Private L.A. (18 page)

Justine shook her head.

“Rick moved his right big toe about an hour ago. Jack saw it.”

She smiled. “That’s so good.”

“I know, right?” Sci said. “There they are.”

Ahead on the winding road, Justine could see several satellite broadcast trucks set up across from the gate to the Harlows’ ranch. With klieg lights and cameras trained on the Suburban, Sci pulled into the drive behind two vans emblazoned with the symbol of the FBI. A short, slight man, forties, buzz cut, FBI blue Windbreaker, already stood by the front gate.

“Good,” Sci said. “That’s Todd McCormick. We work peachy together.”

“You being sarcastic?”

“No, I mean it. He’s first-rate. Little uptight. FBI, what do you want? But the man’s completely on it when it comes to forensics.”

They got out. Sci introduced Justine to McCormick, who seemed Kloppenberg’s exact opposite in almost every way. And yet Justine noticed immediately that the men appeared to have some kind of quiet bond, a shared expertise and curiosity that was remarkably free of ego or competition.

“I saw the tapes of the children,” McCormick said. “Of course, I’ve heard of you, though I’ve never seen you in action. Impressive, Ms. Smith.”

“Thank you,” Justine said.

“You trained in forensics as well as child psychology?” McCormick asked.

Justine shook her head.

“Gotta admit, it’s a little off from my perspective,” the crime tech said.

“What’s that?” Sci asked.

“Townsend letting you both back on the crime scene,” McCormick said.

Sci grinned coldly. “Private’s forensics teams and labs are fully accredited with every major law enforcement agency in the country, even yours, Todd. If you remember, I have lectured at the FBI Academy.”

“I remember, Sci,” McCormick said before gesturing toward Justine with his chin. “No offense, but I was talking about her.”

Justine said, “Look, I’m here because Jack Morgan thinks I have a good eye for things. Special Agent Townsend concurs. I certainly won’t touch anything you consider evidence, Mr. McCormick. I’ll notify you the moment I find anything that seems germane to the investigation.”

You could tell the FBI tech didn’t like it, but he nodded. “You have a key?”

“No,” said Sci. “I thought you got it from Sanders.”

Justine sighed, stepped by them to a keypad. “Don’t worry, gentlemen, I have the entry code. I wrote it down the last time I was here.”

“HOW THE HELL
did you get access to these kinds of files?” FBI SAC Christine Townsend asked me. We were inside the lab at Private. Mo-bot was at her workbench, uploading the data onto our system.

“I copied them from Graves’s computer at Harlow-Quinn,” I said.

“Stole them, you mean?” Townsend cried. “Are you out of your mind? I won’t be part of this. Whatever you might find in there is tainted now. None of it can be used in any court in—”

“Does it really matter?” I demanded. “Look, with all due respect, I thought we were in the business of finding the Harlows. Shouldn’t we keep that the number one priority?”

“I have a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution,” she shot back.

“As Chief Fescoe and others have pointed out to me recently, I don’t operate under the same restraints,” I replied. “Besides, I don’t like being lied to or being manipulated, and Sanders and Graves are guilty of both.”

“What’s their motive?” Townsend said skeptically. “Why does this situation benefit them beyond what you said about publicity? You said the Harlows were almost bankrupt, that the film was on the verge of ruining them financially. You’d think they’d be more focused on that.”

“I never said the Harlows were almost bankrupt,” I corrected. “That’s what Sanders told me. As of last night, I doubt nearly everything he has said in this case, and Graves and Bronson too. Taking the files is my way of double-checking things.”

Townsend said, “I still can’t be part of this.” She headed toward the door.

“Don’t you want to know what we find?” I called after her.

“I didn’t say that,” the special agent replied, and went out the door.

Mo-bot called to me. “Where do you want me to start? This is a lot of ground to cover with a one-woman show.”

Before I could answer, my cell rang. A number I did not recognize, but given all that had been going on, I answered. “Jack Morgan.”

“It’s your favorite bail bondsman,” Carmine Noccia purred. “We should meet sooner rather than later.”

“Carmine, it is not a good time.”

“Wasn’t a good time for me last year when the DEA found that truck.”

So there it was. Carmine either knew or openly suspected me. “I suppose not,” I said. “But what’s that got to do with me?”

Carmine laughed. “Cool as ever, Jack. But again, we should meet sooner rather than later. The three of us.”

“Three?”

“Yeah. You. Me. Your brother. Tommy and I have a proposition for you.”

“An offer I can’t refuse?”

A pause, then a short laugh. “You’re a cool son of a bitch, Jack.”

“I try.”

“How about Tommy and I drop by your office?” Carmine said. “Haven’t seen the place in a while. Say, like, an hour?”

“Say, like, I’ll be waiting.”

JUSTINE WANDERED INTO
the Harlows’ bedroom, noticed the mirrors, six in total, none alike, two floor-lengths on either side wall, two smaller framed mirrors, one on the doors to the closets, and a long thin one on the interior wall up high, right below the ceiling. It seemed to reflect nothing but the Italian plaster.

She heard a grunt, noticed McCormick waving an ultraviolet wand over the sheets on the Harlows’ bed. Weren’t they fresh? The sheets? What did he expect to find on them?

Justine headed into Jennifer Harlow’s closet, finding the drawer of sex toys Mo-bot had first discovered, and then the Sybian machine sitting on the floor beneath a row of haute couture dresses.

Justine closed her eyes, tried to get inside Jennifer’s head. The woman was obviously highly sexed. The actress seemed to have one of the best of everything in the self-pleasure toy category. But what did that mean? A lot of highly creative people were also highly sexed, Picasso, for instance, and Anaïs Nin, and a dozen other actors she could name right off the top of her head. It certainly didn’t mean … or did it?

Was it possible that Jennifer used all these toys because her husband did not satisfy her often enough, or at all anymore? Justine flashed on an image of her entanglement with Paul earlier in the morning and felt faint.
What in God’s name was I thinking?
Was that how Jennifer Harlow was? Sexually impulsive?

Or maybe the toys were just that, toys, something to energize a marriage of twenty-plus years. She opened her eyes, looked down, thought,
But how do you explain the Sybian?
She got down on her knees, looked at it. According to Sci, the machine was the ultimate in erotic gizmos for women, a combination of the thundering power of riding a horse bareback coupled with …

Justine imagined herself on the thing and then shook her head violently. She was not going there. She was getting this all under control….

Her hand lashed out, sweeping aside several of the dresses. She saw something behind the Sybian machine, a crack in the closet wall she hadn’t noticed before. She pushed back the dresses, smelling faint perfume. Jennifer’s?

The crack was regular, rectangular, like the seam around a narrow panel or door, except she could see no handle. She knocked on it and was surprised to find it was made of some kind of metal. She felt along the seam counterclockwise, pressing, prodding. Nothing.

She was about to get up to see if McCormick might have better luck, when she noticed an aberration in the wood trim that ran along the carpet five inches below the bottom seam. It was a knot that had not been sanded smooth.

Justine pushed at it, felt no give. She got her finger alongside the knot and nudged it left. Nothing. She pushed right, felt it give and slide until she heard a hydraulic click and the metal pocket door slid back, revealing a steel ladder bolted into the wall two feet away.

THE PASSAGE TO
the panic room
, Justine thought, leaning out to shine her Maglite into the shaft. About twenty feet below her she spotted a cement floor and a door. About eight feet above her, a faint light shone from another passage.

She thought of telling McCormick, the FBI tech, but knew that meant she would not be able to explore for herself. She ducked through the open pocket door, leaned across the space, and climbed the ladder until she was level with the second passage.

Unlike the one below, this passage had no door, just a narrow entry that doglegged left. Justine held the light between her teeth, stepped across the space, found footing inside. She took another step, met a wall, turned left, and found herself in a room about seven feet high, fifteen feet long, and twenty deep. There were bunk beds, a table with six chairs, and a small kitchen whose shelves were stocked with canned goods.

She noticed a switch at the entry and tripped it. Another pocket door slid out, blocking the entrance.

Light fell into the panic room from a window placed flush at the top of the wall. It was about a foot wide and ran most of the length of the space. Just above the window on the ceiling, Justine noticed metal brackets, a series of them, spaced at three-foot intervals, five in all.

She tried to orient herself based on her movements after she’d left Jennifer Harlow’s closet, tried to figure out where the window faced.

“It’s not a window, it’s a two-way mirror,” she muttered to herself.

Again she looked up at the brackets: simple bent and drilled steel bars screwed into the ceiling. There were extra holes in the bars, and signs that something had been bolted to them at one time.

Except for electrical plugs in the wall and what looked like a socket for a cable connection, the place was empty. A cable connection?

Justine looked back at the brackets, imagining screens and cable lines hanging there. But why? And then she saw it. Not screens. Cameras. It made sense, didn’t it? The Harlows were filmmakers, after all.

Justine wanted to see what a camera might pick up from the window. She jumped, grabbed hold of two brackets, and pulled herself high enough to peer through the two-way mirror, which afforded her a complete and elevated view of the Harlows’ bed and the FBI tech still working on it. She swung her attention around the room, spotting the other four mirrors. Were there brackets for cameras behind them?

She was going to find out. As she returned to the ladder, questions and hypotheses darted through her mind. What were the cameras for? In case they had to use the panic room and wanted to document intruders?

She supposed that was possible, but for some reason it didn’t make total sense to her. She tripped the switch; the door slid open again. She left it open and climbed back down the ladder. She almost turned and stepped back through the open pocket door into Jennifer Harlow’s closet but decided to go all the way down the ladder first.

As she neared the bottom, her flashlight beam picked up an alcove of sorts set opposite a steel door. There were three steel shelves set in the cement in the alcove. On the wall between each shelf were an electrical socket and another of those cable connections. She looked closely at the shelves and saw no dust. Which meant what? The shelves were cleaned regularly? Or had they been cleaned after something was removed from them?

Unable to answer, Justine turned toward the door, spotted a switch beside it. She flipped it up. Nothing happened. She shrugged, turned the dead bolt, and yanked open the door.

In the darkness she heard a crash and then a voice yelled out, “Who’s there? Identify yourself or I swear to God, I’ll shoot!”

“BROTHER DEAREST,” TOMMY
said as he entered my office, arms spread wide. He was wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit, no tie, and appeared to have hit the tanning salon earlier in the morning.

I remembered my brother winking at me in the courtroom the day of his arraignment. Was this part of his plan? Figure out a way to get me to admit that I was at the scene when Clay Harris took a 9mm round to the chest? It was not beyond Tommy to go this route. I still suspected that Tommy had hired Clay to kill my ex-girlfriend in the first place. In order to frame me for the murder. Since that didn’t work out, it only made sense that he’d try to frame me for
Clay’s
murder instead. But I had no proof.

Carmine entered my office right behind Tommy, his skin an even deeper red against his starched white collar and yellow cashmere sweater. “Jack,” the mobster said, as if we were long-lost golf buddies. “How gracious of you to entertain us at such short notice.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “What’s the proposition?”

“What, no business pleasantries?” Tommy said, taking a seat across the desk from me.

“I’m not feeling particularly pleasant, brother,” I replied.

Tommy beamed at me as if I’d said something of deep significance.

Carmine shut the door. He looked around my office, a space I intentionally keep devoid of personal effects. In my line of work, I’ve found that it pays to know more about other people than they do about me. Carmine gazed at me, popped his chin up. “Place bugged?”

“Good idea, but no,” I said. “You fellows wearing wires?”

Tommy cocked his head as if I’d gone paranoid, which I had.

“Nah,” Carmine said. “I was never one for taping myself.”

I said nothing. Tommy scowled but took off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, and showed me his chest and back. “Satisfied, brother?”

“Carmine?” I said.

“Fuck you,” Carmine said, as Tommy tucked his shirt back in.

I sighed wearily. “What’s the proposition, then? I’m a busy man.”

“I heard that,” Tommy said, and laughed. “Saw that too: the expression on your face when Bobbie Newton caught you with the Harlow children. It was worth the price of admission. You’re a television star, brother, you really are.”

“Glad to have entertained you,” I shot back. “By the way, I found it interesting that
you
designed the security system at the Harlows’ estate, Tommy. The one that was so easily foiled.” I looked at Carmine. “You two didn’t have anything to do with their disappearance, did you?”