Annalise and I fanned out, searching the house. Hardy could have afforded an English country house, with dozens of bedrooms and, I don’t know, a solarium and billiards room and bowling alley and who knows what else. Instead, he lived in what looked like a sprawling upscale cabin. It had two floors, a den, a downstairs office, and four bedrooms upstairs.
Except that everything was immaculate, and the walls were huge glass panels, just like the walls at his office. Maybe his high walls meant he didn’t have to worry about privacy. Or maybe he got a thrill thinking about his neighbors watching him walk around in his underwear.
What it really meant was that Silicon Valley light pollution streamed through those panels, and we could see every stick of furniture and every treacherous mini-stair between one room and the next.
The kitchen was like a movie set. The fridge was completely empty and meticulously clean. A little stack of mail, with postmarks from this week, lay in a stack on the corner of the counter. Somebody was picking up the mail, and that person either had no sense of smell or they liked the stench of rotting flesh.
I’d met sick motherfuckers like that, back in Chino. Not up close, and not as friends, but guys like this were always around… at least until someone got sick of them and put them in the ground.
And it looked like Hardy had become one of those sick motherfuckers. Luckily, I knew where he needed to go.
There were no bodies downstairs, but we did find a TV room at the front of the house that had been cleared of furniture. Four wooden panels had been placed on the floor and bolted together. Then, a summoning spell had been painted on them in white enamel.
Milton Hardy needed to be killed.
“Upstairs,” Annalise said.
We hurried. The smell grew stronger with each step, and there was no need to search around for the bodies. All we had to do was follow our noses.
We found them in the master bedroom. There were three kids and one adult, judging by the size and number of skulls we found.
I’d seen bones before. I’d seen bones in a classroom and in the California desert. But I’d never seen a skeleton that looked so slick and sticky. Smears of brown clung to the sides of the skulls or in the place where the bones touched, and the carpet beneath and around them had been stained black.
Was this a supernatural death? Or had this adult—no, a mother; I was sure I was looking at the bones of a mother—and her children been murdered in the space between the king-size bed and the bedroom wall, then left to rot for so long that they’d melted into dark slime? Was that even possible?
And obviously it could have been both.
Since I started working for the Twenty Palace Society, I’d seen my share of bodies. I’d seen people who’d been burned down to ash and bones, who’d been shot dead right in front of me, who’d been physically torn apart.
But this? The whole world seemed to turn sideways for just a moment, and I staggered against the dresser.
There was a cell phone sitting right there beside my hand, plugged into a little outlet at the back of the dresser. I seized it.
“Ray,” Annalise said. Her voice froze me in place. “Is this the real Milton Hardy?”
The question surprised me. I had assumed the adult was a mother because of the way she was holding those little bodies, but that was just my prejudice. It could have been a father, or a babysitter, or an aunt or uncle… Any adult, facing certain death, might have clutched frightened children to them as the killing blow came.
But was this Milton Hardy? My instinct was to blurt out a No, but I wasn’t sure why.
I didn’t answer fast enough, because Annalise said, more sharply this time, “Ray, it’s not like this would be the first time we came across a predator that killed someone, hid the body, and took his place, right? So, tell me if that’s the real Milton Hardy lying there.”
I could picture Hardy in my mind. The skull looked like a different shape than the thumb with eyes I’d seen on TV. The chin looked wrong, the… Not that I was an expert in estimating the shape of a skull once it had been stripped of its flesh. “Boss, I don’t think so. The Hardy I saw on TV looked pretty tall. He was maybe half a head taller than the people he was shaking hands with. It was just a glimpse, but this body in front of us looks too small.”
“Okay. Let’s assume that this is not Milton Hardy we’re looking at. And smelling. Let’s assume that he’s too big for this, and that he was not killed by a predator that shrunk him down as it fed.”
“Is that a thing?”
She shrugged. “What happened here? What’s the story?”
“My half-assed theory, based on nothing, is that Hardy summoned a predator with his family upstairs and it got loose and killed them. The only question is whether he got the bear or the bear got him.”
We moved through the rest of the darkened house, checking the kids’ bedrooms, the bathrooms, and every closet for a pile of human bones.
There was nothing. The house was tidy—a little dusty, but everything was in its place. And there were no more bodies.
The phone I’d grabbed off the bureau was still in my hand. I dropped it into my pocket.
We returned to the kitchen. A man with a flashlight moved through the little amusement park, making a circuit of the grounds. We watched him play his light around the yard, then shine it at the house. He didn’t come closer than thirty feet before he returned to his guard booth, so we didn’t have to go through the trouble of subduing him.
I was glad. “Hardy doesn’t want them coming inside, I guess. If his bones were scattered out there on the merry-go-round, one of these rent-a-cops would have seen him by now.”
“Unless he’s under the ground. But fuck it. We’re not the people who can dig up the place. Besides, Milton Hardy became a primary years ago, and primaries used to summon predators to enslave them. It’s hard to imagine a predator taking out a primary.”
“I hear what you’re saying, boss. Maybe the predator didn’t get away from him. Maybe he summoned it to kill his wife.”
“And what? The kids were a bonus?”
“Some dude killing his wife or girlfriend is the most common thing in the world. But to kill his kids, too?”
“Ray, this asshole is one of the richest people in the world. He was probably some dude who did common things back when he was a regular asshole, but his kind of money intensifies people. He might be the type to weep over inefficient water-usage rules, or he might decide that his kids are in his way and need to be flushed. You can never really tell.”
I looked out the window into the darkened yard. The guard was long gone, and there was nothing to see but the work lights of the repair crew playing along the top of the fence. Could Hardy have really called a predator to kill his own kids? Then left their bodies lying upstairs in his own bedroom?
It sounded absolutely revolting, but the bunks in Chino had been full of worse.
I went back into the main room to look at those panels again. Then I went up to the main bedroom.
Those kids died and then they lay there, slowly dissolving. The stink of their rotting flesh floated up, circled around, then settled onto everything. Every surface was coated with a thin film of dead child.
I hurried into the hallway. The bathroom was on my left, and it looked as bright and clean as the ones in the fancy hotel we’d bounced around in.
But I knew the stink that hung in the air around me, getting into my clothes and my lungs and touching my eyes, had been swirling over and landing on that smooth tile for weeks. Maybe months. There had to be a thin film of rotting flesh in there, and no way was I going to dry-heave into that toilet.
I hurried down the stairs, clutching the phone to my chest. Of course it would also have the same film on it, and now that film was smeared on my hands.
For fuck’s sake, I had to stop thinking about this or I was never going to eat again.
The phone was locked, obviously, but the code to unlock it had to be traced through a grid of dots. I hurried to the pile of mail on the counter and found a bill addressed to Evelyn Hardy. I traced a capital E through the dots without a happy result. Then I tried a lowercase E.
Nothing. I didn’t know how many more guesses I’d have before the phone locked, but I was feeling reckless enough to plunge ahead. Her own initial didn’t work. I traced out a capital M and it unlocked. Evelyn’s name was right there on the home screen, but she used her husband’s initial to secure her phone. She loved him enough to die at his hands.
Annalise came up behind me. “What are you doing?”
“Hardy is a slippery bastard with too much money. We need to turn somebody close to him, because we’re not going to get close to him again soon. He’s got too much pull and too many layers between him and the public. We need someone who can slip past all that and get close. Someone we can turn.”
Evelyn Hardy had eight fucking months of missed calls and unanswered texts. She must have died sometime back in May of 2019, before I even escaped from the Show. A quick skim of the texts showed that people were genuinely worried, and some were threatening to contact the police.
The urge to send a mass text announcing her death was powerful, but I didn’t take that step. I could always contact the cops or the press or someone later, but for now I wanted to work quietly. Cops would only get in the way.
Lauren Woo might have been Milton’s personal assistant, but of course she was also in the contacts of the boss’s wife. What was the point of marrying a rich asshole if you didn’t take advantage of his underlings?
I typed out a text to Woo.
COME TO THE HOUSE IN PALO ALTO. EMERGENCY.
If Milton Hardy was standing next to Woo when the text arrived, I was fucked. What the hell. I sent it.
The response was almost immediate.
Are you back from Melbourne?
YES. HURRY.
That was all it took, apparently, because she responded instantly.
omw
The phone began to ring like an old, corded landline. Woo wanted to speak face-to-face. I set it facedown on the counter.
“Either she turns on Hardy and starts working for us, or I will personally…”
I couldn’t finish that sentence, because I was about to say kill her. And I don’t think I really had the heart for that, not after seeing the tiny dead bodies upstairs.
All Annalise said was “Let’s get ready.”
The electrical repair crew arrived before Lauren Woo did, but there was still no power. That made it easy to notice Woo’s arrival, since her headlights, shining through the front gate for nearly two minutes while she talked with the security guy in the booth, were the only lights we could see within Hardy’s walls.
We waited for her by the door, and I spent the time on my phone, looking up video of Milton Hardy. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to find, but by the time Woo got there, I hadn’t found it. When Woo entered, Annalise seized her wrist and dragged her inside. I snatched her phone from her hand and dropped it on the little table by the door. She looked up at us with shock and recognition, then said, “Oh!”
I pushed the door closed. “You’re not in any danger unless you do something stupid. Come on. There’s something you need to see.”
Woo didn’t want to move. She stood in the little foyer, eyes wide, looking from me to Annalise back to me again, trying to think of something to say.
“Boss, would you take her upstairs to show her what we brought her here to see? She’ll get the wrong idea if I do it.”
“What’s that smell?” Woo asked as Annalise dragged her toward the stairs. “You’re hurting me. What’s that smell? What is it?”
I stayed downstairs, but the house was quiet and I could hear every word and every footstep. Annalise dragged her to the front bedroom, then moments later I heard the unmistakable sound of a toilet seat going up, and I heard vomiting. A bit later, water ran in the sink. Woo seemed to be muttering and trying not to weep.
Then I heard Annalise drag her back into the front bedroom and make her look again, for longer this time.
I wandered back to the front of the house. The panels laid out on the floor, decorated with that summoning spell, needed to be destroyed. I found some basic chemicals beneath Hardy’s kitchen sink, but pouring them over the paint and swiping at them with a stiff-bristled brush didn’t get the job done. The bristles flaked away little chips of paint, but it would have taken me three days to destroy this sigil that way.
At least the harsh cleaning fluids cut through the stink.
Then I noticed a can of paint with white streaks down the side sitting on a shelf in the corner of the room. By the time the others came back downstairs, I had poured it all over the panels and swept it over the marks, turning the sigil into a solid white blob.
I went into the den and found Annalise and Lauren Woo sitting on leather couches that looked like slabs. Woo was pale and shaking.
“Milton’s whole family…” Woo said, staring at her hands. “His kids. Did you do this? Why did you do this?”
“You know we didn’t do this,” I said, wiping paint from my hands.
“No, I don’t know that. I don’t know anything. Except that I’m pretty sure that’s Evelyn and the kids.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that it could be someone other than Hardy’s family. “How are you so sure?”
“Medical chips,” she said, without looking up, “were implanted into their forearms five years ago. It was supposed to be the next big thing, but that didn’t pan out. You can see the little metal bit just below their wrists. God, what is happening? I have no idea what is happening right now.”
“You know some things. You know that your boss said his family was out of the country. You know they’ve been gone, I’m guessing, about eight months. You know that your boss, Milton, started acting weird right after they vanished. He changed, and you didn’t know why—you still don’t, really—but you assumed it was because of something ordinary, and you got used to the new version of him.”
“Eight months? That would be…”
“It’s January now, so last May.”
“Yes. Yes, I understand what you’re asking. Milton withdrew from the day-to-day for weeks. We hid it from the investors as best we could, saying he had a mild flu, but word leaked out anyway. Everyone thought Evelyn had taken his kids and was going to divorce him.”
“Because of the affairs,” Annalise said.
Woo looked embarrassed. “Not with me. I have plans, and they don’t involve… that. Or even the appearance of that.”
“Which doesn’t stop the whispers.”
“People were going to whisper no matter what. But I am definitely not the reason Evelyn took the kids and ran off to Australia. I never—”
“Hey,” I interrupted. “You just saw her body upstairs. Evelyn Hardy didn’t go anywhere.”
Woo cringed and looked at the floor. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I said that because…”
She didn’t know what to say next, but I understood and prompted her. “You said it out of habit.”
She nodded. “I guess so. I mean, once word got out that she and the kids weren’t here, it was all over the news. I’m sure you saw it.”
I shook my head. I was still trapped inside the Show when all this happened. Annalise shrugged. Some billionaire’s marriage problems were the last thing she’d have cared about.
Woo looked at us with her brow furrowed in confusion, as though we were telling her we’d slept through our own house fire. “Well, whatever. I guess. But it was absolutely everywhere, all over the news. And people kept putting my picture online under headlines like HOME-WRECKER? or HARDY’S NEW TROPHY WIFE? My favorite was IS THIS A THREE-BILLION-DOLLAR PIECE OF TRIM? So, yeah. I spent that whole summer and every week since telling people that I was not the cause of Milton and Evelyn’s split, if it was a split, and I guess it became something of a habit.”
Annalise nodded. “But now you know they never split at all. Now you know that your boss murdered his whole family and went out of his mind. Maybe not in that order.”
“It had to be someone else,” Woo said, leaning away from us as though she needed space to disagree. “Milton doted on his kids. Anybody could see that just by looking at the backyard. And Evelyn… I know that people can’t really know what’s going on inside a marriage, but I just don’t see it. He wasn’t under that kind of stress.”
“There’s a stack of recent mail on the counter in the kitchen,” I said. “Does the guy drive himself to the office?” Woo looked away and shook her head. “So, he’s being picked up here every day. With this smell.”
“He cancelled the home-cleaning service last year about that time. And the guards are supposed to keep out of the house now, no matter what. They still patrol the grounds, but they’re supposed to ignore anything that happens in here.”
She took a long, slow breath, then continued. “After his brief hiatus, he returned with a new strategy for his top people. He made everyone prove themselves to him again. He treated them like strangers, and the ones who seemed smart to him stayed part of his inner circle. Others got transferred. I thought he was being a genius, because it opened him up to good advice from people he didn’t normally listen to, and profits have gone up. But he’s done with that now. He still wears the same clothes every day, but he’s not as odd or as demanding as he was in those first few weeks. Still… He’s not this person. I can’t believe it.”
Now I was annoyed with her. “Something happened to him last May. You used to think he changed because his wife hurt his feelings by fucking off to another country with his kids, and now you think he changed because they all died and he had some kind of mental breakdown. Me, I think he did something stupid and went off his rocker. He’s living in this house—with this smell—and has been for months.”
Woo stood there, blinking, as she tried to think up something that would make everything I said untrue.
Annalise turned away with a wave of her hand. “Forget it. She’s a waste of time. She knows the truth but can’t accept it, not even after looking at that pile of bodies. We don’t have time to wait around until she does.”
“I’m sorry,” Woo said, putting her hands out, palms down. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Whatever has happened here, the…” Tears started streaming down her cheeks. “I knew Evelyn. And I knew those kids.” She laid a trembling hand on her eyebrow, shielding her face from us. “I really liked them. Oh, my god, I know how that sounds.” She fished around in her oversized handbag. “It sounds so weird and alien—like a robot or something—but… I mean, we weren’t close and we weren’t friends, but Milton’s family was part of my everyday life. I saw them constantly and—”
“You’re a family servant,” Annalise interrupted. “They’re not so common now, but they used to be. It takes a certain personality type to be a really good servant, and Hardy has the means to recruit them. Your whole life becomes an act of service to someone you admire. It’s a specific kind of love. Not romantic, because fucking him would have ruined everything, right? You’re like a wife without the messiness of sex and emotion. Distance, a crisp attitude, hard work, and you create a well-ordered life for the person who can only do great things with your quiet support.”
“Stop it,” Woo said, quietly.
“If you have the personality type to be someone’s loyal servant, then it can be hard to do the right thing when the right thing goes against their needs and wishes. Even if the right thing is as simple as standing in a room full of dead bodies and letting yourself be fucking furious about it. Even if the right thing is to take a stand against a man who turned three little kids into a bad smell.”
“Stop. All of this is confusing and difficult, and I just needed a moment to take it all in. But I’m okay now. I’ve caught up. Let’s call the cops.”
She already had her phone out, but I laid my hand over it. “There’s something important we need to do first. Milton Hardy has something planned, and he’s been using Tristan Serrac to set it in motion. He admitted as much to us earlier today. We need to know what it is.”
Woo looked at Annalise, then me, then Annalise again. “I don’t know.”
“She’s lying,” Annalise said, her look turning murderous.
Except I didn’t think she was. “Bullshit,” I said anyway, just to prod her. “You’re all over him. Where does he go when you’re not around, besides his murder house?”
“No, it’s true! He’s been cutting me out for months. He’s got some kind of secret project he’s been developing, and he doesn’t want me involved because…” She glanced at the door as if she wanted to get the fuck out.
“Finish your sentence.”
Woo pulled her shoulders back and stood up straight. “I have a project of my own that I’ve been trying to develop. It’s related to neurochemical studies and image processing. Milton finally gave me the green light to put together a team and work on some basic R&D. I still have most of my duties as his assistant—really, I don’t know who we have that’s capable of taking over for me—but I have an assistant of my own now, my team is working semi-autonomously, and I’m getting ready to transition away from the day-to-day stuff into a division, created by me, that will help bring his company into the future.”
“So, he’s given you a partial promotion to keep you out of his way.”
Her expression soured. “Sure. I guess so.”
“Who does he work with on a daily basis?” I asked, already sure I knew the answer. “Who is inside his smallest circle?”
“Luis. You should have met him on the tour of the Ark. Milton is very invested in the success of the project, and I know that Luis is frantic about the collapse that happened this afternoon. He’s called me six times, trying to reach Milton. Milton’s travel coordinator isn’t a confidant, but she knows quite a bit about his itinerary. Although he used to run travel arrangements through me. His lead attorney, a woman named Jeri Howland. Steve, his vice-president of operations at the FriendShip, although Milton has been increasingly hands-off the social-media end.”
There was more, but she wasn’t going to say it. “And Serrac.”
“Yes. Tristan Serrac, as you said. They have… something going on, but I haven’t heard that they’re doing anything bad.”
Annalise didn’t like that. “We told you some of what he was doing.”
“What? When? What did you tell me?”
My thoughts flashed back to Woo’s expression when we were standing outside Daria’s hospital room, telling her some of what Serrac had done. If her career required her to brush off the bones of dead children, stories of kidnap and attempted murder weren’t going to affect her.
I sighed. “Okay. He’s been sending Serrac all over the world, right? Searching?”
“Yes, and…”
She let her voice trail off. Annalise leaned toward her. “Say it.”
“Fine. I’m not in the loop, and I don’t have any of the details, but Milton has an agenda, and he’s moving it up.”