Page 17 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

“Is it bad?”

She shrugged.

“Well, you’re injured, but at least you’re alive!” I said as she dumped her purse on a chair next to me. “What happened? Did you drop your phone into a tar pit? Did it get stolen by coyotes? I’m so eager to hear what grave misfortune has prevented you from answering my texts and calls for hours.”

“You didn’t pass the vibe check.” She shrugged.

“Thewhat?”

“I’m just here to grab some things, then I’m heading out again.” Baby dropped the ice pack and the towel in the sink and set her coffee on the kitchen counter. “We can talk about it later.”

“No, we can’t, and no, you’re not.”

“I’ll be out all night. One of my besties is having an emotional crisis. I need to debrief with her.”

She reached for her purse. I grabbed the strap.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said.

“Rhonda, we have been over this, okay?” Baby glared at me. “You donotget to tell me what I can and cannot do.”

I knew it was a losing battle, so I changed tactics.

“Listen, Baby, I need you on the Troy Hansen case. You’re my business partner, and you’ve committed to this job. Troy is our client. Okay? He’s the one in crisis.”

“You can handle the Troy Hansen thing on your own for a while,” Baby huffed. “He’ll keep.”

“No, he won’t. I know the cops are all over Troy about Daisy, and they want to learn what she did right before she disappeared. We have an angle here that nobody else knows about yet. If we can start working through the missing people in this box, maybe we can find a link between them and the Hansens.”

Baby was texting the whole time I talked. I balled up my fists to stop myself from smacking the phone out of her hands. When a minute had passed and she still hadn’t looked up from her screen, I banged on the table.

“Baby! Are you listening to me? I need you to pull your weight and come down to Santa Monica Pier with me. We’re going to see if there’s anything we can find out about what happened to Jarrod Maloof.”

“Who’s Jarrod Maloof?”

“He’s a missing teenager whose name was in the trophy box,” I said. “The most recent case. He disappeared about three months ago.”

“I don’t get why you can’t just do this yourself.” Baby glared at me. “You insisted on being lead. Can’t I call in sick?”

“No, you can’t! Not when there might be a serial killer on the loose! Jesus!”

She sighed.

“If you can’t bring yourself to actually care about finding a bunch of missing — maybe murdered — people,” I said, “or about helping a potentially innocent man escape the bear trap that’s about to close on him, maybe you’ll care about this.”

I took out my phone, opened my voicemail, and hit play on the last message. I put the phone on speaker. A man with a dark, low voice came on the line.

“Yo, I’m calling to leave a message for Rhonda and Barbara Bird of the Two Sisters Detective Agency,” he said. “I just wanna say y’all are fucked up, try’na help Troy Hansen get away with killin’ his wife. Y’all better drop that case or watch your backs, bitches, for real.”

Baby was unfazed by the message. She dropped a hip and crossed her long, lean arms while I played more messages, all in a similar vein:

“Hi. I just saw on Facebook that you guys are helping Troy Hansen, Daisy Hansen’s husband. If that’s true, I want you to know how disgusted I am that — ”

“... why anyone would want to stop the police from doing their goddamn jobs! You must be absolute psychopaths yourselves, and — ”

“... need to wake up! Because Troy Hansen is a wife killer! If you don’t know that already, you can follow my channel and — ”

Baby waved at the phone. I put it down.

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