2 Sisters Detective Agency(79)

“I might know a way,” Summerly said.





Chapter 113



At night, from three thousand feet above the desert beyond Victorville, the I-15 from Los Angeles to Las Vegas looked like the ocean. There were long stretches of nothingness, bare roads, then here and there clusters of gold lights floated in the blackness like little meetings of fishermen. Streams of slow-traveling red dots wound gently through the desert basin, the taillights of people leaving the coast for the city of cards and dice.

In the sixties, the mob used the desert outside Vegas as a dumping ground for whacked guys, and serial killers used it to pick up hitchhikers heading from the Midwest to be singers and actresses in LA. Desert highways always made me think of lonely ghosts, and tonight I was hoping my sister wouldn’t become one of them.

Summerly hunched over his phone in the seat in front of me as he connected it to a cable in his headset, punching in a call before he’d secured the unit over his ears again. “I need CHP keeping an eye on 15 near Barstow, at the turnoff for route 127, and at the state border, just before Primm,” he yelled as the helicopter blades thumped outside our windows. Then, once his headset was in place, he continued in a quieter tone. “Yes, that’s what I said. No, you don’t need his approval. You’ve got mine. I wasn’t stood down, I was…I’ve just been reassigned. Just set it up! It’s two kids in a black Maserati!”

My headset clicked as Dr. Tuddy was patched through from his seat next to the helicopter’s pilot. I saw his shaggy brown hair shift as he tilted his head back toward me.

“Beautiful night for an air pursuit!” he said, his voice barely audible through the headset.

“You’re so good to loan us your chopper!” I said.

“This is one of many toys I bought with the patent money,” he said. I saw his shoulders rise and fall as he sighed. “It’s not the best of my collection. I also have a Bell 47G from 1946. It still runs! I’d have suggested we take that one, but there’s no way it would cope with our collective weight.”

“There’s also no way I’m getting into a seventy-five-year-old helicopter!” I yelled. “Are you nuts?”

Dave ended his call and sat back.

“Vera’s gone,” he said. I reached out and put my hand on his knee. I had the cold, awful feeling deep in the pit of my stomach that we would hear from her again. She was not a nimble and crafty fox, darting into the night to hunt chickens another day, a nuisance that would be dealt with the next time it appeared. She was a rampaging tiger going to ground in the jungle, a creature who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay hidden for long. I had the feeling that Vera had gotten a taste for blood, and wherever she ended up next, people would start to disappear.

“We weren’t dealing with a kid there,” Summerly said, as though he could read my thoughts. “She wasn’t a child making a mistake. She was a killer with training wheels.”

“And now they’re off,” I agreed.

He nodded.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have—”

“You couldn’t have known, Rhonda.” He waved a hand. “You did your best, and that was pretty amazing, even if it didn’t work out.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a handkerchief. I wasn’t crying but took it anyway. Only when I looked down did I realize it was for the blood still on my hands, on my face.

“They said Jacob Kanular had a kid inside the hospital?” I asked.

Summerly nodded. “They’re saying his ten-year-old daughter came in after a severe asthma attack. She’s been in a coma. A unit went to the house a couple of hours ago and found her mom dead. Knife wounds.”

“If that poor little girl wakes up, they’re going to have to tell her that both her parents are dead,” I said.

“She’s awake,” Summerly said. He was scrolling through his phone. “She’s on her way to another hospital. I’ve got a report here that says she’s cooperating with police as best she can.”

I looked out the window. Summerly reached over and rubbed my knee.

“You can’t save them all, Rhonda,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I know. But I like to try when I can. It feels good. It feels like I’m helping some version of me when I was that age. In some stupid way it’s almost like if I help enough of them, I’ll get back there, through time, to myself. I’ll be able to undo all the pain.”

“That’s a nice thought.” He smiled at me. But I didn’t have the strength to return it. Baby and Ashton were down there somewhere in the dark, and our hopes of finding them seemed to be ticking away with every turn of the rotors above our heads. The land below was a mess of scattered lights, as unreachable as distant stars.

“How the hell are we going to find them?” I asked helplessly.





Chapter 114



Baby took her right hand off the wheel and reached out to grab Ashton’s arm, shaking him awake. All the terror and pain had left him weak to the temptations of sleep. The hypnotic shadows of rocky terrain drifting by had taken him deep into slumber.

“Police,” she said.

“Oh, man.” Ashton sat up, rubbed his eyes. In the distance a cluster of California Highway Patrol vehicles sat on the wide median between the two lanes of the freeway heading in each direction, but all of them were pointed toward their eastbound lanes. The taillights of cars ahead brightened as they slowed on approach.