Seventeen

To be clear, it wasn’t Emme’s necklace. It belonged to her sister, Toni. There were only two of those necklaces in the world and they were unmistakable. “WTF?!” Emme said.

For the first time in the three years I’d known her, I had her full attention. She’d even taken off the headset I would’ve bet money was surgically attached to her head. She held Toni’s necklace, staring at it, while playing with its twin around her neck.

On impulse, Omari and I had reclaimed the necklace, wiped my prints off the lock, and hauled butt straight to Emme’s place. We’d spent a good ten minutes detailing how Toni’s necklace had gotten into our possession. This was the first time Emme had spoken. “What was it doing there?”

I hadn’t the slightest clue. It shouldn’t have been there. It should have been around Toni’s neck, in whatever exotic location she was shooting. “She would have mentioned if she’d been hit by the Rack Pack,” Emme said.

“Maybe she doesn’t know,” I said. “She’s been in Antarctica since the SVU finale.”

Toni was a fellow Law & Order addict. I remembered talking with her about the finale back in May when she’d stopped by Emme’s on her way to start filming her latest movie.

Emme grabbed her phone and dialed Toni. It rang four times before the automated voicemail greeting kicked in. Emme hung up and redialed as she spoke. “She has an alarm. Security cameras. Gates. A guard who drives around in a stupid golf cart. She couldn’t have been robbed, Day.”

Omari and I shared a look. I made sure to keep my voice as gentle as possible when I answered her. “The necklace says otherwise. Em, I’m sorry, but Toni was hit by the Rack Pack. We just need to figure out when.”

“We could if she’d answer the freaking phone.” I thought Emme was going to fling her cell across the room. Instead, she just hung up when she got voicemail once again and immediately hit redial.

I lost track of how many times she dialed, but it would have put a crazed fan voting for their favorite singing competition contestant to shame. After the kabillionth time, someone picked up. “She’s sleeping!”

It was an assistant. Toni went through them like toilet paper. Half of Los Angeles probably had signed confidentiality agreements saying they’d never discuss their time working with Toni Abrams. From the tone of the voice, this one wouldn’t last either.

“Wake her up,” Emme said.

“She had a late call last night,” the assistant said. “She needs her sleep.”

“It’s an emergency.”

“Regarding?”

The silence was long enough to indicate a standoff. Emme had no plans to tell the assistant what was going on and the assistant had no plans to wake Toni up until she knew. Just when I thought we’d have to call in the United Nations, Emme spoke. “Does Toni know you answer her phone?”

“I’m just doing my job.”

“No. That would be getting coffee and packing suitcases.”

There was a pause then, and it was a full thirty seconds before anyone spoke again. “I’ll tell her you called,” the assistant finally said.

Yeah, right.

“Can you at least give me Ben’s private line?” Emme asked.

But the assistant had already hung up. Ben was Toni’s take-no-prisoners manager. About the only thing he didn’t do for her was brush her teeth, and based on my encounters with him, he would if she asked.

Emme threw her phone down and grabbed her wallet. “I’m going to Toni’s.”

Omari and I looked at each other again, then scrambled up. “I’ll drive,” he said.

The ride over felt like forever, especially since it was dark out by then. I rode shotgun, while Emme sat behind Omari and continued to call Toni. The assistant was smart enough not to pick up again.

Toni lived in the hills. Technically, the Hollywood Hills separates Los Angeles proper from the Valley. In reality, it separates the haves from the have-nots. Celebrities and the people with enough money and power to make them famous like to buy houses built on the side of a mountain. It affords them a grand view of Los Angeles, literally letting them look down on the little people.

The closer we got, the more butterflies entered my stomach. Toni lived in a gated community with the aforementioned golf-cart-driving security guard and his pal who manned the entry gate. Just like everything else in Hollywood, you only got in if you knew someone and were on the list. We weren’t.

“How are we gonna get in?” I asked. “Even if we get past the guard, we still need a key.”

“Getting in is obviously not a problem,” Omari said as he pulled up to the gate.

I threw him a look. He caught it and lodged one back to me.

“Too. Soon,” I whispered. Now was not the time to be making jokes about Toni’s security or lack thereof.

“Maybe, but I do have a point.” He did, but still.

Emme spoke from the seat behind him. “I have a key.”

Great! Hopefully we’d be able to finagle our way past the guard so we could use it. From the looks of him, he wouldn’t make it easy. He was too young and too fat to have once been a cop. And judging by how precisely his stretched-to-the-limits shirt was tucked into his pants, he took his job way too seriously. Toni probably hadn’t been robbed on his watch.

Omari rolled down his tinted window as the guard approached. He seemed cautious, like he knew we didn’t belong. And we didn’t. Omari was now technically famous, but he was “first-season, semi-hit television show on broadcast TV” famous. Up here, he may as well have been begging on the side of the road.

“Hi, folks, this is restricted property.” The guard didn’t even bother to bend down. Omari stuck his head out the window to talk to him.

“We know,” Omari said. “We’re going to Toni Abrams’ house.”

“You on the list?”

“No, but we’re good friends of hers.” Honesty was not the approach I’d have gone for, but maybe it would work.

“Even good friends need to be on the list.” Or maybe not.

From her perch in the backseat, Emme rolled down her window. I could only see the guard’s big belly, but I could tell his whole demeanor changed when he saw her. It didn’t quite shake like a bowl full of jelly, but it came close. “Ms. Abrams! I didn’t know you were back there. I’m so sorry. Let me get the gate for you.”

He rushed back to his itty-bitty guard house to open the gate for us. “You three have a great day,” he called out as he waved goodbye.

We were already gunning it through the gates. The best part? Emme never said a word.

Toni’s house was at the tippy-top of the neighborhood. The road was so steep, it felt like heading up the world’s scariest roller coaster. It made where Aubrey lived look like a mole hill. We survived the initial ascent and parked in her driveway.

The house looked small. But like everything else out here, what you see isn’t always what you get. The place had to be at least 5,000 square feet, most of which clung for dear life to the hillside. From the front, however, the most impressive thing about it was the security lights spaced out every few feet. This was the only spotlight you didn’t want to be in around here. Toni had so many lights because she didn’t have room for a gate.

Emme was out the car before Omari could even put the thing in park. We scrambled to catch up, but she was already pushing the front door open when we got there. We were greeted by silence. There was none of that familiar beeping that signaled an alarm.

“WTF?” Emme stormed in and checked the alarm panel a few feet from the door. Sure enough, it said unarmed. “Idiot.”

“You think it’s been unarmed since she’s been gone?” I asked.

Emme threw me a look that said I, too, was an idiot.

I looked around, expecting to see the house in disarray. There were two rooms off the foyer: a library and what Toni called the media room. Both looked dusty but otherwise untouched. The thieves had even left the television.

Omari and I followed Emme like she was the Pied Piper. Instead of music, we were led by her thoughts regarding her sister, her sister’s assistant, and mankind as a whole. Her words were few but they were choice. If this were a movie, we’d get an NC-17 rating based on her rant alone. We wouldn’t even need a peek of boob.

We got to the back, where Toni had her main living area that served as both dining and living room. The space was huge, featuring floor-to-ceiling windows with sliding glass doors that opened onto a clear deck. When you stood on it, you could look down and see her pool below. It had always freaked me out, especially if I was drunk.

Emme went to turn on the chandelier, only to find the switch already in the On position. It must’ve burned out. She opted for a nearby table lamp. It clicked on, illuminating everything in its path.

Like the front of the house, this room also looked untouched. The press reports weren’t lying. The Rack Pack was neater than most housekeepers. I finally ventured to speak. “You said she has video cameras?”

“Really expensive ones, like you find on cruise ship. They’re motion-activated so it only films if someone’s there.”

“Does it keep everything?” I asked.

“IDK.”

“One way to find out,” Omari said.

Just when I didn’t think it was possible, I managed to get even more excited.

The main living area was in the back center of the house. To the left, nestled behind the three-car garage, was Toni’s master suite and personal office. We went in that direction. The office was done in various shades of white. Toni had even managed to find a snow-white desktop computer. Emme booted it up.

As we waited, my phone rang. “That your boyfriend?” Omari asked.

If he meant Aubrey, he was right. We’d left the storage place without saying goodbye. I knew Aubrey wouldn’t approve of my stealing, even if it was from thieves. I was too excited to listen to a lecture. I hit ignore and watched Emme open the surveillance program. This was the equivalent of Christmas morning and Santa was bringing me exactly what I’d asked for: a murderer.

Several files were listed, the last one dated August 16th. “That’s not right,” I said. “That’s only two days before Haley died. Way too soon. The Rack Pack waits at least a month between robberies. Look for something older.”

Instead, Emme just opened the file. The video was black and white and as fuzzy as an old stuffed animal, but we could make out what was going on. I immediately recognized the deck. It was night, but thanks to the high-beam spotlights, it might as well have been high noon.

She strode into frame. Yes, she. The face was covered by a hoodie, but it was most definitely female. A rail-thin one at that.

I was surprised. I was expecting someone big, bad, and, well, male. Not this itty-bitty thing making her way toward the sliding doors off Toni’s main room. The three of us stared at the computer screen, entranced. “We should call the police,” Omari finally said.

I flashed back to the car chase and how the Range Rover had become off-limits as soon as those a-hole patrolmen arrived. No way, José. Luckily, Emme nixed that idea first. “Ben’ll take care of it.”

That settled, I refocused on the computer. Even without the hoodie, the camera distance made it impossible to make out any features. The intruder was about three feet from the door when she stopped. It looked like her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear anything. In fact, I didn’t hear anything at all. “What’s she saying?”

“IDK,” Emme said. “No sound.”

Blurg. I should’ve known I wasn’t that lucky. The person continued to talk soundless words when an object flew past the camera. “What. The. Heck. Was. That?” I asked as another object missed the camera by mere inches.

“One of her cohorts is trying to take out the spotlight,” Omari said. He was right.

As if on cue, a second image popped up from the other camera in the area, this one aimed right at Toni’s sliding glass door. We watched the two pieces of footage in tandem as the rock traveled from one camera’s area to the other’s. After the fourth try, the rock hit its target. Both cameras went black. “We lose the stream?” I asked.

“It’s still on,” Emme said. “She’s there.”

“You mean, they.” Omari said.

He was right. Without the spotlight, we couldn’t make out much more than figures, but there were definitely two of them. Just two of them. “What happened to the Pack?” I asked.

We couldn’t even tell if the second person was a man or a woman. It was too dark. I found it hard to believe that these two shadowed stick figures had robbed over a half million dollars’ worth of stuff. They walked up to the sliding glass door. “They’re deciding the best way to get in,” I said.

“They’ll probably take out a glass cutter and cut a hole in the door,” Omari said.

“Or better yet, use one of those long ruler-looking things and jimmy the lock,” I said.

That was a thief staple. At least it was on television. I was more than ready to find out if it was true in real life as well. We watched as one of them reached for the handle. A second later, the door slid open. After all that, it turned out it was unlocked. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” Omari said.

Who was he telling? “My sister has to be the dumbest person on the planet,” Emme said.

A light turned on in the window to the left of the door. The aforementioned chandelier. I spoke up, all excited-like. “Shouldn’t it switch to the inside cameras?” I was more than ready to put faces to the shadows. My heart increased in speed. I was close. So very close.

“No,” Emme said. I must’ve looked dumbfounded, because she clarified the obvious. “No cameras inside.”

“That’s stupid!” It slipped out of my mouth before I even thought about it.

“My sister’s not stupid,” Emme said, although she’d spent the last fifteen minutes stating otherwise. I’d forgotten Emme was the only person allowed to say a bad word about Toni. “She had that incident a couple of years ago when someone tried to sell that video of her getting undressed,” she continued. “She had all the cameras removed after that.”

“Well, that make sense,” I said. It didn’t, but I didn’t dare admit how disappointed I was.

We sat in silence watching the black screen. When it was clear they weren’t coming out anytime soon, Emme hit fast-forward. A sped-up forty-five minutes later, the back door once again slid open. A lone figure came out, dropped what looked like a bag, then turned around and stormed back inside. A few minutes later, the two of them returned to drop off another bag.

The bags had to belong to Toni since they hadn’t had them when they came in. Geez. It really took balls to steal someone’s stuff using their own carry-ons.

They stood there. Then there was shuffling. In the dark, it looked like two angry shadow puppets. It took me a second to realize what was going on. “They’re fighting.”

The argument escalated, the figures moving quickly. A shoving match. Someone got off a particularly good push and his or her cohort fell, landing smack-dab into the patch of light coming from the room. It was the one in the hoodie.

We could finally see her clearly, but since she was looking down, the hoodie covered most of her face. “Look up, just look up.”

I doubted Omari even realized he was talking out loud. He was reading my mind, though. If I could just see her face, I could give a positive ID to the cops.

She moved, causing her hoodie to fall back slightly, teasing us with a quick glimpse of a nose. But that’s all we saw. The hoodie stopped its descent before we could see any other identifiable features north of said nose. I held my breath.

“Just look up.”

From below the hoodie, I could see the woman’s lips moving. Judging by the speed, she was pissed. She struggled to get up, resulting in her hood inching another centimeter back.

“Lookuplookuplookup,” Omari said.

She finally stood, slapping her hands together in an angry attempt to rid them of dust and gravel. She flung her hair out her face, taking the hoodie down in the process. I had never been so happy to see hair before in my life.

“Looook up, look—” Omari stopped abruptly because he’d finally gotten his wish. She looked up.

Emme immediately hit pause so we could have a clear image of her face.

It was Haley.