“Derek Benstein didn’t have a car battery clamped to his nipples,” I said, pushing her phone down. “He was tortured with a cattle prod and then shot to death, probably while begging for his life.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” Baby took out her vape pen and put it to her lips. It wobbled in her mouth as she spoke. “Online it just said he was electrocuted. He’s dead. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is that I’ve seen those crime-scene photographs,” I said. “And his death was horrific. It was prolonged, violent, and sickening.”
“How did you—”
“Never mind.” I grabbed the vape and threw it into a nearby bush before she could take another drag. “What I’m telling you is that Ashton has come to us admitting he’s done terrible things and saying he’s sorry. He’s asking for help. It doesn’t matter what a person has done; when they ask for help turning things around, you’ve got to set aside everything that happened before that moment and try to start fresh.”
“You’re nice,” Baby said, plucking the vape from the ground and bringing it to her lips. I sighed, the fight going out of me for trivial things when I was trying to communicate such important themes. “I guess you’ve probably had some nasty kids come to you wanting you to go into the ring for them in the courtroom.”
“I have,” I said.
“Rapists and killers and stuff.”
“That’s right.”
“And how did you know which ones really were sorry and which ones were just playing you for a sap?” Baby asked.
I tried to answer, but no words would come.
“I don’t trust this guy.” She nodded toward the house. “Yeah, I knew him back when we were kids, but this is some heavy stuff right here.”
“You’re still a kid,” I said. “And news flash! You don’t trust anyone. You don’t trust me, and I’m your own flesh and blood.”
“Well, what does that even mean?” she asked.
I stepped back and exhaled slowly, reminded myself that I was trying to talk about family trust and loyalty to a child whose mother had dumped her on her uninterested father’s doorstep.
“Let’s just not call the police yet,” I said.
Baby got some kind of alert on her phone. Something was going on in her internet world, a disruption only she could sense as she went back to flicking and scrolling.
“Let’s get more information and see what kind of danger we would be putting Ashton in if we did that. We don’t know if this guy is watching him right now. If he senses Ashton’s about to be locked up, out of reach, he might make a move.”
“I’d say you’re right,” Baby said, exhaling smoke at her phone screen. “He’ll probably move on Ashton next.”
“What? Why?”
“Because Sean and Penny Hanley are dead,” Baby said. She turned her phone toward me. I saw a car crushed against a tree, the hood streaked with blood. “Only Ashton and Vera are left.”
Chapter 87
Vera walked up the cobblestone driveway, smoothing her curls back and smiling her best girl-next-door smile again. Jacob Kanular’s house seemed smaller in the daylight. The dark hours stretched things, created long shadows and yawning spaces in closets and at the ends of halls that frightened little children. Vera wondered if Jacob’s daughter had been scared of the dark. If she ever would be again.
It was the wife’s social media profile that had given Vera everything she needed. Jacob was a dark vacant space online—a stray elbow visible in the corner of a selfie Neina had taken with their grinning daughter, Beatrice, or a reflected outline in a window beside the slender woman as she snapped a sunrise. Neina, whose sculpture page on Instagram had tens of thousands of followers, had posted a brief note about Beaty’s condition the day after Vera and her crew invaded the house.
Pray for us. Beaty in hospital after severe asthma attack. All shipments/commissions postponed until further notice.
An earlier Instagram post about participating in an upcoming exhibition at the Palos Verdes Art Center had given Vera the ruse she needed to get through the gates. She tucked her clipboard under her arm and went to the huge front double doors of the house, the same doors she had run through with her crew only a few nights before. She tried to look eager when Neina opened the door and a little surprised at her bedraggled, exhausted appearance.
“Annabelle Cetes.” Vera put out a hand.
“Is this going to take long?” Neina asked. “I’m really busy here.”
“I just need a couple of snaps of the pieces you planned to exhibit for the program and the online marketing scheme.” Vera brandished the little camera hanging around her neck.
“This was too awkward to try to explain through the intercom.” Neina leaned in the doorway, sighed. “But the pieces I put together for the exhibition were destroyed. There was a…an accident here at the house. I won’t be participating in the exhibit. I explained all this to—”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Vera gushed. She pulled out the clipboard and flipped the pages on it. “This is so weird. You’re still on my list. I should have been told about this. God, how embarrassing. I’m so sorry.”
Vera squinted in the sunlight, wiped invisible sweat from her temple.
Take the hint, lady, she thought. But the killer’s wife didn’t budge from the doorway.
“Hoo!” Vera said. “A real hot one today, isn’t it?”
“Was there anything else?” Neina asked.
“Do you think I could come in for a moment and make a call back to the office, see what’s going on? It’s so hot out here.”
Neina looked back into the house. Vera smiled sweetly again. She knew Jacob wasn’t home. In case he was following her, Vera had driven through a series of parking lots and alleyways in Culver City before heading to the Kanulars’ address. She’d then texted Sean, saying she was going to meet with Ashton at Soho House, in case he had her dead friend’s phone. She’d even sent her phone to the restaurant by courier in case Jacob was tracking her device. She’d watched the Kanular house from the hillside for half an hour for any sign of him before approaching but had only seen Neina through the huge windows facing the sea, rattling around the house and gathering her things.
It seemed now that the woman was reluctant to be alone in the big house with a stranger. Vera concentrated, positively beamed innocence and genuine warmth while fanning her cheeks in the oppressive California heat.
Don’t let me drop dead of heatstroke on your doorstep, bitch, she thought. You already have one fragile little girl in a coma to worry about.
“Can’t you—” Neina began.
“I’ll only be a moment,” Vera said.
She stepped back reluctantly as Vera followed into the huge foyer.
Chapter 88
The Kanular house had been cleaned since the Midnight Crew’s rampage. The only indications left of their presence were the strangely bare shelves, where books or sculptures had stood, and the smell of fresh paint in the air.
Vera followed Neina into the big living room, looking at the back of the woman’s skull, thinking about the shape of it beneath her chopped dark hair, the delicious force it would take to crack it. There was a suitcase spread open on the couch, another clipped closed and standing ready in the hall leading to the bedrooms. Neina was leaving. Vera guessed a husband running around enacting his grisly revenge on a bunch of teenagers when he should have been sitting beside their dying child would put a strain on any marriage. That’s assuming Neina knew what was going on. How smart was she?
Vera watched the woman carefully as she settled on the arm of the couch. She made a show of playing with her phone. Made a fake call and huffed as it wasn’t answered.
“Do you think I could trouble you for a glass of water?” she asked.
Neina seemed to stifle a sigh but went to the kitchen. Vera followed. When Neina took a glass from the cupboard and then to the sink, Vera let her hand wander across the counter toward the knife block.
> “Oh, sorry.” She laughed. “Uh, maybe a cold one? Do you mind?”
Neina rolled her eyes and went to the fridge, turning her back on her visitor.
Chapter 89
Something about the hospital room felt different as soon as Jacob walked in. Though the flowers and greeting cards at his daughter’s bedside were the same, he sensed a shift in the air as if a window had been opened somewhere, letting the room finally breathe. Jacob knew the smell of death, and he also knew the scent of life. He went to the bedside and sat beside his child, took Beaty’s limp fingers in his.
There was blood under Jacob’s nails. He noticed a splinter, probably from the tree branch he had used to impale Sean Hanley, embedded in one of his knuckles. He picked at it and, while he was focused on it, almost missed the sensation of Beaty’s fingers moving in his. Her hand gripped his for an instant—no more than a flutter, but the movement shot a bolt of painful energy through Jacob. He looked at her passive face and saw no signs of wakefulness.
Finally, finally, some of his work out there in the world, hunting down the ones who had done this, was bringing some life back into his little girl. Three of them were gone, and their passing was bringing Beaty home one step at a time.
He stood and brushed off the legs of his dirty jeans, fixed his hair. He’d walked into the hospital looking like he’d been scrabbling up the sides of rocky ravines hunting wild animals, but his appearance hadn’t raised eyebrows. The halls were full of men and women who looked bedraggled and worn and dirty from days and weeks spent refusing to leave the sides of the sick and dying.
He had to find someone, tell them Beaty was coming back. He would get them to order more brain scans. He kissed Beaty and walked into the hall, grabbed his phone as it buzzed in his pocket. Neina’s name flashed on the screen.
“She moved,” he said before his wife could speak. He tried flagging down a doctor walking busily past in the hall before him. “I felt Beaty’s hand move.”
“Can you come back to the house, please?” Neina’s voice was tight, strangely low, like she was afraid of being overheard. “The police are here.”
“What?” Jacob stopped walking.
“There was another home invasion last night in Brentwood, up north. A woman got shot. The police know about what happened to us.”
Jacob looked back at the door to his daughter’s room. A painful prickling was creeping out from the center of his chest. His old instincts warning him.
“Do they know…” he said. Neina was silent for a long time, and in his thoughts he screamed at her words that he could never say out loud.
Do they know what I’ve been doing?
“Just come here,” Neina said. “Now, Jacob.”
“I’m on my way,” he said.
He hung up, looked back down the hall. The old Jacob, the hit man for hire, the shadow who had walked the earth with only a backpack and a gun and a desire for blood, said one word to him: Run. Beaty would be okay, or she wouldn’t. Neina would be okay, or she wouldn’t. If he decided to go now, to slip away from the hospital, out of the city, and into the ether again, there would be no coming back, no dropping in now and then, no watching his little family from afar. He either abandoned them completely now or stayed to fight through whatever implications his revenge would have on his existence as a father and a husband.
He tapped the phone against his leg, watched a man with a toddler girl hugged against his hip using the nearby vending machine. The little girl was slapping the glass as the colorful treats glowed in the bright lights.
Could he have his vengeance and go back to the life he had built himself here with Neina and Beaty? Or was having both of those things simply too much to hope for?
Jacob decided he had not lost hope yet.
He turned and headed for the parking lot.
Chapter 90
Neina Kanular put the phone down on the tiles beside her face and stifled a scream. She was pressed facedown on the floor of the kitchen, the teenage girl’s bootheel pressing into the tender place beneath her shoulder blades, the muscles knotted and bunched, trying to protect the bones beneath. Neina rolled onto her side and clutched at the deep slash wound the girl had cut across her chest, the tiles around her already smeared and streaked with blood. She scrambled into the corner of the kitchen.
“Jacob’s coming,” she said. She cowered on the floor and tried to remain calm. “It’s him you want, right?”
The girl didn’t answer. She was using the knife to flick photographs stuck to the refrigerator door onto the floor. Beaty and her friends in sleeping bags on the living room floor, camped out watching a horror movie. Beaty and Jacob at the helm of a small sailboat.
“If he comes and sees there are no cop cars out front, he’ll know something is up,” Neina said. “You’ll need me to get him in the door.”
“I don’t need you for anything,” the girl said. She shifted the knife in her grip. “You’ve served your purpose.”
She advanced toward the older woman. Neina dragged herself to her feet, backed against the wall, an animal cornered.
“Now, don’t scream,” the girl said.
Chapter 91
At a gas station off the 405 heading north, I kept Ashton in my sights as he walked into the main building to buy some snacks. I filled up the little orange Jeep I had borrowed from the Bruhs. The huge biceps logo emblazoned on the side of the vehicle wasn’t the most subtle thing in the world, particularly as we didn’t know if the man hunting Ashton and his crew was following and watching us. But I’d turned the keys in the car knowing it was unlikely to explode on us, which was more than I could say for my father’s Maserati.
I watched the teenage boy inside the gas station. He guzzled a bottle of water and shoveled the contents of a bag of Cheetos into his mouth as he walked to the counter to pay for an armful of snacks. It had been a big night.
Baby leaned against the car beside me, her eyes hidden behind her huge sunglasses. I knew she was nervous, and not only because we were on the run from killers. In Baby’s world, she was probably equally terrified that at any moment Ashton would tell me about how she’d kissed her teacher. The kiss was almost certainly “the thing” they had talked about in the hall outside my father’s office. I was sure I had heard Baby in the back seat of the Jeep growl something like “If you say anything” at the other teenager as we drove. When I’d glanced up, she’d been making a cutting motion at her neck and Ashton had looked distinctly uncomfortable.
Now Baby was rubbing her shoulders, trying to ease out some of the tension as I pumped the gas.
“This is the worst idea I ever heard of,” Baby said finally.
“When the heat is on, you go underground,” I said. “We’ve got a Mexican drug cartel after us and some kind of revenge-bent psycho after Ashton. Neither of those parties is going to pursue us all the way to Colorado, or if they do, we’ll have plenty of time to lose them and form a plan to keep ourselves safe when we get there.”
“Yeah, that’ll be really easy to do with us driving around in a bright orange car with a giant armpit printed on it.” Baby gazed at the freeway, the cars zooming past, a huge pink billboard advertising Jennifer Lopez’s new film. “Let’s assume we get there safely. Then what? We, like, hide out in your shitty condo until this all blows over? Just crawl under the beds with your thousands of cats meowing and pawing at our faces? Get real, Rhonda. This isn’t going to just blow over. We ought to stay here and fight.”
“Okay, hold up. First of all, my condo is awesome. And what’s with the cats? Why would you think I have thousands of cats?”
Baby shook her head.
“Oh, I see.” I nodded. “I keep thousands of cats because I’m so fat and lonely I just sit at home waiting for a man to come along and marry me?”
“You’re missing the point,” she said.
“Look, Vegas is a businessman. Or so he keeps telling us. Hopefully, if he’s weighing risk versus reward, he’ll find it far more reward
ing to go back to the beach house and try to find the money and drugs there while we’re gone rather than come after us,” I said. “He might even be successful after a while.”
“So you did hide it in the house,” Baby said, chewing her lip.
“The search will keep them entertained,” I continued. “Those guys want their stuff more than they want us. That’s their priority. So we set them up to get busted while they’re searching. That’s one problem solved. As for whoever is after Ashton and his friends, without him in the picture, the killer will have only Vera to focus on. We can call the police and negotiate Ashton’s surrender, and while we’re at it, we tell them this guy is going to be watching her, and—”
My words were cut off by a wail of sirens. Two squad cars and an unmarked sedan with a flashing light bar in the windshield pulled into the gas station, surrounding us, the last to arrive screeching to a halt only feet from Ashton as he exited the building. He dropped his armful of snacks, shattering a glass bottle of soda on the concrete. Men and women congregating around the automatic doors backed up against the wall, their hands up.
Officer David Summerly was the last person I expected to see exit the lead unmarked vehicle and walk across the station toward me. He took a pair of cuffs from his belt and snapped one onto my wrist.
“Rhonda Bird,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”
Chapter 92
Jacob was rusty. That was his problem. He’d gotten worn down and slightly crooked, like an armchair flopped into too many times over too many years. Creaking and cracking. He was getting old. Jacob had made mistakes, and the biggest of them was falling in love, building a family. As he drove through the streets of Palos Verdes, slamming his foot on the accelerator of the BMW and hooking into turns like a race-car driver, he scolded himself. A family not unlike his own, two parents and a young girl, hurled themselves out of a crosswalk and onto the grass beneath a palm tree as he roared past.
2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 20