perfect something like the Move to do for your goddamned movie. Now she dies, and all you guys care about is your sacred schedule!

Lark’s death had nothing to do with Kiernan; logically, she accepted that. But viscerally, she knew she owed Lark.

She stared hard at the two men, still talking—hoping?
planning?
—to shove this inconvenient death under the rug! Her hands squeezed into fists. Dammit, they would not get away with it!

That much she could do for Lark.

She turned to Yarrow. “Yarrow, are you saying this was no accident? Do you honestly believe the director had something to do with Greg Gaige’s death?”

“Two top-notch stunt doubles die a decade apart, and both times he’s directing. What do you think?”

Kiernan hesitated.

“You saw her run through the gag. It was perfect, right?”

She nodded.

“And that time she landed a couple of yards from the edge of the cliff. So do you think when it came to the real thing, she suddenly decided to add a few steps in the middle and trot off the cliff?”

When gymnasts compete for a medal, they may be forced to drop a move, but they never take the chance of adding one. Surely stunt doubles were the same. “Yeah—?”

“Look, the whole setup is weird.” His words came faster, his voice more urgent. “Stunt doubles—they’re supposed to be invisible. Like the star did everything. But Lark, she contacts the media, gets herself a ton of publicity, all these spectators, and a press conference. That’s crazy. You pull something like that, and you never work again. Lark knew that. So why take the chance, huh?”

Kiernan watched Yarrow, his foot tapping on the sandy ground, his thumbs looped into his pockets, as close to hands-on-hips as he could get, his whole body leaning forward, pushed so close she felt as if he were going to suck up her air. The last thing she wanted was to be allied with him. Still, she had to ask, “You think it had something to do with Greg?”

“Makes sense.”

“When Greg died, were they upset only because it put them behind schedule?” She noted Yarrow’s startled face; even she was surprised by the bitterness in her voice.

Yarrow nodded. “They got him in the ground as fast and cheap as they could.”

The siren gulped and started another rise.

She couldn’t walk away. “Okay.” The word was barely audible. She swallowed and said, “We need to be sure. I’ll check the bluff.”

“You? And you won’t be tramping over the evidence? What—you’ll be hovering two feet above the ground?”

“I’ve handled plenty of investigations; I know how not to disturb the scene. I’m a licensed investigator.” The siren shrilled.

From nearer the set came a low moan. Ezra! She couldn’t leave him. But there was no time to take him back to the Jeep. She assessed Yarrow: trustworthy, but only marginally so. Enough to leave him in charge of Ezra? She pulled her key ring from her pocket and snapped off the Jeep’s. “Take my dog back to the Jeep. You remember it, don’t you? A red Jeep Cherokee parked at the far end of the lot.”

Yarrow nodded, the hint of a grin tickling the tense set of his mouth and then vanishing.

She stared him in the eye. “If anything happens to my Jeep, you’re in deep shit. If anything happens to my
dog,
don’t plan to inhale.”

A siren cut the air behind her. In the parking area she could see two policemen, busy dealing with the crowd. Damn—she’d waited too long. In a minute their reinforcement would arrive and clear the bluff. She turned and ran toward it.

Twenty feet from the edge of the bluff, she stopped. The sirens were closer. Exactly where had Lark Sondervoil gone over? One rise of dry bluff looked like the next: little ripples of land shoving up beside the trenches that the wind had cut into the bluff.

The ground was hard and scrabbly; only the heaviest of skids would mark it. Any mark Lark Sondervoil had made here had been destroyed by the special effects blasts. Kiernan bent over, scanning the edges of one hole, then the other. Both were empty but for the remnants of the light and sound devices.

She needed to rerun Lark’s movements in her mind. No, no time for all that. But she
had
to. Quickly she scanned the Move, figuring where Lark would have landed after her final double backflip. From there she hurried toward the edge of the bluff where Lark had stumbled off.

Kiernan wasn’t afraid of heights—if she had been, she’d never have admitted it, even to herself.
Especially
to herself. But she wasn’t. She had never
not
looked down. Looking down had been the reward of climbing up.

But now she was moving flat-footed, cautiously, too slowly. The sand swirled around her feet, particles the wind had picked loose from the sandstone bluff.

Brakes squealed. The siren cut off in midwail. From the parking lot she could hear car doors banging. The wind ripped at her shirt, battered it against her ribs. She planted her legs hard and looked down, down the nearly four hundred feet to the beach.

The way down was smooth for this bluff. But it wasn’t perpendicular. Knife-sharp protrusions dotted the cliff wall. On the nearest one, maybe a hundred feet below, she could see something blue. Lark’s leotard had been blue. She swallowed against the too vivid picture and forced herself to look farther down, but there were no telltale signs on the cliffs beneath. Nothing till the blue blotch in the middle of a small crowd on the beach. Almost directly beneath where she was standing.

From behind her came the wind-muffled croaks of a bullhorn. She had to get off the bluff. They’d reprimand anyone traipsing across the crime scene, but a private investigator they’d throw the book at. She looked down, right and left. Her eyes widened. She wondered if Lark had seen and understood. There to her left, twenty feet below the next rise of the bluff, was a white cocoon, big and tough enough to catch any stunt woman.

Any stunt woman who had gone off that mesa.

Lark Sondervoil had stumbled off the wrong mesa.

An icy chill swirled in her stomach. She found herself looking from the fluffy safety of the catcher to the long, hard, and rocky fall beneath her.

On the beach, official cars (tiny black rectangles topped with flashing red-and-yellow specs) were converging from both directions. State park lifeguards—fully badged peace officers who were closer to cops than beach boys—were probably already in the crowd down there. Farther south on the beach she could make out an ambulance. And in the distance to the north, a helicopter. Life Flight, she thought.

By the time she could get down to the beach, the body would be gone. Quickly, she scanned the bluff.

For the first time she noticed the platform fifteen feet beyond the catcher. It held a camera and two men sitting with their backs pressed against the bluff. “Omigod!” she said aloud. They must have gotten Lark Sondervoil’s fall on film. That was where the answers could be.

“Move back off the bluff,” a loudspeaker blared. “This is the police. Everyone out on the bluff, move back behind the line. Now!” Two pairs of uniformed officers were running toward the bluff.

She glanced over at the set, trying to spot Bleeker, the director. The man was nowhere in sight. She needed to see that film. Fast, before the police confiscated it. She strode off toward the parking lot, restraining the urge to break into a run until she was well past the police.

Yarrow was standing by the Jeep, hands in pockets, his foot tapping. “Well?” he demanded.

“I was out on the bluff,” she said panting, “at the spot where Lark ... It was the wrong spot. The catcher is ... ten feet to the south.”

“Ten feet away? How the hell could that happen?”

“Maybe Lark panicked?”

“Lark? Never!”

“Maybe she just screwed up. Daredevils screw up.”

“Daredevil?
Daredevil?!
” His face hardened. “Lark Sondervoil was no daredevil,” he said, spitting out the term like an expletive. “You heard Bleeker, huh? Well, Bleeker’s an ass. Where does he get off calling her irresponsible? He’s the second unit director—the stunt coordinator—he’s the one who’s supposed to be creating these gags, directing them, the one who should have the expertise to plan them. That’s
his
job!

“Hell, considering it’s Cary Bleeker,” he yelled over the wind and engine roars, “it’s no surprise he acts like he just wandered onto the set with sandwiches. It probably
was
Lark who orchestrated the whole gag. But Bleeker is responsible. Lark was as good as they come, but she was only nineteen years old. The girl hadn’t lived long enough to know she
could
die!”

“The Gaige Move was perfect,” said Kiernan, “so either she shifted the angle of the line of approach, or she started at the wrong spot.”

“The line of approach was straight at the bluff—no mistaking that.”

“Okay… But if she planned the stunt, wouldn’t she have noticed the start marker was moved?”

That stopped him. It was a moment before he said, “Normally, I’d say yes. But here, when the start marker is the cordon pole—well, the cordon might as well be a solid wall; it’s not something you would think might have moved.”

“Once she started, wouldn’t the ground feel different to her?”

“She’d checked everything herself,” Yarrow said slowly, clearly thinking as he spoke. “Lark was always A-plus responsible. That gives you a feeling of confidence,” he said in more of a question than an answer. “But,” he said, looking sure for the first time, “the down side is, you trust that feeling. She’d checked it all. Why would she think the cordon might move between the check and the scene call?”