Born To Die

“My twin,” Kacey repeated, arching an eyebrow. “Since I’m an only child, who exactly would that be?”

“Shelly Bonaventure!”

“Shelly who? Oh, the actress who was in… Oh, God, I can’t remember the film.” But she did remember Shelly’s face as pretty and even-featured, with big green eyes, short nose, pointed chin, and high cheekbones. Heather’s comparison was definitely a compliment.

“She was in lots of movies, just wasn’t the star. Off the top of my head, there was Joint Custody and Sorority Night, but that was a few years back, and, oh, crap, what about Thirty Going On Fifteen?” Now she was scanning an article in the e-zine, getting her info from the computer screen. “Mainly she was known for her role on What’s Blood Got to Do With It, you know, that vampire drama where Joey Banner got his start.”

“Never saw it,” Kacey admitted, but that wasn’t surprising as she wasn’t into television; just didn’t have a lot of extra time. Between college, med school, residency, and her internship, she’d missed what seemed like a whole generation of pop culture.

“Wow, you missed out. But it’s on DVD and Blu-ray. The whole series, starting with the pilot. It was great. She was great.” Heather was really going now. Animated. “She was from around here, you know. Her real name was Michelle Bentley.” Heather looked up, her brown eyes blinking with the adjustment to the light. “She was just thirty-five, or would have been this coming week.”

Another thing in common. “And she committed suicide?” Kacey said. “A shame.”

“Yeah, she didn’t leave a note, either, or at least the police aren’t copping to it… Oh, get it, ‘copping’ to it?” Heather’s smile was wide, showing off adult braces as she caught her own joke.

“Got it.” Kacey was already passing examination rooms and snapping on the lights in the short hallway. “Too bad.”

“Yeah. . weird. But she really does — did — look like you.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Kacey said as she stepped into her office, a small room lined with bookshelves and one window overlooking the parking lot. Sleet was slanting from the still-dark sky, pinging against the window and drizzling down. Kacey set her computer on the desk, pulled it from its case, flipped it open, and plugged it in. As it warmed up, she adjusted the shade that allowed her to see out but no one to look into the office, then flipped through a stack of messages as she munched on her breakfast cookie and sipped her coffee.

Patients weren’t due to arrive for nearly an hour, so she had time to catch up on paperwork, e-mail, and settle in for another day in the throes of flu season. She returned a couple of calls, heard the rest of the staff arriving, and through the window noticed steely clouds rolling in over the Bitter-root Mountains.

She’d just hung up from a consultation with a colleague in Spokane about a patient with breast cancer when Heather poked her head through the door, which Kacey kept ajar during most of the day. “Mrs. Ingles called and canceled, something about her nephew needing a babysitter.”

“Okay.” Helen Ingles was battling type 2 diabetes and had been scheduled for more blood work.

“Oh, and here. I ran off this article about Shelly Bonaventure.”

Kacey looked over the tops of her reading glasses.

Heather dropped a couple of pages onto Kacey’s desk. “Yeah, yeah, I know it’s time to get to work, but”— she shrugged her slim shoulders—“she was a local celeb, and just look at how much she resembles you.”

“Enough already,” Kacey said, shaking her head, as she pushed the article to the side of her desk. For years, she’d heard that she and several Hollywood actresses had similar facial characteristics. Hadn’t her wide grin been compared to Julia Roberts’s smile? Even her ex-husband, Jeffrey Charles Lambert — oh, wait, just JC to his friends — had told her that her face had the same shape as Jennifer Garner’s, which wasn’t true at all. As for Shelly Bonaventure, the only real resemblance, as she saw it, was that their eyes were the same shape and color, that is, if Shelly hadn’t worn tinted contacts.

“Okay, okay… I get it.” Heather held up her hands in surrender as she backed out of the office. “Mrs. Whitaker is here already.”

“Great.” Constance Whitaker was a hypochondriac who had too much time on her hands and spent it investigating illnesses on the Internet, then freaking herself out because she was certain she was contracting the latest disease du jour. “What about Dr. Cortez?” Kacey asked, shrugging into her lab coat.

“He called around fifteen minutes ago. He’s on his way from the hospital,” Heather said as headlights flashed across the window and Dr. Martin Cortez’s Range Rover wheeled into the lot. “Record time.”

Kacey shook her head. “He’s been faster. When he had the Porsche.”

Heather sighed. “I remember.”

The sporty car had lasted one winter, and then he’d traded it in for an upscale four-wheel drive that could deal with the mountainous terrain and harsh winter weather.

The phone started ringing, and Heather retreated to the front desk just as the back door opened and closed sharply. Dr. Martin Cortez had arrived.

Kacey glanced at the article about Shelly Bonaventure, and yeah, she had to admit to herself, there was a slight resemblance between them, but it was minimal.

She tossed the article into the trash just as Martin stuck his head into the room. Already wearing his lab coat and a warm smile, he started the conversation with, “You pick up a triple-shot caramel mocha with extra whip this morning?”

“In your dreams.” It was their morning joke. Every once in a while Kacey did surprise him with some outrageous, over-the-top coffee drink, but not today.

“How will I get through another minute?” He splayed one hand over his chest and looked to the ceiling, as if for holy inspiration.

“It’ll be tough, but you’ll manage,” she said. “Soldier on, okay?”

“I’ll try.” His smile, a quick slash of white against his tanned skin, was infectious. No wonder half the single women in the county were interested. Dropping the Oscar-worthy pose, he turned serious. All local GP again. “So did you take a look at Amelia Hornsby’s chart?” Martin knew the names of the family members of nearly everyone who stepped into the clinic. Amelia was an eight-year-old who had been through several rounds of antibiotics to fight a throat infection that just wouldn’t go away.

Randy Yates, a male nurse just out of school, stuck his head into the door. “Hey, Docs, time to rock ’n’ roll,” he said, flashing a quick grin. His brown hair was shaved nearly to his skull, leaving little more than stubble over the top of his head, but he made up for it with a neatly trimmed goatee. “I’ve got exam one, two, and four ready to go. Vitals taken.”

“I’ll take Mrs. Whitaker,” Martin said.

Kacey checked the chart on exam room two. Elmer Grimes. “I’m in two,” she said and opened the door to her first patient.

Detective Jonas Hayes of the LAPD wasn’t buying the setup. He hadn’t last night, when he’d responded to the call to Shelly Bonaventure’s apartment, and he didn’t today, as he sat at his desk and clicked through the images of the crime scene on his computer. This morning the department was buzzing, phones ringing, conversations drifting from one desk to the next, footsteps shuffling, computer keys clicking, and somewhere a printer was clunking out copies.

Hayes took a swallow of his coffee, a cup he’d picked up at the Starbucks a few streets down, as he worked his way through the statements collected the night before. Again. He had perused them all around four in the morning and now was reading them more slowly five hours later.

Last night, from the minute he’d stepped through Shelly Bonaventure’s front door, he’d been hit by the sensation that everything wasn’t as it was portrayed. He felt as if the crime scene had been staged a la Marilyn Monroe some fifty years earlier. Half a century later there were still conspiracy theories and the question of murder still hung over Marilyn’s grave. He didn’t want the same controversy to be a part of Shelly Bonaventure’s death. Not on his watch.

And the crime scene just hadn’t felt right last night.

Still didn’t.

And that, in and of itself, was odd. A man of science, Hayes believed in cold, hard facts. He wasn’t big into