Read Online Dead Shot by Annie Solomon - Free Book Online

married. He kept it, rented it out. When Nancy and I separated, I moved in here. Supposed to be temporary, but . . .” He shrugged.
    Silence while she sipped at the coffee. “I don’t suppose you have any Oreos? Health maniac like you?”
    He opened a cabinet and tossed a package of cookies at her.
    “See”—she grinned—“I knew you had a weakness.” She bit into a cookie. “Somewhere.” Carefully, she separated the top half from the rest. Scraped her teeth against the white icing.
    He repressed a smile. She could have been sixteen. Small and delicate and young.
    No. Somehow he doubted she’d ever been young.
    Still, he couldn’t help wondering about the teenage Gillian. The file he’d read had been full of her childhood.
    Or at least the part connected with her mother’s death. Not much on the intervening years.
    He had known some of the back story on Holland Gray and her beautiful daughter. Not that the mother was a slouch in the beauty department. On cover after cover of
Vogue, Cosmo, Elle,
Holland embodied 1980s glamour. Even after her child was born, she continued to wear the supermodel crown. So there’d been great upheaval in the celebrity world—and among those who pay attention to it—when Holland abruptly withdrew to Nashville. And when she was killed, the coverage bordered on frenzy, if the mountains of articles were any indication.
    One cover had stood out. He’d been fourteen when Holland Gray had died. His mother had subscribed to
People,
so he didn’t know whether he remembered the cover or not. But it struck him when he saw it in the file. The orphaned Gillian, then a blond wisp of a child, innocent, trusting, hair like angel dust against the setting sun, eyes closed in sleep in a chair on her dead mother’s front porch.
    It had hit him then, just as it hit him now.
    The first dead Gillian.
    The first dead shot.
    There had been many since. Many dead children, teenagers, women, all of them her. The media fury after her mother’s death eventually died away, but her own work had made her famous again. Or infamous if you read the tabloids.
    The Diva of Death they called her.
    She caught him staring at her. “Sorry.” She pushed the cookies toward him. “Did you want one?”
    He shook his head. “No. Thanks.”
    She finished the cream, polished off the plain half. “Something on your mind, Ray?”
    He nodded slowly, still thinking about that beautiful, lost child. “Your . . . work. The photographs. Why do you do them?”
    Carefully, she wiped the crumbs off her hands. “Why do you think?”
    “Therapy?”
    She laughed. “That’s right.” She leaned back, crossed her arms, and studied him. An ugly gleam reflected in her eyes. “We’ve all got issues, don’t we, Ray? Murder is mine.”
    “Because of your mother?”
    She stiffened. “So . . . you think you know all about that.”
    “I read your file.”
    She nodded sagely. “Ah. My file. I see. Or do you mean
People,
the
Star,
and the
Enquirer
?”
    “Those, too.” He shrugged. “Enlighten me. How does it help, burying yourself in all that gore?”
    “I told you. It’s the truth. We’re one of the few species that murders its own. We not only do it, we glorify it. On TV, in the movies. Only it’s not glorifying. It’s ugly. Horrorfilled.”
    “And you shove our faces in it.”
    “You bet I do.”
    They stared at each other for a long moment.
    Then Gillian slid a second cookie out of the package. “So, Ray, tell me . . . who’s the girlfriend?”
    He gave her a swift look. “Excuse me?”
    “The girlfriend. In the hockey pic on the place of honor on your shelf.”
    He paused, silently debating whether or not to answer.
    It wasn’t any of her business. But saying so made more of a big deal out of it, and it wasn’t. Not anymore. “That’s Nancy.”
    She seemed to consider that. “Been divorced long?”
    “Three years.”
    She bit into the cookie. “So . . . still carrying a torch?”
    He scowled. “I keep