Private L.A. (Private 6)

“All right, then,” Roberto said. “Go left.”

I did as he said, walking past mausoleums, aware of the traffic noise and snatches of music coming over the cemetery wall, and something else. Was that crying? Then I lost the sound to a backfiring bus that accelerated away in the neighborhood adjacent to the cemetery.

“Are they here?” Justine asked. “The Harlows?”

Roberto and the other boys said nothing, and I looked all around at the dark outlines of the crypts, wondering again if the Harlows were dead. A sense of futility swept over me then. What had it all been for? Had we exposed the skeletons in the Harlows’ closet only to find where their corpses lay?

Then there they were. Before the flashlight went out I caught a glimpse of fresh graves in front of me, three of them, two mounded over, one yawning.

“Stop,” Roberto said. “Do not move.”

Was this it? Would guns be pressed to the backs of our heads, and then a brilliant flash of light and nothing more but a hole in the ground?

“They deserved it,” a woman’s voice said. “They deserved to die.”

My head twisted about, eyes peering into the shadows in the cemetery, and then spotting her on top of a mausoleum about fifteen feet to our left. She wore a black dress and a hood of some kind.

“Adelita?” Justine said.

“Adelita no longer exists,” she replied bitterly. “She has decided to enter a convent, become someone else, try to find some way to believe in God again.”

“By becoming the Harlows’ killer?” Justine asked.

Chapter 127

JUSTINE FELT SICK to her stomach, waiting for Adelita Gomez to reply. She too had seen the graves before the light had gone out.

After all the work, all the risk, the Harlows were dead, killed by the nanny they had defiled. No matter how she felt about the actors’ many secret lives, she was shocked by the fact that they were gone. The Harlows were part of so many lives, including Justine’s; she’d seen virtually every movie they’d ever mad

e. And now they were gone. Everything about this case suddenly felt cursed somehow.

How would she tell the Harlows’ children? What would become of them? Would they be manipulated and led by people like Dave Sanders, Camilla Bronson, and Terry Graves their whole lives? Justine felt overwhelmingly sad at the thought.

Adelita coughed hoarsely. “I said the Harlows deserved to die. I didn’t say they got what they deserved.”

“Wait, they’re alive?” Jack said.

“There’s only one reason they aren’t a meal for pigs,” Adelita said. “Cynthia Maines sent an e-mail to my old box. She said copies of the tapes had gotten backed up somewhere in Minnesota. She said she would turn them over to the police if I wanted. Or return them to me. And I realized that given what’s happened here in Mexico, maybe living would become worse than dying for Jennifer and Thom.”

“Where are they?” Justine asked.

“Tell Cynthia I do not want the tapes made public and I do not want them,” Adelita said flatly. “I will not come forward to testify against the Harlows in any way. And if you or the Harlows or anyone tries to come after me, my uncle will hunt Jennifer and Thom down like dogs.”

And then Justine heard it, the muffled sound of people crying, and she turned her head away from Adelita, trying to locate its source.

“Listen,” Adelita said. “They sound like me now.”

“They’re in the open grave,” Jack said, moving toward the sound.

Justine made to go after him but glanced back at the top of the mausoleum. Adelita was gone. Justine whipped her head around, realizing that Roberto and the other boys were gone too. She’d never heard any of them move.

In seconds she and Jack were shining their Maglites into the hole. The man and the woman sitting at the bottom of the grave were naked, filthy, and blindfolded, their wrists and hands tied together with rope. Even through the grime Justine saw the festering sores on their skin where they’d been burned repeatedly with what would turn out to be a small, round branding iron.

The woman had four such weeping burns on her face, which was so swollen that for a moment Justine did not recognize her as the most glamorous and famous actress in the world.

Jennifer Harlow cringed from the light, whimpered, and clung to her husband, whose face looked worse than his wife’s.

“Mr. and Mrs. Harlow,” Justine said, trying to calm down. “You’re safe now. My name is Justine Smith.”