Private L.A. Read online

  “Like assassins sent by a drug lord?”

  “Exactly,” Jack said, looked at Mo-bot. “First shot, you upload that video.”

  Mo-bot nodded, but Justine could tell she was shaking.

  For several minutes there was just the sound of their breathing. Then Justine heard a soft ding from Mo-bot’s computer. Two new numbers were flashing—8 and 9, the rear bedroom and the bathroom windows.

  They’d already been breached and no one had heard a sound.

  Chapter 123

  I GESTURED TO Cruz to cover the front door and to Justine to cover the windows in the main room. Then Cordova and I slipped off our shoes, turned on the red flashlights, held them beneath the barrels of our weapons, went back to back, moved sideways over rough wood floors into the hallway, guns and lights aimed in the direction of the doors to the bathroom and the rear bedroom.

  As we listened for any sound, any movement, any reason to open fire, I wondered whether this was it, after everything I’d been through, my family’s disintegration and disgrace, the helicopter crash, my tortured relationship with my brother. Was I going to die in a squalid house in Guadalajara? Were Justine and the others going to follow me to the grave?

  We reached the end of the hallway and split. Cordova stood to the doorknob side of the bedroom door. I did the same with the bathroom door. It took everything in me to stay calm, control my breath and my heart so I could hear.

  A shuffle. Right there on the other side of the door.

  Sometimes the best defense is surprise. Without thinking I twisted the knob, hurled the door inward, felt it hit something soft and crunchy. I heard a grunt and jumped around into the doorway, trying to get square to shoot.

  But I came up short at a trembling sleek black pistol aimed by a street urchin who could not have been more than fourteen. He kept moving his right leg and cringing.

  “Get back or I’ll kill you,” the kid snarled. “No matter what my orders are, I’ll kill you if you make one more move.”

  Chapter 124

  AT TEN PAST ten that evening, we drove past the wall that surrounded El Panteón de Belén cemetery in Guadalajara.

  “Park here,” the boy said, rubbing at his knee where the door had hit him. He said his name was Roberto. He sat in the passenger seat of one of the panel vans, his pistol in his lap, lazily aimed at my waist as I drove.

  We’d come to something of a Mexican standoff back there in the house and had negotiated a truce that allowed me to keep my weapon and my life in return for going with him and his two friends. Justine came along too. The others had been forced to remain behind, which didn’t sit well with Cordova or Cruz. But that was the deal if we wanted to find out what had happened to the Harlows.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Inside,” Roberto said.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “What do you usually find in cemeteries?” he said. “Get out.”

  “Who sent you?” Justine asked from the back, where two other armed teenage street urchins watched her.

  “That’s right, we’re not getting out until you tell us who sent you, Roberto,” I said. “De la Vega? Gomez? Fox?”

  “I do not know these men,” he said, opening his door. “And I don’t know who you are. And I don’t care. This is a business transaction. Understand?”

  Chapter 125

  JUSTINE WALKED WITH Jack toward the entrance to the dark cemetery with the armed kids walking behind them. For reasons she wasn’t quite sure she could identify, she felt none of the terror she’d endured during the attack inside the jail. Indeed, she felt strangely calm as they passed through an arched wrought-iron gate and she smelled the faint odors of incense and Jack.

  What do you usually find in cemeteries?

  Roberto clicked on a flashlight and aimed it ahead of them. There were gravestones, monuments, and tombs everywhere. Many were coated in red wax, which Justine guessed came from candles that had burned in the cemetery during the two Days of the Dead.

  “This cemetery is haunted,” the boy said.

  “By who?” Justine asked.

  “Vampire,” Roberto replied. “He hunted the citizens of Guadalajara two hundred years ago. It started with small animals, dogs and cats, found all over the city drained completely of their blood. Later, human babies were found dead and exsanguinated as well.”

  “Exsanguinated?” Jack said.

  “That’s what I said,” the boy replied.

  “Where’d you learn to speak English so well?” Justine asked.

  “Arizona,” Roberto said. “Lived there until my parents died two years ago. Then I came back here. Take a right there onto that path.”

  Very smart kid, Justine thought. How did he come to this?

  Roberto, meanwhile, was going on with his story about the vampire. “Everyone lived in fear. They stayed indoors after dark and prayed for their lives. A group of citizens who were tired of living in constant terror decided to end the daily nightmare and track down the vampire. They eventually found him and when they did, they drove a wooden stake through his heart.”

  “I like it when that happens,” Jack said. “Reassuring.”

  “But this was not over,” the boy replied. “The morning after they kill the vampire, the townspeople bring his body here. They bring many rocks too and bury the body beneath them, hoping he will never return from the dead.

  “You see this big tree here?” Roberto asked, shining his light through a wrought-iron fence that surrounded a massive live oak tree. “They say the vampire is buried under this tree. They say that if the tree is ever cut down, he will rise from the dead and hunt again.”

  Chapter 126

  OKAY, I ADMIT it, walking in front of an armed hypersmart fourteen-year-old kid through a graveyard haunted by vampires had me more than a little unnerved. I could see scores of ways this could turn out wrong, and more than half of them had me and Justine never going back to Los Angeles again.

  “All right, then,” Roberto said. “Go left.”

  I did as he said, walking past mausoleums, aware of the traffic noise and snatches of music coming over the cemetery wall, and something else. Was that crying? Then I lost the sound to a backfiring bus that accelerated away in the neighborhood adjacent to the cemetery.

  “Are they here?” Justine asked. “The Harlows?”

  Roberto and the other boys said nothing, and I looked all around at the dark outlines of the crypts, wondering again if the Harlows were dead. A sense of futility swept over me then. What had it all been for? Had we exposed the skeletons in the Harlows’ closet only to find where their corpses lay?

  Then there they were. Before the flashlight went out I caught a glimpse of fresh graves in front of me, three of them, two mounded over, one yawning.

  “Stop,” Roberto said. “Do not move.”

  Was this it? Would guns be pressed to the backs of our heads, and then a brilliant flash of light and nothing more but a hole in the ground?

  “They deserved it,” a woman’s voice said. “They deserved to die.”

  My head twisted about, eyes peering into the shadows in the cemetery, and then spotting her on top of a mausoleum about fifteen feet to our left. She wore a black dress and a hood of some kind.

  “Adelita?” Justine said.

  “Adelita no longer exists,” she replied bitterly. “She has decided to enter a convent, become someone else, try to find some way to believe in God again.”

  “By becoming the Harlows’ killer?” Justine asked.

  Chapter 127

  JUSTINE FELT SICK to her stomach, waiting for Adelita Gomez to reply. She too had seen the graves before the light had gone out.

  After all the work, all the risk, the Harlows were dead, killed by the nanny they had defiled. No matter how she felt about the actors’ many secret lives, she was shocked by the fact that they were gone. The Harlows were part of so many lives, including Justine’s; she’d seen virtually every movie they’d ever mad
e. And now they were gone. Everything about this case suddenly felt cursed somehow.

  How would she tell the Harlows’ children? What would become of them? Would they be manipulated and led by people like Dave Sanders, Camilla Bronson, and Terry Graves their whole lives? Justine felt overwhelmingly sad at the thought.

  Adelita coughed hoarsely. “I said the Harlows deserved to die. I didn’t say they got what they deserved.”

  “Wait, they’re alive?” Jack said.

  “There’s only one reason they aren’t a meal for pigs,” Adelita said. “Cynthia Maines sent an e-mail to my old box. She said copies of the tapes had gotten backed up somewhere in Minnesota. She said she would turn them over to the police if I wanted. Or return them to me. And I realized that given what’s happened here in Mexico, maybe living would become worse than dying for Jennifer and Thom.”

  “Where are they?” Justine asked.

  “Tell Cynthia I do not want the tapes made public and I do not want them,” Adelita said flatly. “I will not come forward to testify against the Harlows in any way. And if you or the Harlows or anyone tries to come after me, my uncle will hunt Jennifer and Thom down like dogs.”

  And then Justine heard it, the muffled sound of people crying, and she turned her head away from Adelita, trying to locate its source.

  “Listen,” Adelita said. “They sound like me now.”

  “They’re in the open grave,” Jack said, moving toward the sound.

  Justine made to go after him but glanced back at the top of the mausoleum. Adelita was gone. Justine whipped her head around, realizing that Roberto and the other boys were gone too. She’d never heard any of them move.

  In seconds she and Jack were shining their Maglites into the hole. The man and the woman sitting at the bottom of the grave were naked, filthy, and blindfolded, their wrists and hands tied together with rope. Even through the grime Justine saw the festering sores on their skin where they’d been burned repeatedly with what would turn out to be a small, round branding iron.

  The woman had four such weeping burns on her face, which was so swollen that for a moment Justine did not recognize her as the most glamorous and famous actress in the world.

  Jennifer Harlow cringed from the light, whimpered, and clung to her husband, whose face looked worse than his wife’s.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Harlow,” Justine said, trying to calm down. “You’re safe now. My name is Justine Smith.”

  “We’re with Private Investigations Worldwide,” Jack said, jumping down into the hole, taking off his jacket and putting it over Jennifer before he set about removing their blindfolds and untying their bonds. “We’ve come to take you home.”

  The actors both collapsed into sobbing.

  Justine dialed Cordova’s number on her cell phone, asked him to order their pilot to fly Private’s jet from Manzanillo to Guadalajara, and to hire a discreet doctor willing to fly with them to Los Angeles. She also told Mo-bot to alert Cynthia Maines, David Sanders, Camilla Bronson, and Terry Graves.

  “Do people know we’re gone?” Jennifer asked weakly when they’d gotten the Harlows out of the grave. “The fans?”

  “It’s been international news, Mrs. Harlow,” Jack said.

  Jennifer stared off into space at the wonder of that. Thom said, “What will people think of us now, when they see what’s been done to us?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Mr. Harlow,” Justine replied. “I’m afraid that’s something you and your wife will have to discover for yourselves.”

  EPILOGUE

  THE SHOW MUST GO ON

  Chapter 128

  LATE ON THE afternoon of November fifteenth, Justine and I sat in a dive bar not far from the Warner lot in Burbank, sipping beer and watching Bobbie Newton gush some total fabrication crafted by Camilla Bronson about the Harlows’ “daring escape” from the clutches of “their biggest fan,” an insane obsessed man who’d held them in a doomsday preppers’ bunker in the Sonoran desert somewhere south of Tucson.

  “There you have it, the most up-to-date scoop on the entire sordid affair,” she said. “Though we’ve yet to see Jennifer and Thom appear in public, the FBI and Mexican authorities assure us that they are hunting for the as-yet unnamed madman. Until my next status update, this is your best friend forever, saying follow me on Twitter, #BFFBOBBIENEWTON. I’ll be tweeting all updates in the Harlow case as they unfold, round the clock.”

  “No mention of Private at all,” Justine said, finishing her beer.

  “Just the way we like it,” I said, getting off the stool and laying down a generous tip. “L.A.’s finest ninjas.”

  “What do you think they want to talk to us about?”

  “I’d imagine they’ll have an entire agenda,” I said.

  We drove Justine’s car to the Warner gate, where Cynthia Maines was waiting for us. We’d spoken several times since our return from Mexico, but this was the first time we’d seen her in person.

  “Have you spoken with them?” Justine asked.

  “Not a peep,” the actors’ former assistant said. “I just got a summons from Dave Sanders, just like you.”

  We walked to the Harlow-Quinn bungalow, where we found Camilla Bronson waiting for us out front. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” I said.

  The publicist went stony, barely gave a nod to Cynthia Maines, turned and walked inside. She led the way into Terry Graves’s office. Dave Sanders stood by the window. Jennifer and Thom Harlow sat at a conference table. Their faces were still heavily bandaged from the emergency plastic surgery that had taken place immediately upon their arrival in Los Angeles, but their famous eyes inspected us one by one.

  “Hello, Cynthia,” Jennifer began in a mumbling voice.

  Her former personal assistant shot back, “If it wasn’t for Adelita’s wishes, I’d be turning over those tapes right now.”

  “Don’t even think about that,” Sanders growled. “Those tapes were and are private property, recordings of activities among legal, consenting adults.”

  “Consenting?” Cynthia cried.

  Terry Graves shut the door, said, “Shall we all calm down here? Discuss our differences? Figure out a way to win-win?”

  I really wanted to punch the producer right then but kept my cool, said, “What did you have in mind, Terry?”

  Chapter 129

  THE HEAD OF Harlow-Quinn Productions went into full-on schmooze mode.

  “Jack, Justine,” Terry Graves said, exuding the deepest sincerity. “Jennifer and Thom would be saying these things themselves, but they’ve been advised by their surgeons to speak as little as possible.”

  Justine glanced over at the actors, whose eyes locked with hers a second. She saw every shade of pain in them, and fear, but it did not change her opinion of the Harlows. Not one bit.

  Terry Graves went on, saying, “We, all of us at Harlow-Quinn, Jen and Thom, are eternally grateful to you two and to Private for the courageous acts that saved the Harlows and brought them home to us and to their children.”

  Justine had to bite her tongue. For the first four hours after their rescue, long into the flight back to Los Angeles, neither Thom nor Jennifer Harlow had mentioned their children. Granted, they’d been doped up on painkillers.

  But not once?

  Dave Sanders picked up the pitch from the producer. “We’re all grateful for your discretion, as well, in keeping your promise of client privilege regarding what really happened in Mexico.”

  “And why,” Camilla Bronson said, glancing nervously at Thom and Jennifer, who’d taken to inspecting the wood grain on the table.

  “Yes, well,” Terry Graves said, and coughed. “But the important thing is that the Harlows are home, and soon they’ll finish their masterpiece. And they, we, wanted to thank you.”

  Graves reached over and handed Jack an envelope. Jack took it, opened it, looked inside, and then showed it to Justine. A check for five million dollars.

  �
��We trust that’s enough for you to ensure bonuses for all the good people at Private who were involved in the rescue,” Sanders said.

  “Sure would be,” Jack agreed. “But Private’s not in the business of taking money from starving orphans to save degenerates from a just reward.”

  Chapter 130

  A SILENCE SO complete took the room that I swore I could hear the pounding heartbeats of Jennifer and Thom Harlow.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Camilla Bronson said in an uncharacteristically high-pitched voice.

  “It means that this is not going to be the typical Hollywood scandal complete with requisite cover-up,” I said. “For once, this is going to unwind with justice being served.”

  Sanders’s face turned almost purple. “You and Private have a legal obligation to—”

  “No, Dave, we don’t,” I said calmly. “That obligation went south the day you fired Private. What we did in Mexico, we did on our own. So we’ll be the ones who decide just compensation and penalty.”

  “You—you’ll get nothing if you expose them,” Camilla Bronson sputtered.

  “Everything will be ruined,” Terry Graves said. “Their careers. Their children. The orphans. Countless others.”

  “We see that,” Justine replied.

  “And we know justice isn’t always just,” I said.

  A garbled voice said, “What’s that s’posed to mean?” It was the first thing Thom Harlow had said since we’d arrived.

  “It means, Mr. Harlow, that we’re not going to tell the police or the FBI about your secret lives and transgressions,” Justine said.

  There was a collective sigh.

  “But in return, we have specific demands,” I said. “These are nonnegotiable terms.”

  “And these terms are?” Jennifer Harlow said.

  Cynthia Maines said, “Number one: the Harlows will never seek to retaliate against Adelita Gomez in any way.”