Private L.A. Read online

  They stood there looking at each other for several beats. Justine’s heart raced. She felt outside herself somehow. She heard her own voice as if from far off, like in a dream, saying, “Did you ever just want to give in sometimes and do something totally crazy? Totally not you?”

  Paul’s gaze went lazy, and he nodded. “All the time.”

  Justine could not believe that she replied, “We should lock the door, then. Turn out the lights.”

  A moment of surprise, then Paul murmured, “Perfect. No one will even know we’re here.”

  Chapter 60

  AT FIVE MINUTES to eight that morning, Terry Graves entered his office in the Harlow-Quinn Productions bungalow on the Warner lot. He carried a grande Starbucks and was reading that morning’s Hollywood Reporter. Dave Sanders was trailing him, chewing on a bagel, engrossed in the Los Angeles Times.

  The office was surprisingly small and the furniture surprisingly understated given the success of the company. Except for the various framed movie posters, you would not have pegged the room as belonging to a Hollywood power player.

  The producer was almost around the back of his desk before he noticed me sitting in his chair, looking at him. I was finishing an egg-and-bacon sandwich, one eye on the television, which showed a clip from Bobbie Newton’s footage of the Harlow children.

  “What the hell are you doing in here, Jack?” Graves demanded.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” Sanders said.

  “I’m resourceful, remember?” I said. “That’s why you hired me.”

  “What’s this all about?” Graves said, indignant now.

  “Bobbie Newton’s footage of the Harlow kids?” I said. “I just heard it’s the number one clip on YouTube, something like seven million hits since yesterday. And it’s the number one most-linked-to site on Facebook. There isn’t a news channel or newspaper in the world that isn’t carrying the story.”

  “Does that surprise you?” Sanders demanded.

  “The question is: Does it surprise you?”

  “What?” The producer scowled. “Of course it doesn’t surprise us.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  The attorney caught the edge in my voice. “What’s that mean?”

  “Bobbie Newton told me that Terry here is the one who tipped her about the kids. I suspect you were in on it too, Dave. And maybe even Camilla.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Terry Graves snapped.

  “The coverage. The uproar. The publicity value of the Harlows disappearing, especially when they’re making the movie of a lifetime. Makes me wonder what’s really going on here.”

  The producer’s eyes flared. “I have no, zero, nada interest in this kind of publicity. And what Bobbie told you? That’s an out-and-out lie from a lunatic lush who will say anything to further her own ego-glorifying ends.”

  I had to admit, Terry Graves knew the Bobbie Newton I knew.

  Sanders became livid. “And for thinking that we had anything to do with any of this, you’re fired, Morgan. Vacate the premises. Invoice me for your time.”

  I watched him, saying nothing.

  “Get … out … of … my … chair,” Terry Graves said.

  “I don’t think that’s in your best interests, gentlemen,” I said, not moving.

  “Our best …?” the producer shouted. “Should I call security?”

  “I dunno, will that be how you handle the FBI?”

  “What are you talking about?” Sanders demanded.

  “You don’t think they’re coming here eventually, Dave?” I asked. “For an attorney, you have no sense of how criminal investigations go forward. They’ll be wanting to review the books, look at every file that Terry and you and Camilla Bronson have concerning the Harlows.”

  Sanders stiffened. “My files are protected under attorney-client privilege.”

  “And mine are protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution,” Terry Graves said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think any of that will fly in a case this high-profile. You will not be able to control this story, gentlemen, no matter what you do. It’s taken on a life of its own. Stand in its way? Get ready to be trampled.”

  Sanders thought about that. His tone turned more businesslike. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” I replied. “I’m telling you that if you are as smart as I think you are, you’ll allow me and my investigators access to all your files. We’ll look for anything amiss and notify you. That way you’ll have a heads-up before the FBI hands it to you with your head down.”

  “You don’t think I know what’s in my files?” Terry Graves asked. “I do. And I’ll tell you, Morgan, I’m more than comfortable with what’s in there.”

  “How about you, Dave?” I asked.

  The entertainment attorney grimaced. “I’m fine too. And we’re not interested in your proposition. I stand by my decision. You and Private are fired. We don’t need your advice or services anymore.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, standing up finally and reaching out to shake Terry Graves’s hand.

  The producer looked at my hand with extreme distaste, did not take it. Neither did Sanders. I exited as gracefully as I could, thinking that the Harlow-Quinn team really did need my advice, and really did need Private’s services. Take their security system, for example, especially the computer security system.

  Like most people, Terry Graves was lazy when it came to things like passwords. I’d found his written down on a sticky note under a divider in the top drawer of his desk.

  Leaving the bungalow and heading toward the gate and my car, parked just outside the Warner grounds, I kept my hands in my pants pockets and gripped the flash drives I’d used to copy everything I could find in the producer’s computer regarding the Harlows and Saigon Falls.

  Chapter 61

  TWO HOURS LATER, Justine sat in the passenger seat of the Suburban as Sci drove them north out of Thousand Oaks on the 101. Kloppenberg was monitoring up-to-the-minute radio coverage of the Harlow disappearance.

  Justine barely listened. Her mind surged with battling thoughts and emotions about what she’d done so blithely earlier in the morning. How could she have done that? She barely knew Paul. And locked door or not, they’d taken such a chance, making love on the floor of the gym and up against the steel poles that supported the pull-up stations. But maybe the possibility of getting caught had only magnified the experience. Even now, hours afterward, Justine had to admit that the sex had been incredible, mind-blowing.

  But that’s not me, she thought in sudden desperation. The Justine I know doesn’t hook up with strangers and … She alternated between wanting to call Paul, to tell him how amazing it all had been, and wanting to sob.

  Was this the kind of random sexual acting out she had feared? She couldn’t come to any other conclusion. The knife fight in the jail cell in Guadalajara had seriously affected her. For God’s sake, she knew risky sexual behavior was a symptom of PTSD, and yet she’d just gone ahead, almost as if she were an adolescent again, unable to make rational choices.

  “You okay?” Sci asked as they drove into Ojai and headed toward the Harlows’ ranch.

  “Huh?” she replied, feeling foggier than normal. “I’m just tired, Sci. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately.”

  “Lot of that going around,” Kloppenberg offered. “You see the text from Jack and Del Rio?”

  Justine shook her head.

  “Rick moved his right big toe about an hour ago. Jack saw it.”

  She smiled. “That’s so good.”

  “I know, right?” Sci said. “There they are.”

  Ahead on the winding road, Justine could see several satellite broadcast trucks set up across from the gate to the Harlows’ ranch. With klieg lights and cameras trained on the Suburban, Sci pulled into the drive behind two vans emblazoned with the symbol of the FBI. A short, slight man, forties, buzz cut, FBI blue Windbreaker, already
stood by the front gate.

  “Good,” Sci said. “That’s Todd McCormick. We work peachy together.”

  “You being sarcastic?”

  “No, I mean it. He’s first-rate. Little uptight. FBI, what do you want? But the man’s completely on it when it comes to forensics.”

  They got out. Sci introduced Justine to McCormick, who seemed Kloppenberg’s exact opposite in almost every way. And yet Justine noticed immediately that the men appeared to have some kind of quiet bond, a shared expertise and curiosity that was remarkably free of ego or competition.

  “I saw the tapes of the children,” McCormick said. “Of course, I’ve heard of you, though I’ve never seen you in action. Impressive, Ms. Smith.”

  “Thank you,” Justine said.

  “You trained in forensics as well as child psychology?” McCormick asked.

  Justine shook her head.

  “Gotta admit, it’s a little off from my perspective,” the crime tech said.

  “What’s that?” Sci asked.

  “Townsend letting you both back on the crime scene,” McCormick said.

  Sci grinned coldly. “Private’s forensics teams and labs are fully accredited with every major law enforcement agency in the country, even yours, Todd. If you remember, I have lectured at the FBI Academy.”

  “I remember, Sci,” McCormick said before gesturing toward Justine with his chin. “No offense, but I was talking about her.”

  Justine said, “Look, I’m here because Jack Morgan thinks I have a good eye for things. Special Agent Townsend concurs. I certainly won’t touch anything you consider evidence, Mr. McCormick. I’ll notify you the moment I find anything that seems germane to the investigation.”

  You could tell the FBI tech didn’t like it, but he nodded. “You have a key?”

  “No,” said Sci. “I thought you got it from Sanders.”

  Justine sighed, stepped by them to a keypad. “Don’t worry, gentlemen, I have the entry code. I wrote it down the last time I was here.”

  Chapter 62

  “HOW THE HELL did you get access to these kinds of files?” FBI SAC Christine Townsend asked me. We were inside the lab at Private. Mo-bot was at her workbench, uploading the data onto our system.

  “I copied them from Graves’s computer at Harlow-Quinn,” I said.

  “Stole them, you mean?” Townsend cried. “Are you out of your mind? I won’t be part of this. Whatever you might find in there is tainted now. None of it can be used in any court in—”

  “Does it really matter?” I demanded. “Look, with all due respect, I thought we were in the business of finding the Harlows. Shouldn’t we keep that the number one priority?”

  “I have a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution,” she shot back.

  “As Chief Fescoe and others have pointed out to me recently, I don’t operate under the same restraints,” I replied. “Besides, I don’t like being lied to or being manipulated, and Sanders and Graves are guilty of both.”

  “What’s their motive?” Townsend said skeptically. “Why does this situation benefit them beyond what you said about publicity? You said the Harlows were almost bankrupt, that the film was on the verge of ruining them financially. You’d think they’d be more focused on that.”

  “I never said the Harlows were almost bankrupt,” I corrected. “That’s what Sanders told me. As of last night, I doubt nearly everything he has said in this case, and Graves and Bronson too. Taking the files is my way of double-checking things.”

  Townsend said, “I still can’t be part of this.” She headed toward the door.

  “Don’t you want to know what we find?” I called after her.

  “I didn’t say that,” the special agent replied, and went out the door.

  Mo-bot called to me. “Where do you want me to start? This is a lot of ground to cover with a one-woman show.”

  Before I could answer, my cell rang. A number I did not recognize, but given all that had been going on, I answered. “Jack Morgan.”

  “It’s your favorite bail bondsman,” Carmine Noccia purred. “We should meet sooner rather than later.”

  “Carmine, it is not a good time.”

  “Wasn’t a good time for me last year when the DEA found that truck.”

  So there it was. Carmine either knew or openly suspected me. “I suppose not,” I said. “But what’s that got to do with me?”

  Carmine laughed. “Cool as ever, Jack. But again, we should meet sooner rather than later. The three of us.”

  “Three?”

  “Yeah. You. Me. Your brother. Tommy and I have a proposition for you.”

  “An offer I can’t refuse?”

  A pause, then a short laugh. “You’re a cool son of a bitch, Jack.”

  “I try.”

  “How about Tommy and I drop by your office?” Carmine said. “Haven’t seen the place in a while. Say, like, an hour?”

  “Say, like, I’ll be waiting.”

  Chapter 63

  JUSTINE WANDERED INTO the Harlows’ bedroom, noticed the mirrors, six in total, none alike, two floor-lengths on either side wall, two smaller framed mirrors, one on the doors to the closets, and a long thin one on the interior wall up high, right below the ceiling. It seemed to reflect nothing but the Italian plaster.

  She heard a grunt, noticed McCormick waving an ultraviolet wand over the sheets on the Harlows’ bed. Weren’t they fresh? The sheets? What did he expect to find on them?

  Justine headed into Jennifer Harlow’s closet, finding the drawer of sex toys Mo-bot had first discovered, and then the Sybian machine sitting on the floor beneath a row of haute couture dresses.

  Justine closed her eyes, tried to get inside Jennifer’s head. The woman was obviously highly sexed. The actress seemed to have one of the best of everything in the self-pleasure toy category. But what did that mean? A lot of highly creative people were also highly sexed, Picasso, for instance, and Anaïs Nin, and a dozen other actors she could name right off the top of her head. It certainly didn’t mean … or did it?

  Was it possible that Jennifer used all these toys because her husband did not satisfy her often enough, or at all anymore? Justine flashed on an image of her entanglement with Paul earlier in the morning and felt faint. What in God’s name was I thinking? Was that how Jennifer Harlow was? Sexually impulsive?

  Or maybe the toys were just that, toys, something to energize a marriage of twenty-plus years. She opened her eyes, looked down, thought, But how do you explain the Sybian? She got down on her knees, looked at it. According to Sci, the machine was the ultimate in erotic gizmos for women, a combination of the thundering power of riding a horse bareback coupled with …

  Justine imagined herself on the thing and then shook her head violently. She was not going there. She was getting this all under control….

  Her hand lashed out, sweeping aside several of the dresses. She saw something behind the Sybian machine, a crack in the closet wall she hadn’t noticed before. She pushed back the dresses, smelling faint perfume. Jennifer’s?

  The crack was regular, rectangular, like the seam around a narrow panel or door, except she could see no handle. She knocked on it and was surprised to find it was made of some kind of metal. She felt along the seam counterclockwise, pressing, prodding. Nothing.

  She was about to get up to see if McCormick might have better luck, when she noticed an aberration in the wood trim that ran along the carpet five inches below the bottom seam. It was a knot that had not been sanded smooth.

  Justine pushed at it, felt no give. She got her finger alongside the knot and nudged it left. Nothing. She pushed right, felt it give and slide until she heard a hydraulic click and the metal pocket door slid back, revealing a steel ladder bolted into the wall two feet away.

  Chapter 64

  THE PASSAGE TO the panic room, Justine thought, leaning out to shine her Maglite into the shaft. About twenty feet below her she spotted a cement floor and a door. About eight feet above her, a faint ligh
t shone from another passage.

  She thought of telling McCormick, the FBI tech, but knew that meant she would not be able to explore for herself. She ducked through the open pocket door, leaned across the space, and climbed the ladder until she was level with the second passage.

  Unlike the one below, this passage had no door, just a narrow entry that doglegged left. Justine held the light between her teeth, stepped across the space, found footing inside. She took another step, met a wall, turned left, and found herself in a room about seven feet high, fifteen feet long, and twenty deep. There were bunk beds, a table with six chairs, and a small kitchen whose shelves were stocked with canned goods.

  She noticed a switch at the entry and tripped it. Another pocket door slid out, blocking the entrance.

  Light fell into the panic room from a window placed flush at the top of the wall. It was about a foot wide and ran most of the length of the space. Just above the window on the ceiling, Justine noticed metal brackets, a series of them, spaced at three-foot intervals, five in all.

  She tried to orient herself based on her movements after she’d left Jennifer Harlow’s closet, tried to figure out where the window faced.

  “It’s not a window, it’s a two-way mirror,” she muttered to herself.

  Again she looked up at the brackets: simple bent and drilled steel bars screwed into the ceiling. There were extra holes in the bars, and signs that something had been bolted to them at one time.

  Except for electrical plugs in the wall and what looked like a socket for a cable connection, the place was empty. A cable connection?

  Justine looked back at the brackets, imagining screens and cable lines hanging there. But why? And then she saw it. Not screens. Cameras. It made sense, didn’t it? The Harlows were filmmakers, after all.

  Justine wanted to see what a camera might pick up from the window. She jumped, grabbed hold of two brackets, and pulled herself high enough to peer through the two-way mirror, which afforded her a complete and elevated view of the Harlows’ bed and the FBI tech still working on it. She swung her attention around the room, spotting the other four mirrors. Were there brackets for cameras behind them?