2 Sisters Detective Agency(49)

“Who’s that?” a girl beside her asked.

“My sister!” Baby yelled over the music. “Can you believe it?”

“Whoa, crazy!”

“Yeah, crazy!”

“So if your dad was Early Bird, and you’re Baby Bird, she’s…” the girl said. They looked at me. Baby burst out laughing.

“Big Bird!” Baby said. They both cackled.

I stepped up to the edge of the pool table. “Enjoying the festivities?” I asked.

“Sure am.” She grinned, crouching and leaning in so I could hear her. “This is what you get for messing with my stuff, Rhonda. You shouldn’t mess with me—I’m the queen!”

I nodded appreciatively. A stupid, childish, competitive spirit was twisting in me. This is what it’s like to have a sister, I thought. I had the strange compulsion to grab a fistful of Baby’s hair, throw her iPhone in the pool. A delicious meanness was growing in my heart.

“You know what’s hilarious?” I asked.

“What?”

“I could make myself the queen of this whole party in ten minutes flat and you don’t even know it.”

“You think so?” She blurted out more laughter. The other kids were getting in on the game, giving me laser-beam eyes so hot they could fry an egg. I was the loser big sister. The party crasher. The fun police.

But not for long.

“Watch and learn, little girl,” I told Baby. I turned and walked out of the house.





Chapter 63



They stood between two big properties in a dark alleyway that was so overgrown with bougainvillea, from the street it was invisible. Ashton thought about the Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman murders, committed only streets away, the rear-gate access that only the killer would have known about, the alleyway secretive and overgrown with foliage. All the kids Ashton knew were overly familiar with rich-people murders—the O. J. Simpson thing, the Menendez brothers, the Manson family killings. Poor kids feared slow-driving cars with their windows rolled down. Rich kids feared hippies and disgruntled relatives.

Vera, Sean, and Penny were standing silently, listening, waiting for the terrier on the other side of the gate to find the meatball they’d laced with diazepam and go off to nighty nights.

“What’s to stop this guy from leaping out and mowing us all down right now?” Ashton asked, glancing into the street. He was imagining every shadow as a tall man with a big rifle. “One gun spray and that’s it. We’re all done for.”

“He’s not like that,” Vera said. “He messed around with Benzo. He was going to mess around with you before you slipped out of his grasp. He wants to take his time. He’ll watch us tonight and creep up on one of us when we’re alone.”

“Well, that’s just awesome,” Ashton said. “My parents flew out to New York this morning. I’m alone tonight.”

“Aww.” Sean smirked under his mask. “You can come curl up on the end of my bed like the little pussy that you are, if you like. I’ll get you a blankie and a bowl of milk to keep the boogeyman away.”

“Go get a room at the Ritz.” Penny was tucking her hair under her mask. “They have great smoked salmon at breakfast.”

Vera pushed open the gate at the back of the house. The crew followed her through a lush garden, past the little terrier lying unconscious on its side on the terra-cotta tiles. Vera took out her lock-picking kit, knelt, and worked the doorknob. Ashton bet she had been picking locks since before she could walk. He’d known Vera since grade school, and she was that kind of kid—interested in doing anything that put her where she wasn’t meant to be. In the empty staffroom between classes. In the out-of-bounds area under the school bleachers. In the classroom after the bell had sounded and all the teachers had gone. Even if there was nothing to do there, nothing to see, she hated being shut out. If it was gated, roped off, signposted, locked, bolted, or chained, Vera wanted in.

They opened the door and shuffled inside. Ashton’s eyes adjusted to the darkness after a moment. He smelled dog and wondered how the scruffy little thing they’d passed in the dimly lit yard could infest the house with such an odor. Then he saw the rack bolted to the wall beside him. The hooks holding four leashes. One small, thin pink one.

And three heavy chain-link ones.

Ashton saw the dogs over Sean’s shoulder. Three enormous figures emerged in the hallway before them, sharp ears pricked and luminescent eyes locked on the intruding teenagers.





Chapter 64



When the weight-lifting dudes’ front door opened, the first thing I saw was a giant red logo on the wall. A flexed biceps, veiny and bulging, the word BRUH underneath. The armpit of the flexed arm in the logo was strangely hairy. The long-haired, beefy dude who opened the door recognized me from the rooftop weight-lifting showdown. I saw a quick grimace pass his lips—wounded pride. He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see the long table of computers set up in the dining room behind him, monitors everywhere, wires running all over the floor. His fellow muscle-bound friends were all staring at me.

“You’re a tech company?” I said.

“Yeah.” The beefcake glanced back at his friends, then at the logo. “What? You think just because we lift that means we’re idiots?”