2 Sisters Detective Agency(24)

Baby and I looked at each other.

“This isn’t my first incarceration,” he said finally.

“Excuse me?”

“The first time I was abducted, a cartel in Mexico City put me in a basement under a steelworks factory. It was hot, loud, damp. They kept me in the dark, like a mushroom. I caught a foot fungus down there that took me three months to get rid of after I was released,” he said.

“How long were you down there?” Baby asked.

“Five months,” he said. “It was my own fault. I kept resisting cooking the meth for them. Trying to escape every chance I got. Attacking the men who were guarding me. Now I just do what I’m told. I usually get let out or sold to another cartel after a couple of weeks when I’ve made more meth than the gang can sell. So when I get an opportunity to leave, I try to make myself difficult to find.”

The car filled with silence.

Baby adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see his face better, then took out her phone and started tapping. I drove on through the dark, trying to process all this, trying to envision my father as a cartel man. I had just come from his inexplicably lavish dwelling on the sand in Manhattan Beach. My heart sank in my chest.

“He’s telling the truth,” Baby said, flashing her phone screen at me. “There are tons of missing persons alerts on this guy. Look. ‘Dr. Perry Tuddy, last seen at Walmart in Studio City, missing two weeks.’ ‘Dr. Perry Tuddy missing three weeks, feared dead.’”

“What makes you such hot cartel property, Dr. Tuddy?”

“Perry is fine.” He was watching the desert roll by the windows, the distant highway a string of gold lights. “They want me because while I was studying for my PhD at Claremont I developed an alternative to methylamine, which is essential in the production of crystal meth. The cartels were having trouble getting hold of pseudoephedrine, so they started using methylamine because it’s cheaper and easier to get. My alternative is even cheaper and easier than that. Things are getting competitive for meth dealers with fentanyl use on the rise.”

“Fentanyl is stronger and cheaper than meth,” Baby said, pulling a vape from her purse. “I saw that on Dateline.”

“I was studying the effects of methylamine and some other chemicals on the brain in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s, not illicit drug production,” Perry said. “But my discovery was culture changing. The LA Times ran a story about my work and how pharmaceutical companies were bidding for the patent. I was abducted for the first time a week later.”

“Why the hell don’t you just leave the country?” I asked, reaching over and flicking Baby’s vape from her hand. She squealed and punched the dashboard. “Why stay here and keep getting abducted over and over?”

“Because Los Angeles is my home.” He snorted as though the suggestion was preposterous. “I won’t be driven out of my own city.”

“Well, if you’re so desperate to stay here, why don’t you hire a team of bodyguards with all the money you made selling your recipe for metha…meffle…” Baby looked at me for help.

“Methylamine,” I said.

“Meth…” She thought for a moment. “Metha-lama-lama-whatever-whatever.”

“Because this is my life,” Perry said. “I’m not going to go into hiding like a criminal just because I’m a genius. I’m not going to have goons shoving people out of my way everywhere I go.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but I couldn’t decide what to think of his comment about criminals and his own genius, and his apparently casual acceptance of regularly being abducted because of it.

A purple chrome Subaru WRX roared past us on the highway, heading in the opposite direction, green lights under the rims making it look like a spacecraft hovering just above the surface of the road. Cartel men? I quickly took the next exit before they could realize they’d just passed the women they saw on the shipping container camera liberating their captive genius.





Chapter 28



At the Miffy’s in San Bernardino, Dr. Perry Tuddy wrangled his tall, gangly body from the back seat of my car and walked off toward the brightly lit restaurant without saying good-bye or thanking us for releasing him. Baby hung an elbow out the window and watched him go, shaking her head in disbelief.

“Maybe he just likes being abducted,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Could be kind of exciting.” She shrugged. “Not knowing when you’re going to get grabbed next. Always looking over your shoulder. I can see how it would make life interesting.”

“Your life is pretty interesting already, Baby, from what I can tell.”

“Wrong.”

“You might be right about Tuddy, but those cartel guys don’t mess around,” I continued. “It’s only a matter of time before they stop playing catch and release with the good doctor. You know what they say. It’s all fun and games until someone winds up in a mass grave outside Tijuana,” I said.

“They say that? Who says that?” Baby said. “Anyway, he’s wrong about Dad. He was a genuine asshole, but he wasn’t a crook.”

I didn’t have the heart to break it to Baby that clearly our father was as much a stranger to her as he was to me, even if she had spent the last thirteen years living with him. Instead, I rolled out of the parking lot and switched on the radio. A news broadcast was just beginning.