2 Sisters Detective Agency(68)

Which meant Neina was dead.

Rusty. Stupid. He’d allowed himself to be lured. Not lured into a trap but away from the only thing in the world more precious to him than his wife.

Jacob stepped on the gas and spun the wheels, heading back toward the hospital.





Chapter 93



One of the patrol cops, I saw, was trying to grab Baby, with Ashton surely next, while Summerly shoved me toward his sedan.

“What the hell is this?” I yelled as he shoved me into the back seat. I waited, barely containing my fury, while he walked around the front of the car and got in. “Are you kidding me? You’re arresting me for what?”

“I can hear you, Rhonda. You don’t have to shout.” He winced, rubbing his ear. “There are only two of us in the car, you know.”

“Where are you taking those kids?”

“Just calm down.” Summerly turned the wheel and headed out of the lot. “We’re all going to the West LA station. They can service us there.”

“Service us? What the hell is going on?”

“I’ve been lying to you, Rhonda,” Summerly said. “I’m not a patrol cop.”

I stared out the window at the gridlocked traffic. Somewhere behind us, I imagined, Baby and Ashton were being loaded into the patrol cars. It would have been tight with me in the back seat and the two of them squished in with me, but I wanted the kids by my side. The pendulum that had been swinging between being Baby’s mother and sister now had me feeling the hot, flustered stress of a mother duck with her ducklings loose from the flock, toppling and turning down river rapids.

“I’m a detective,” Summerly said. “Gang and Narcotics Division.”

“Well, congratulations!” I sneered, the new threat of danger creeping up my spine. “What has that got to do with me?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Summerly said. “Do you happen to know someone around here who might have millions of dollars of cartel cash and drugs in their possession somewhere?”

I bit my lip.

“You’re not under arrest for possession.” Summerly watched me in the rearview mirror with his warm brown eyes. “But I gotta tell ya, if I didn’t like you so much I’d be tempted.”

“Well, what the hell am I under arrest for?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We were making a show of taking you into custody so that the guy working for Martin Vegas who was sitting in the yellow Camaro at the gas station where we picked you up would know you guys were off-limits.”

“You…” I tried to think. “What guy? There was a guy?”

“You didn’t notice?” Summerly said. “The car was bright yellow.”

“I was a little distracted.”

“Drug dealers have terrible taste in cars.” He shook his head.

“And clothes too,” I agreed.

I felt strangely deflated. Stupid and gullible. Since I arrived in Los Angeles, I had been playing with the big bad kids, and I’d just been revealed to both them and myself as the odd one out. I’d thought I was putting the pieces of the puzzle together, and all this time it had been shifting around me as I stumbled along. I sagged into the seat, crushing my chained hands against the leather.

“So you’ve been onto me since the car bombing?” I asked.

“No, we’ve been onto you since Earl died,” Summerly replied. He blasted the horn at a vehicle ahead of us holding up the lane while I tried to collect my thoughts. “Rhonda, your dad was working for us.”





Chapter 94



Vera felt numb. That was good. Once, when she was about eight, she’d crept to her father’s office and lingered outside the door, listening to Evgeni Petrov describe his first kill to an associate. The anticipation of what it would feel like had been so great, he’d said, that the act itself passed over him as seamlessly and unremarkably as the act of pouring a cup of coffee or making the bed.

Vera had always wondered what her first real kill would feel like, whether she would work through it mechanically, like her father had, or whether she would connect with what she was doing emotionally, something she assumed would make her weak and vulnerable. But killing Neina Kanular had been like smacking a mosquito. She’d fought a little. Been difficult to catch, to pin down. But then the superefficient death strike, right on target, had given Vera a little ripple of satisfaction and nothing more.

She had the mind for it. The soul. She really was Daddy’s girl.

Vera walked now through the hospital halls and took the elevator to the fifth floor. Neina hadn’t given up any further information on her daughter’s location, but Vera knew the girl wouldn’t be hard to find. She used the mirrors in the elevators to wipe a blood smear from her neck and tuck her wild curls back in. Though Vera was sure she had buried Neina’s death somewhere deep in the dark corners of her mind, her eyes seemed a little wild to her. She closed them, breathed, tried to reset. A family with a stroller got onto the elevator at the third floor, and Vera cooed at the smiley baby.

Vera walked confidently onto the ward and turned left into the first room as though she knew exactly where she was going. She shoved back a curtain to reveal an old man with a neurosurgery scar sleeping with his mouth hanging open. She turned and walked out, checked the next two rooms: two teen boys sitting on a bed playing with their phones while a woman took a phone call by the windows, another old man reading a newspaper.