Private L.A. by James Patterson, Mark Sullivan Read Free Book Online

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.
    “My brother.”
    “The guy in the papers?” Sanders asked in a groan. “The one implicated in that murder?”
    “One and the same,” I said.
    What was the likelihood of that? My brother designed and installed the system, a system that failed?
    “You think he could be involved here?” Terry Graves asked.
    I considered the producer’s question but then shook my head. “Tommy’s a wack job, but his specialty
is
security systems. How exactly did it fail?”
    Del Rio ran a paw over his stubbled chin. “Logs say the computers ran diagnostic software upon rebooting at nine twenty-seven p.m. two nights ago. It detected a failure in the trip connection to the backup generators four seconds before the ranch’s main power line died.”
    “You call Southern Cal Edison?” Sci asked.
    Del Rio nodded. “A transformer blew about that time, cut power all over Ojai. Took three hours to bring electricity back online.”
    “But you said the computer logs show the system was only down for two hours, not three,” I said.
    “That’s right,” Del Rio said. “The logs say the generators kicked back to life at nine twenty-seven, main power came on about an hour later.”
    “So someone
inside
cut the generator, and then what, reconnected it?”
    He nodded again. “I figure coordinated attack, inside, outside. Takes a few minutes for the system to reboot. Enough time to vanish when you’re done.”
    My mind raced through the people who 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