The most striking thing about it was the way the car’s silver paint job caught the light of the setting sun, just for a moment. It was followed by the spectacular fall, the crash against the cliff and the explosion near the high-water mark, but for everyone who saw it, what they really remembered was that instant when it hung like a gold star against the slate green sea.

    It took about ten minutes for the first police car to arrive. It was followed soon by two more and then suddenly the place was swarming. They blocked off the road and turned back the cars and a growing number of people saw their sunset drive up the Coast Road turn into just another traffic jam.

    "Any survivors?"

    "Doubt it."

    Barnes peered down at the wreckage. "Yeah, you’re probably right. Still, we should get down there and have a look. Any way we can do that?"

    "Not likely before morning." After the sun had gone down the fog had rolled in on a cold wind and the lighting had gone from honey gold to dark, damp gray. "There’s no way we can get a boat up over those rocks and a helicopter would be suicide under these conditions."

    "Could one of your guys rappel down there or something, just to see?"

    "Maybe tomorrow, but I wouldn’t like to risk it with this wind. Not with so little chance of finding anyone alive."

    The cop nodded, then sighed. "Yeah, well we’re gonna have a hell of a time securing that one."

    The Coast Guard man gave him a sympathetic chuckle and they both turned away to get on with their work. Barnes thought he had this one pegged; suicide or DWA--Driving While Asleep. It was the skid marks that did it- there weren’t any. And nobody conscious is going to go shooting off a cliff at ninety miles an hour without hitting the brakes. That was his working hypothesis, anyway.

    The forensics team was working its way along the margin; bagging and labeling every cigarette stub and candy wrapper that littered the five foot wide stretch of land that separated the road from the Pacific. It was cold and boring work and at first Barnes thought that the woman was just stretching when she waved him over.

    "Hey, take a look at this."

    The detective zipped his jacket up closer to his chin and walked up to where she was standing.

    "What is it?"

    "Looks like someone came by here, crushed a path through these bushes not too long ago. See, the sap is still wet."

    Barnes bent down for a closer look. She was right; several bushes by the roadside had had their branches torn off, as though they had been stamped down, and the sap from the wounds was sticky on his fingers.

    "Good job. Get the photographer over here, then go ahead and bag this." He stood up and took a more careful look at the road. It was a dangerous piece of asphalt, a long, slightly uphill, straightaway followed by a sharp curve. Cliffs rose on one side and dropped on the other, almost sheer both ways. It wasn’t until he was almost at the bend that Barnes could see the restaurant patio with its black-clad patrons lined up like crows on a fence.

    He waved a patrolman over. "That where the call came from?"

    "Uh-huh; the Sand Hill. It’s a big celebrity hangout; lots of Malibu types."

    "Oh. Great. Well, let’s get some guys up there to take statements before we miss them. Go ahead and open up the road as soon as the crime scene guys are done; we aren’t going to try a rescue tonight."

    "Right."

    The next morning, after the fog had burned off and the wind had died down, they got to work on the car. The local media had put in an appearance, complete with a chopper for aerial pictures of the workers rappelling down the cliff. It would make a nice visual for the six o’clock broadcast, even if nothing came of it. Detective Barnes stayed up top, directing the operation but lacking the skills or the inclination to get down there himself.

    "We have a body?"

    "That’s a negative sir." At least the radios were working fine. "Pretty high tide last night, front door’s popped open, it probably got washed away." Along with any trace evidence. This was going to be a fun one.

    "Anything left at all?"

    "Could be. Water kept the front of the cab from really burning; looks like we’ve got some stuff in the glove compartment."

    "Good going; bag it and send it on up. Any chance of getting the plates?"

    "Rear one took it pretty bad when the gas tank went, but we might get something from the front."

    "Right, well we’ll haul it up and see what we can do."

***

    It had already been a long day by the time Det. Barnes made it back to his desk. Getting the car up had been a hell of a job, but it had been worth the effort. There had been a front plate and it had been readable, with some effort, as had the soggy registration from the cab. They matched, and the owner had been identified, and that was when their problems had really started. The car belonged to a Cassandra Nash, a moderately famous actress and a phone call had confirmed her as missing, last seen preparing to go for a drive up the coast.

    By seven-thirty it was all over the news. In a way, Barnes was glad; if Nash was actually still alive this was the best way to find her.

    But the next morning came and went without any word from the vanished actress and by three p.m. her death was generally assumed. All of the local stations had tributes prepared for the eleven o’clock news, and three out of five led with her story.

    Uninterested, Barnes gave up on flipping channels and turned off the TV. He shut his eyes and tried to remember what he knew of Cassandra Nash--he had been surprised when the DMV records had shown that to be her real name; he would be interested to meet her parents--and found that it wasn’t much. Without her photograph in front of him, he couldn’t even picture her face. She was pretty, more so in her head shots than on her driver’s license, and blonde of course. To Barnes she had always been just one of the dozens of seemingly interchangeable thin, blonde young women that showed up in the multiplexes every weekend.

    The next stage of the investigation started with a phone call on Wednesday morning. It was one of the hundreds that inevitably came with a high-profile case: angry accusations about the state of the roads, ‘tipsters’ who swore they saw her in Ft. Lauderdale Monday night, many, many people asking if it was really true and one very persistent woman who claimed to have "established a connection with the spirit of the departed" and was asking for three thousand dollars for her services. And in amongst them there was a very polite, slightly worried call from an agent for the Golden State Insurance Company, saying that she had something that might be relevant to the Nash case and could she please speak to the officer in charge. She did, eventually, and Barnes listened, then raised his eyebrows and asked her to repeat what she had just said. Then he thanked her and told her that an officer would be coming by to collect the materials and could she please put them in a safe place. Then he hung up and sat thinking for a while before he headed towards his next appointment.

    "Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Nash. I know that this must be a very difficult time for you."

    Mary Nash dabbed at her eyes with a new linen handkerchief. "It’s a nightmare officer, an absolute nightmare. You can’t even understand. Cassie was so perfect; she was just an angel. And now she’s gone and I just, I can’t..."

    Barnes averted her eyes and gave the older woman time to recover. How much older was a matter of question. At first glance he had placed her in her mid-forties but since then he had been continuously adjusting his estimate upwards; right now he had her at about sixty-three. She was dressed in a low-cut blouse and leather pants and the skin on her face had been stretched so tight that he had the unkind urge to bounce pennies on it.

    She was still coughing, sniffing and wiping, so Barnes spent some time taking in his surroundings. They were in the living room of the house Cassandra Nash had shared with her mother and older brother--the father was an apparent nonentity. It was a room of dazzling whiteness with chrome accents; the closest thing to color came in a dove gray bowl of fresh yellow daisies.

    A couple of gulps and a general straightening up indicated that the grieving mother was ready to continue with the interview.

    "Is there... Do you know how this happened?"

    "That’s what we’re trying to figure out, Mrs. Nash. How long had your daughter had the car?"

    "A little over a month, I think."

    "How was it driving? Had she had any problems?"

    "No, none at all. She bought it from Westmond, you know, and they’re one of the best dealers around."

    One of the most expensive, at least. But she was right; Westmond Imports would not risk its reputation by selling a sub-par vehicle to a high profile client.

    "Mrs. Nash, what would you say your daughter’s state of mind had been like lately?"

    "Oh, she was fine. She was happy. They were going to start shooting Blood Dawn next week and her agent had worked out a very good deal on that one. Of course, Summertime Blues hasn’t grossed quite as much as we were expecting--and she had a back-end deal on that one too--but I hear the studio is thinking of expanding it back to fifteen hundred screens and there’s really no telling where it’s going to go."

    "I’m afraid that wouldn’t be likely to have influenced her thinking much," Barnes added dryly.

    "Oh no, of course not. Why do you want to know about how she was feeling? Surely... I mean, you can’t think..."

    He chose not to answer that question. "Mrs. Nash, were you aware that just before she died your daughter cancelled her life insurance?"

    "She WHAT?"

***

    "Look, I’m telling you, I don’t know why Cass would do a thing like that. I mean, she cared about her family. It must be a mistake. Or maybe those bastards down at the insurance company are trying to screw us out of our money. My sister would never do a thing like that."

    "I’m sorry Mr. Nash, I’m afraid it’s pretty clear. She cancelled the policy three days before she died."

    "Well dammit, why? It’s not like she couldn’t afford the premiums; Cass was absolutely raking the stuff in. Didn’t she even care what happened to us?"

    "Perhaps she thought she wasn’t in much danger of dying for a while."

    "Well she got that one wrong." Cole Nash flicked his cigarette butt away onto the patio and lit a new one. Barnes had found him here, smoking and staring at the ocean, and he hadn’t objected to being interviewed. Actually, he had barely seemed to notice until now.

    "She was fairly young, wasn’t she?"

    "Twenty-eight. Getting a bit long in the tooth for an actress, but she was holding up pretty well. She probably could have gone another seven or eight years before she needed any work done."

    Barnes thought of Mrs. Nash’s trampoline face and suppressed a shudder. "Do you work in the movie business, Mr. Nash?"

    "Call me Cole. And yeah, I used to be a stuntman. A damn good one too, until my knee gave out. Taught Cassie everything she knew. Look, if you’re wondering about this accident, and I don’t blame you, the person you really need to talk to is that freaked-out boyfriend of hers. If there was anything funny going on you can sure as hell bet he had something to do with it."

    "Would you mind giving me his name?"

    From the way Cole Nash looked at him, you would have thought Barnes had just asked where the sky was.

    "Chris Janic? You know, the actor? Tall guy- blonde hair, green eyes, two Oscars--you can’t miss him. You have heard of him, haven’t you?"

    "Yes, thank you. You’ve been very helpful."

    The boyfriend added an interesting wrinkle. When he got back to the station Barnes pulled up Janic’s record and spent about half an hour just covering the arrests and parole violations. And, as much as he hated to admit it, he began to think that maybe Cole Nash had had a point about this man’s bearing on the investigation. Unable to reach the actor, Barnes left a message for him and turned his attention back to the victim, starting the long chase down the paper trail left by all modern lives. Credit card phone and bank records for the last three months; he could go back further if he needed to. He started with the phone records.

    Two and a half hours later, all he could say for certain was that Cassandra Nash didn’t spend much time on the telephone. Discouraged, he turned his attention to her credit card purchases and found that what she did spend was money, and lots of it. Here were eye-popping amounts spent on clothes, furniture, jewelry, two cars in as many months and plenty of what his mother would call ‘sundries’. Along with all of that she had taken almost daily cash advances of hundreds and occasionally thousands of dollars. The detective turned to the bank statements to see what was supporting this excess.

    He was not surprised to find that she had almost eighteen million dollars in various banks. He was surprised to find that from every account she had been withdrawing hundreds of dollars on a daily basis. Seriously intrigued now, Barnes dug deeper into the pile of papers. He didn’t come up with too much more, but he did learn that one of the cars she bought, a new station wagon, she had almost immediately resold, apparently for cash. All together, it brought the amount of money missing to about six hundred thousand dollars.

    What would a person do with that kind of money? More specifically, what would a person who could, and apparently did, buy everything she wanted on credit, do with that much cash? Barnes could come up with two major answers and neither one made his job any easier. A drug habit was the first one, and that was where his money was. Considering the crowd she hung out with, and her boyfriend in particular, he would have had a lot of trouble believing she had never been exposed to any of that. It wasn’t something that would automatically tag her as a junkie, but this massive outpouring of cash didn’t exactly help her case. It was a rare dealer who took plastic.

    Blackmail was a close second. For someone whose career depended so heavily on public perception it could be an especially ugly threat. Get a few ill-advised photos or some old videotape on the net and she could go from starlet to punch-line within hours. Or maybe it was a combination of the two: someone found out about her (theoretical) drug habit and decided to mine her deep pockets in exchange for his silence. The possibilities were endless, and either option could have influenced or caused what happened on Sunday. Blackmail victims not infrequently saw death as their only escape and a druggie might think it would be fun to get high on the Coast Road. Both, either, none of the above; the truth was that Barnes just didn’t have enough information to say anything for sure. What he did have was an indication of who he needed to talk to next.

***

    "I hope you are aware of what you are doing here, officer."

    "It’s ‘Detective’, actually and yes Mr. Janic, I think I have a pretty good idea. I’m sorry I had to go through your parole officer to arrange this meeting." The actor snarled, but said nothing. "But I hope you understand how serious this is."

    "Look, I thought Marnie explained all of this to you on the phone. I’m very upset over Cassie’s death and I don’t know anything about it."

    Barnes refrained from pointing out that police investigations are not generally conducted through publicists and pressed on. "When was the last time you saw Ms. Nash?"

    "Last Saturday. We went to a party."

    "Did she mention having any plans for the next day?"

    "What, like ‘by the way, I’m going to drive off a cliff tomorrow’? No, it must have slipped her mind." His attitude had shifted from angry to sullen, with an option on grief. "Look, it was a big party. We didn’t get much of a chance to talk, but she seemed fine. Completely normal. Really."

    The detective studied the young man across the table. He was handsome, authentically movie-star handsome, without being pretty. His clothes were casual but obviously expensive, in a way only sweatpants and sandals can be. They were in the workplace of his parole officer, apparently the only place to which the actor could be summoned at will. Somehow, his presence made the station’s interrogation room seem smaller and shabbier than it was.

    "Do you know if there was anything she was unhappy about? In her professional life, perhaps?"

    "What? No, of course not. She was doing great, pulling down almost $2 million a picture. People really liked her."

    "What about her personal life? Was anything bothering her?"

    "Everybody loved Cassie." He clenched and pulled at his hair. "I see what you’re getting at here, Detective, and I don’t believe it. Cassandra would never kill herself, if you knew her you’d understand."

    "What about drugs?" Barnes had hoped to surprise with a blunt question and he got what he expected.

    "Who the hell do you think you are? What, are you people getting all of your theories from the tabloids now?"

    "So you are not aware if Ms. Nash was involved with narcotics."

    "No, I know she wasn’t. Look, maybe you see me as some kind of junkie Typhoid Mary but I can give you two reasons why I would never get Cassie into that stuff. First, she just wasn’t that sort of person. And secondly, I do not, I really do not, want to go back to prison.

    Was it even worth a murder investigation? Barnes mulled the question as he parked the car and got out. He had returned to the scene of the crime, or whatever it was, to try to get a better picture of things but it hadn’t helped and his thoughts remained stubbornly unclear.

    The money was the big thing. With murder, nine times out of ten, if it wasn’t love it was money. Barnes hadn’t seen a lot of love in this case, but there was over half a million dollars unaccounted for. Not to mention all the money that was still around, sitting in those bank accounts. She hadn’t left a will so it all went to her next of kin, who seemed fairly happy with the deal. There was also the matter of the cancelled life insurance; not too unusual on its own, but in Barnes’s experience people generally told their dependants when they did something like that.

    On the other hand, would anyone’s life stand up under scrutiny? If he fell off this cliff right now, what would the people investigating his death decide about him?

    Barnes thought for a minute and smiled. They’d probably decide he didn’t get out enough and he had lousy balance. And they would be right. He took a step away from the edge and turned his thoughts back to the case and his eyes back to the road.

    An impromptu shrine had sprung up at the curve. Cards, pictures and piles of flowers had been left to lean against the damaged guardrail and occasionally tumble into the surf below. The piece of road leading up to it was the first good straight stretch for miles, a place where anyone might be a bit heavy on the gas. So she comes up on the curve doing sixty-five, maybe seventy and then what? Does she gun it and send herself flying over the edge for God knows what reason? Does she doze off, on drugs--willingly or otherwise--or just plain tired? Or was it something else entirely?

    Barnes tried to visualize the scene and found it surprisingly easy. The car zipping along, launching, crashing and exploding; it was all out of a movie. Except in movies no one really died. It was stunts and effects and...

    Barnes brought himself up short. Stunts. Done by stuntmen. People who knew how to drive a car off of a cliff and jump out at the last minute, who would roll to break the fall and might just smash some roadside vegetation in the process. People who, when faced with a problem like getting rid of a body might come up with an idea like this as a matter of course.

    The brother then. But why kill a goose that laid such fat golden eggs? As long as she was alive and making movies, Cole Nash looked like he was set for life.

    Or maybe not. After all, she seemed to be supporting her family only because she had no one else. What if the thing between her and Janic was actually serious? Nash may have been a pushover, but her boyfriend seemed fairly sharp. He might not have wanted any freeloading relatives hanging around and, having met the people in question, Barnes could believe that she might not have been too opposed to the idea. Cole or even Mrs. Nash could have gotten wind of this and decided that they had better take what they could while they could. Now that was a motive for murder.

    The policeman picked up a rock and flipped it into the ocean as he thought about this. It worked, as far as it went, but it wasn’t exactly supported by the boyfriend’s indifference. He tried it again, cutting Janic out of the equation. Maybe she had decided to change her life on her own. Maybe, for whatever reason, the actress had decided that she had had enough of being used, taking parts that maybe she didn’t want so her relatives could live it up. The cancelled insurance could have been an early indicator that she was getting ready to cut them loose.

    Barnes ran this revised scenario to see how it played and the first thing that hit him was that she needn’t have actually died here. In fact, it made more sense to imagine that her body, dead or unconscious had been loaded into the car at some other place and this was just a convenient, if unconventional, method of disposal. For that matter, who was to say that the body had ever been in the car at all? If she had been killed by some method that would make it obvious her death was not an accident, such as a gunshot or an strangulation, it might have made more sense to drop the car here and the body somewhere else, probably up the coast a ways. After all, they couldn’t have been sure the tank would blow, or that the rescue crew would be delayed. It made the most sense to have left the body somewhere out here, but just to be sure Barnes determined to start the paperwork for a warrant to search the Nash place as soon as he got back.

    Even when he wanted to, Barnes couldn’t get away from the case. He flipped on the TV that night, looking for something mind-numbing, only to find yet another tribute to the dead actress. Not having anything better to do, he decided that it was just fate and yielded to it, peeled the top off of his microwaved dinner and settled in to watch.

    The program opened with a biography, with shots of the drab stucco houses where she had grown up, interviews with the neighbors who said she was a nice kid and pictures of the actress as a smiling blonde child. Then there were the yearbook photos--still smiling, less blonde--and footage from her early work in ads for a local chicken restaurant-- more smiling, violently blonde. Then they moved on to her ‘real’ career with clips from a number of movies that all seemed very much the same and interviews with all of the famous people the show’s producers could get their hands on. Their comments swept over Barnes as a monotonous litany of praise.

    "A beautiful young woman with tremendous talent..."

    "A rising superstar..."

    "Everybody who knew her just adored her..."

    "A very real, down-to-earth person..."

    "Everyone in Hollywood is mourning..."

    "...her last picture almost cracked $100 million."

    It was right about then that Barnes had a silly thought. It just floated by at first, but then he grabbed it and focused on it and found the idea becoming less absurd by the second. Then the case turned itself inside out and suddenly all of the pieces fit.

    The theory was still too ridiculous to waste department time or money on, so Barnes made his own reservations and on Friday evening he caught a late flight out of LAX to Chicago. He rented a car and drove for a long time, spent the night in a motel and then drove some more.

    He ended up in a one-Walmart town fifty miles past the Illinois State line. The address he had led him to a single story, wood frame house just off the main road. It could have used a new coat of paint, preferably in something other than septic-tank green, but the curtains were new and it looked like someone had been working in the garden. Barnes parked his rental, walked up the short concrete path to the front door and knocked.

    "Can I help you?"

    " I’m Detective Phillip Barnes of the LAPD." He held up his badge for her to examine. "I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right."

    The woman cast a nervous glance in the direction of the neighbors’ windows and opened the door the rest of the way. "Please come in."

    He entered and found himself in a narrow hallway with an old and much-used carpet and a new runner. His hostess led him to the living room before she spoke again.

    "What do you want?"

    "To ask you about the death of Cassandra Nash."

    She had a small, triangular face, vaguely pretty in an ordinary way and framed by frizzy, light brown hair. She stared at his shoes while he spoke and her mouth creased with worry.

    "Oh. Why would you ask me about that?"

    "Because I want to know why."

    "Oh."

    The only furnishings in the room were a few boxes of books, a television, a folding chair and an old couch at an odd angle, as though someone had just set it down and left it. The woman had taken the chair, so Barnes settled himself on the arm of the sofa while he waited for her to continue.

    "You must think I’m completely insane."

    "Well, I knew insurance fraud was out."

    That got a smile. "Yes, I thought of that. I didn’t want that kind of trouble."

    "What did you want, Miss Nash?"

    She winced and ducked her head. "I wanted out," she said in a small voice. Then, louder, "And it’s Pratt now. Susan Pratt."

    "I know. You put it on the registration."

    "Is that how you found me? The car?" She shook her head. "I thought I had been so careful."

    "And I have to say, you did a pretty good job of it. Actually, I didn’t hit on it until I saw one of those tributes and I started wondering if maybe someone would like to be alive to see that stuff."

    This got a laugh. "Really? Unbelievable."

    "I’m wrong?"

    "No, you’re right. God, you’re so right." She raked her fingers through her hair and smiled in the general direction of the ceiling. "Don’t you love those memorial specials? They’re even better if you knew the person."

    "I’m afraid I never had the pleasure. Are you..."

    "Look," she broke in, "If I explain everything, will you promise not to tell people I’m alive?"

    "We don’t make that kind of deal, Miss Nash."

    "Could you please call me Susan? I can’t stand that name. And why not? I mean, technically, I didn’t break any laws."

    "The State of California imposes a two hundred dollar fine for littering."

    "Okay, I confess. Guilty as charged. But is that really enough to deprive South Bend County of its only third grade teacher?"

    "Really? Third grade?" This got a chuckle from the detective. "All right, let’s hear it. But no promises."

    She acknowledged with a nod and thought for a minute. "Well, we must think alike because I got the idea from a tribute special too. Do you remember back in January when Megan Marks OD’d? They did this whole big thing about her, about how great and brilliant and wonderful she was. And believe me, she was none of those things. I thought it was funny at first, but then I started thinking about what people would say about me when I died. And this whole thing started because I realized they wouldn’t say anything."

    "I don’t have any illusions about my talent, Detective, or my place in the Hollywood food chain. I’m a passable actress, but I’ll only get work while I’m young and thin enough to be worth anything. And I was already closing on my expiration date. After that, you get TV movies, networks, then basic cable, and then it’s third string game shows and then nothing. I just couldn’t bear to watch myself go through that."

    "So why didn’t you just quit? Why go through all this trouble and give up the life you had?"

    The actress took in her surroundings with a sad smile. "Vanity again, I guess. It wasn’t the idea of not working that bothered me so much as the thought of being treated like a failure. Having all of my friends forget me, seeing my boyfriend dump me for someone more fashionable; I couldn’t handle it. And my mother…" She shuddered. "I’d rather be dead."

    "But you aren’t."

    "As far as they’re concerned, I am. I did think about it, but I just didn’t have the nerve. I didn’t really want to die anyway, I just wanted to get away."

    "So you stockpiled as much cash as you could get your hands on, cancelled your life insurance and sold a car to your new identity, then killed your old one."

    "And Step Three was where you caught me. I guess there really is no such thing as a perfect crime. Or non-crime, as the case may be. I suppose that’s up to you."

    Her tone was light but her eyes were pleading. Barnes looked around at the tiny room, the shabby furniture. He thought about the snow-white palace on the Malibu coast, with its glistening interior and spectacular views. Then he thought about the shrewish woman with a face made by modern medicine and the person who was discussed by family and friends in purely financial terms. Finally, he looked at the woman across from him, young but not quite young enough, who would so much rather be here than there and made up his mind.

    "What makes you think you won’t be discovered? Aren’t you afraid people will recognize you?"

    "Not really. People tend to see what they expect, and nobody expects to see a dead movie star teaching grade school in Nowheresville. Besides, I don’t really look much like her."

    Oddly enough, he could see it. "And this isn’t some publicity stunt? If you turn up again in six months I am going to look pretty damn stupid."

    "No! God no."

    "Do you promise?"

    "Cross my heart and hope to die. Again."

    Detective Barnes drove back to Chicago that night and caught a red-eye home. The death of Cassandra Nash was ruled accidental and a better guardrail was put in on the curve. By the end of the year she had been generally forgotten by the population of the greater Los Angeles area, with one notable exception.