They pulled up in front of a small house with a wheelchair ramp built over its front porch steps. “She’s sometimes afraid of men she doesn’t know,” Ciara warned.
The woman Ciara paid to care for Laney when Ciara had to work late-which was often, Alex figured-opened the door to their knock and protested that she had just picked Laney up from the Clooney Center. The nearby Betty Clooney Center, Alex knew, specialized in helping those with head injuries and their families.
It prepared him, a little, for meeting Laney. She was watching television, or was facing it, anyway. Unlike her sister, she was a redhead. Alex thought that if she could have stood, they would have been about the same height. But Laney was thin to the point of gauntness. Like Ciara, she had big brown eyes.
At the sound of Ciara’s voice, she turned her head and gave a lopsided smile. She made a sound that was something between a shout and a squeal.
“Hello, Sis,” Ciara said. “Ready to go home?”
This was met by a low sound. She was staring at Alex now.
“Hello, Laney,” Alex said. “I’m Alex. I work with Ciara.”
Her brows drew together, and her face twisted, then relaxed. The squealing sound again, if a little less enthusiastic.
“Well,” Ciara said, “so you won’t mind if he drives us home?”
Another lopsided smile.
Ciara thanked the caregiver and managed all the effort of getting Laney into the car, while Alex stowed the wheelchair. Ciara had seen him consider helping to lift Laney into the backseat and said, “Let’s not press our luck.”
Throughout the short drive to Ciara’s home, Alex held a conversation of sorts with Laney, an exchange of signals of interest in each other, if not something comprehended on both sides. He spoke to her as if she could understand every word he said. She apparently did the same.
Between directions to her house and managing the trip inside, Ciara explained that Laney had some motor skills left-she could grasp objects, for example. She could also chew and swallow, which made life for the two of them easier than it was for some of the other head injury patients and their families. But Laney’s speech, ability to walk, and anything involving fine-motor skills were lost. Ciara did not exclude Laney from the conversation while explaining all of this. “Laney, you obviously catch a word or two now and then, or read people’s voices and body language, right?”
Laney made a soft sound they took for agreement.
The house was a small single-story Craftsman, probably built in the 1930s. There was a white picket fence around what had been a front lawn, but was now completely covered in concrete. A long, gently sloping ramp led up to the deep front porch.
The interior of the house was neat and clean, with what little furniture there was moved to the walls, where it would not block the way of the wheelchair.
Ciara took a framed photograph from a shelf-a picture, she said, of Laney with their mother-taken when Laney was about twelve. The young girl in the photo was at a stage of life when her prettiness was already maturing into beauty, and he supposed that the changes her injuries brought to her appearance must have been all the more difficult for her family to bear because of that beauty. But having met Laney now, becoming acquainted with her now, he found himself unable to think of the image in the photo as the same person. Ciara might as well have shown him a picture of one of Laney’s ancestors.
“Around the time Laney was able to leave the hospital,” Ciara was saying, “my mom was already widowed and living with me, so Laney moved back in with us-right, Laney? Then my mom died about two years ago, just about the time I started working in Homicide. That was a rough time for both of us, but we had our routines set by then, so it wasn’t as hard as it might have been.”
Laney reached for the photo, and Ciara gave it to her. She held on to it without really looking at it. After a moment, she seemed to lose interest in it, and Ciara gently took it back and returned it to the shelf. “My brother and I look more like my dad,” Ciara said, “except I’ve got Mom’s hair and eyes, too.”
They ordered pizza-an apparent favorite of Laney’s.
“I’d better hit the road if I’m going to get up to Malibu this evening,” Alex said quietly, when he noticed that Laney was nodding off. “And I have that lecture to give about fire and bees.”
Ciara smiled. “Thanks for the ride. I know it was out of your way.”
“That stuff about the shortest distance between two points being a straight line? Really overrated.” Tired as he was, he meant it.
He decided to stop at home before heading up to Malibu. As he drove, he thought about Ciara and wondered how she managed to cope with all the pressures of the job and the pressures of being the primary caregiver for her sister. And still managed to be a damned good detective into the bargain.
Had any of her previous partners known about Laney? He doubted it. Word would have spread, most likely. The first time someone had called her B.B. Queen, someone else would have said to cut her some slack, and mentioned that she cared for a sister with severe disabilities.
And God, how she would have hated that.
“You can slit your throat with your tongue,” John had once told him. Hell if he’d be the one to talk about Ciara’s home life to anyone in the homicide bureau.
31
Palmdale, California
Wednesday, May 21, 4:05 P.M.
Julio Santos was bored. He was used to seeing a lot of action when he was working as a bodyguard for Bernardo Adrianos, because somebody was always trying to kill that bastard. At first, he had enjoyed the high- intensity life, but nobody likes to live like that for long. Or gets to. That much was clear to him, and to his partner Ricky Calaban, even before they were contacted by their new employers.
The basics of the original deal had been appealing. Adrianos dead, Julio and Ricky alive and wealthy. None of Adrianos’s friends or associates knew where Julio and Ricky were. Most people figured the bodyguards had died trying to defend him. This is exactly what the strangers had told him would happen.
Then the strangers offered more-if Julio and Ricky agreed to come to work for the strangers’ private company for one year, they would earn five million each, and Ricky’s brother and Julio’s mother would each receive another million. If they wanted their family members relocated to a safer place, this would be arranged.
Julio asked what they would be required to do during that year.
It would be a dangerous job, the leader said, but not as dangerous as continuing to guard Bernardo Adrianos. They would each guard one man, and that man would be drugged most of the time. They would learn to do certain simple medical procedures involving narcotics and intravenous feedings. They did not need to learn how to do these gently, just effectively. In addition to the leader, three men would be allowed to visit the prisoner from time to time, but otherwise, they would be somewhat isolated.
Ricky, he learned later, had jumped at the offer. Julio had been more cautious but had ultimately accepted it. He didn’t have a lot of options.
At first, he thought it might all be some FBI setup, but so far, all the strangers had told him had been true. Julio’s mother now lived like a queen back in Mexico, and he had a bank account that was going to be much bigger in a few months. The man he was guarding here in this abandoned small factory in Palmdale was too heavily sedated to be a threat. He looked like a mean motherfucker, all right, but most of the time, he was completely out of it.
To the outside world, Julio appeared to be a watchman who was paid to keep an eye on a property that might be sold. The room Julio guarded and his own living quarters were concealed within the building. His quarters were extremely comfortable. He had music and magazines, electronic games, a satellite dish, and a phone-although they warned him that the phone was tapped and that the entire place was, in fact, full of listening devices. If he
