by Chris Mooney
Ellie had had no idea her brother was a carrier until after he’d been abducted. She also had no memory of that night. She had been staying at the home of her mother’s friend, a woman who also lived in Westmont, a suburb of Los Angeles. Her mother had to drive out early the next morning to Children’s Hospital to discuss ear tube surgery—because of J.C.’s chronic ear infections—and she couldn’t do that while trying to juggle a pair of rambunctious twins.
Ellie vaguely recalled staying with her mother’s friend—an older woman with graying hair who loved wearing scarves—for two days, maybe three or four. She couldn’t recall the name of the friend, but what she could recall, vividly, was coming home and seeing the bandages on her mother’s still-swollen face, her left arm in a sling because she had broken her arm. Her mother was crying, and Ellie was crying, too, even though she didn’t yet know what had happened, but it had to be bad, real bad, because her mother looked all hurt and banged up, and the car was packed with boxes.
During the drive to Maryland, her mother told her that J.C. was a carrier, which meant he had very special blood that could heal people, make them look younger. Very bad people had abducted him. You’re not a carrier, her mother explained, but these bad people think you are and may come back for you. That’s why we’re moving—and why we need to change our names. We need to make sure we’re safe—and we will be, sweetheart. I promise you, we’ll be safe. Her mother said it like she was trying to convince herself instead of her terrified six-year-old daughter.
Or that was Ellie’s memory of it. That and feeling that the world was this great big monster that could not only bite you but devour you whole, no matter how many people loved you. She had grown up in a state of perpetual fear of not only the dark but also the light. It wasn’t until she became a cop that she reclaimed herself—from that day forward she would no longer be a victim.
Life after her brother meant moving across the country every few months and being homeschooled and living under different names and having heavily supervised playdates with her mother acting like a bodyguard, constantly scanning for potential threats. Ellie was what her mother always called her—the middle name of some cousin Ellie had never met. Ellie was twelve, and she embraced her new identity as she’d always done, as she’d been trained to do. Amanda Cullen, who had lived on the first floor of a rental home in Westmont, no longer existed, except in her mind. Amanda Cullen was, for all intents and purposes, dead.
As for her brother? There were no pictures of him around the house or on her mother’s phone. J.C. could be spoken about only at home, only when she and her mother were alone.
The Los Angeles police are still looking for him, her mother would say in the beginning. Keep praying. Don’t give up hope.
That became: He’s gone. He’s probably never coming home.
Then: We have to live our lives. Maybe one day things will change, but we need to live our lives.
Things did change, at least for Ellie, when she made the decision to move from Boston, where she had settled with her mother, to attend a small college in Los Angeles, against her mother’s wishes. Christ, what fights they’d had over that. Running away from your problems and fears, Ellie had learned at a young age, only magnified them, turned you into a victim. Victims ran away from their shit. Ellie wanted to run to them. Into them. That was how you dealt with life. After she got her degree in criminal justice, she enrolled in the LAPD Police Academy.
Now she had access to the most powerful and interconnected law enforcement databases from all over the world. Ellie quickly discovered that no one named Jonathan Cullen from Westmont had ever been reported missing. She confronted her mother, who admitted that she never reported to the police what had happened.
Why? Because, her mother explained, she recognized the voice of one of the gunmen that night. The voice, she was certain, belonged to a cop who was well-known in the neighborhood. She couldn’t go to the police, because they might come after Ellie. This cop, her mother had learned, was working with other cops to abduct carriers from all over the country and sell them to blood farms.
Save your daughter or stay and try to find your son? Pick one.
She picked her daughter.
Even as her mother was dying, the body lying in the hospital bed looking more like a husk by the day, the cancer having feasted on all her organs—even in pain and on morphine she refused to share key details from that night that would help Ellie find J.C. or, at the very least, find out what had become of him, if he was alive or dead. It’s for your own protection, her mother kept telling her. Those men are still out there—they could find you. Promise me you’ll let it go.
Ellie couldn’t let it go. She had begged and pleaded for details and asked questions—she got good and angry and walked away more than once—and her mother refused to share details, reciting the same lines over and over again, as if by rote. When her mother finally passed, Ellie remembered sitting next to her, loving and hating her equally.
Ellie wondered what her mother would say if she could see her daughter now, standing in this makeshift shrine/operations center devoted to finding J.C., wondered if her mother—
A car was approaching.
Ellie turned away from the photo, listened. The engine was loud, rumbling—the kind that belonged to a truck, not a car. The kind Cody’s Ford F-150 had.
She realized she was quite drunk. Not stumbling, fall-on-your-face drunk but riding that oh so wonderful warm wave that made her feel relaxed. In control.
The doorbell rang as Ellie plodded downstairs on her bare feet. She placed the empty glass next to the whiskey bottle sitting on the breakfast bar and caught her reflection in the glass cabinet door. A normal twenty-something woman would have taken the time to look more presentable for her boyfriend, worn something other than a pair of Under Armour track pants and a frayed T-shirt that should have been relegated to the rag pile or dumped in the trash. But a normal twenty-something woman wouldn’t have spent her afternoon dodging bullets and dealing with a crazy masturbating woman high on illegal blood, so screw it.
The doorbell rang again. She was glad Cody was here. She didn’t need him to be here, and she wanted him to understand that. She didn’t want him hovering, treating her like some bruised flower. Screw that, she thought, and opened the door.
Her little speech would have to wait. Police Commissioner James Kelly was standing on her doorstep.
“Evening,” Kelly said. “I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.”
Ellie was too stunned to speak. Why in God’s name would the police commissioner be standing on her front doorstep at—she glanced at the wall clock over the fireplace—quarter past eleven?
And alone. Kelly had come here alone—at least it appeared that way, because there was no one else standing anywhere outside. And he must have driven himself, because she didn’t see a driver sitting behind the wheel of the vehicle parked in her carport, a two-door white Toyota Tacoma truck with a Santa Clara University sticker on the back window.
“My daughter’s truck,” Kelly said. “She’s home for the weekend.” He smiled. “Mom washes and folds the laundry and provides free meals while my daughter complains about how rough and demanding her schoolwork is.”
Ellie wanted to say something, or at least nod in acknowledgment, but her mind was overflowing with questions, and underneath them she felt a vague sense of panic. Having the commissioner dropping in at such a late hour didn’t exactly scream good news.
“This is usually the part where you invite me in,” Kelly said kindly.
Ellie’s face flushed in embarrassment. “Right, yes. Yes, of course.” She stepped back and held the door open for him. “Please come in.”
“Why, thank you.”
Kelly had traded his suit and tie for loafers, a white polo, and a pair of khakis with a razor-sharp pleat. The cold and mechanical exterior he had displayed this afternoon
had been replaced by something more relaxed and agreeable. Ellie shut the front door, feeling certain he hadn’t come here to deliver bad news or interrogate her; he had lackeys for that. She suspected he needed something from her—something important. A favor, maybe.
Ellie felt herself relax a bit. “Can I get you something to drink?”
He eyed the whiskey bottle on the breakfast bar almost lovingly. “Thank you, but no,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“You sure? There’s plenty.”
“I’m in recovery, which is a more polite way of saying I’m a boozehound. But please, don’t deny yourself on my account.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
Kelly let loose a bark of a laugh. It erased a good decade off his face.
She didn’t know why she had said those words; they had simply rolled off her tongue, uncensored. It probably had something to do with the booze and the fact that, whatever this was about, she had the home court advantage. She hadn’t been brought to his office and called out on the carpet, and he had come here alone, all of which reinforced the notion that he needed something from her.
Ellie motioned to the sofa and took the armchair. She crossed her legs and rested her hands on her lap.
“What do you need from me, Commissioner?”
“Straight to it.”
“Saves time.”
Kelly considered her for a beat. Outside, she could hear the ticking of his cooling truck engine.
“Gingerbread Man,” he said. “Did he get a good look at you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Think about it for a moment.”
“I did, while I was at the hospital,” Ellie said. “I was wearing sunglasses and my cap, so no, I don’t think he got a good look at me. Why?”
“Are you a carrier?”
The question surprised her.
“Yes, I know it’s unethical to ask you that question,” Kelly said. “But since I’m asking in the context of your job, I believe I might have some wiggle room.”
“My job? I don’t understand.”
“Ellie—may I call you Ellie?”
“Of course.”
“Today you made it a point of showing me just how badly you want a spot on the Blood Unit. I came here tonight to find out why.”
“I explained that to you already.”
“I think it’s something more than that.” Kelly’s gaze felt as penetrating as an X-ray. “Something more . . . personal.”
The upstairs room with the picture of her brother, the drawers stuffed with the files of missing carriers, her off-the-clock research—all of it flashed through her mind and fear raised the hammers in her heart. He knows, Ellie thought. Somehow he’s found out about my brother, my real life, everything.
Which meant he knew that her real name wasn’t Ellie Batista. It meant he knew she had applied to the LAPD under a false name—an alias—and that was a crime, one that could send her off to prison, her career gone. The thought of prison was terrifying, but not as terrifying as no longer being a cop. No longer having the resources to search for her brother. The panic she felt in that moment was so sudden, she felt like she was choking.
Kelly stared at her intently, waiting. Ellie remembered advice someone had given her: If you don’t like the story, change it. She had to bear down hard.
“Your first question, about me being a carrier,” she said. “I’m not one.”
Kelly nodded, his features relaxed.
“As for my interest in the blood world—how can I not be interested? Carriers are being snatched from their homes or taken at gunpoint from cars or at school, and we lack the resources and manpower to find them. We don’t know much of anything about the blood world, how it operates, what a blood farm looks like. I want to know more about this world. I want to know everything.”
“But you haven’t explained why.” Kelly smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“What I’m asking,” Kelly went on, “is for you to explain what’s driving you. Why you’ve devoted your spare time to memorizing the names of missing carriers. Someone who makes that kind of commitment—well, there’s got to be a deep, personal reason, don’t you think?”
In the hospital room, while being examined by a first-year resident with stale coffee breath and thinning hair, and in the silence of the car ride on the way home, Ellie had started thinking about the moment when Detective Alves and/or someone from the police commissioner’s office would start asking her more specific questions about how she knew so much about the victims. She knew she would be answering a lot of questions in the days ahead, and she was prepared.
“Your older brother, Rodger,” Ellie said.
Kelly’s eyes widened at the mention of his brother and at the unexpected segue. Ellie continued, riding the rails of her gut instincts. “You’ve talked about him in multiple interviews, about how he died from a heroin overdose. He was sixteen, you were thirteen, and your parents had placed him in yet another private treatment center. Only this time he escaped. No one knew where he was for nine days, if I remember correctly.”
Kelly was too much of a pro to react. He sat as still as a stone statue, letting the silence linger and waiting for her to explain her train of thought—possibly hang herself with it.
“You and your parents lived through nine hellish days before the police found his body,” Ellie said. She left out the part about a homeless person finding Rodger Kelly dead in Echo Park, because she didn’t need it for emphasis. “My point is, you found your brother. No matter how painful it was, you and your family got closure.”
“And how, exactly, is my personal life related to your almost pathological interest in the blood world?”
“Pathological?” Ellie chuckled. “Sir, no matter where you go in the city—in the state—all you see are billboards advertising missing carriers. Abducted carriers. They’re all over the news; they’re all online and clogging social media feeds. I’m drowning in information. I can’t get away from it. I have no idea what’s going on out there, or what’s being done about it, and I want to know.”
Ellie folded her hands on her lap. Kelly said nothing.
“Sir, I don’t know you well—I don’t know you at all, really—but I’m willing to bet that when you received the news about your brother some part of you felt relieved, maybe even grateful, because, when you get right down to it, you knew. Because there is nothing worse, no greater horror in this life, than going through it not knowing.”
Kelly digested this silently as he stared at her from the couch.
Ellie didn’t want this to be a confrontation. She crossed her legs and looked down at her stomach, pinched a strand of hair caught in the fabric of her T-shirt.
“LAPD’s Blood Unit,” Kelly said, “is working with a federal task force. We have a confidential informant—a high-level stickman who finds carriers and sells their names. He claims he doesn’t meet the sellers, doesn’t have any names for us. Yet. We can use him as your entryway into the blood world.”
“You’re talking undercover work?”
Kelly nodded. “How do you feel about that?”
Ellie didn’t want to come across as too eager. She paused, pretending to consider the question, then said, “Sounds like a big commitment.”
“It’s a major commitment. It means giving up your life. No contact with your friends, boyfriend, anyone.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes. The task force is after the people behind Pandora.”
“We don’t technically know if that product exists. We’ve never come across it.”
“That’s true. Maybe you’ll find out, bring us back some hard evidence.”
“Undercover,” Ellie said, trying on the word and thinking about her brother. Kelly was giving her an opportunity to possibly find out what had happened to her
brother. While she had no direct proof, she believed that the blood barons, as the media called them, had to have records. They had to be organized. There had to be something for her to find—there had to be.
Still, she asked the obvious question: “Why me?”
“You’re young. Ambitious and smart. I need people like that. Think about it.”
Kelly stood, and Ellie was about to when he said, “No, don’t get up. I’ll let myself out. Thanks for your time. Again, I’m sorry about what happened to Danny.”
Kelly had opened the front door when she said, “No.”
“There’s no rush. Take as much time as you need to think it over.”
“I meant no to your CI,” Ellie said, thinking about the photograph of Anton Kuzmich tacked to her corkboard. “I know a better way in.”
CHAPTER 11
SEBASTIAN’S MAIN COMPETITORS in the luxury real estate market were the big-box firms with main and satellite offices located inside swanky towers and strategic storefronts situated in primo locations like Wilshire and Sunset Boulevard. They paid enormous rents, had high overhead, and employed fleets of agents and support staff. They fought one another like starving orphans battling over table scraps.
Sebastian stayed out of the fray by taking a different approach to his business: a referral-based boutique agency that operated out of a three-floor, six-thousand-square-foot home in a quiet neighborhood in Beverly Hills. He owned the home free and clear, because he had no desire to build his company into a mighty global empire like Sotheby’s, which was why the industry barely paid any attention to him, even when last year he sold a seventy-five-million-dollar French Palladian in Beverly Hills that had been on the market for almost three years.
Which was exactly how Sebastian wanted it, flying under the radar, so he could focus on his true business.