“Yulia’s on a shoot at a warehouse in Spitalfields,” he said when he hung up. “Am I good or am I good?”

“Gee, Sherlock, it only took you two hours,” Vivi said, her voice still gravelly with hangover.

Tyler borrowed a big pair of sunglasses for the Uber ride to Spitalfields, though his “disguise” was so clearly an attempt to not look conspicuous that the driver spent most of the journey glancing at him in the rearview mirror. I held Vivi’s hand. My right leg jiggled up and down, animated by a new sense of hope. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A lead. It wasn’t over yet.

We found the shoot in a warehouse, right where Tyler’s contact had said it would be. It was an haute couture photo shoot with models wandering around in transparent raincoat ball gowns and jumpsuits made from netted rope, their faces glazed with bloodred eye shadow and neon-pink freckles. The three of us wandered in, our presence unquestioned because we looked like we belonged there.

“Why aren’t you in hair and makeup yet?” a woman with a clipboard snapped before looking at us closer and realizing, suddenly, who we looked like, who we were. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Then she hurried away into the next room and left us be.

We found Yulia at the back of the warehouse, painting the face of a man with blue permed hair. Yulia wore no makeup herself. Her dark hair was in a braid, and the clothes she wore beneath her tool belt were functional, sensible: She looked almost out of place in such extravagant surrounds.

“I don’t know where she is,” Yulia said when she looked up and saw us. “I haven’t talked to her since before I met you,” she said to Tyler. Then she turned and went back to her work.

“We’re not looking for Grey,” I said.

“We’re looking for you,” Tyler said.

“We know you lived with her,” Vivi said.

Yulia looked up at us again. “My parents owned the apartment. They let me live there when I was going to castings, but I needed roommates to help cover the rent. Hence, your sister. I’m not interested in answering any more questions.”

“Please,” Vivi said as she stepped forward and reached seductively for Yulia’s face.

“Don’t,” Yulia said, smacking Vivi’s hand away with a makeup brush. “Don’t you dare do that vile thing to me.”

“Ow, ow,” Vivi said, her hands up in surrender. “All right. Sorry.”

“You’re just like your sister,” Yulia snapped, stabbing the brush at us. “Manipulative. Now get out of my workplace before I call the cops.” Her gaze slid again to Tyler. “I’m sure they’d be very interested to know that you were here.”

“Hag,” I heard Tyler say under his breath.

“Please,” I said, trying to calm the situation. “Please. We promise we won’t come near you. We won’t touch you, we won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. We just want to find our sister.”

Yulia exhaled, then nodded and bent to whisper in the ear of the model. When he left, she picked up a pair of scissors and held them at her side. “Don’t come any closer,” she said. “I will defend myself.”

“Is that really necessary?” Vivi asked, nodding to the scissors.

“I know your sister. If you’re anything like her, then yes,” Yulia said. “Ask your questions.”

“You have absolutely no idea where she might be?” Tyler asked.

“Last I heard, you killed her. Next question.”

We needed a different angle. “What was she like when you knew her?” I asked.

That caught her off guard. Yulia paused before answering. “Beautiful,” she said finally. “That’s the first thing anyone notices about her, obviously. Also secretive. Quiet. Weird.”

“Weird how?” I asked.

“Most girls, when they get into modeling—they’re swept up in the scene. It’s the first time they’ve lived away from their parents. They drink, they party.”

“You’re telling me Grey Hollow didn’t party?” Tyler said. “Unlikely.”

“Not with us,” Yulia said. “We would go to clubs and she would stay behind. When we came home, she’d be gone, sometimes for days at a time.”

“Gone?” I asked.

“Yes,” Yulia replied. “Gone, as in conspicuously absent.”

“Where do you think she went?”

“Probably having sordid affairs, as is her custom,” Tyler said. Vivi glared at him.

“At first I thought a lover,” Yulia said. Tyler threw his hands up. “Then maybe a drug problem.”

Vivi scoffed. “Grey dabbled, but she would never have developed a habit.”

“What would you know?” Yulia snapped. She grasped the scissors harder. Her knuckles blanched white. There was an animal flash in her eyes, the look of something ready to fight for its life. What had Grey done to this woman? “Grey kept all sorts of secrets. No doubt she kept many from you. I didn’t even know she had sisters until she was famous. She never talked about either of you. She was a nightmare to live with. She had a lot of weird hobbies, but the taxidermy was the weirdest. How many teenage girls do you know who like to skin mice and birds and snakes and make them into weird Frankenstein monsters? That was how she paid her rent, in the first few months, before the modeling money started rolling in. Apparently, her taxidermy was so good that weirdos off the internet would reach out to her for freelance work. Great for her, really shitty for my kitchen table. I never got the stains out.”

“And then there was the week you took a little tumble off the face of the earth,” Tyler said. “What happened, peach? Where did you go?”