2 Sisters Detective Agency(12)

“Barbara—”

“It’s Baby. Baby Bird.”

“Baby,” I said carefully. “Your father just died. There’s a woman here you’ve never met who’s supposed to take care of you. Everything is upside down. I understand that you’re scared—”

“I’m not scared.”

“And upset. But let’s just slow down. I’m also kind of freaked, just in case you were wondering. In eight hours, we’re still going to be working this out, and that’s going to be kind of difficult if you’re on a plane to Milan with…Who were you going with?”

“I’m going by myself.”

“Wow,” I said, incredulous.

“There’s nothing wow about it. I go everywhere by myself. I just got back from Puerto Rico and the Fixy Life Festival. This is what I do. This is my job.”

I held my head. “Your job? Baby, I can’t even begin to explain what I think about a fifteen-year-old traveling the world by herself just to tell hundreds of strangers on the internet what she thinks of the live music scene.”

“Hundreds? Excuse me?”

“Let’s get in my car and—”

“Yeah. Okay. Fine. Show me to your car.” She flicked her hand at me. “I’ll explain it all to you while you drive me home so I can pack.”

She stormed off importantly. I had to laugh, to stave off the urge to cry.





Chapter 14



Jacob Kanular sat beside the bed, listening to the soft clicking and bleeping of the machines monitoring his daughter in the cool dimness of the room. Outside the small space, the hospital thrummed with life, nurses chattering as they walked, soft bells calling for assistance to different rooms. Jacob had sat in rooms like this before, looking over strangers in beds, a night shadow slipping in while family members took breaks in the cafeteria or outside the hospital doors. Clients had hired Jacob to speed up the inheritance process, or to finish the job some two-bit amateur hit man had botched. Often all that was required was the simple blockage of a tube, the flipping of a switch, the gentle press of a pillow over a placid face. At least, that’s how it had been back then. But now his ability to do the job again remained in question.

He’d been ready to kill Ashton Willisee. He’d told himself that, as he’d loaded the unconscious boy into his van, as he’d dragged him out of it, moaning and crying. But his first attempt at justice for Beaty had been a failure, which wasn’t something Jacob had ever experienced on the job. He just didn’t do failure. He didn’t choose stupid locations. He wasn’t caught out, as he had been the night before, by the strange coincidence of a police squad car pulling over a vehicle within distant eyesight of where he had planned to torture and kill his mark. Jacob was never interrupted. He was never seen. He never left evidence. And yet there he’d been, watching his mark run off into the ravine, the rabbit bolting from the wolf’s jaws.

Had he wanted to fail? Could he really kill again? Or had time, love, and family done away with the monster inside him, the man who had been capable of taking the lives of others with such ease?

Even as he wondered these things, holding his daughter’s cold, limp hand, his other hand held Ashton Willisee’s phone, flipping through folders of videos. He found one entitled “Midnight Crew” and opened it.

Ten videos. He clicked the one at the top of the screen, the newest, dated a few days earlier. He recognized the range hood in his own kitchen. The camera swept to the dining room, where the big kid with the golf club was lining up Neina’s sculptures on the table. He saw his own figure slumped in a chair, unconscious, Neina bound beside him. He watched as the girl in the black catsuit with the single blond curl hanging from her hood forced a screaming and crying Beaty into another chair, winding tape around her chest.

“Please, please don’t,” Beaty cried on the video. “Mom! Mom! Mom!”

Jacob felt his lip twitch. It was the only outward sign of the boiling, searing rise of fury inside him, the stirring of old reserves of killer rage. He rolled the video back. Ashton’s main focus had been on his own activities in the kitchen. He’d only filmed a snippet of the girl tying his daughter to the chair. Jacob isolated the clip and played it again.

Please, please don’t. Please don’t. Please.

The phone screen went blank. An error message told him the phone had been remotely disabled.

Jacob let the phone fall from his fingers into a nearby trash can.

He had what he needed.





Chapter 15



I had to get the address for my father’s office on South Alexandria Avenue in Koreatown from Abelman because Baby wanted to go home and would only give me her own address. The girl hunkered down in the passenger seat of my Buick, her long insectile legs crammed against her chest, eyes behind huge round sunglasses level with the door of the car, and a scarf she’d extracted from her tiny handbag pulled over her head.

“This is so embarrassing. This is. Urgh. Urgh. This car. This paint job. Worst day of anyone’s life. Ever,” she muttered to herself.

“This paint job was done by a very talented kid about your age,” I said, “as payment for me fronting his bail money on a public exposure charge. I’m pretty fond of it.”

“Why would you front some kid’s bail money?”