Page 43

CHAPTER 43

ABOUT SIX YEARS AGO in Colorado, I worked a case defending a teenage girl who was accused of planning to take a rifle to school and shoot as many of her classmates as she could. The girl was guilty, and she admitted it.

During long nights working on strategy and researching prior cases to get her the best sentence possible, I’d basically lived in my cramped little office, a gas heater by my feet and the coffee machine working its ass off. The day before the sentencing hearing, the girl’s mother showed up at my door. She hadn’t slept in three days, the worry over her daughter’s fate writhing in her brain like a snake.

I couldn’t let the woman drive home, and I couldn’t put her in a cab. She needed help, and I needed her to be fresh and bright and ready to read her appeal to the judge. I borrowed a foldout couch from a neighboring office, put the woman in it, and went back to my desk. The mother of the would-be school shooter slept soundly for eighteen hours while I filed motions and wrote reports and emailed colleagues.

Since then I’ve always kept a foldout couch in my office. When I moved to Los Angeles and took over my father’s business, I found he had one too, but his was tattered and coffee-stained and full of mouse holes. So when I woke at six a.m. to the sound of Dave Summerly stirring, we were in the clean, fresh, and barely used foldout in my office that I’d bought to replace my father’s. Turns out, a foldout in the office is handy not only for after-lunch naps and clients desperate for sleep but for banging your ex-boyfriend when he attempts to conduct a raid on your premises.

Summerly and I got dressed in opposite corners, sneaking looks at each other. We both had guilty smiles. His softened into a reflective one. He stopped looking at my body and started searching my eyes.

I held up a hand. “Before you say anything, I don’t know what last night meant. And I sure don’t want to try to figure it out right now. I need coffee and a shower and I have to check in with Baby and make sure she got home safe last night.”

“Why does it have to mean anything?” Summerly sighed. “This is what you do, Rhonda. You assign meanings to things, then you decide you don’t like those meanings and you run off, trying to put as much distance as possible between yourself and those terrifying, arbitrary meanings.”

“A plausible theory.”

“You ever think of consulting with the other person to decide what a thing means?”

“Dave, listen. Whether we do it together or I do it alone, it ain’t happening right now.”

He rolled his eyes and grabbed his phone from my desk. Some paperwork I had sitting there caught his eye. “Dorothy Andrews-Smith?” he said, pointing.

One of the names from the trophy box, the sixty-two-year-old who’d disappeared from her house in Redondo Beach. I felt a shiver run up my back. “What about her?”

“I know this case.” He picked up a sheet of paper. I could see from where I stood that it was her MISSING poster. “Dorothy Andrews-Smith. Last seen at home. Front and back doors left hanging open, no sign of Dorothy or her cat. Has her family hired you to find her?”

“Uh.” I raked my fingers through my hair. “I mean ... I’m making some inquiries.” It was the vaguest thing I could think of to say. “I’ve got confidential papers on that desk, Dave. Would you mind not sniffing around my cases?”

“I have a warrant to sniff around your cases.” He put the poster back down. “So you’re trying to prove Troy Hansen’s not a wife killer, and you’re rubbing shoulders with gangs? You’ve got a real bucketload of thankless jobs here, Rhonda.”

“Gangs?” I asked. “Dorothy was mixed up with a gang?”

Summerly’s phone pinged. Something shifted in his face when he read the message. Without a word, he turned toward the door. He was about to walk out, brow furrowed, when I called, “Hey!” The word jolted him out of a deep, intense focus. “You gonna say goodbye or what?”

He came over and pecked my lips, then left without saying anything.

A feeling of unease settled in my chest. I hadn’t shaken it when I got to my car, or when I arrived home, or when I jumped in the shower. I thought about texting Summerly but didn’t know how to explain that some extrasensory flicker in my brain hadn’t liked the way he’d walked out and hadn’t liked how he’d looked when he read that text, whatever it was. I checked social media and all the news sites, but there was nothing new about Troy or Daisy. I called Troy on his burner, but he didn’t answer. The GPS tag I’d placed on his truck said it was still in his driveway, but I knew that didn’t mean much.

I looked into Baby’s room and saw her bed hadn’t been slept in. I swore out loud and checked to see if she’d replied to the text I’d sent as I left the office. She hadn’t. The neatly turned down sheets and the blankness of my phone screen deepened my sense that something bad was about to happen.

When the doorbell rang, the sound was like the whump of a bullet taking me in the chest. I went to the front door, knowing even before I put my hand on the knob that whatever terrible thing I had sensed was waiting for me on my stoop.