Now a folding table is set up beside Jacob’s chair and I know what they are going to put on it. Elements of torture. Wire cutters. Shocksand knives. I am nauseated as they carry in a cardboard box, set it on the surface, and reach inside.
Then a surprise. The first item pulled out is not a knife but a laptop. Then a keyboard and mouse. A long extension cord, which is plugged in to the wall and then attached to the back of the computer.
Jacob is as confused as me and watches everything they are doing, his head jerking from side to side as he tries to take it all in.
I catch the wordpadrein something they say to him, and I’m not sure whether this is someone else’s father or his, but I hope they call Mike. Mike will handle this. He will find whatever money is needed for a ransom—and I suddenly think of my life insurance money and wonder whether that is what this is about. We had two policies on me, and they totaled more than $5 million, maybe six.
People would certainly kidnap and kill someone for that money. It could pay off this house and buy five more. Cover the costs for a caregiver for the older lady. Private school and college tuition for the girl.
Repercussions. Mike loved to talk about them. Small and large, the trickle effects of our actions. Here is the trickle effect of mine. I died, and my life insurance put my son at risk.
No matter, because Mike will pay. Hehasto pay, and he won’t just pay: he’ll think through how to pay in a way that will ensure Jacob’s safety, and he’ll anticipate any dangers, and he’ll examine the situation from each side and every angle, to guarantee success.
I take a deep breath and try to channel the confidence toward Jacob, who looks terrified. From behind me, the door at the top of the stairs opens. I turn and look up, and there is Mike.
My hope and confidence plummet at the look on his face.
CHAPTER 67
LENNY
I give up on David Laurent’s interview when the brass and the feds show up. It isn’t just Horkins; two other suits arrive, which is enough to convince me that Laurent was an undercover agent and Lillian was a target. Why is still a giant question mark, but I trust Gersh to get to the bottom of it and leave the station before anyone starts asking questions about why I am there.
I drive over to Lillian’s house to take a look. As a detective, I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes and didn’t break any sort of department records, but I was a good cop. I noticed things that others didn’t, and I had an intuition that kept a few bad characters from slipping through some cracks. So I take a moment, a long moment, as I drive by and just observe.
I’ve never bothered to think about what sort of house Lillian Smith would live in, but this one is painfully dull, one that has gone out of its way to be normal. It’s brick, with a double garage that faces the front, two windows on the second story, and a wide front porch that holds two rocking chairs and a pot of dead geraniums. Three houses down is an identical duplicate, and across the street is the same home, flipped and minus the front porch. They have three parking pads, and there’s an older sedan in one with a Nine Inch Nails window decal. I circle theblock, then return and park a few houses down, in front of a ranch style with aFORSALEsign in the yard.
Gersh shared with me what they knew—that the neighbor across the street saw Lillian walk out her front door and head to the left around eleven. After that, she disappeared. The closest major intersections with cameras don’t have any record of her on foot, and there are no taxis or car services that enter or exit the area that haven’t already been questioned and cleared. I knock on the neighbor’s door and wait, eyeing Lillian’s house across the street. According to Gersh, she’s a bit of a busybody, but that works well for me.
I knock again, and look down the street. A truck passes, then a sedan. It’s fairly busy, which should help. Someone had to have seen something, and we just have to find that person, and then the next person. She got from here all the way to Malibu, so someone, other than her killer, saw something.
I step off the porch and cross over to Lillian’s house, then turn the direction that the neighbor said she walked. According to the husband, she left the house with a bottle of bourbon, a fact he was very insistent about. So she was drinking, and I can certainly put myself in that mindset. I pause at a cross section of streets. Ahead, a major road two blocks up. To the right, a cul-de-sac. I turn left.
I wander down streets and across lawns. I stop a kid on a bike and show him a picture of her. I sit on a bus stop bench and call Gersh and ask him to check the bus activity. I walk and take my own sips from a flask and think through everything that I know so far.
Women don’t just disappear. If not by their own hand, they are taken by a stranger or by someone that they know.
First, the potential stranger. She’s an attractive woman, though that isn’t necessary to attract danger. She’s alone in public, in a fairly safe area, if any part of Los Angeles can be considered safe, but she’s drinking and she’s off her medication, which makes her unpredictable and prone to blackouts, according to her doctor, husband, and best friend.So maybe she blacked out or flagged down a stranger. And that stranger could have drugged her, accidentally or intentionally killed her, and dumped her body in Malibu. It’s not a horrible theory except for ...
The phone calls. Someone needed an intimate knowledge, or at minimum a working knowledge, of Lillian in order to make those phone calls. And whoever did make those phone calls was intentionally casting red herrings. So I was leaning away from a stranger’s involvement.
And the phone calls also eliminate the possibility that Lillian got drunk, got herself over to Malibu, and overdosed, either intentionally or accidentally.
I trip over a crack in the sidewalk that I should have seen, but I didn’t, because my attention is on what I have just found: Lillian’s drinking spot. I know it because she described this spot before, in a conversation I had forgotten but now recall.
“I cheat on you, you know.” She peeked at me through hooded eyes, and if I still had a heart, I probably would have fallen in love with Lillian already.
“Do you now?” I’m trying to stay upright, trying to maintain a cool air of dignity, but the tombstones are beginning to spin, and I need to just lie down and close my eyes for twenty, maybe thirty, minutes.
“I do. I have another cemetery, much cuter than this one. And it has benches.” She said the word as if it were special, as if we couldn’t buy benches if we wanted to—though I wasn’t sure we could, since the board wouldn’t approve the budget to repair the broken trash can that someone backed into last December. “Plus, it’s in walking distance of my house. So...none of this”—she waved both hands in the air to encompass her car and the LA traffic—“driving nonsense.”
“But does it have me?” I asked.
“A grouchy groundskeeper who steals my food and drinks?” she deadpanned. “No, that is an excellent point. It’s clearly lacking.”
I had toasted to that and then lain back on the grass to keep the world from spinning.
Before me is a small neighborhood cemetery, one surrounded by a neat iron gate. I open it and step in. There is a bench, I note. And past that, another one. I walk down a thin paved path. Maybe fifty plots, many of them disturbed by the mature roots of the trees. And it’s quiet, pleasantly so. She probably sat here and got drunk. And then ... what?