“She wants to make sure you know about Nolan and Story Farm,” the woman beside her cut in.

  Farah’s impatience dissolved at the awareness that a puzzle piece, somewhere, was about to connect. “We don’t, so please fill us in.”

  CHAPTER 58

  THE ACCOMPLICE

  Nolan Price was dry heaving on the side of the Pomona Freeway when his cell phone rang, followed by another text from his Protect the Children boss, telling him that he was needed “urgently” at the office for the team’s meeting with the LAPD. He read the text while a passing bus blew a thick braid of hair away from his face.

  Sorry, Ian. Don’t think I’m going to make it in.

  Placing his hands on the roof of his Honda Civic, he turned his face into the morning sun and took a moment to just enjoy being alive, being free, being unknown and without stigma.

  Two miles away, the Protect the Children offices occupied the fourth floor of an ugly brick building in Mission Viejo. Nolan was one of eight full-time staff members who raised, budgeted, and dispersed more than $6 million each year. Through the organization they had housed orphans; sent underprivileged kids to college; and rescued and supported battered women, drug addicts, and financially strapped families. They fed the unhoused twice a week, provided Christmas miracles for hundreds of families each December, and facilitated dream vacations for dying children. It had been a dream job for Nolan, except for the small administrative task that occasionally ended up killing someone.

  Every job had a thing—that was what Nolan told himself when he got up in the mornings and stared at his reflection in the mirror. Something that marred the good. Maybe a bad coworker. Bitchy customers. A long commute. Shit pay. A secret that ate them apart from the inside.

  It had been a good life. A good relationship, a nice job, a mended bond with his mother. He would be thought of fondly, by those who mattered. Be a failed Hollywood story to those who didn’t.

  Smoothing his suit down—he had worn the cheap one, just in case this was needed—he looked left, then right, gauging the traffic and waiting for a good opening.

  When it came, between a red sedan and a FedEx truck, he took five steps forward and stopped in the middle of the lane, waiting for impact.

  CHAPTER 59

  THE KID

  This motel room was super cool. Miles ran from one side of it to the other, then crawled onto the bed and jumped off.

  “Hey!” Mustache Man yelled at him, and pointed at the floor. “Sit!”

  Miles giggled, because it was exactly the same way that Daddy told Nana’s dog to sit. He sat in the spot, like Nana’s dog did, his hands flat on the floor between his feet. Sticking out his tongue, he panted.

  The man eyed him like he was a little afraid of him. “You gotta calm down, kid. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack. Just . . . lay down for a minute.”

  “Are we going to Disneyland?” Miles stayed where he was, because suddenly the idea of getting up to go to the bed, or to go anywhere, didn’t sound so good.

  “I don’t know, kid. We’re waiting right here for another”—the man looked at his watch—“two hours, and then I’m taking you to the park, where you can find your parent, okay? So we just need to—oh shit.” The man stood up and stared at him, his eyes growing big.

  He shouldn’t saybadwords in front of a kid, but Miles wasn’t able to tell him that because his jaw was chatteringsohard that he couldn’t speak and he was onhisside, his shoulder shaking against the floor. This was gonna be a bad one, he could tell, and he needed hismommywherewasMommy and his head was rattling inside . . . rattling, rattling, like a rattlesnake’s tail, and the pain was so sharp, like knives were inside his skull. The man crouched beside him, yelling at him and trying to pull him into his arms, and Miles neededtoSCREAM at him that that wasn’t what he was supposed to do but he couldn’t move his jaw wide enough or get his tongue out of the way to make any noise.

  His head slammed backward, into the edge of the bed, and maybe this was his punishment for not listening to Mommy.

  CHAPTER 60

  THE DETECTIVE

  Farah fanned herself as the elevator took her and Kevin down to the building’s lobby. The car was slow and paused between the second and third floor, which was just long enough for her to shoot Kevin a look of concern.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, leaning against the wall. “I’m the perfect person to get stuck in an elevator with. I’ve been called highly entertaining by at least two people.”

  “Being able to say the alphabet in fish species is not entertaining,” she said dryly.

  “Well, it is highly informative,” he pointed out. “And do you know how many people can name a fish that starts with X?”

  “You are, indeed, a marvel. Future civilizations will worship at statues of your image.” The door opened and he gestured her to go first. “And manners also. Still my swooning heart.”

  As they stepped out of the lobby and into the glaring California sun, Kevin hitched his navy suit pants up and glanced back, making sure that no one was in earshot. “So Nolan Price was the Black kid on the show. Who saw that coming?”

  “Not us,” Farah said, weaving around a handicapped parking sign. “Then again, we didn’t know about a Nolan Price or Protect the Children connection to this crime until this morning, so I think we can be forgiven for that oversight.” They had parked on the far side of the parking lot, in one of the few shaded parts, and she glanced at him as they walked in between two cars. “I’m thinking about that spray-painted picture from Trent’s house, the one of the four Story Farm kids. Nolan was the only one of them that wasn’t defaced somehow.”

  “The girl had a heart on her,” Kevin pointed out. “Not really defacing.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it’s still interesting.”

  “You think he’s the one who did the graffiti?”

  “I don’t know.” A pigeon bobbed ahead of them, then flew off when Farah got too close. “I’d be curious to find out how close Nolan and Trent were. If he went to parties at Trent’s house—what kind of crowd he hangs with. Let’s do an arrest check for Nolan on the way to Hugh’s.”

  “Sure, but five bucks says it’ll come up clean.”

  “I’ll take that bet.” Farah held out her fist and bumped Kevin’s with it as they approached the SUV.

  A few minutes later, she cursed and handed over a crumpled five-dollar bill. Nolan Price was clean as a church mouse, but still MIA. There was a backup of traffic on Pomona, so they zigzagged across to the 101 and took it north to Beverly Hills.

  It was time to put Hugh Iverson’s feet to the fire.

  CHAPTER 61

  THE HUSBAND

  Kyle Pepper would give the LAPD one thing—they didn’t mess around. It was a Sunday morning, just one night after he’d gotten the call from Meeko with the news of Kerry’s murder, and already there was a tip line, press coverage, and a gigantic conference room full of people who were being managed with ruthless efficiency by a gray-haired woman in Crocs and a button-up fishing shirt.

  “That’s Gertie.” Meeko nodded toward the woman, who was studying a clipboard, a pair of reading glasses perched on her wide nose. “She drove in this morning from Las Vegas. She’s a bit of an expert in missing children and comes in when we need her.”

  “You the father?” Gertie stuck out her hand toward Kyle. “I’m Gertie Silver. Lost my own little girl in ’03. Since then I’ve led sixteen privately funded missing-children searches. I understand how to coordinate with law enforcement, press, and the public, and how to get the most out of all of their lazy asses.” She glanced at Meeko as she shook Kyle’s bruised hand with a vise grip. “Including you, Minko.”

  “It’s Meeko,” he corrected.

  “On my watch, thirteen of the children were recovered safely, and I’m committed to making sure that Miles Pepper is my fourteenth.” She glared at Kyle as if he might stand in her way. Thirteen. Thirteen out of sixteen. He didn’t like the odds.

  Kyle cleared his throat. “He’s sick. He has a brain tumor.”

  “That could work in our favor.” She nodded in approval, like there was anything positive about a life-threatening growth on Miles’s brain.

  “You said ‘privately funded,’” Kyle said. “We can’t—” He stopped. Not we. There was no we anymore. The thought almost dropped him to his knees.

  Gertie waved off the concern. “Protect the Children has put up a fifty-thousand-dollar reward and provided two dozen volunteers. We’ll use them to man the tip line phones and the website. They’ve also taken responsibility for any administrative costs of the search.”

  Kyle nodded tightly and tried to contain his emotion. “That’s really . . . that’s great.”

  “Come with me.” She turned and hustled by a long table, where a line of yellow-shirted individuals were already seated, phones at their ears, pens in their hands, taking notes on some clipboards. “We’ve got around a hundred tips coming in each hour,” she called over one shoulder. “And most of those will be junk, so the key is precise organization and cataloging of commonalities.”

  She picked up one of the phone operators’ clipboards and tapped her red pen against a questionnaire pinned to it. “Every field on this is gotten from every caller, every time. They’ll then hand this off to the computer inputters, so it’ll show up here.” She walked over to a huge touch screen, which showed a map of Los Angeles County. The streets and suburbs were covered in dots, each one corresponding to a potential sighting. “Ninety-eight percent of the tips we receive will be garbage. The only way we can determine their accuracy is through tracking the time, location, and commonalities of the elements. That means, if someone saw little Miles on the 710, you need to know at exactly what time and exactly where on the road. If they can’t remember, we press harder. Have them look at their phone logs, their text messages, the last time they remember seeing a clock anywhere. We need at least a window of time, and it needs to be the tightest window possible.”

  She pressed a button, and the screen changed to a list of descriptions that had come in so far. “When I say ‘commonalities of the elements,’ I’m talking about descriptions of the car, the person or persons with Miles, what he’s wearing, what they’re wearing, activities they are doing, what they’re eating—anything. We will use these to find duplicates among the tips and identify the valid from the invalid.”

  She waved her hand and gestured for him to follow her toward the adjacent room. It was comforting, her no-nonsense manner and her explanation of the process that had worked so many times in the past. Finally, after two days of feeling helpless, things were happening. This giant city was shrinking. A hundred calls an hour? Any one of them might lead to Miles. She placed a hand on the doorknob. “In this next room are Minko’s band of brothers.”

  Meeko gave an amused smile at what must be an intentional dig. “I’ll take the tour from here, Gertie.” He stepped into the room and held open the door for them. Kyle waited to see if Gertie would follow, but someone called her name from a desk by the front of the room, and she headed off before Kyle could extend his thanks.

  The next room was crammed with monitors and nerds. While the conference room had been a sea of efficient yellow shirts, this room was a hodgepodge of glasses, graphic tees, and dyed hair. Most of the people were young, younger than Kyle and Kerry, and they all had cups of coffee in hand and their faces turned to a screen. “Here’s the HQ of Miles’s task force.” Meeko stopped in front of an empty desk. “When an area of the city becomes hot—meaning that Gertie’s team has received enough valid tips to confirm a high likelihood of an appearance, then this team pulls every security camera in the area, and they work to confirm the sighting and get additional information, like license plates and facial recognition.”

  “So these are all police officers?” Kyle asked as a kid in a Farrah Fawcett T-shirt and a shell necklace walked by, his attention glued to his phone.

  “Believe it or not. We call them the Whiz Kids, though Joel over there is pushing forty.”

  Kyle counted eight officers at individual banks of screens, all their eyes scanning, mouses moving as they zoomed in, out, and changed views. “All of them are following up on tips?”

  “Except for a couple who are focused on just the elevator and lobby footage from the hotel. We’re double-checking to see if Miles might have been brought back in, or if anyone was following them.”

  “What’s outside of the hotel? Any cameras there?”

  Meeko scowled. “When I say that they couldn’t have stayed at a worse hotel, I mean it. No cameras on the street, and about four different side streets, all with bars and coffee shops that stay open late. She could have gone into any of them. And most opened to back alleys, so we’re talking about a really easy way for someone to get her into a car and out of there, if they wanted to.”

  “Is the hotel in a dangerous area?” Kyle asked.

  “It’s in a safe area, but hey—it’s LA. Crime’s gotten worse, and people are opportunistic. They see a woman alone, they have an opening, they take it.”

  “And my son?”

  “It’s possible she left him behind and someone else took him. Sort of a ‘wait here, I’ll be right back,’ but then she couldn’t.”

  Kyle looked around the room wearily, and the feeling of utter helplessness returned. “Okay. What about the woman on Facebook?”

  Meeko made a face. “I’m not sold on that. I’m not doubting what she said to you, but Kerry not wanting to come on this trip could have been for a variety of personal reasons. A strange woman telling you that she doesn’t know anything . . .” He shrugged. “What good is that?”

  “She said, ‘None of us do.’” Kyle stared at the cop. “Who is this ‘us’ that she’s referring to?”

  “I don’t know, but you gotta worry about that mystery later, after we have Miles back to you, safe and sound.” He clapped a hand on Kyle’s shoulder and squeezed. “Trust us, Kyle. We’re doing everything we can.”

  Kyle knew that. He could see that. But it still, somehow, wasn’t enough.

  CHAPTER 62

  THE MOM

  Before her death, Andi was kind of the ringleader of our group. Maybe that’s why she was killed first.

  She stayed the ringleader even after death, but in a much different sense.

  On the morning after she died, a post was made from her profile with a set of rules for all group members. At first, I rolled my eyes—rules for the group? But then I scrolled down farther. Put on my glasses. Read them again.

  They were simple and written in a way that left no room for interpretation.

  The gist was that we were no longer “allowed”—and that was the terminology used—to do anything that might harm our family, spouses, or kids. But not just that. We also couldn’t exploit them in any way, and it took us some time to figure out what that meant. Basically, I couldn’t post pictures of Miles online to try and get attention. Not pictures of him being sick or even pictures of him being well. Nothing.

  And apparently, if we broke those rules, we’d be killed.

  KILLED.

  I literally laughed when I read that. What was Andi talking about? It was so extreme that most of us didn’t really believe it, especially not coming from her. And the other women agreed. We thought Andi was alive, giggling over a chai latte as she typed out a set of demands.

  But Blanche knew. Blanche was the only one of us who took the threat seriously.

  Blanche read Andi’s post, walked out on the balcony of her downtown high-rise, looked over the view of the Seattle harbor, then hoisted her flat stomach onto the railing, swung one LuLaRoe pumpkin legging–clad leg over the side, then the other, and pushed off.

  In the news article about her death, it said that a window washer on the fourteenth floor caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see Blanche fall past him, her hair trailing like a flag.

  He said she was silent, like a stone.

  A stone that cracked upon impact with the pool deck below.

  Andi’s Facebook post took only a few minutes to kill her. That was the scary thing for me. That Blanche would rather die than stop what she was doing to her child.

  Tonya left the group, saying things had “gotten too weird.”

  Rule #3 said we couldn’t leave the group, and two weeks later, Andi’s account posted a photo of her. Tonya was on the ground, and half of her face was missing.

  I quickly decided that I hated the rules, but I could follow them. I could change everything about my life if it meant that I got to keep it.

  So I changed everything, Kyle. I thought you’d notice. I thought you’d ask me about it, and when you did, I planned to tell you. I was like a pop bottle that was all shaken up and the pressure in me was about to explode and all you had to do was notice and ask me, but you didn’t.

  You just kept going.

  Kept working.

  Kept living, while I went crazy inside myself.

  I went crazy and you never even noticed a thing.

  CHAPTER 63

  THE LEADING LADY

  As the late-morning sun streamed through the long stretch of windows, Nora walked down the suspended staircase and forced a smile at the maid, the one who had told the detectives that Nora could be stuffy. Bitchy was what she had meant, and they all knew it. But bitchy was better than being a whore, and they had all managed to keep their mouths shut about that.

  One day, if it all came out, that’s what the public would brand her. A whore. A slut. A woman who had America’s favorite man and then slept with his brother. They wouldn’t understand, no matter what she said or how their publicist couched it. She would be vilified, and Hugh would be idolized—that was Hollywood for you.

  Eventually, they’d move on. Trent was dead, so they couldn’t get a quote from him, and Hugh would do what he did best. Smile. Wave. Stay as far from controversy and drama as possible. He would deliver approved lines that they would agree about in advance, and then he would star in another billion-dollar blockbuster, and the whispers of Nora’s potential little affair would fade, at least for a while.