Private L.A. (Private 6)

Sanders frowned. “Who the hell is Kit-Kat?”

“Sci’s virtual girlfriend,” Mo-bot said.

Not really wanting it discussed that my chief criminologist’s private life consisted of online video sex with a woman in our Stockholm office, I quickly changed the subject, asked, “Find anything in the kitchen, Seymour?”

Sci nodded. “Enough mold and bacteria to say those dishes and glasses are from thirty-six to forty hours ago at the outside. I’ll be able to give you a more definitive answer once we get back to the lab.”

Thirty-six to forty hours. Which meant the Harlows had left the house voluntarily or involuntarily roughly two days after they returned home from Vietnam. What had happened in those two days?

I left the others and again walked around the house, trying to see something I’d missed on the first pass, trying to imagine the things that might have unfolded in the time before the family disappeared. Had they left on their own, or at gunpoint? In what vehicle? And what about the caretaker, and the personal assistant, Cynthia Maines?

I had more questions than answers, and the growing feeling that I was indeed missing something, something that was staring me right in the face. Then again, little of the scene made sense to me. There were no signs of violence that I could find, no indication that they’d been forcibly taken, no blood, no broken furniture, certainly no ransom note or demand of any kind.

So what had happened here?

I discovered an editing room in the basement below the east wing of the house, with five big screens all linked to a main-frame server and a state-of-the-art editing and mixing console. I tried a door beyond the consol

e. It was locked.

I turned, my eyes drifting across the electronics in the editing room, and it hit me. There were no computers anywhere. No desktops. No laptops. No tablets. No handhelds except for the dead iPhone in Malia’s room.

This was a wealthy family in a home equipped with the highest-end techno-gadgets. No computers beyond that phone? Impossible. So they were gone too. But there had to be some kind of backup system, right? A cloud connection, at least.

I was about to go find Mo-bot and the trio I’d come to call the Harlow team to dig into that issue when Del Rio found me.

“Went through the caretaker, Héctor Ramón’s, place, Jack,” he said. “It’s like the main house, used, but abandoned. There’s a cat down there, walking around meowing.”

“No signs of struggle?”

“None,” Del Rio said.

“Maybe Sci’s not that far off, then. Maybe that’s what scared the bulldog and made the computers all disappear. It is an alien abduction.”

“Yeah, maybe, except for the fact that for two hours the night before last, either the electricity blacked out and the backup to the security system suffered a complete failure, or the system was disarmed and fucked with by total pros.”

Chapter 14

ME, DEL RIO, Sci, Mo-bot, Sanders, Camilla Bronson, and Terry Graves were all crowded into a small room off the garage watching a big screen split into ten frames. Each frame displayed a different feed from security cameras arrayed around the ranch, at the gate, near the barns, above every exterior door, and at intervals on the roof, panning the near grounds.

“Fairly sophisticated system,” said Del Rio, who on the whole is largely unimpressed with security he didn’t himself design. “Redundant controllers. Satellite link. Cable link. Pressure sensors inside the fences. Lasers in the hallways. Fiber optics in the windows. Panic room off the master suite.”

“I didn’t see any panic room,” Sci said.

Del Rio tapped a feed that showed a room equipped with couches, a refrigerator, and two sets of bunk beds. “Entrance is off Jennifer’s closet. Looks like a frickin’ fortress. But obviously they never made it in there.”

“Which means something happened to the security system?” Mo-bot asked. “They were never alerted?”

“Something did happen,” Del Rio agreed. “I reviewed the logs in the two computers that run the show. At seven twenty-seven p.m. two nights ago, the entire system went down, the backups failed, and no alerts were issued to police or the folks who installed this.”

“And who was that?” I asked.

Del Rio got a sour look. “You’re not going to like it.”

I cocked my head in disbelief. “Tommy?”

“His people, anyway.”

“Who’s Tommy?” Camilla Bronson asked.