2 Sisters Detective Agency Read online

  Which made it easy to remember the last time he’d offended someone. The girl who had attacked them in his house had accused him of needing to learn manners. There was only one thing remotely rude he’d done recently. A mistake caused by the pressures of time.

  At the security office, a lone man in a black-and-white uniform lounged behind the counter, one hand hidden in a bag of Cheetos, the other tapping away on the PC on the desk.

  “Excuse me,” Jacob said, his eyes on his shoes, affecting uncertainty. “I don’t mean to bother you. I know you’re probably busy.”

  “What’s up, pal?”

  “I was just in TJ Maxx on the first floor, and there are a bunch of kids in there. I saw one of them slip a pair of sunglasses into his backpack. I tried to alert staff at the store, but they were all busy.”

  “Oh, man.” The mall cop shot upward in his seat like a dog spying the park from the back seat of a car. “Thanks for telling me. I’m on it. I’m on it!”

  Jacob stood back as the mall cop thrust open the barn door of the security office and bounded away. When the man had disappeared, Jacob reached over the counter and flipped the lock, walked to the desk, and settled into the still-warm chair. He knew the exact time and date he was looking for. He clicked through the security cameras on the PC until he found the northeast corner of the mall parking lot at 9:47 a.m. two Tuesdays earlier.

  There he was on the screen, pulling his Tesla quickly into an empty space against the concrete wall and jumping out, totally ignoring the little red convertible Mustang that had been waiting patiently for the spot to be vacated. He’d been in a mad hurry to get into the mall. Beaty had called him from school in tears—she’d forgotten to bring a roll of blue craft board needed for a group project that day. Jacob watched a petite girl with blond ringlet curls stand up in the passenger seat of the convertible.

  The footage had no sound, but Jacob could see her yelling after him as he jogged toward the mall entrance. Jacob remembered the moment distinctly, could hear her voice in his mind.

  Hey, asshole! That was our spot!

  He didn’t typically do something like that—take people’s parking spots or cut in line. People remembered that kind of thing, and he avoided being remembered.

  In the video footage, Jacob watched the girl jabbering excitedly to the teenage boy in the driver’s seat and pointing angrily at Jacob’s car. He watched as she took out her phone and tapped something into the device as the driver pulled away.

  He knew what she was doing. She was writing down his license plate number.

  Jacob smiled. He paused the footage, zoomed in, and took out his own phone. He snapped a photo of the computer screen and noted down the license plate of the red convertible.

  “See you soon,” he said.

  Chapter 7

  Not quite halfway to Los Angeles, I decided to stop for the night in Hanksville, Utah. I’d known some nice guys named Hank in my life, and I liked the look of the town on the bright phone screen. I never flew anymore. Like my father, I’d bought a car with a wide bench seat and lots of elbow room on the sill, something slightly worn but kept with love that I could sling my fluffy, lime-green court bag into or spill milkshakes in without much drama. I liked the way the Buick’s suspension groaned when I got in, like climbing on an old familiar spring mattress on a weary night.

  Hanksville was tiny. As far as I could see, all it had was a pizza place, a pharmacy, a motel, and a bar and grill. I chose the bar first. It was full of big hairy bikers bad-mouthing one another and playing pool at large tables under low gold lights. A smattering of biker chicks was among them, hanging around the edges of the pool game or sitting at a round table near the door, playing poker.

  I sat at the bar and ordered a rare steak with onion rings and a side of mac and cheese, then slowly devoured it with a glass of red wine. The steak came covered in a thick, creamy gravy, and the mac sauce was orange, stretchy, and liquid hot. The bikers who came to the bar eyed the wine suspiciously but, unlike most people, didn’t let their eyes travel down my body, assessing how big I was and in which ways my fat assembled itself. There were no glances to the barstool to measure how the unlucky piece of furniture was coping with my bulk. I’d received the Fat Person Look-Over a million times in my adult life, so often that I noted when it didn’t happen. Bikers were rarely judgy. I got a couple of appreciative nods at the tattoos on my forearms: a big yellow lion on the right and a couple of pinup girls on the left.

  “How was it?” the bartender asked as he retrieved my empty plate. His mustache was so heavy and thick it completely covered his mouth and stayed in place as he spoke, so at first I wasn’t sure he had spoken.

  “Great,” I said eventually. “Really, really great. In fact, I’ll go for round two.”

  He shrugged and smiled, punched my order into the register again. The cook in the kitchen gave me a thumbs-up through the window behind the bar as he started my second steak.

  The Chalet Inn, what appeared to be the only motel in town, was within walking distance of the bar, but I was exhausted from the drive so I drove there. Regret over the second dinner hung like a coat on my shoulders, so I told myself I’d get up early and walk it off before I continued my drive tomorrow.

  The sky was huge and crowded with stars. I hadn’t been able to settle on how I felt about my father’s loss, but as I walked from my car toward the motel entrance I got a small, wistful rush of sadness. It wasn’t that I missed him, but I realized suddenly that any chance we had of reconnecting was now gone. I’d always known it was ludicrous to imagine that Earl Bird would ever have swept back into my life and become the dad I’d always wanted him to be—gentle, loving, supportive, interested—but now it wasn’t just ludicrous. It was impossible.

  The old guy who shuffled out of the motel owner’s room to the reception desk was small and stern faced. I stood before him and received my first Fat Person Look-Over since I’d arrived in Hanksville.

  “What do you want?” the owner asked.

  “A room,” I said. “One night.”

  “Nope,” the man said. I waited for more, but there was none. As though to illustrate his point, the man flipped closed the heavy ledger lying open on the counter between us. The book was so unused to being closed that its cover came unstuck from the counter with a clack sound.

  “What do you mean, ‘nope’?” I asked. “The motel is full?”

  “Nope to that too,” the man said. “I got one room left, but it’s right there.”

  He pointed to room 8.

  “It’s right next to mine.” He pointed to the owner’s room visible behind the counter. “And you look like you snore. So while there is a room available, I ain’t renting it to you, lady.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “I do snore,” I said. “You’re right. But the nearest hotel from here is fifty miles away, and I’ve been driving for seven hours already. Being someone who purveys temporary sleeping environments for a living, I imagine you’ve got some earplugs back there behind the counter?”

  “Sure do,” he said.

  “Why don’t you rent me the room and use those for the night? Between the brick walls and the earplugs, I’m sure you won’t have any trouble.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because this motel is old,” he said. “We got old furniture here.” His eyes wandered over me. “It’s wood. It won’t take your heft.”

  I grabbed the counter and held on, giving my hands something to do other than twitch with the desire to throttle this guy. I swallowed a swell of fury that leaped into my throat.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

  “It’s Amos.”

  “Listen, Amos,” I said. “You obviously have a problem with me. And I think I know exactly what that problem is.”

  “It’s that I don’t like fat people,” he said.

  “I thought so.” I nodded.

  “I don’t think it
’s a problem so much as an opinion,” he continued. “Everybody’s got an opinion. Some people don’t like cats. Some people don’t like going to the beach. Some people don’t like the Jews. I don’t like fat people. They’re selfish and they break things. They either break them by sitting or lying on them or they knock them over ’cause they’re just plain clumsy.”

  “Well, Amos,” I said, “I don’t like assholes. So I guess we were never going to be best friends.”

  I walked to the door.

  “And you’re right,” I added. “Fat people are clumsy.”

  I nudged the vending machine as I went by, a slight sideways bump. The vending machine tilted to the side, then smashed back down onto the tiles with a noise so colossal it made my heart sing. I turned and tipped an imaginary hat at Amos and then went on my way.

  Chapter 8

  Ashton Willisee let the back door of the Beverly Hills Playhouse swing closed behind him. The parking lot was almost empty. He’d sat for ten minutes on the edge of the stage in theater room 6 after class had finished, staring at the empty seats before him, visualizing.

  Ashton’s mother had been reading books on psychic energy and the power of mindfulness, and she’d told him that as important as the acting classes was a ritual of creatively visualizing what he wanted, closing his eyes and really feeling himself succeed. Ashton thought the creative visualization stuff was probably bullshit, but he’d been taking classes for a year and only had one unsuccessful audition for a toilet paper commercial to show for it, so he figured he’d give it a whirl.

  As he walked to his car at the far edge of the lot, a light distracted him. Two spots from his red Mustang convertible, a battered white Econoline van sat idling, the cabin light glowing brightly. Silhouetted against the light, a man in a ball cap stood, poring over a map.

  “Hey, mate,” the man said as Ashton moved toward his car. Heavy Australian accent. “Could I borrow you for a sec?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Ashton started walking over.

  “Is that Gregory Way over there?” the man asked. “I’m looking for a place on the corner of Gregory and Arnaz.”

  “That’s Robertson,” Ashton said, taking out his phone and nodding to the road that accessed the parking lot. He hadn’t seen anyone use a paper map in years. He pulled up Google Maps as he walked. “Gregory Way is—”

  He was interrupted by a hiss sound, and the sharp, shocking sensation of a fine mist of liquid hitting his face. At first he thought the man had sneezed. Then Ashton saw a hand emerge whip fast from beneath the map, and the unlabeled aerosol can.

  Then he saw nothing.

  Chapter 9

  Ashton woke to the sensation of the van thumping over a pothole in the road. There was no telling how long he had been lying there, facedown on the rough carpet, swaying gently with the motion of the vehicle. His mind whizzed backward in terror, like a spring recoiling. He remembered the van. The nondescript Econoline—anonymous serial killer van of the ages. He remembered the silhouette of the man against the cabin light, the ball cap pulled low, obscuring his face. He remembered the Australian accent that had lured him in, made him think he was talking to a tourist. The hiss of whatever paralyzing chemical he’d been sprayed with, which had shunted through his system, switching out the lights.

  Ashton understood the situation immediately. He was being driven to his death.

  He curled now into a ball, eyes wide in the dim light, his heart hammering. His wrists were bound with something thin, like wire. There was tape on his mouth. He shifted, looked around him. Nothing he saw brought his terror into check. A case lay beside him, hard and black, three-quarters the length of his body. An unzipped duffel bag, which he could see held pliers, drills, clamps. A folding chair and sheets of plastic.

  Ashton told himself that he could talk his way out of this. The guy probably wasn’t a serial killer. Why pick off a rich kid from Beverly Hills and cause a media sensation when you could grab a dozen homeless kids from Culver City without anyone batting an eye? So if he knew Ashton’s family had money, that meant the guy was a businessman. This was a kidnapping.

  He’d heard tales from other kids at school about this sort of thing. A guy in economics class had a cousin who’d been abducted in Tapachula for ransom while his father was working down there on trade deals. The cartels could smell money and had clocked the family as soon as they arrived in town. Ashton shook in the dark, staring up at the motionless silhouette of the man in the ball cap in the driver’s seat, as he remembered the guy in school saying the family had paid the ransom but never got their son back. A few months later a shriveled hand had arrived in the mail at the family’s mansion in Brentwood.

  The van stopped, and Ashton lay panting in the dark. He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed down sobs as the man crunched through what sounded like gravel outside the van.

  The van doors opened. Ashton was dragged and dropped onto the ground. His ribs crunched. He spotted dark mountains. A distant road, the red and yellow lights of passing motorists. Too far to hear his scream. He still couldn’t see the guy’s face.

  The man caught Ashton’s wrists, cut the tie. Ashton ripped the tape off his mouth and scrabbled away on the ground, almost crawling right over the edge of a gaping ravine lit by silvery moonlight.

  He thought of running, but the van blocked both him and the man on an outcrop of rock with only a narrow escape route on either side. Ashton let a few sobs escape as the man went back to the van and returned with a huge black rifle.

  “Oh, Jesus.” Ashton’s voice was high, thin. “Oh, please. God. Please no. Listen! Listen! Listen! I know what this is.”

  “You do, huh?”

  Ashton didn’t recognize the voice. He cowered on the edge of the cliff, blinking at the silhouette against the van’s headlights.

  “I-I-If you look in the contacts list on my phone,” Ashton stammered, “you’ll get my parents. They can have the money here in-in-in—”

  “Do you recognize me yet?” the man asked.

  Ashton’s stomach sank. A person didn’t kidnap someone who knew them. “This is a mistake!” he cried.

  The man shifted the rifle in his grip. Ashton scrambled back as far as he could, sending rocks and dirt crumbling into the ravine.

  “There’s no mistake, Ashton,” the guy said.

  “I don’t know you, man!” Ashton pleaded. He glanced over the rocky edge into the blackness. “Jesus! I don’t—I’ve never seen you before in my life! I—Please, man, please! I’m sorry. I’m sorry! Don’t hurt me. I’m just a kid!”

  A thunk sound. A spray of dirt. Ashton realized with sickening clarity that the guy had shot into the ground at his feet, an inch or two away from the toe of his right sneaker. The rifle had a suppressor on it the thickness of a Coke can. Ashton backed onto the last few inches on the edge of the cliff. There was nowhere to go. Thunk, thunk. He screamed and curled into a ball on the ground, his feet hanging in the dark air over the edge.

  “Just a kid, Ashton?” the guy said. “Just a child? An innocent child? Tell me, what do children deserve, Ashton?”

  Another spray of dirt. The guy had shot into the ground near his face. Ashton drew his arms up over his head and face, too terrified to move. It was the sound that drew him out of it. He expected another thunk from the suppressor, or a grinding sound as the mere inches of dirt and rock on which he perched over the deadly drop gave way. But instead there was a blip. A short, high-pitched wail. Ashton blinked through tears. Down on the distant road, new lights had joined the snail trail of yellow and red. They were blue and red.

  Ashton looked up. The guy’s silhouette was watching the distant lights too. Paused, calculating. Ashton gripped the ground for life, hanging on to dry shreds of grass and sharp rock, his teeth clenched and toes curled, his clothes soaked through with sweat and piss.

  “Go,” the guy told him.

  Ashton didn’t have to hear the word twice. He fast-crawled toward the van, squeezed past it, then bolted down
a slope beside the cliff. He ran blindly downward, no idea if there were sharp falls or loose embankments ahead, thinking only of getting away from the van on the cliff above him.

  Another thunk behind him. Another into the boulders of granite on either side of him. He followed the narrow natural trail, stumbling over cactus and rocks, falling and getting up and pulling himself onward as the shots followed him into the night.

  Chapter 10

  There was a beautiful young Black woman sitting in the waiting room of Ira Abelman’s office on Wilshire Boulevard in Central Los Angeles. I guessed her to be around twenty-five. She was the first Angeleno I’d seen up close. True to the city of beautiful people, she was tall and rake thin, and I’d bet she paid her hairdresser more than I paid my mechanic. She gave me the Fat Person Look-Over and turned back to her phone, clicking a moody selfie of herself in the plush leather chair.

  The morning had begun with the broken promise of a walk to burn off the second dinner, feeling too stiff from sleeping in my car to push myself physically. Vegas had whizzed by my car windows, a searing, glaring kingdom surrounded by sand. I sunk into a chair two down from the beauty in Abelman’s waiting room. I felt only a mild sense of annoyance as she took a Diet Right magazine from the coffee table before us and slapped it suggestively on the chair between us.

  I’d set my expectations of my father’s debt at a hundred grand. If I sold my condo in Watkins, that might give me enough to stave off debt collectors for a while. Then I’d probably have to make some unwelcome business decisions. Being a public defender paid my bills, but it wouldn’t pay my father’s. I’d never been in it for the money. I liked helping young people who were stuck in a criminal jam. I felt like those early offenses—usually fueled by plain stupidity, emotional overreaction, or the spirit of adventure—could make or break a kid and determine whether they became a lifelong criminal. When I helped a kid who was on a dark path, when I spared them jail time and got them a second chance, I felt like I was actually doing that corny thing all lawyers profess to want to do at some point in their career: making a difference in people’s lives.