2 Sisters Detective Agency(44)

“So Benstein liked to play with a stun gun,” I said. “And then someone electrocuted him to death.”

“He was also shot.” Tuddy thrust the phone at me again. I winced, saw only red, torn flesh. “See here?”

I snatched the phone away.

“Thanks for the help,” I said, closing the images. “If I need you again, where can I find you?”

“Hopefully inside a steel box, somewhere quiet, far away,” he said. He was watching the ocean. Sea lions were bobbing up at the end of the pier, searching for the fishermen’s throwaways. I took down Tuddy’s phone number as he recited it, and then I walked into the crowd, leaving the doctor to his sunshine musings. There were darker things on my mind. I was sure now that someone was enacting his sick revenge on Ashton Willisee and his friends. If I was going to stop him, I had to find out why.





Chapter 55



Baby was waiting for me on the steps of our father’s house when I arrived home in an Uber. She smiled sweetly as I approached. I should have listened to the niggling uneasy feeling in my belly as she tossed me a heavy set of keys.

“Let’s roll,” she said. “We’ll take the Maz.”

“Let’s roll?” I asked. “Just like that?”

“Yeah.” She turned and headed through the open garage door. “I’ve got a lead on some people who are connected with both Ashton and Benzo. You still want to go messing around that whole, like, case thing. Right?”

“Right,” I said. “But you seem to be forgetting you just about ripped my head off this morning about your room.”

“I know.” She flicked her big sunglasses down over her eyes. “I was being stupid. That’s over now. I checked out my room properly, and they didn’t get to any of my private stuff. You were trying to do the right thing, so, you know.” Baby took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I forgive you.”

“Oh.” I laughed. “How nice.”

“Don’t push your luck with me, Rhonda,” she said. “You do not want to get on my bad side permanently.”

“Whatever you say,” I said. We climbed into Dad’s Maserati. I was enveloped in his smell again, smoke and sweat, fried food, bad cologne. The driver’s seat was set at the perfect height and distance from the wheel for me. I felt like I was slipping on his clothes. Despite Baby’s cool exterior, I was feeling upbeat about repairing our relationship, avoiding what I had assumed would be days of silent treatment punctuated by the occasional violent outburst.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to see some very important people,” Baby said, plugging her phone into the car’s system. A map appeared on the console. I could see texts pinging silently into a bubble at the bottom of the screen, the number of unopened messages climbing steadily. Again the feeling pulsed through me that I was missing something. No teenager could possibly be so inundated by communication on any regular sort of day, nor would they so happily ignore the onslaught of messages Baby was now receiving. I brushed off my uncertainty, thinking that some news in her social circle must have just broken. Or maybe she was being barraged by texts in a group conversation. I headed for the address on the screen in Downtown Los Angeles as the garage door slid closed behind me.





Chapter 56



Vera pushed the doorbell at 103 Redmark Avenue, Brentwood, and listened to the chimes ringing inside the big house. She straightened her skirt and flipped her hair. Though she was only four blocks from her own home, Vera felt like a different person. She liked taking on new personas. As a kid, desperate for attention, she had worn all kinds of identities with the girls in her pony club and in her swim squad. Once she had been the secret love child of an affair between her mother and Hollywood heartthrob Kurt Russell. Another time she had been fighting seizures caused by a rare and incurable tumor in her brain.

Vera liked provoking reactions in people. Awe. Sympathy. Jealousy. All her life she’d watched her father twist and wring emotions from his men, smile and laugh with them around the dinner table while they shoveled pelmeni dumplings into their mouths, or make them cower in their seats while he raged and sneered in the pool room.

It hadn’t taken much to shake off the identity of Vera Petrov. To ensure she wasn’t being followed by whoever was hunting them, the man who had killed Benzo and taken Ashton for a little joyride, she had set out from home and driven up into the mountains. She blasted her Porsche along old fire trails and down a narrow road behind a property owned by the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre, security cameras following her progress as she went. By the time she was back in Brentwood, she was practicing being her new self, the girl next door just popping round for a quick and friendly favor.

When she heard footsteps on the other side of the door, she painted on a sweet smile and gazed happily at the old woman who answered.

“My name is Annabelle Cetes,” she explained. “I live one street over.” She pointed in the opposite direction of her mother’s mansion on Redmark Avenue. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but my little brother was here in the street earlier playing with his friends, and I think he might have kicked his soccer ball up onto your roof.”

“Oh, all right,” the old lady said. “Come in. We can go and see from the second floor.”