2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 19

  “Whoa,” I said. “Are you guys sure that’s how it played out?”

  “Yeah.” Summerly nodded. “We looked into it. He did not, as it turned out, want to be her boyfriend. Not at all.”

  “Oh, God. And he didn’t know it was coming?”

  “No,” Summerly said. “The whole thing took him completely by surprise. And she was so upset and embarrassed about having done it and been rejected that this male teacher thought, Oh, dear. I better let the school authorities know. Because he’s thinking, next thing you know Baby’ll be saying he kissed her.”

  “That’s the way it usually goes.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Summerly said. “So he made damned sure his boss heard his version of events first.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “So the school authorities brought the police in just to make sure everything was dealt with correctly. They didn’t want a lawsuit on their hands. My superior officer handled it. I assisted. We questioned Baby and the teacher. They both said the same thing. She got confused. Tried to plant one on him in the classroom.”

  “Oh, Baby.” I covered my eyes. I could feel my sister’s hurt and humiliation burning up my throat from deep in my chest. “How did our dad handle it?”

  “He was…” Summerly paused to remember. “You could tell he didn’t know what to do. He sort of brushed it off, told her it was no big deal, didn’t answer any of our follow-up calls. He wasn’t one of those very experienced dads.”

  Funny, I thought. It wasn’t his first time, being responsible for a troubled thirteen-year-old girl.

  “How the hell did the other kids find out?” I asked. “When we were at the school, another girl there seemed to know about it.”

  “You know how it is.” Summerly shrugged. “People talk. Kids overhear them. How is she? Is she okay?”

  “How does she seem?” I asked. As if on cue, the sound of glass smashing came from downstairs followed by more cursing from Baby. “It’s a weird time with her dad gone and me being in her face, as old and lame and completely intrusive as I am.”

  With the room around us still trashed from the party, and Baby’s activities downstairs becoming louder and louder, it seemed impossible to stay in bed. I got up and pulled on a T-shirt and boxers and threw Officer Summerly’s shirt at him.

  “I’ll distract her while you sneak out the back,” I told him.

  “Who are the teenagers now?” He smirked. His phone bleeped, and he took it from the nightstand, checked the screen. “Will I meet you later for…”

  “For what?” I asked. But he had become consumed by what he was reading. I threw his hat at him.

  “I was going to say coffee, but I’ve got to go.” He pulled his shirt on. “I’ve got a call out past Upper Canyonback.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s…” He waved vaguely north.

  “What is your beat, exactly?” I asked. “First you turn up at Stanford-West Academy, then you’re here in Manhattan Beach. Now you’re getting called to a canyon?”

  “I cover for a lot of guys,” he said, slipping his shoes on quickly. “I’ve got to go.”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes as he headed for the stairs. I was left with the distinct sensation that I had just been lied to.

  Chapter 81

  When I found Baby, she was trying to sweep up the broken pieces of a beer bottle on the kitchen floor, standing barefoot, surrounded by shards. I walked over piles of crumpled party detritus and shooed her away.

  “Let me handle this,” I said.

  “Was that the guy?” she said.

  I looked up. Summerly was just disappearing up the Strand, as visible as any mountain-size man would be slipping between the beautiful people outside.

  “What guy?”

  “Oh, come on.” Baby slapped me playfully. “You just had that cop in your room, didn’t you? The one with the ass!”

  “Baby.” I sighed.

  “This is so romantic!” she squealed.

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah.” Her eyes were dazzling with excitement. “You two are perfect for each other! Oh, wow. And if you’re spending all your time with him, you won’t be messing with my life.”

  “Who says I’m going to spend a minute more with that guy?” I asked, sweeping the glass into a dustpan, pouring it into the trash can.

  “What, don’t you like him?”

  I was beginning to see the Baby who, at thirteen, had gotten herself all tied up in knots about a teacher having a romantic interest in her. This was yet another unfamiliar side to the girl who had proved to be the most unpredictable teenager of my life, the one I was responsible for. This sudden gushing fascination with my love life defied her usual surly, sarcastic, apparently wizened outlook.

  “Baby,” I said, “despite what you might think about overweight and socially defunct women from the howling depths of Colorado, we are perfectly capable of sleeping with random guys without needing them to rescue us from crushing loneliness by getting romantically involved. Now go take a shower,” I instructed. “I’ll make coffee.”

  The doorbell rang. Baby tottered over in the bemused fashion of a girl only just coming to terms with both the worst hangover of her young life and the idea that I, of all people, was more sexually liberated than she was. She opened the door to Ashton Willisee. His exhausted, terrified face made me drop the dustpan into the trash can at my feet.

  “I need help,” Ashton said.

  Chapter 82

  The boy smelled of smoke. One of the knees of his black jeans was torn, and I could see a cube of safety glass, the kind used in car windows, wedged into his boot. Ashton walked in stiffly and went to the spacious living room, numbly staring at the party junk on the couch as though he didn’t know how to solve the intricate problem of shoving it aside to sit down. Baby assisted.

  “We killed someone,” Ashton said.

  “What the fu—” Baby wheeled around, her eyes wide and locked on me.

  I put a hand up as I sat down across from the boy in an armchair. “Ashton, don’t say another word,” I said. “Whatever you’ve done, you don’t need to make it worse by blurting out something that might count in court as a confession to people you barely know.”

  Baby’s eyes somehow grew even larger. “He just said he—”

  “He’s shell-shocked, panicked, maybe injured,” I said to Baby. “He needs his parents and a legal representative on hand as soon as possible. Ashton, I want you to call your parents now and—”

  “I don’t have my phone,” he said. While Baby was becoming more excited by the second, Ashton on the other hand seemed to be calming, easing himself back into the leather couch and fixing his mussed hair. “And I don’t want a lawyer. Last night my friends and I broke into a house in Brentwood, and while we were there, we got trapped. We set the place on fire to escape. We killed the lady who lives there.”

  I held my head in my hands, my thoughts racing to find a way to contain the situation legally, even if Ashton insisted on blathering all the details of his crime to Baby and me. Baby curled up on the couch sideways, facing Ashton, her phone glowing as her thumbs danced over the screen.

  “I’m going to jail,” Ashton said.

  “Well, not for murder,” Baby said. We both looked at her. She was chewing a nail as she scrolled one-handed. “‘A home invasion in Brentwood last night has left a woman with multiple gunshot wounds and neighbors terrorized.’ Looks like half her house burned down, but she’s still alive. She’s in stable condition at Santa Monica Med Center.”

  All the air seemed to go out of Ashton. There was silence as Baby continued to scroll.

  “You killed two dogs,” she finally said. She looked up from the phone at the boy beside her. “You asshole.”

  “I didn’t mean to kill or hurt anybody,” he said. “And what happened last night wasn’t my fault. When it started, when I got into all this, we were just trying to scare people.”

  “I’m really going to advise you to stop
talking now,” I said.

  “I don’t have any choice,” Ashton said. “I have to tell someone what we’ve been doing because he’s coming. He’s going to kill me. And if I don’t let the secret out now, no one will ever know.”

  Chapter 83

  Ashton told us everything. I sat and watched the boy physically unfold as his story did, his posture loosening, his hands—which had been tucked tightly into his armpits—slowly emerging and beginning to illustrate in the air.

  It had started with another excruciating Thanksgiving dinner. In the hours after sunset at his parents’ vacation home in Carpinteria, before Ashton was allowed to join the local kids on the beach, during the insufferable cocktail swigging and hard laughing of socialites with deep tans and painfully white teeth. He’d stood on the balcony and watched his uncle Ray argue with his wife, Francine, then his uncle’s big hand smacked the side of Francine’s head in the dark beyond the palm trees. The strike had made no sound in Ashton’s world, was swallowed up like a scream in space. When he went downstairs and tried to explain what he’d seen, the adults smirked and shrugged or wandered away, changing the subject the way they had with just about everything unpalatable he’d brought up over the years.

  As Ashton spoke, I saw the anger rise in his throat and temples, and I recognized a pain in him that I had witnessed many times across my career working with troubled youth. The unmistakable hurt of a child ignored, a child discovering that justice didn’t always play out in the real world.

  In that moment, Ashton had realized every story he’d ever been told in his life was a lie. The wolf eats Grandma. The witch eats the children. The robber dashes away from the cop. Sometimes in life people didn’t get what they deserved, and that ugly truth so rocked the boy’s world that he began to obsess over the slap. The sound of it in the night. The looks on his parents’ faces. It stopped being about Aunt Francine and Uncle Ray and started being about everything. The whole unfair, awful, stupid world.

  Turning to Vera, Benzo, Sean, and Penny had been the natural move, he told us. Ashton thought of the crew as his “angry” friends. There were other kids in his life—mostly the children of his parents’ wealthy friends, princes and princesses of worthy empires—but they were just as dim-witted and shallow as his parents and hopelessly immune to discontent. The members of the Midnight Crew were capable of hate. They listened to Ashton when he spoke about feeling alone, feeling like just another of his parents’ accessories—a toy that had been fun to tote around when he was small and cute and could be dressed like a doll but eventually had grown tiresome as he got older. He was a troublesome boy. He wanted to talk about legal reform and taxes and poverty and things that made his parents and their guests very uncomfortable. They couldn’t throw money at him and make him shut up. That was annoying.

  Vera had texted their group, saying, We should do something ourselves.

  Ashton had sent a laughing emoji, and for a while there had been silence. He’d got the feeling, a sixth sense, that the others were talking on some other group text thread without him. Then Vera had texted again.

  Let’s meet up. I can tell you about our game.

  Chapter 84

  The game was everything Ashton had wanted. One big, loud, violent release. They called themselves the Midnight Crew. They wore a uniform. Moved in sync, like ninjas or black ops soldiers.

  The look on his uncle Ray’s terrified face when he and his friends stormed into the bedroom and threw on the lights had given Ashton a deep, stomach-clenching, skin-tingling pleasure that he’d been able to call upon even months afterward. They locked his aunt in the bathroom and tied Uncle Ray to his desk, then stripped, taunted, and belittled him, leaving him bloodied and sobbing and drooling onto his paperwork as they ransacked his house. Ashton jumped on the bed, threw a can of beer from the fridge at a mirror in the guest room, and heard the giggles rippling up from inside him at the delicious smashing sounds.

  The righteous violence released his tense shoulder and neck muscles so that the next morning he was actually walking straighter. Thinking clearer. He was braver, smarter, fiercer. He felt tough. Capable. He snapped at a guy in a café who tried to cut ahead of him in line, sent him shuffling away. He fired his acting coach and personal trainer, and demanded his father’s secretary find him better ones. Ashton was finally the big man. He was in touch with his primal, powerful self. He couldn’t wait to wear the black skull mask again that Vera had given him. He wished he could wear it every hour of the day and night.

  The next raids followed quickly. Ashton barely listened to the justifications for the victims they chose. Some guy had catcalled Penny outside a construction site. A woman had turned Vera away from a dance club. All he had to know was that these were bad people who didn’t know their place. Ashton told himself he was doing a good thing—dishing out justice, teaching people respect, humility. But he hardly needed any convincing. He was having so much fun.

  Aunt Francine left Uncle Ray. Ashton heard talk at the next party that she had moved to London and started trading expensive antique pottery, had a younger guy living in her apartment—a much younger guy. He had seen his uncle once afterward, at a christening. Ray had looked pale and thin.

  As I sat listening to Ashton, my mind bounced between pity and fury at the child before me. A part of me wanted to scream at him that the “righteous anger” that had led him down his violent path was just the selfish whining of a spoiled brat who too early had gotten bored of being rich and didn’t know what to do with all his pent-up energy. But another part of me knew that it didn’t matter how much money a kid had, how big his house was, or how many toys his parents paid the holiday decorators to wrap and arrange artfully under the tree. If a parent ignored, abandoned, or abused their child, an angry seed was planted that could grow into a poisonous tree. I knew that whether a parent was rich and snubbed their kid for expensive wine or they were poor and snubbed them for cheap crack, the message to the kid was the same:

  You’re not as important to me as my next high.

  The slap Ashton witnessed that had so outraged him wasn’t as important as the parents who hadn’t listened to that outrage. I’d been dealing with the fallout of ignored kids in courtrooms for a decade, defending girls and boys who had gone out looking for the attention and acceptance they didn’t get at home, looking in all the wrong kinds of places, with all the wrong kinds of people.

  “How did your little game get this out of control?” I asked when Ashton had finished his story. Ashton looked up at me, gripped the torn knees of his jeans.

  “We messed with the wrong guy,” he said.

  Chapter 85

  I sat thinking. Baby scrolled and tapped on her phone. I knew that even though she seemed distracted, she had been soaking up everything, probably confirming or discounting what Ashton said with searches online. He explained Derek Benstein’s death and the terrifying encounter he had had with the killer outside the house in Brentwood the night before. It was a lot to take in.

  Ashton was watching me hopefully, and even though I hadn’t decided how best to help him, I knew I needed to begin throwing ideas around just to ease the tension before it consumed him again.

  “Whoever this guy is,” I said, “he’s on your list, and he’s got a big-ass rifle. He’s probably military or ex-military, if what you’ve said about his sharpshooting skills is correct. So we just look at the list of all the houses you hit and find a military family.”

  “That’s fine if he’s one of our victims. But it doesn’t help if the person we’re looking for is a friend or associate of someone we targeted,” Ashton said. “Or someone they hired.”

  “Excuse me for butting in.” Baby put a hand up. “But isn’t finding the guy who’s hunting you a problem for the police? Rhonda, we should turn Ashton in. There’s probably a big reward, which I think should probably go to me because it was my idea to do it.”

  “Are you kidding me right now, Baby?” Ashton turned to her in shock.

&
nbsp; “Nope,” she said.

  “We go way back, you and me,” he said.

  “I go way back with the cute lacrosse player from school. This guy?” She gestured to him. “I don’t know this guy at all.”

  “I didn’t come here to hand myself in,” Ashton said, turning to me. “I came here for your help. I’m sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am for everything we did. It’s like I’m someone else or…under the mask I was seeing through different eyes. But I can see now. What we did was wrong. So wrong. But at the same time, I don’t want to die for it.”

  “No, Ashton, you don’t want to pay for it.” Baby scoffed. “You don’t want to do time, so you’re hoping Rhonda will stick up for you. Make this all go away. That’s what rich kids do. Well, you should have thought about that before you broke the law.”

  I put my own hand up. “Baby, don’t be a smart-ass. You don’t get to lecture people about being spoiled when you’re sitting on a twenty-thousand-dollar couch in your dad’s fifteen-million-dollar house. And the party you hosted here last night shows you’re much more Courtney Love than Mother Teresa.”

  “I don’t know who either of those people are,” Baby said. “But I do know that if someone busted in here, tied me to a chair, and broke all of my worldly possessions, I’d probably want to clamp a car battery to his nipples too.”

  “Baby, outside,” I snapped. She followed me in a huff as I got up and went to the Strand, slamming the door behind us.

  Chapter 86

  As soon as we got outside, Baby took her phone out and started tapping on it.

  “Put that away and look at me.”

  “In a second.”

  “What are you doing?” I leaned over. “Are you googling Courtney Love?”

  “No.” Baby scrolled. “She seems cool, though.”