Page 18 of Pro Bono

This didn’t necessarily mean everybody in the family was at home. Daddy might be driving Vesper Ellis’s body to the desert tonight. Warren stepped in front of the garage door and looked in the row of small windows along the top. There were two nearly identical-looking black SUVs inside. There was no white Mercedes C-300. He also saw that there was a human-size door on the right side of the garage. He had guessed that if people were still awake, the alarm system for the house had not yet been engaged. The garage was not attached to the house, but that didn’t mean it was on a separate circuit. Would anybody turn on the alarm for the garage but leave the rest of the alarm system off? He decided to take a chance that they hadn’t. He went to the side door, tried the knob, and found it wouldn’t turn.

Vesper Ellis’s time could be running out, and this could be a way to find her before that happened. He looked at the ground near the door for a place where a key could be hidden—a fake, hollow stone sold for that purpose, a brick, or single real stone to hide the key under. He didn’t find anything of the sort. He took out his wallet and began removing cards from it. He tried to push a credit card into the crack between the door and the jamb beside the knob, but the door was too tightly fitted.He tried his library card. It fit, but it was too worn, and simply curled at the end when it reached the plunger. No card worked. He put his wallet away. He saw the row of trash bins near the back of the garage.

He decided the blue recycling bin would be the best place to start. He opened the top and tried to see what was inside. He found a tuna can that had been opened, but the lid was still attached by a very small bit of uncut metal. He took off his KN95 face mask, cradled the can’s top in it, gripped the mask so it protected his hand from the sharp metal top, and inserted the top into the space beside the doorknob. He slid it up and down a bit, and then pushed, keeping his grip tight so it didn’t slip. The can top went in, bent just enough to slide along the beveled plunger, and moved it out of the way. He leaned on the door and it swung inward.

He went inside. The only light in the garage came from the door he’d just opened and the row of small windows along the top of the garage door. He knelt beside the first car, reached up under it and attached an AirTag to a wire bundle under the hood, then attached one to the other car, and stood up. He didn’t want to spend another minute at the Talbert house. He had been forcing himself to stay, each moment feeling increasingly risky and dangerous, and now he had done all he could expect to do. He stepped to the side door, went out, and closed it behind him. He left the can in the bin, moved past the house, and made the turn to cross the lawn. In a moment he was beside the wall lined with trees. As he started down the sloping lawn, the light in the house went dark. Someone would be arming the alarm system right now.

10

Warren sat at his kitchen table with his phone and pressed theFindicon to search for the AirTags he had attached to the five cars this evening. When he’d bought them for the trip to Paris six months ago he had named them C 1–3 for his bags and R 1–3 for his girlfriend’s in his phone. As he looked at the displays on his screen, he remembered that the technology communicated with him using any iPhone within thirty feet of the tag. That would probably be fine in the daytime or when the driver was in the car, but right now the tags weren’t transmitting.

Morning began when the phone rang. He grasped it, looked at the screen, and then answered, “Charles Warren.”

“This is Doug McHargue. We found Mrs. Ellis’s car at the airport.”

“A white C-300 hybrid?”

“That’s the one.”

“Have you figured out who drove it there yet?”

“No. We have people going through the surveillance footage from the lot’s cameras to see. Other people are looking through the recordings from the airport terminals and checking with the airlines in case she left it in the lot and got on a plane. They’re also dusting the car for printsand swabbing for DNA. They’ll put a rush on anything that makes it to the lab, but that’s not magic. It takes time.”

Warren said, “I don’t think she drove it there. Do you?”

McHargue paused. “People do weird things all the time, cars get stolen, and people are harmed. I’ll wait for which it was.”

“I’ve been working on Mrs. Ellis’s financial reports, and so far, I’ve found two local men I think have something to worry about in an audit.”

“Can you send me an email with the two names and the simple version of what you know?”

“I’ll do it right now.”

“Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.” Warren showered and dressed, then sent the information. He gave Detective Sergeant McHargue the two men’s names, home addresses, and the positions they held at the two companies. He attached to Patrick Ollonsun’s section two pages of Vesper Ellis’s reports from different months recording sales of stock shares and cash withdrawals that had been requested by the late George Ellis within the last year.

The attachments to Ronald Talbert’s page showed sweeps of dividend and interest income that had produced cash. The cash had then been labeled as used for investments, but there were no new shares of anything, either then or on the next months’ reports.

When he had breakfast earlier, he had checked his phone to track his AirTags. It was early, but two of the cars had already moved. One of Talbert’s black SUVs carrying R1 had moved to one of the financial buildings in Century City, and one that was Ollonsun’s C1 was on Olympic Boulevard. They were the two trackers he had identified as Patrick Ollonsun’s and Ronald Talbert’s personal cars.

Now, Warren opened the file again to see if any of the other cars had moved. One of the cars from the home of the Ollonsuns had gonesouthwest, looking as though it was headed for Malibu. He remembered looking in the windows from the dark shadow beside the pool house and seeing the daughter. He slightly revised his image of the Ollonsun family’s day so it made sense to him. The father had driven the expected vehicle, the black BMW, to his office in Century City very early in the morning. It fit with his image as a vice president of a big investment company. The Lamborghini had seemed to Warren to be what the wife might drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel for lunch at the Polo Lounge or something like that; this AirTag showed the vehicle was heading for the ocean. He rechecked the identifying codes and verified that the car heading for the ocean was the white Prius. That had to be the daughter going to the beach.

The two black SUVs he’d bugged at the Talbert house were both out now. One of them was still at the investment company office in Century City and the other was just pulling up to park at the UCLA hospital in Westwood.

It was all pretty routine and normal, and told him nothing. He stood up to leave for the office when his cell phone rang. He looked at his screen and touched the green oval. “Warren.”

“Hello. This is Vesper Ellis. I’m returning your calls.”

Warren hesitated, and then realized he’d been holding his breath. “We’ve been thinking you—”

She interrupted. “I apologize. I haven’t been able to call. I want you to hold off working on my embezzlement problem for the moment. I think it’s only for a week or so.”

She sounded unnatural. Maybe she was just scared, but Warren had to be sure it was really Vesper Ellis. All he could think of was, “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”

“Iolanthe Burness. Iolanthe, like the nymph. It means violet flower in Greek. All the women in my family were given special names.”

“Are you in danger?”

“I’m alive and unhurt.”

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