Reason To Believe by Roxanne St. Claire Page A

She appreciated that Chase wanted to help, wanted to search drawers and tear the bed apart to somehow make the damn ring appear, but she needed to sit on the floor next to her empty nightstand, and wallow in regrets. She should never have taken it off, she should never have left it home, she should never have accepted it in the first place.
    She should—
    “Arianna.” Chase opened the bedroom door, his voice low and quiet.
    “What?” She wiped her nose and looked over her shoulder. “Please don’t ask me to think about who. I don’t know who.”
    And without the ring, she never would. She’d never read anyone again. She’d never have a chance to fulfill her mother’s wishes—just when she’d stopped fighting the paralyzing fear and realized that they weren’t just her mother’s wishes, they were her own. Now she’d lost the power.
    Chase sat next to her on the floor, draped his arm around her and opened his laptop. “I need you to look at something, sweetheart.” He tilted the screen toward her. “You need to read this file. It’s important.”
    She sniffed, blinked back a tear that made the screen swim in front of her, and forced herself to read the digital reproduction of an LAPD accident report.
    According to the file, twenty-four-year-old Katherine Childress, the daughter of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, had been driving a car that careened off Mulholland into a brushy, muddy area and was killed instantly. The accident happened on a rainy night in April 2003, one week before her wedding. The night was so rainy police were unable to find any evidence of what caused the accident. There were no witnesses.
    When she finished, she looked up at him.
    “Keep going.” He paged down to an obituary from the Los Angeles Times, with the picture of a pretty blonde. Something clicked in her head and she squinted at it, trying to think where she’d seen that face before. Her gaze darted over the words describing the brief life of Katherine Childress, a student intern at a movie studio, an aspiring filmmaker, a part-time actress. Then she stared at the last line, unable to breathe as the words sank in.
    Childress is survived by her parents and by her fiancé, Brian Burroughs.
    “Oh, my God,” she whispered, her hand over her mouth. That’s where she’d seen the face before. The picture on Brian’s dresser. In his wallet. “Katie.” The only woman Brian ever loved. “She was his fiancée, who died in a car accident four years before I met him.” She’d never heard him say her last name. Just Katie.
    Chills exploded all over her. Was Brian sending the message? Had he killed his fiancée?
    “It can’t be him,” she said, as though Chase was following her thoughts.
    “Yes, it can.”
    “No, no.” She held out her bare hand. “He’s not worried about my abilities—he doesn’t believe I’m for real. He thinks the staff gets information to me from secret interviews.” She looked at Katie’s picture again, trying but failing to reconcile any role Brian could have had in her death. It was impossible. It defied logic. “It’s not him.”
    “I’m not so sure of that,” Chase said. “The boyfriend or husband is always the number one suspect. Surely you know that, as the daughter of a cop.”
    “He’s still grief-stricken. He couldn’t have killed her. And even if he did, he doesn’t believe that I could figure it out.”
    “But he could be thinking about her death, sending you the message.”
    She grabbed his arm, pulling him up. “Let’s go find him. He’s probably home by now. If he’s guilty, you’re the man to get him to confess. But if he’s not, and someone else on that set killed her, he has the right to know.”
    “How far away does he live?”
    She stared at him as realization hit even harder. “He lives on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Right off Mulholland.”

    A call to Burroughs Production confirmed that Brian was at home, as Arianna suspected. He was a creature of habit who