Private L.A. (32 page)

“Was
Saigon Falls
backed up?”

Maines’s eyes were glistening with tears. “That’s what makes this all so awful. It was there, backed up around six the day Thom and Jen disappeared. It was a rough edit, but you can already see the genius of it. The story line. The acting. The cinematography. I’d love to show it to you, but it seems so …”

“Seems so what?” Justine said, wondering where this was going.

Maines looked lost again before saying, “There was another backup made from the ranch the night they disappeared, some sort of emergency thing. Maybe triggered by the power going off and the generator taking over? I don’t know. But about a hundred files were sent to the data bank that had never been there before.”

“What were they?”

Maines replied, “How is it possible that the artists who created
Saigon Falls
also created this?”

She hit RETURN on the smart tablet. The huge LED screen lit, showing the Harlows’ master bedroom at the ranch in Ojai.

A NAKED WOMAN
knelt on the bed, feet and butt facing the hidden cameras. She was whimpering in pain as Thom Harlow crouched over her, naked too, sodomizing her while Jennifer shoved a dildo into her vagina and smacked her ass with her open palm.

“You came back early because you love this,” Jen Harlow said in a taunting tone. “Admit it, you little bitch whore.”

The woman just kept making soft, painful noises, like a rabbit Justine had once seen with a broken leg.

“Admit it!” Thom roared.

“Turn it off,” Justine said, feeling sickened.

“Wait,” Maines said bitterly. “It’s important.”

Justine tuned out the increasingly lewd and degrading things Jennifer and Thom Harlow were saying to the woman, watched from her peripheral vision until Maines said, “There.”

Thom Harlow had come off his knees, rolled onto his right side, and pulled the woman down after him, so that the cameras caught the front of her body.

Adelita Gomez winced with every one of Thom’s thrusts, but she was not broken. She was looking defiantly at Jennifer, as if she would not allow herself to display any sign of humiliation or submission.

Justine looked away toward Maines, who said in a numb, flat tone, “I found other films like this with Adelita starring. When they were in Vietnam, they got her drunk. She cried like a baby the first time they took her.”

“Turn it off,” Justine said again, repulsed and filled with sympathy for the nanny. What was she, eighteen?

“Not yet,” Maines said in a dull voice. “It gets worse.”

“I don’t think I—”

“There he is,” said the Harlows’ personal assistant before her hand flew to her mouth. She whined, “Oh, God, the poor little guy.”

In the lowest part of the screen Miguel Harlow had wandered into the room. For a moment he was frozen, watching his adopted parents defile his nanny. Then he turned and ran out of the picture. His parents seemed not to notice him at all.

“This had to have been shot the night the Harlows disappeared,” Justine said, watching Maines. “Miguel didn’t just hear strange noises, he saw this, he got scared, he ran, he tripped and fell, bruised his shins, and—”

“Get off her or I fucking kill you!”

Up on the screen, four men dressed in black and wearing black balaclavas had burst into the Harlows’ bedroom, shotguns and pistols trained on the trio.

Thom Harlow stopped his frantic thrusting and squirmed away from Adelita, trying to cover himself, while Jennifer screamed, jumped off the bed, and reached for a robe. One man grabbed the actress’s hair and hurled her against the wall. “You going nowhere you’re gonna need that, bitch.”

He picked up the robe, looked away from Adelita, tossed it to her.

“What do you want?” Thom Harlow demanded, now over his initial shock and trying to sound like one of the action heroes he’d played over the years.

The men said nothing.

But Adelita Gomez, in Jennifer’s robe now, glared at Thom and spat bitterly at him: “I want justice.”

“THAT’S REALLY WHAT
she said?” Mo-bot asked, appreciation starting to show on her face. “ ‘I want justice’?”

Justine nodded, then shook her head when Sci offered her the bottle of Midleton Very Rare Irish Whiskey. Almost everyone from the L.A. office was in Del Rio’s hospital room, called there by me to celebrate the fact that that afternoon, while I was battling No Prisoners, Rick had shown movement in both knees, and feeling as high as his hips.

Sci offered me the bottle. I wanted it, but the nurse who’d examined me earlier in the evening said I’d probably suffered a mild concussion and should lay off the booze for a week or two.

Meanwhile, Emilio Cruz was saying, “So someone, maybe that son of a bitch Captain Gomez, sent those men to snatch the Harlows?”

“Or maybe Adelita recruited the gunmen,” I offered. “I mean, she had to be the one who got them past the security. She had to have been the one who cast that shadow we saw behind Jennifer when she was returning from her jog the night they disappeared.”

“How would she know how to disable security at the ranch?” Del Rio asked. “She’d never been there, right?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Justine agreed. “But maybe she snooped around in their computers and found a diagram of it. Who knows? But I watched those guys in the black hoods shoot up the Harlows with hypodermic needles and carry them out of the bedroom. The cameras seemed to be feeding directly to the data bank in Minneapolis until someone tore out the cameras and presumably took all the computers in the house.”

“So you think they made a hundred of these films?” Sci said, pouring himself a little whiskey. “That’s seriously twisted. Going back how long?”

Justine looked even more disgusted, said, “Cynthia made me watch one more of them. It was worse, openly sadistic.” She paused. “I recognized the victim almost immediately.”

“Who?” I asked.

Justine shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it. “I suspected something the other night at Sanders’s, but I couldn’t have known the deeper, terrible secret.”

“What are you talking about, Justine?” Mo-bot pressed.

“
Who
are we talking about?” Del Rio asked.

“Anita Fontana,” Justine said. “The Harlows’ housekeeper.”

“No way,” I said, flabbergasted. “She’s been with them, what? Twelve years? Why would she stay? She could have left them, refused to come back when she went home on vacations.”

“I think she had a reason she couldn’t stay away,” Justine said, her face a mix of compassion and ruefulness.

“What?” Mo-bot asked.

“Miguel,” Justine said. “Last night when we were leaving Sanders’s house, I happened to be at the perfect angle, watching her hold him in her lap, both of them in profile, the left side of his face, the side not affected by the cleft palate and all the operations he’s had.”

“You trying to say she’s his mother?” Mo-bot cried in confusion.

“I’m willing to bet on it,” Justine said. “I just can’t bear to confront the poor woman with it. Not tonight.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Why would she give her baby to the Harlows?”

“I’m guessing,” Justine allowed. “But it’s not hard to imagine Anita wanting the best possible medical care for her baby, especially when he was born with such a dramatic abnormality, one that required so many operations. You could also imagine Anita, nanny to little Malia and baby Jin, sexual slave to the Harlows, being submissive to their rights and demands.”

“Wait,” Cruz said. “What rights and demands?”

“Paternal,” Justine said coldly. “I think Miguel is Thom Harlow’s son.”

There was dead silence in the hospital room.

I could see it. Thom Harlow fathers a deformed child while acting out his and Jennifer’s perverse desires. The Harlows, with their pristine public image, don’t want any of that coming out. It absolutely will not do.

So they offer to “adopt” Miguel, making it seem to the world as if they’re even more saintly than everybody thought. And Anita? She’s allowed to work in the house, no longer nanny, no longer sexual slave, but forced to live a lie for the sake of her son.

“Amazing job,” I told Justine, and meant it and more. “There’s only one thing left for us to do now.”

“What’s that?” Justine asked with some trepidation in her voice.

“Go back to Guadalajara.”

TWO NIGHTS LATER
, around eleven in the evening on November second, Mo-bot pulled a tan Ford van over and parked down the street from La Fuente, a five-star cantina on Pino Suárez about a block from the Ministry of Justice in central Guadalajara.

In the rear of the van, I checked the action of a Smith & Wesson .45. Pablo Cordova, the big Mexican in the long black duster sitting in the front seat, had provided the weapons as well as the van. Cordova was once a top investigator with the Mexican federal police. Now he runs our Mexico City office and is one of those guys who operate on the right side of the law.

For the most part. When it suits his purposes.

Cordova had met us at the Manzanillo airport about five hours from Guadalajara earlier on the second Day of the Dead, an annual celebration that involves everyone’s ancestors and lots of tequila. The streets were filled with revelers wearing skeleton masks.

“Sci?” I said into a Bluetooth device in my ear.

A blare from a mariachi band before Sci replied from inside the cantina. “They’re paying up now.”

“How drunk are they?” Justine asked. She was cradling a Remington pump-action combat shotgun with a halo sight.

“I saw them drink seven rounds with
cerveza
chasers,” Sci said. “But they probably had one more before I got in here because they’re not looking too steady on their feet.”

“Perfect,” I said.

In the front seat, Cordova nodded, said, “I’m up, Jack?”

“Seems time,” I replied.

Cordova tugged a skeleton mask down over his face, climbed from the van, shut the door, and started down the sidewalk toward the cantina just as Commandant Raoúl Gomez of the Jalisco State Police stumbled from the bar, followed by his drinking companion, Chief Arturo Fox of the Guadalajara Police Department.

“This could get ugly and has big downsides,” I said. “Last chance to bail.”

“Here we go,” Justine said, tugging down her own skeleton mask.

Mo-bot and I did the same, despite the fact that our plan could backfire and get us thrown into a Mexican prison for a significant stretch of our lives.

“Okay, Cruz,” I said. “They’re heading toward Independence.”

Mo-bot threw the van into gear, came parallel and then abreast of our targets and Pablo Cordova, who was quickly closing on them. Cruz, wearing a skeleton mask and a long black duster like Cordova’s, appeared in front of the drunken cops. The right sleeve of the coat was empty. Cruz’s right hand lifted, parting the coat, revealing a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, which he aimed point-blank at the stomachs of Chief Fox and Commandant Gomez. We eased to a stop, blocking any bystanders’ view of what was happening. I slid back the door.

“Get in!” Cruz ordered. “Or die.”

FOR AN INSTANT I
felt sure that the police officers were going to go for their weapons, but then Cordova prodded them from behind with his sawed-off shotgun and growled, “You want to join your ancestors on the Day of the Dead,
señores?
”

Chief Fox broke first, turning and lurching into the van.

“You’re making a big mistake,” Commandant Gomez snarled as he followed his colleague unsteadily inside the van.

“On your stomachs,” Justine said, making her voice hoarse and pointing her gun at them from the shadows.

Cruz climbed in after them, took their weapons, and emptied them of bullets as I slid the door shut. Cordova jumped into the front seat. Mo-bot started driving again.

“Nice easy pace,” Cordova said.

Cruz and I meanwhile threw zip-tie restraints around the men’s wrists and ankles. They reeked of tequila and sweat but showed surprisingly little fear when we sat them up.

“You’ll spend many years behind bars for this,” said Commandant Gomez in an angry, drunken tone. “If you’re lucky and I don’t kill you first.”

Cruz gagged them. I blindfolded them.

No one spoke during the drive. South of Guadalajara, near the town of El Zapote, Mo-bot turned off onto a two-track dirt road and bumped up it for several hundred yards next to a condemned building that we’d scouted earlier in the day. Sci pulled up in a second panel van.

Still wearing the skeleton masks, we got the two men from the van and took them inside what had once been a tool and die operation, using red-lensed flashlights to lead them through the debris that had been left behind. In a high-ceilinged space deep inside the structure, we sat the two men in chairs.

Cordova said, “We cut off the wristbands. But if you move, we will shoot you with your own guns,
señores
. Nod if you understand.”

Both men bobbed their heads. Cruz used a pocketknife to slit the ties. Sci set glasses of water in front of them as they undid their gags. The second the gags were off, Mo-bot threw a switch and high-intensity spotlights glared down on them.

“WHAT IS THIS?”
Chief Fox demanded, holding up an arm to block the light glaring into his bleary red eyes. “Who are you? What do you want?”

The state police commandant squinted into the light and demanded angrily, “Do you have any idea who the fuck we are?”

“Sí,”
Cruz said. “We know who you are.”

“No,” Gomez insisted. “Do you really know
who
we are? And what will happen to you if you don’t release us?”

“His brother-in-law is a very powerful man,” Chief Fox said. “Listen to him, my friends. You don’t want to do this. We pay our dues. We are protected.”

“By who?” Cruz asked.

“De la Vega,” Fox said, almost boasting. “Antonio de la Vega.”

I felt a hand on my forearm, looked over at Cordova. We were behind the spotlights, still wearing our skeleton masks. He whispered in my ear, “De la Vega drug cartel. One bad
hombre.
Reclusive. Doesn’t like attention.”