2 Sisters Detective Agency(60)

Vera waited. As the action played out inside the house, a car rolled slowly down the street, on screen for only two seconds before it disappeared. She rolled the footage back, took a screenshot of the car, and stared at it. An old, beaten-up panel van, maybe dark-blue or green, the back windows blocked with patterned curtains. One of those “If the van’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’” type vehicles.

No, that wasn’t him.

Vera knew the man had used a white van to abduct Ashton. A panel van with the windows blocked was also a perfectly serviceable vehicle for an abduction. But there was no need for two grab vans. And this vehicle was too distinct, too memorable. It was probably the last remnant of some aging hippie’s former life before they sold their soul to Wall Street and bought a seven-bedder with a screening room in the hills behind the Getty.

No, Vera knew she should be looking for something with discreet sophistication. Something that wouldn’t look out of place rolling around the neighborhood at night. He didn’t want to be pulled over and searched with an enormous rifle perched on the passenger seat, a series of telescopic lenses in the back, surveillance material on a bunch of rich teenagers stuffed into the glove box. He wouldn’t bring his grab van. He’d bring his everyday car.

No other cars passed in the street while the failed raid played out. Vera tapped her nails on her desk and thought. Maybe he wasn’t following behind. Maybe he’d kept just ahead of them, anticipating their moves, keeping them in his rearview mirror as they headed for the target.

Vera rewound the footage back further, to those moments when the four of them stood in the alley, waiting for the terrier to succumb to the diazepam. Further again, until the street was silent, just seconds before they would appear on screen. A car rolled by. Vera stopped the film and screenshot the image, blew it up.

She knew a little about cars. If there was one status symbol among Russian mobsters, it was their mode of transportation. She googled some BMWs and found the model—the Gran Tourer. Jet-black. The website advertised that instead of a trunk, the car had a big cargo space for kids’ scooters and sports bags, nets behind the front seats for their iPads and crap. A family man. A man with kids, killing kids. Vera smiled. This was very interesting.

She opened the list of Midnight Crew victims on her desktop and deleted all the childless couples. There were four men remaining. One of them had been her target: the jerk from the mall who had stolen her and Ashton’s parking spot. She’d been having a terrible day. The mall valets had been on break, and then the stolen spot had pushed her over the edge. Vera sat back and thought. The mall guy was the same guy with the kid who had collapsed. Jacob Kanular. But she remembered his car from the mall: a blue sedan of some kind, whizzing into the space ahead of them. Not a BMW. She selected the Kanular family from the list and rested her finger on the Delete button.

Then she stopped.

A white van. A blue sedan. Was there another car? Had the sedan been his? Or was it the car his wife usually drove?

She remembered the Kanular guy glaring at her over the duct tape wound around his head, his black eyes strangely calm, calculating. She googled the Kanulars’ address and selected Street View. Outside the house, Google had caught someone coming home, one door of the four-car garage rolled halfway down, a pair of legs, jeans, and boots, standing by the trunk of a vehicle.

She saw the black, blue, and white BMW symbol on the trunk of the car and smiled.





Chapter 80



Officer David Summerly lay beside me in the late-morning light, the gold hair on his chest glowing in the sunshine from the open window as he fiddled with the edge of the sheet and stared up at the ceiling. He was probably turning over the same idle things in his mind that I was, the same strange questions and possibilities that had opened up after we unexpectedly fell into bed together before sunrise. How he was going to get out of the house without running into Baby, who was loudly clattering around in the kitchen below. Whether we would see each other again. How to discern if the morning’s recent activities meant anything—what we had shared both before and after the “I really like you” moment, the intimate whisperings we’d had in the bathroom as he’d watched me in the shower. Those words that had come before we fell asleep, excited murmurings, soft laughter.

The hand that was fooling with the sheet wandered up the pillow and toyed with a strand of my pink hair. Something crashed in the kitchen, and we heard Baby’s curse echo through the big house. She sounded hungover and desperate, rattling around, shifting bottles and opening and slamming the fridge.

“Is there any more Spam?” she roared through the big empty house.

“I know that kid, you know,” Summerly said.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I responded to the thing at the school a couple of years ago.”

“What thing at the school?”

“Nobody told you?” He paused for a moment to think. “Oh. I shouldn’t, then. But…if you’re her guardian, maybe it’s relevant.”

I had told Summerly some of my situation with Baby in the hours since he’d shown up. I had come to a crossroads now. I could trust Baby to have handled her past and leave it where it lay, unexposed to me, or I could open her box of secrets and see if there was anything in there that concerned me.

“What happened?” I asked, knowing even as I said it that I was betraying Baby’s trust.