Private L.A. (Private 6)

There were six theater seats inside and a good-sized screen. Justine had no idea what was going on when Maines scooped up an iPad and gave it orders.

Maines’s hands were shaking. She seemed to be having trouble picking out the commands.

“I got worried after you left the other day,” Maines said hoarsely. “About the computers missing at the ranch, and whether the files for Saigon Falls had actually been backed up.”

“Okay?” Justine said.

“I couldn’t get into Harlow-Quinn to take a look,” Maines said. “So I contacted the repository in Minneapolis where all the digital files were supposed to be sent. I had to talk to them a couple of times when we were setting this all up before the move to Vietnam, so they knew me. They had no idea I’d been fired and gave me a temporary password that allowed me to review the logs.”

“Was Saigon Falls backed up?”

Maines’s eyes were glistening with tears. “That’s what makes this all so awful. It was there, backed up around six the day Thom and Jen disappeared. It was a rough edit, but you can already see the genius of it. The story line. The acting. The cinematography. I’d love to show it to you, but it seems so …”

“Seems so what?” Justine said, wondering where this was going.

Maines looked lost again before saying, “There was another backup made from the ranch the night they disappeared, some sort of emergency thing. Maybe triggered by the power going off and the generator taking over? I don’t know. But about a hundred files were sent to the data bank that had never been there before.”

“What were they?”

Maines replied, “How is it possible that the artists who created Saigon Falls also created this?”

She hit RETURN on the smart tablet. The huge LED screen lit, showing the Harlows’ master bedroom at the ranch in Ojai.

Chapter 114

A NAKED WOMAN knelt on the bed, feet and butt facing the hidden cameras. She was whimpering in pain as Thom Harlow crouched over her, naked too, sodomizing her while Jennifer shoved a dildo into her vagina and smacked her ass with her open palm.

“You came back early because you love this,” Jen Harlow said in a taunting tone. “Admit it, you little bitch whore.”

The woman just kept making soft, painful noises, like a rabbit Justine had once seen with a broken leg.

“Admit it!” Thom roared.

“Turn it off,” Justine said, feeling sickened.

“Wait,” Maines said bitterly. “It’s important.”

Justine tuned out the increasingly lewd and degrading things Jennifer and Thom Harlow were saying to the woman, watched from her peripheral vision until Maines said, “There.”

Thom Harlow had come off his knees, rolled onto his right side, and pulled the woman down after him, so that the cameras caught the front of her body.

Adelita Gomez winced with every one of Thom’s thrusts, but she was not broken. She was looking defiantly at Jennifer, as if she would not allow herself to display any sign of humiliation or submission.

Justine looked away toward Maines, who said in a numb, flat tone, “I found other films like this with Adelita starring. When they were in Vietnam, they got her drunk. She cried like a baby the first time they took her.”

“Turn it off,” Justine said again, repulsed and filled with sympathy for the nanny. What was she, eighteen?

“Not yet,” Maines said in a dull voice. “It gets worse.”

“I don’t think I—”

“There he is,” said the Harlows’ personal assistant before her hand flew to her mouth. She whined, “Oh, God, the poor little guy.”

In the lowest part of the screen Miguel Harlow had wandered into the room. For a moment he was frozen, watching his adopted parents defile his nanny. Then he turned and ran out of the picture. His parents seemed not to notice him at all.

“This had to have been shot the night the Harlows disappeared,” Justine said, watching Maines. “Miguel didn’t just hear strange noises, he saw this, he got scared, he ran, he tripped and fell, bruised his shins, and—”

“Get off her or I fucking kill you!”