Private L.A. (Private 6)

Up on the screen, four men dressed in black and wearing black balaclavas had burst into the Harlows’ bedroom, shotguns and pistols trained on the trio.

Thom Harlow stopped his frantic thrusting and squirmed away from Adelita, trying to cover himself, while Jennifer screamed, jumped off the bed, and reached for a robe. One man grabbed the actress’s hair and hurled her against the wall. “You going nowhere you’re gonna need that, bitch.”

He picked up the robe, looked away from Adelita, tossed it to her.

“What do you want?” Thom Harlow demanded, now over his initial shock and trying to sound like one of the action heroes he’d played over the years.

The men said nothing.

But Adelita Gomez, in Jennifer’s robe now, glared at Thom and spat bitterly at him: “I want justice.”

Chapter 115

“THAT’S REALLY WHAT she said?” Mo-bot asked, appreciation starting to show on her face. “ ‘I want justice’?”

Justine nodded, then shook her head when Sci offered her the bottle of Midleton Very Rare Irish Whiskey. Almost everyone from the L.A. office was in Del Rio’s hospital room, called there by me to celebrate the fact that that afternoon, while I was battling No Prisoners, Rick had shown movement in both knees, and feeling as high as his hips.

Sci offered me the bottle. I wanted it, but the nurse who’d exa

mined me earlier in the evening said I’d probably suffered a mild concussion and should lay off the booze for a week or two.

Meanwhile, Emilio Cruz was saying, “So someone, maybe that son of a bitch Captain Gomez, sent those men to snatch the Harlows?”

“Or maybe Adelita recruited the gunmen,” I offered. “I mean, she had to be the one who got them past the security. She had to have been the one who cast that shadow we saw behind Jennifer when she was returning from her jog the night they disappeared.”

“How would she know how to disable security at the ranch?” Del Rio asked. “She’d never been there, right?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Justine agreed. “But maybe she snooped around in their computers and found a diagram of it. Who knows? But I watched those guys in the black hoods shoot up the Harlows with hypodermic needles and carry them out of the bedroom. The cameras seemed to be feeding directly to the data bank in Minneapolis until someone tore out the cameras and presumably took all the computers in the house.”

“So you think they made a hundred of these films?” Sci said, pouring himself a little whiskey. “That’s seriously twisted. Going back how long?”

Justine looked even more disgusted, said, “Cynthia made me watch one more of them. It was worse, openly sadistic.” She paused. “I recognized the victim almost immediately.”

“Who?” I asked.

Justine shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it. “I suspected something the other night at Sanders’s, but I couldn’t have known the deeper, terrible secret.”

“What are you talking about, Justine?” Mo-bot pressed.

“Who are we talking about?” Del Rio asked.

“Anita Fontana,” Justine said. “The Harlows’ housekeeper.”

“No way,” I said, flabbergasted. “She’s been with them, what? Twelve years? Why would she stay? She could have left them, refused to come back when she went home on vacations.”

“I think she had a reason she couldn’t stay away,” Justine said, her face a mix of compassion and ruefulness.

“What?” Mo-bot asked.

“Miguel,” Justine said. “Last night when we were leaving Sanders’s house, I happened to be at the perfect angle, watching her hold him in her lap, both of them in profile, the left side of his face, the side not affected by the cleft palate and all the operations he’s had.”

“You trying to say she’s his mother?” Mo-bot cried in confusion.

“I’m willing to bet on it,” Justine said. “I just can’t bear to confront the poor woman with it. Not tonight.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Why would she give her baby to the Harlows?”

“I’m guessing,” Justine allowed. “But it’s not hard to imagine Anita wanting the best possible medical care for her baby, especially when he was born with such a dramatic abnormality, one that required so many operations. You could also imagine Anita, nanny to little Malia and baby Jin, sexual slave to the Harlows, being submissive to their rights and demands.”