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has.”
    “Did you read it?” He was genuinely curious if she’d wondered enough to look.
    Shelby shook her head. “Madge rattled off the highlights, but looking into your life that way isn’t fair.”
    “The way the entertainment field looks into yours?”
    She raised her eyebrows slightly.  
    The look in her eyes was more innocent than he could believe, considering that she was a world famous singer.  
    Then she slowly nodded. “I’m not sure how I feel about you reading me that easily, even after all these years. You were doing that back at the station, too.”
    “It’s not really reading you, Shel. Anyone not living under a rock has been bombarded with your life, your success, and your love life. You’ve been on the covers of magazines and splashed all over TV for years now.”
    She rolled her eyes. “What love life?”
    “You were engaged—what was it—five years ago?”
    She snorted. Probably the most unladylike thing she’d done since becoming a superstar. The sound made Mike grin. It was such a normal little thing, something she used to do when they were younger.
    “That was a train wreck from the beginning, and I never actually told the jerk I’d marry him.”
    Mike half sat on the plush arm of the couch, at the other end from Shelby, who was still curled up in the corner. She hadn’t moved an inch since they started talking. She was holding a little too still. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, but her gaze was clear and steady. And she looked amazing. No make-up on, hair in a haphazard bun—she was stunning. “Well, his career took off for about six months after the story broke.”
    “And that’s what the ass was after all along anyway. I was just a means to get him noticed.”
    He didn’t have an answer for that. The guy was a bum and his career tanked as soon as the news came out that Shelby was no longer seeing him. Mike saw the cell phone on the table in front of her. Face down. He pointed at it because talking about Shelby’s ex-lover was starting a slow, angry sizzle somewhere near his heart. Time to get back to business. “Can I take a look?”
    Her voice wavered a tiny bit. “It’s really bad.”
    Mike had the absurd urge to scoop her up, blanket and all, and put her in his lap. She looked so sad and small, all bundled up and shut away from everything. One touch might shatter her hard-won composure, though, and he didn’t want to do that to her. Instead, he grabbed the phone from the table. The video was loaded and ready for viewing.
    And she was right. The images were worse than the original crime scene.
    Shelby’s hand had obviously started shaking during the recording, but the footage was steady enough to get the gist. Another warehouse, but he couldn’t determine the actual size from the small screen. The focal point was a bed. And the woman lying there.
    She was naked, with a black satin sheet covering her breasts and genitals. The full-sized bed had splashes of red covering the edges of the mattress that had clearly dripped down to pool on the concrete floor. The illusion was a bed floating on a red pond.
    The victim’s eyes were gone. Removed cleanly displaying little blood or damage to the orbital sockets. Her lips were bright red, matching the color of the substance pooled beneath the bed.
    And her throat had been cut all the way across. Mike could see the white bone of her spine. Curly blond hair completed the picture and then the music started. Shelby’s third song off her first album. That album had gone platinum. And if he remembered correctly, the video had taken place on water, with Shelby rolling around on a bed singing about her lover being away.
    “Can you tell where she is?” she asked.
    Mike played it again, focusing on the background this time and not the body at the center of the shot. Finally, he shook his head. “Could be any of a hundred different places downtown. He could have even moved to one of the surrounding cities like Glendale or