Chapter 3

She’s beautiful.

I keep trying to get beyond that thought because it’s shallow and because it’s become very obvious very quickly that there’s a lot more to Veronica Romero than what she looks like. And still I can’t help thinking it as I stand here, watching her chat with a couple members of the crew now that the photo shoot is complete.

She’s taken off the other half of her makeup, but left her hair up in its fancy style and the result is more compelling than I ever would have imagined. With nothing to distract from the raw honesty of her features—no makeup, no artfully tousled hair, no glitzy jewelry—she looks sexier than I have ever seen her. And more vulnerable.

One of the crew members, the stylist’s assistant, I think, must crack a joke because she bursts out laughing. She has a good laugh—loud, generous, infectious—and I find myself turned on by the sound of her in that moment. And the look of her, so open, so natural, so—

“Veronica.” Marc calls her name and she turns toward him, eyes sparkling and mouth still stretched in a wide, openhearted grin.

At least until he snaps a series of pictures of her.

She keeps the smile in place, but the honesty of it dwindles to nothing. As does the sparkle.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t regret the loss even as I wonder at what caused it. When she laughs like that, she looks gorgeous and joyous and sexy as fuck—why wouldn’t she want a photographer as talented as Marc to capture that look? Why wouldn’t she expect him to want to capture it when every man in the room, myself included, is spellbound by it? Spellbound by her?

Who is the real Veronica Romero, I ask myself for what feels like the thousandth time in the last twenty-four hours. I want to find her, want to tunnel through the layers of polish and what I’m beginning to think of as deliberate deception, want to brush away at the years of self-protection she’s built around herself until—like an archeologist on a desert dig—I excavate the real woman underneath.

I tell myself it’s because it’s my job to find that woman, to pull her out and examine her and write about her. But the truth is, I don’t actually give a shit about this Vanity Fair article and I never have. Accepting the assignment was just the means for me to get close to her, to see what she knows about William Vargas.

And while that’s still true, it’s very quickly becoming more than that. Though I only met her yesterday, every instinct I have is screaming that there’s a story here. And while I don’t know if it’s connected to Vargas or not, I know that I want to unravel it.

I don’t know why it matters so much, but it does.

As the Vanity Fair crew works on cleaning up and clearing out, I make my way over to Marc. I met him when he photographed me for Entertainment Weekly about a year ago and we hit it off. We’ve been friends ever since, so I don’t feel like too much of a creep when I ask, “Hey, can I get copies of those last shots?”

“Yeah, of course. The magazine gets copies of all the photos that I’m happy with. I’m sure a few of those will be in the bunch.”

“I don’t mean for the article.” I ignore how fucked up that sounds and just plow ahead. “I mean, for me.”

“Oh right.” He grins, shoots me a look. “It’s like that then, huh? Not turning into one of those weirdos you write about, are you, and building a shrine to her in your bedroom?”

It’s a crude joke, but I know he doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s just being Marc. But still, the implication makes me more than a little queasy. “I’m not the shrine type,” I tell him in an attempt to play it off. “But seriously, I’m trying to get inside her head, trying to figure out who she really is. It’s hard to do that when she keeps so much of what she’s thinking and feeling hidden.”

“I hear that,” he says with a heartfelt shake of his head. “I fucking pride myself on being able to reveal the real person with my photos. Digging deep is kind of my thing. But Veronica…she’s always been hard, man. This is the fourth time I’ve shot her and I don’t think I’m any closer to understanding her now than I was ten years ago when I did her first cover for Vogue.”

I’m not sure if I’m relieved at his words, or only more frustrated. “So it’s not just me, then? She’s this careful with everyone?”

“Oh yeah. Absolutely. I’ve never seen her lower her guard all the way. Which is why when I get a rare glimpse inside her walls, I try to take it.”

I get what he’s saying—I do—and the artist in me even agrees with him. But I think back to the way her face closed up when he snapped those last pictures, to the way her laughter died like it had never been, and I can’t help wondering if that’s why she is so guarded. Because when she finally lowers the walls a little some asshole she trusted always takes advantage of it.

It’s a thought that hits uncomfortably close to home. After all, isn’t that why I’m here? To probe and dig and use whatever information I glean from her for my own purposes?

When I look at it that way, suddenly this whole thing seems so much more nefarious.

But just because I recognize it, doesn’t mean I plan on backing off. Instead, I file away his observations so I can pick them apart later. One more piece of information on Veronica Romero. One more thing to understand if I’m going to be the one who finally succeeds in opening her up.

I do my best to ignore the sudden, inappropriate images that bombard me at the thought…getting hard in the middle of a room of people I’m working with is not on my agenda.

“So, when do you fly back to New York?” Marc asks me as he carefully packs up his lenses.

“I’m actually planning on staying in town a few weeks, doing the Southern California thing.” More like following up on some research leads I have for the Vargas book, but I’m not spreading that around. At least not until I suss Veronica out about the subject.

“Oh, yeah? That’s cool. We should grab a beer some night. Or maybe a game. I could get Lakers tickets if you’re up for it.”

“Sure, man. That’d be great.”

“Oh, and I’m having a party next—”

“Excuse me, gentlemen.” The man-slaying smile is in full attendance as Veronica insinuates herself between us. It’s a sensual, well-practiced slide and judging from the look on Marc’s face, I’m not the only one whose mouth goes dry at the move.

Then again, he’s got a reason for it, considering she’s focusing all her attention on him. Her hand is on his chest and she’s stroking her fingers along the buttons of his shirt, playing with the patterned silk as she gazes deep into his eyes. “I’m so sorry to interrupt.”

“You can interrupt me anytime, baby.” His hands come up to rest on her hips and even though I feel like I’m watching a perfectly choreographed dance, a twinge of something uncomfortable flashes through me anyway. I tell myself it’s only because I don’t need to be here for this little seduction, but I don’t buy it even as I’m feeding myself the bullshit.

I think about backing away to give her a little privacy to accomplish whatever it is she came over here for, but the idea doesn’t sit well with me. Especially when one of Marc’s hands starts to migrate from Veronica’s hip to her ass.

Her perfectly padded, perfectly heart-shaped ass.

Not that I’m looking exactly. It’s just hard to ignore it when it’s right there, especially considering it’s one of her trademarks.

Still, as I watch Marc manhandle it—manhandle her—I have a very brief, very detailed fantasy about breaking his hand. And the fingers he uses to take pictures with, which, coincidentally, are the same ones currently stroking the curve of her very delectable ass.

Deciding to hell with watching any more of this, I move forward intending to ease her away from him even though it isn’t exactly my place. But she’s already got it, sliding her hand up to stroke his jaw as she leans forward and whispers in his ear. I don’t know what she says to him, can only hear the low, breathy tone of it all, but whatever she says leaves him flushed and sweaty and looking like he’s about to swallow his tongue.

I expect him to grab her then—that’s how aroused he looks—but instead his hand finds its way back to his side and then he’s grabbing his camera and roughly shoving it into its bag despite the fact that he’s babied the damn thing all day. Two minutes later he’s bidding us both goodbye and all but running from the house.

What. The. Fuck.

Veronica watches him go with a small, satisfied smile on her face that says more than any words can, but when she turns to me, eyebrows raised, she’s back to being perfectly composed. “I’m so sorry the shoot ran over. Would you like some coffee before we get started on the second part of the interview?”

“What I’d like is to know what you said to Marc to send him running out of here like his ass was on fire.”

“I’d tell you,” she says, caressing my cheek in much the same way she just had Marc’s, “but then I’d have to kill you.”

“Oh yeah? My security clearance not high enough for you?” I go along with the Top Gun allusion because it amuses me. As does the sharp wit she doles out so carefully.

She tsks at me. “It’s got nothing to do with security clearance and everything to do with the fact that I don’t trust journalists.”

“Even ones who usually write true crime books and not gossip articles?”

“Especially those ones. They’re very often the nosiest.” This time the smile she gives me is as enigmatic as it is enticing. “Now, do you want that coffee or not?”

I almost say yes because I’m dying for some caffeine to help clear my head. But she expects it of me, and every instinct I have is screaming at me that doing what she expects is not the way to get anywhere with this woman. So at the last second, I change my affirmation to, “How about a tour instead?”

Her eyebrows shoot up nearly to her hairline. “A tour?” Mission accomplished as she looks like she doesn’t even know what the word means.

“Of the house?” I clarify. When she still doesn’t respond right away, I’m more than a little mystified. Surely I can’t be the first one to ask it of her. This house, built for her legendary mother by her even more legendary father, is almost as famous as she is. “We nosy true crime writers know that a person’s house says a lot about them. Especially when it’s a house the person in question has spent most of her life living in.”

“Does it really?” She relaxes incrementally. “Well, then, I can hardly say no, can I?”

“You can always say no to me.” I’m not sure what spurs me to say it, but once the words are out I don’t regret them. My instincts assure me they need to be said. “I’m a big boy. I can handle it.”

She freezes and for the first time today I see something in those violet eyes that isn’t manufactured. I just wish I could figure out what it is.

She recovers nicely, though, with a Madonna-like smile and the slide of a palm down my back. “That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”

This time, she doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead, she turns on her heel and starts the long trek across the rapidly emptying ballroom.

For long seconds I stay where I am, held in place by the sensual sway of her hips with each step she takes. From behind, she’s all long hair and longer legs and curves that make a man want. And I am very definitely a man. What I wouldn’t do for a chance to—

I cut the thought off abruptly, before it can fully form. Partly because it feels wrong to be fantasizing about a woman I’m working with, even if she is one of the biggest sex symbols in the world. And, more important, because there’s no way I’m going to screw up the opportunity I’ve got just because I want to fuck one of the only people still alive who has spent more than a cursory amount of time with Vargas.

Veronica stops at the ballroom doors and waits a few seconds, though she never glances back at me. I do a quick jog across the room to catch up, saying the pat, “Sorry, I was checking my messages—”

“Save it,” she answers, cutting me off. “I know exactly what you were checking out.” She sends an arch look over her shoulder as she moves out of the room.

Deciding that in this case silence really is the better part of valor, I follow her without another word. Part of me wants to explain, to tell her that I’m really not that guy. But since she’s caught me ogling her twice in two days, I’m not sure she’ll buy it. Besides, I can’t guarantee that prolonged exposure to Veronica Romero isn’t turning me into exactly that guy.

Just the thought makes me feel like a total dick.

The ballroom takes up the entire fourth floor of the house, so we take the wide circular staircase down to the third floor. As we do, I can’t help wondering what must it be like to be so used to men ogling you that you can sense it even with your back turned, even in men who should know better?

The question—not to mention her obvious experience in dealing with situations such as these—shames me and I vow to keep my mind on the case and off her very delectable ass for the rest of the time I spend with her. I’m not an animal, after all. How hard can it be?

“This floor is made up almost completely of guest rooms,” she tells me, her voice as perfectly modulated as a tour guide’s as she leads me from the landing and down a long, winding hallway. “There are twelve.”

“Twelve guest rooms?” I ask, surprised despite myself. The house is huge, but still, twelve is a pretty big number. Especially for someone as insular as Veronica obviously is.

“My mother likes to entertain.”

“And your father?”

“He liked to keep my mother happy, so…Twelve guest rooms and a ballroom the size of a small country.” She stops in front of the first room we come to, gestures inside of it. “So, this is the Picasso room.”

I angle my body so I can get a glimpse of the room. “Because there’s a Picasso in there?”

“Because there are three.”

“Paintings?”

“Sketches. The one painting my father owns still hangs in his office downstairs.”

I notice that she refers to the room as her father’s office, though he’s been dead for nearly three years.

“How long have you lived here?” I ask even as I dart into the room to look at the sketches. Picasso is a particular favorite of mine and when else am I going to get to see his sketches this up close and personal? And without a line on a museum floor that I’m not supposed to cross?

The sketches are everything Picasso drawings are known for. Cubist. Sexualized. Brilliant. I could stare at them for another hour—maybe even the rest of the day—but it’s obvious that Veronica is antsy. She wants to move on.

I can’t help wondering why as I reluctantly let her tear me away. But the thought evaporates when she nods toward the room across the hall. “That’s the Warhol room. If you want to take a look.”

The better question is who wouldn’t want to take a look? “Do you mind?” I ask. “Art’s a passion of mine. It has been since I was a child.”

She smiles serenely. “I know. I told you yesterday, you aren’t the only one who can research.”

Instead of dwelling on the implications of that, I push the door open and step into the room. This time, I don’t need to cross the floor to get a good look at the painting. It’s hanging above the bed and impossible to miss in the way of so many of Warhol’s portraits.

“I didn’t realize he’d painted your mother,” I comment without taking my eyes off the portrait.

“That’s because it never hung in a gallery. It was a present for my father’s fortieth birthday.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“She is,” I agree. I stop short of telling Veronica that I think she’s a hundred times more beautiful than her mother, even though it’s true. There’s something very…cold about Melanie Romero’s beauty, something precise and studied and just a little too perfect. Warhol must have seen it, even back then, because he’d painted her all in cool blues and grays, with none of the bright joie de vivre of so many of his portraits. It was still exquisite, still fascinating, but it was a very different statement than a lot of his work regarding other pop icons.

“Ready to move on?” she asks after another moment, with a sharp, cool courtesy that would rival her mother at her coldest. “There are ten more rooms to see on this floor alone.”

“Do each of them showcase a different artist?” I ask, even as I slide my phone out of my pocket and fumble to turn on its recording device without making a big deal of it. I have her blanket permission to tape our sessions, but still I don’t want to draw her attention to it. Not when it’s this detached coolness I want to try to capture. That I want to examine later.

“They do,” she says, continuing down the hallway. “Four more in this wing and six more on the other side of the landing.”

“Who else do you have?”

“On this side of the house? Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Lucian Freud.”

I whistle, long and low. “Your parents have impeccable taste in art.”

“My father did. My mother’s focus has always been on very different things.”

There’s a story there, one I can’t resist picking at a little. “Is that why the paintings are still here, in what is now your house? Because they were your father’s passion and not your mother’s?”

“They’re here because this is where they belong.”

Once again, it’s a deliberate non-answer, doesn’t tell me anything about her or her family dynamics. I’m getting sick of them.

“Do you want to see the other pieces?”

“I do.” I really, really do—I wasn’t lying when I told her that art is my thing. In another life—one where Jason is normal and I’m not wracked by guilt—I would have been a sculptor. “But I know my interview time with you is limited, and something tells me that you’re planning on counting this tour as part of our allotted session.”

Her smile is razor-sharp and twice as deadly. “You know me so well.”

It doesn’t sound like a compliment, but then I don’t expect it to. Twenty-four hours in and I’ve figured out that the absolute last thing Veronica Romero wants is to be understood. The question is why. Most actors want nothing more…or less.

“Why don’t you show me the rest of the house—the part where you actually live? And then, if we have time at the end of the interview, maybe you’d be so kind as to let me check out the other guest rooms?”

She inhales sharply at that, but I’m studying her face and her placid, pleasant expression never changes. It annoys me a little, just how perfect she is, and I have the overwhelming urge to poke at her just to see how long it takes for her to snap. Her anger would be so much better than this total lack of animation. Anything would.

Once again I think of how she was when she’d first gotten to the café yesterday and once again I regret whatever it was I did that had turned off that warmth. I’m determined to get it back, to see it at least once more before the day is over.

“The main living areas are on the second floor,” she says as she leads the way to another gleaming, circular staircase. “The east wing is mine. The west wing was always my parents’.”

“So you didn’t move into the master bedroom when you took over the house?”

“There was never any need to. Both wings are laid out in an almost identical fashion.”

Because that isn’t weird at all. To have your child’s bedroom done in the same manner as the master suite…Then again, what did I know of the mental workings of the uber rich? Her parents could have had it redone when she was a teenager to make it more comfortable for her. Or maybe her father had just been very forward thinking. God knew the Academy and most film critics had claimed that and much more about Salvatore Romero through the years.

“Which side would you like to see first?” she asks.

I start to say her rooms, of course, but something stops me and I say, “The west wing, if you don’t mind.”

“Why should I mind?”

As she leads the way, she talks a little about the history of the house. About where the marble in the columns came from. About the awe-inspiring art on the walls. About the various antiques we pass. I take it all in, but what I’m really paying attention to is the fact that this whole wing seems to exist in a place out of time.

Her father died over four years ago, yet there’s a stack of books on the coffee table in the sitting room that I’m pretty sure belonged to him.

A box of cigars sits half-open on an end table.

A beautiful Hermès scarf is draped over the back of one of the chairs, as if her mother had dropped it there this morning instead of several years ago. Then again, for all I know, she did. Maybe she stays over regularly and this is just detritus of that existence.

But something about the careful way Veronica skirts or skims over any object that is even remotely personal makes me think that that isn’t the case.

Again there’s the little tingling at the base of my spine that tells me to push, that tells me there’s a story here, one that just might help me unravel the mystery that is Veronica Romero. Before I can so much as formulate a question, though, she leads me into the opulent master suite. And every thought I have is pushed aside as I stare at the huge photograph hanging on the wall opposite the door.

It’s Veronica on what I assume is Christmas morning, if the glowing tree in the background is any indication. She’s maybe seven or eight and she’s sparkling as brightly as the tree, with shining eyes and a huge smile that stretches across her whole face. She’s wearing a red velvet dress with white lace trim and her hair is tied back with a long, red satin ribbon. In her arms she’s holding a large white teddy bear with a matching ribbon around its neck.

For several long seconds I can do nothing but stare at the picture as a million different thoughts race through my head. Puzzle pieces that I’ve struggled with for months start falling into place at an alarming rate, but I try to take a step back. Try to maintain some small semblance of objectivity as I warn myself to be careful. To take it slow.

But when she turns to look at me quizzically—like she’s noticed something isn’t quite right—I find myself asking, “When was that picture taken?”

“The Christmas I turned eight.” She’s cool as a cucumber as she answers, her face blank and her voice pleasant. She doesn’t have a clue. But I do.

There it is, I think over and over again. There it is. The puzzle piece—the smoking gun—I’ve been looking for for the last two and a half years. The one that tells me my instincts, and my research, have been right all along.

Because the Christmas Veronica turned eight—the Christmas she wore that red ribbon in her hair—is the same Christmas that William Vargas, the man who later became the Red Ribbon Strangler and one of the most depraved serial killers this country has ever seen, was employed by her parents as her bodyguard.