Page 16 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

“Have you used it today?”

“Uh ... no?”

“So whatever happened to it must’ve happened between last night and now.”

“We should call an electrician,” Arthur said. “And we should get you to a hospital. Get your ass out of there.”

“I’m fine. Fortunately, I barely touched that faucet.” Baby crawled deeper into the dark, following the pipe to where it met the ancient water heater. “Electrician, yes. Hospital, no.”

She pulled her phone from her pocket and turned on the flashlight. She could see what she assumed was the source of the problem: An old brick pillar beneath the house’s entryway had crumbled, tipped, and smashed into a solid wood beam as it fell. The wooden beam played host to both the copper water pipe from the kitchen sink and a black electrical cable. Baby shuffled in the dirt until she was right up on the pipe and the cable and examined the meeting point. The corner of a brick, it seemed, had squashed the pipe and the cable together, denting but not bursting the pipe and cutting into the plastic casing of the cable, exposing the live wires.

Baby was no electrician, but she knew that electrical wires and metal pipes weren’t friends. The collapse of the pillar had caused the two parties to meet. The only question was whether the pillar collapse that had added Arthur’s faucet to the electrical circuit was a freak accident or something orchestrated.

She shuffled closer still. Her iPhone light picked up the edges of the plastic casing. They looked sharp. Like they had been cut, not smashed.

She froze, and a tingle passed through her that had nothing to do with electricity. She swept the flashlight over the dirt beneath her. She could see the imprints her boots and hands and knees had left. She also saw other marks coming from a different direction. Baby followed the other tracks to the back of the house.

By a piece of lattice at the back stairs, she saw a handprint in the dirt. The hand was much bigger than hers. Probably much larger than Arthur’s too.

Arthur had tracked her. The old man crouched with difficulty outside the wooden lattice and peered in at her.

“Arthur,” Baby said. “Don’t go back inside the house, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because someone is trying to kill you.”

CHAPTER18

I WAS IN THEkitchen of our mansion on Manhattan Beach when Baby came home.

I had the trophy box sitting on the table. I’d slipped on a pair of latex gloves and carefully pulled out all its bagged contents, and now I had ten zip-locks lined up in front of me. Each bag contained an item and a newspaper clipping about a missing person, and each article featured a photograph: Jarrod. Maria. Dennis. Dorothy. Luis. Brooke. Luke. Charlie. Francis. Tia.

I looked over the collection and wrote down a few things in a spiral notebook. I glanced at some of the names.

Maria Sanchez, sixteen, last seen at the entrance to Franklin Canyon Park. Her item was a hand-painted hairbrush.

Dorothy Andrews-Smith, sixty-two, last seen at her home in Redondo Beach. Her item was a tiny oil-painting kit.

Dennis Maynar, forty-seven, last seen at his workplace in Bell Park. His item was a silver watch with a broken clasp.

Jarrod Maloof, seventeen, last seen at the Santa Monica Pier. His item was a high-school sports jersey, slightly frayed at the hem but clean, smelling of laundry detergent. He was the most recent victim. Reading between the lines of the articles I’d found online, I gathered that Jarrod, who came from a middle-class family in Torrance, had run away from home several months before he disappeared, and his family knew he’d been living on the beach, but no one had seen him in three months.

As I took notes, my heart sank. Nothing obvious connected the victims to each other. Not age. Not race. Not occupation.

Ten disconnected lives.

Missing from a beach.

From a hike.

From a supermarket parking lot.

That’s when Baby came into the kitchen holding a to-go cup of coffee. Something about her movements seemed jittery, overloaded with energy. She also had an ice pack secured to her hand with a dish towel.

“Are you okay?” I pointed at the ice pack.

“Lid wasn’t on tight. Coffee got me.”

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