Page 18

CHAPTER 18

I WAS IN THE kitchen of our mansion on Manhattan Beach when Baby came home.

I had the trophy box sitting on the table. I’d slipped on a pair of latex gloves and carefully pulled out all its bagged contents, and now I had ten zip-locks lined up in front of me. Each bag contained an item and a newspaper clipping about a missing person, and each article featured a photograph: Jarrod. Maria. Dennis. Dorothy. Luis. Brooke. Luke. Charlie. Francis. Tia.

I looked over the collection and wrote down a few things in a spiral notebook. I glanced at some of the names.

Maria Sanchez, sixteen, last seen at the entrance to Franklin Canyon Park. Her item was a hand-painted hairbrush.

Dorothy Andrews-Smith, sixty-two, last seen at her home in Redondo Beach. Her item was a tiny oil-painting kit.

Dennis Maynar, forty-seven, last seen at his workplace in Bell Park. His item was a silver watch with a broken clasp.

Jarrod Maloof, seventeen, last seen at the Santa Monica Pier. His item was a high-school sports jersey, slightly frayed at the hem but clean, smelling of laundry detergent. He was the most recent victim. Reading between the lines of the articles I’d found online, I gathered that Jarrod, who came from a middle-class family in Torrance, had run away from home several months before he disappeared, and his family knew he’d been living on the beach, but no one had seen him in three months.

As I took notes, my heart sank. Nothing obvious connected the victims to each other. Not age. Not race. Not occupation.

Ten disconnected lives.

Missing from a beach.

From a hike.

From a supermarket parking lot.

That’s when Baby came into the kitchen holding a to-go cup of coffee. Something about her movements seemed jittery, overloaded with energy. She also had an ice pack secured to her hand with a dish towel.

“Are you okay?” I pointed at the ice pack.

“Lid wasn’t on tight. Coffee got me.”

“Is it bad?”

She shrugged.

“Well, you’re injured, but at least you’re alive!” I said as she dumped her purse on a chair next to me. “What happened? Did you drop your phone into a tar pit? Did it get stolen by coyotes? I’m so eager to hear what grave misfortune has prevented you from answering my texts and calls for hours.”

“You didn’t pass the vibe check.” She shrugged.

“The what ?”

“I’m just here to grab some things, then I’m heading out again.” Baby dropped the ice pack and the towel in the sink and set her coffee on the kitchen counter. “We can talk about it later.”

“No, we can’t, and no, you’re not.”

“I’ll be out all night. One of my besties is having an emotional crisis. I need to debrief with her.”

She reached for her purse. I grabbed the strap.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said.

“Rhonda, we have been over this, okay?” Baby glared at me. “You do not get to tell me what I can and cannot do.”

I knew it was a losing battle, so I changed tactics.

“Listen, Baby, I need you on the Troy Hansen case. You’re my business partner, and you’ve committed to this job. Troy is our client. Okay? He’s the one in crisis.”

“You can handle the Troy Hansen thing on your own for a while,” Baby huffed. “He’ll keep.”

“No, he won’t. I know the cops are all over Troy about Daisy, and they want to learn what she did right before she disappeared. We have an angle here that nobody else knows about yet. If we can start working through the missing people in this box, maybe we can find a link between them and the Hansens.”

Baby was texting the whole time I talked. I balled up my fists to stop myself from smacking the phone out of her hands. When a minute had passed and she still hadn’t looked up from her screen, I banged on the table.

“Baby! Are you listening to me? I need you to pull your weight and come down to Santa Monica Pier with me. We’re going to see if there’s anything we can find out about what happened to Jarrod Maloof.”

“Who’s Jarrod Maloof?”

“He’s a missing teenager whose name was in the trophy box,” I said. “The most recent case. He disappeared about three months ago.”

“I don’t get why you can’t just do this yourself.” Baby glared at me. “You insisted on being lead. Can’t I call in sick?”

“No, you can’t! Not when there might be a serial killer on the loose! Jesus!”

She sighed.

“If you can’t bring yourself to actually care about finding a bunch of missing — maybe murdered — people,” I said, “or about helping a potentially innocent man escape the bear trap that’s about to close on him, maybe you’ll care about this.”

I took out my phone, opened my voicemail, and hit play on the last message. I put the phone on speaker. A man with a dark, low voice came on the line.

“Yo, I’m calling to leave a message for Rhonda and Barbara Bird of the Two Sisters Detective Agency,” he said. “I just wanna say y’all are fucked up, try’na help Troy Hansen get away with killin’ his wife. Y’all better drop that case or watch your backs, bitches, for real.”

Baby was unfazed by the message. She dropped a hip and crossed her long, lean arms while I played more messages, all in a similar vein:

“Hi. I just saw on Facebook that you guys are helping Troy Hansen, Daisy Hansen’s husband. If that’s true, I want you to know how disgusted I am that — ”

“... why anyone would want to stop the police from doing their goddamn jobs! You must be absolute psychopaths yourselves, and — ”

“... need to wake up! Because Troy Hansen is a wife killer! If you don’t know that already, you can follow my channel and — ”

Baby waved at the phone. I put it down.

“How many messages are there?” she asked.

“Dozens? Hundreds? They keep coming in,” I said.

As though to illustrate my point, my phone began buzzing on the table. Caller ID said Unknown number.

“We’re already in too deep, Baby,” I said. “Our agency is at stake here. This is our thing . This is our partnership . When we decided to work together we ... we really came together as sisters, you and me. You know? And all of that’s threatened now. If we don’t solve this before the police do, we’re going to look like idiots. Like we have no instincts. Like we can’t tell a client from a killer. The agency could fold over this, okay? And if it folds, what the hell are you and I going to do?”

The words tumbled out of my mouth. I braced for an angry reaction but kept going.

“Look, Baby. We can’t walk away from this now. Backing out would make us look like we’re the kind of investigators who bow to public pressure. We’re not. We’re truth finders.”

Baby sighed.

“The world is angry at us because we’re on Team Troy,” I said. “Let’s show them that we made the right decision.”

“I never agreed to be on Team Troy,” Baby grumbled. But she sent a lightning-fast text, pocketed her phone, and grabbed her coffee.

“All right, sis,” she said. “Quick, to the Mystery Machine. Before I change my mind.”