Private L.A. Read online

  “Which means something happened to the security system?” Mo-bot asked. “They were never alerted?”

  “Something did happen,” Del Rio agreed. “I reviewed the logs in the two computers that run the show. At seven twenty-seven p.m. two nights ago, the entire system went down, the backups failed, and no alerts were issued to police or the folks who installed this.”

  “And who was that?” I asked.

  Del Rio got a sour look. “You’re not going to like it.”

  I cocked my head in disbelief. “Tommy?”

  “His people, anyway.”

  “Who’s Tommy?” Camilla Bronson asked.

  “My brother.”

  “The guy in the papers?” Sanders asked in a groan. “The one implicated in that murder?”

  “One and the same,” I said.

  What was the likelihood of that? My brother designed and installed the system, a system that failed?

  “You think he could be involved here?” Terry Graves asked.

  I considered the producer’s question but then shook my head. “Tommy’s a wack job, but his specialty is security systems. How exactly did it fail?”

  Del Rio ran a paw over his stubbled chin. “Logs say the computers ran diagnostic software upon rebooting at nine twenty-seven p.m. two nights ago. It detected a failure in the trip connection to the backup generators four seconds before the ranch’s main power line died.”

  “You call Southern Cal Edison?” Sci asked.

  Del Rio nodded. “A transformer blew about that time, cut power all over Ojai. Took three hours to bring electricity back online.”

  “But you said the computer logs show the system was only down for two hours, not three,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Del Rio said. “The logs say the generators kicked back to life at nine twenty-seven, main power came on about an hour later.”

  “So someone inside cut the generator, and then what, reconnected it?”

  He nodded again. “I figure coordinated attack, inside, outside. Takes a few minutes for the system to reboot. Enough time to vanish when you’re done.”

  My mind raced through the people who were supposed to have been on the ranch that night. The Harlows. Their kids. The caretaker. The Harlows’ personal assistant.

  “Cynthia Maines,” I said.

  “What?” Camilla Bronson asked.

  “Unless I’m out to lunch here, the only beds in the house I’ve seen used were the family’s. If Maines was here, where did she sleep?”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” Terry Graves said.

  “Or maybe she cleaned up after herself, made it look as if she hadn’t slept here,” Mo-bot said. “I mean, the Harlows’ bed was made, right?”

  “Or Jennifer and Thom just hadn’t gone to bed yet,” I said, gesturing at the screen. “You find tapes from these feeds?”

  Del Rio nodded, gave the keyboard several commands. The screen images jumped and now carried a time stamp four days prior.

  Del Rio said, “The cameras are set up with motion detectors. They only record when there’s movement. Lights too. You can see the two days of activity leading up to the system failure in like five minutes.”

  He speeded up the tapes. My focus jumped all over the split screen, seeing the Harlows arriving four nights ago, hauling gear from the Suburbans into the house, greeting a man wearing a straw cowboy hat, who I assumed was the caretaker, Héctor Ramón; and the three kids going in and out of the house multiple times during the days and into the evenings with the bulldog rambling behind them. The dog seemed never to leave their side.

  Thom Harlow appeared infrequently. His wife was everywhere, a frenetic personality. On the second evening, however, Thom came to the back door to watch Jennifer leave on her run, which Sanders said was a daily ritual, along with yoga. The last recording took place moments before the system failed, roughly thirty-six hours after the Harlows had returned to the ranch. The back-door and deck view again, looking down at a steep angle: Jennifer returned from her run in the dark, sweating, chest heaving, and climbed onto the lit deck.

  Del Rio typed, turned that frame full-screen. Jennifer slowed, stopped, turned to look behind her. The light beyond the deck was dim, shadowy, so I caught only a flicker of movement in the shadows, the hint of a human form before the screen blinked black.

  “What—” Mo-bot began.

  Del Rio held up his hand. “Wait, you’re gonna see the first thing the cameras picked up after the system rebooted two hours later.”

  The screen jumped back to life.

  Stella, the Harlows’ bulldog, was on the deck in much the same place where Jennifer had been when the screen went blank. The dog was frantic, howling and ripping at the screen door as if she’d seen something worse than a ghost.

  Chapter 15

  AT THE SAME time, one hundred miles to the south, in her Civic hybrid parked down the block from a CVS pharmacy on La Cienega Boulevard, Sheila Vicente was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  An assistant district attorney juggling a monstrous caseload, including the upcoming prosecution of a capital murder case, she was also a divorcing mother of two, and on the line with her soon-to-be ex-husband.

  “Do you think I’m a doormat you can just walk on?” Vicente demanded.

  Silence. Then her husband, cold, said, “No, just the same old inflexible—”

  “Bitch?” she said, struggling for control. “I’m a bitch because you have the gall to call me at the eleventh hour and ask for a different weekend with the boys so you and your plastic-boob girlfriend can jet down to Cabo for a quick forty-eight in the sack?”

  “Pat’s got two days off from rotation,” her husband shot back. “It’s rare.”

  “Not as rare as a day off is for me!” Sheila shrieked. “I haven’t had one in three weeks.” She threw down her cell.

  Sheila shook from head to toe, trembled against every bit of will she had left, staring into the distance at what had once been a dream life, barely aware of the blond man with the scruffy beard, the mirror sunglasses, the baggy pants, and the Lakers hoodie pimp-strolling confidently by her car, up the sidewalk, and into the pharmacy.

  “Mommy?” a thin little voice came from the backseat. “Mommy sad?”

  She looked in the mirror, saw her two-year-old son so worried, and knew now she had no choice. She had to go through with it.

  As much as she hated the idea, she was going to fill a prescription for antidepressants. Serious antidepressants.

  Chapter 16

  HERNANDEZ CHECKED HIS disguise in a mirror in the cosmetics section. Not even his own not-so-dear and dead mother would recognize him like this. Gringo to the max, man. I could be one chubby boy under all these clothes, right?

  “How many?” Cobb’s voice muttered through the earpiece hidden beneath the locks of the blond wig, breaking Hernandez from his thoughts.

  “Nine total,” Hernandez replied.

  Silence, then a comment from Watson: “Video and audio feeds are crisp and strong.”

  Cobb said, “Take five, Mr. Hernandez, drop the card, and leave.”

  “Going mundane,” Hernandez said, feeling a familiar thrilling sense of descent, of regressing to the primitive, of tasting bloodlust.

  He angled through the store, sniffed the perfumed air, plucked a king-size Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and tore it open. He dropped the candy into his mouth, savoring the melt as he walked to the prescription window, noticing that the pharmacist was on break. An old black woman stood to one side, hands on her wooden cane, waiting for her medicine, looking at him suspiciously.

  A pimply redheaded woman, the only one behind the counter, said brightly, “Here to pick up, sir?”

  “More like a drop-off,” Hernandez said, drawing the suppressed weapons.

  He shot her at point-blank range with the right-hand gun and then whirled, looking for the old woman. The crazy bitch was already swinging at him with her cane. It broke across his arm, right across the new tat
too, setting it afire, shocking him, but only for a moment before he realized she was moving to stab him with the splintered end of her cane.

  Hernandez’s left hand swung instinctively, aimed at the old woman’s chin, and shot her there. She crumpled to the tile floor.

  “Weak, Mr. Hernandez,” Cobb said. “You should have taken her first.”

  Hernandez ignored the criticism, stalked through the aisles, his arm screaming in pain, but believing that no one else in the store, what with the Muzak braying, had heard the suppressed shots or the bodies falling.

  Guns back in his hoodie’s pocket, he walked past a teenage girl shopping for nail polish in aisle three. He skirted a plump guy looking at razors in aisle five but killed an older man checking out incontinence pads in aisle seven.

  He considered the middle-aged woman perusing the paperback racks, a mystery novel in one hand, but then shifted his focus to the two clerks manning the front desk, man, woman, both in their late twenties.

  The male clerk died stocking cigarettes, shot in the back. “You got company coming,” Cobb said. “Move.”

  The female clerk died screaming, the first to be aware of her impending death, trying to crouch and hide beneath the cash register.

  Hernandez turned, surging on adrenaline. He began to hum a favorite tune. It never got old, this feeling, better than any video game ever. Nothing came close to the real thing. Difference between porn and …

  Ten feet away, an anxious Latina woman in a blue business skirt and pink blouse and her thumb-sucking toddler in the seat of her shopping cart were staring at him, frozen with terror.

  “No,” Sheila Vicente sobbed. “Please, I’m just here for the Xanax.”

  Every nerve fiber, every cell in Hernandez told him to wax her, right now. The kid too. It would make a statement. No quarter would be given.

  He took two steps toward the young mother as she wrenched her child to her breast and sank to her knees, begging incoherently. He stood over her, the guns aimed at her crying eyes and the back of her little boy’s head, savoring the power, smelling the torrents of fear pouring off her. His fingers sought the triggers.

  “Stop,” Cobb said, and then told Hernandez exactly what to do. Hernandez didn’t like it, but for once he followed orders to a T.

  “Cell phone,” Hernandez barked at her. “Give it to me.”

  Shaking, crying, Sheila Vicente got her cell and threw it down. Hernandez crushed it with his heel, slid the guns into his hoodie. He crouched before her, handed her a Baggie with a lime-green card in it, said, “I want you to personally give the mayor this. Don’t show the cops. Just tell them that you have a personal message for the mayor from me. Tell that bitch that unless she complies with my demands there will be no mercy after this. None.”

  Then Hernandez stood, turned, chuckled, and walked out the door of the pharmacy, humming that favorite melody of his, as if he had not a care in this world.

  PART TWO

  SQUEEZE PLAY

  Chapter 17

  STELLA THE BULLDOG sprawled on her side, panting hard, as if she had run for miles in a torrid heat. Justine lay on the veranda floor, stroking the poor beast’s head and laying wet towels over her body. Justine has a thing for dogs. And they have a thing for her. She owns two, spoils them silly.

  “She’s been getting progressively worse,” said Justine when I exited the main house with Sanders and Del Rio. “We’re going to have to take her to a vet.”

  “No vets,” Camilla Bronson snapped. “I know for a fact that Thom and Jennifer put a chip under her skin. They’ll ask questions.”

  “So what? The dog’s sick,” Justine said firmly.

  “She probably got into some bad meat and now she’s suffering for it,” Sanders said.

  “Yes, just keep her out here so she doesn’t dump or puke in the house,” Terry Graves said.

  Justine set her eyes on the attorney, the publicist, and the producer in a way I’d seen before. She no longer liked the Harlow team. They were clients. She’d do the work, but she wouldn’t like them. She stated flatly, “This pup gets any sicker, I’m taking one of the Suburbans and going to—”

  Trying to defuse the situation, I said, “Tell me about the house staff.”

  “What about them?” Sanders asked.

  “I need to know their story.”

  “I just spent two hours with them, Jack,” Justine said, then looked at Sanders, Camilla Bronson, and Terry Graves. “Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  Anita Fontana, thirty-four, the head housekeeper, had been with the Harlows for twelve years, ever since the actors bought the ranch. She appeared the most upset, kept looking at a picture of the family she had by her bed and weeping. She said she loved the Harlows, especially Miguel. The Harlows were demanding but fair, generous at times, surprisingly cheap at others, and somewhat aloof from their children.

  “Aloof!” Camilla Bronson cried. “That goes nowhere. Do you understand?”

  “How couldn’t they be aloof at some level?” Justine shot back. “Busy careers and philanthropic work chew up vast amounts of time.”

  “Jen and Thom are excellent parents,” the publicist retorted. “Anyone who says otherwise is either a fool or a liar.”

  “Then all three of them must be fools or liars,” Justine replied.

  The cook—Maria Toro—agreed in large part with the housekeeper’s take on their bosses. She’d been with the Harlows eight years; said Jennifer was always trying to keep Thom on a vegan diet, but that he loved meat. Jacinta Feliz, the maid, had been at the ranch two years before the furlough they’d been given during the Harlows’ sojourn in Vietnam.

  “She said Malia suffered nightmares and was a lonely girl,” Justine said.

  “That’s not—” Camilla Bronson began.

  Terry Graves cut her off, said, “Listen to the woman and quit trying to spin things.”

  The publicist was indignant. “I’m not spinning—”

  “Yes, you are, Camilla, and it’s not helping,” Sanders said. “Go ahead, Ms. Smith.”

  “The boy wets the bed regularly,” Justine went on. “Jin has several imaginary friends and believes her stuffed animals come to life at night.”

  I said, “What about the Harlows? When was the last time they were in contact?”

  Justine replied that Anita said she’d been in touch with the Harlows several times in the last month, trying to coordinate their arrival with the house staff’s. The original plan called for the three women to return to the ranch two days before the Harlows, but then, Anita said, she’d gotten a call from Cynthia Maines. A change of plans. The women were to return three days after the Harlows’ return.

  “First I’ve heard of that,” Sanders said.

  Camilla Bronson threw up her hands. “Which means what?” Justine said, “Changing the arrival date makes it possible for the Harlows to disappear. That way the caretaker is the only other person to deal with, which makes me think that Cynthia Maines is of interest to us, perhaps our insider.”

  “My God,” Terry Graves protested. “I can’t believe that.”

  Sanders shook his head. “Cynthia was devoted to the Harlows.”

  The publicist, for once, said nothing.

  I said, “I think there’s sufficient cause to bring in the FBI.”

  That soured the Harlow team.

  “Do you know the shitstorm you’ll cause?” Camilla Bronson demanded.

  “For me? Or for you?”

  Her jaw clamped shut, but she was staring bullets at me.

  “I agree with Camilla,” Terry Graves said.

  “I do too,” Sanders said. “At this moment, there’s insufficient evidence to bring in the FBI.”

  “Dave, you called us in,” I began. “I think the missing two hours and the dog’s reaction are enough.”

  “I don’t, and you work for us, and for the Harlows, Jack,” the attorney said firmly. “I, we, want Private to find them.”

  “Yes,” Camilla Bronson said,
more sure of herself. “We don’t want this getting out unless it absolutely has to.”

  “Anything you need to do, you do, Jack,” said Terry Graves. “Just keep this quiet for a few days to see if they show up or we get a ransom note. In the meantime, you keep your people working.”

  “What’s this about?” I asked. “Money?”

  “Damn right,” the producer retorted. “We have a lot riding on Saigon Falls. All of us have sacrificed for this project, and word of the Harlows’ disappearance could cause the entire project to collapse, taking tens of millions of dollars and our futures with it.”

  Sanders and Camilla Bronson nodded.

  I glanced at Justine, whose expression was hard. I could feel it too. These three had some other angle on this that we weren’t seeing. But they were paying, and I had to agree that other than the traumatized bulldog there was no sign of violent struggle anywhere inside the compound. Except for the power and security system issues, they could have just walked away. Hell, for all we knew, maybe Thom and Jennifer had screwed with the security system, wanting to disappear for one reason or another. Thom liked keeping secrets. It would not be entirely out of the question.

  “I’ll give you two days,” I said.

  “Three,” Sanders said.

  Camilla Bronson said, “Where are Anita, the others?”

  “In their quarters,” Justine said.

  “I’m getting them out of here,” she said, turning. “They’re coming with me to L.A. I don’t want any of them talking to anyone.”

  My cell phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID: LAPD Chief Mickey Fescoe.

  I squinted, trying to think of what my fair-weather friend might want this time. I flashed for a second on my brother, Tommy, who was being investigated in the murder of Clay Harris, a surveillance expert who once worked for me. I’d been in the next room when the shooting went down, heard the shots but saw nothing. My brother told me it was self-defense. I’d left him at the crime scene to deal with his own mess. Had Tommy implicated me? It was all I could think of, unless Fescoe had gotten wind of the Harlows’ disappearance?