Private L.A. by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

were supposed to have been on the ranch that night. The Harlows. Their kids. The caretaker. The Harlows’ personal assistant.
    “Cynthia Maines,” I said.
    “What?” Camilla Bronson asked.
    “Unless I’m out to lunch here, the only beds in the house I’ve seen used were the family’s. If Maines was here, where did she sleep?”
    “Maybe she didn’t,” Terry Graves said.
    “Or maybe she cleaned up after herself, made it look as if she hadn’t slept here,” Mo-bot said. “I mean, the Harlows’ bed was made, right?”
    “Or Jennifer and Thom just hadn’t gone to bed yet,” I said, gesturing at the screen. “You find tapes from these feeds?”
    Del Rio nodded, gave the keyboard several commands. The screen images jumped and now carried a time stamp four days prior.
    Del Rio said, “The cameras are set up with motion detectors. They only record when there’s movement. Lights too. You can see the two days of activity leading up to the system failure in like five minutes.”
    He speeded up the tapes. My focus jumped all over the split screen, seeing the Harlows arriving four nights ago, hauling gear from the Suburbans into the house, greeting a man wearing a straw cowboy hat, who I assumed was the caretaker, Héctor Ramón; and the three kids going in and out of the house multiple times during the days and into the evenings with the bulldog rambling behind them. The dog seemed never to leave their side.
    Thom Harlow appeared infrequently. His wife was everywhere, a frenetic personality. On the second evening, however, Thom came to the back door to watch Jennifer leave on her run, which Sanders said was a daily ritual, along with yoga. The last recording took place moments before the system failed, roughly thirty-six hours after the Harlows had returned to the ranch. The back-door and deck view again, looking down at a steep angle: Jennifer returned from her run in the dark, sweating, chest heaving, and climbed onto the lit deck.
    Del Rio typed, turned that frame full-screen. Jennifer slowed, stopped, turned to look behind her. The light beyond the deck was dim, shadowy, so I caught only a flicker of movement in the shadows, the hint of a human form before the screen blinked black.
    “What—” Mo-bot began.
    Del Rio held up his hand. “Wait, you’re gonna see the first thing the cameras picked up after the system rebooted two hours later.”
    The screen jumped back to life.
    Stella, the Harlows’ bulldog, was on the deck in much the same place where Jennifer had been when the screen went blank. The dog was frantic, howling and ripping at the screen door as if she’d seen something worse than a ghost.

Chapter 15
    AT THE SAME time, one hundred miles to the south, in her Civic hybrid parked down the block from a CVS pharmacy on La Cienega Boulevard, Sheila Vicente was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
    An assistant district attorney juggling a monstrous caseload, including the upcoming prosecution of a capital murder case, she was also a divorcing mother of two, and on the line with her soon-to-be ex-husband.
    “Do you think I’m a doormat you can just walk on?” Vicente demanded.
    Silence. Then her husband, cold, said, “No, just the same old inflexible—”
    “Bitch?” she said, struggling for control. “I’m a bitch because you have the gall to call me at the eleventh hour and ask for a different weekend with the boys so you and your plastic-boob girlfriend can jet down to Cabo for a quick forty-eight in the sack?”
    “Pat’s got two days off from rotation,” her husband shot back. “It’s rare.”
    “Not as rare as a day off is for me!” Sheila shrieked. “I haven’t had one in three weeks.” She threw down her cell.
    Sheila shook from head to toe, trembled against every bit of will she had left, staring into the distance at what had once been a dream life, barely aware of the blond man with the scruffy beard, the mirror sunglasses, the baggy pants, and the Lakers hoodie