Chapter 95
JUSTINE WOULD NOT elaborate on what she’d been thinking back in Sanders’s mansion as she looked at the Harlow children and their beloved servants. Indeed, she didn’t seem to want to talk about anything at all on the ride back to her bungalow. She just stared out at L.A. blipping by as if it were some foreign country she was reluctantly visiting for the first time.
The crime scene investigators were gone when we reached her street, though the chalk mark that had surrounded the assassin’s body was still there, along with the blood that darkened the pavement.
“Talk in the morning?” I asked when Justine reached for the door handle.
She nodded, hesitated, looked at me. “Last night, when you brought me home and I was drunk …”
“I was completely honorable.”
“No, of course, nothing like … Did I say anything … strange? Not me?”
My eyes never left hers as I shook my head. “Justine, I don’t remember anything strange or not you at all. You were tired. You drank a little too much. In our business it happens.”
She softened. “You are a good person, Jack.”
“I try to be,” I said. “Need me to walk you to the door?”
“No,” she said. “The dogs are there. I’ll be fine.”
I watched her until she’d opened her door, the Jack Russells jumping around her. She looked back at me and waved. Putting the Suburban in reverse, I was suddenly exhausted. I’d survived a murder attempt and helped uncover fraud on a massive scale. I deserved a good night’s sleep.
As I drove home, I put in a call to Mo-bot, asked her how the coding party was coming along.
“The money’s going to be transferred from the California general fund account,” she said. “We just got word of that a few minutes ago, and we’re making some last-minute changes so the tick hides deep in the file’s metadata.”
“If you say so,” I replied. “They’re the best, right?”
“The fine ladies of Cal Poly?” Maureen said as if it were heresy to even question their qualifications. “They’ve thought of a ridiculous number of things Sci and I missed.”
“Enough said. We’ll talk in the morning. I’ll explain what ESH Ltd is.”
“Look forward to it,” she said, hung up.
I reached my house. It was cool outside. The sea breeze was building. I went inside, turned on the gas fireplace. I sprawled on the couch, watching the flames. I thought of the last time I’d watched the fire. I thought of Guin Scott-Evans and wondered when the actress was returning from London.
Then Justine elbowed her way back into my thoughts.
Justine had always been the level head in the room. Or at least it had always seemed that way to me. And she’d always been the one to try to get me to open up. Now she seemed to be retreating into herself. Why?
I got a Sam Adams from the fridge, drank it while munching on a bag of microwave popcorn, trying unsuccessfully to figure out what was beating her up so badly. I finally decided she’d tell me in her own time—if that was what she decided. If not, I’d give her the space to try and work it through.
After getting a second Sam, I turned on the television, tried to watch the Lakers-Bulls game. But it was preseason stuff and none of the plays looked crisp, and I quickly got bored. Passing on a perfect chance to catch up on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, I instead turned the TV off, listened to the silence of my house, and went back to watching the fake fire in my hearth.
Someone had tried to kill me. Someone had sent an assassin to take me out. Who? Why? Earlier in the day, I’d come up with several likely suspects, and lying there on the couch, I tried to go through them one by one.
Front and center: Carmine Noccia. He’d outright accused me of tipping the DEA to the hijacked shipment of painkillers. I’d outbluffed him when he and Tommy had tried to extort me out of Private. No doubt about it, Carmine had cause.
Two: Tommy? I wanted desperately to say impossible, but he was ruthless, and mean, and more than a little fucked up in too many ways to count. He might try to leverage me in ways I hadn’t considered. He’d pretend that he’d implicate me in murder. But would he? He’d certainly screw me over if he could, and had succeeded at that more than once. But in the end I was his brother, right? There was a line somewhere that he wouldn’t cross, right? He wouldn’t personally hire a Russian assassin, would he? Or was I just a hopeless romantic when it came to what my brother might have been?
Three: No Prisoners? Possibly. But why would they key on me? I hadn’t exactly been front and center on that case. LAPD and L.A. Sheriff’s had helped me in that respect, putting their own people in front of the cameras.
Four: members of the Harlow-Quinn team? Had one of them threatened to blow the story on the orphans’ fund? Or had the actors been ignorant of the way the money was being funneled to the Saigon Falls project, then discovered it, and had they been preparing to go to the authorities?
Five: whoever took the Harlows, excluding the Harlow-Quinn team.
I supposed that was possible. Maybe we were close and someone had decided to take me out?
Then again, for the most part, Justine had taken the lead in that investigation. Had she been the assassin’s real target, with me a lucky opportunity?
It was suddenly all too much to think about. My head ached and I closed my eyes. I honestly don’t remember falling asleep.