Page 59 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

“You could have spoken to reporters outside his house.” My voice was rising. I couldn’t stop it. “Told the world that your son was not a killer. You could have stayed at his house so Troy didn’t have to rattle around in it alone, wondering what the hell was going to happen to him. There was so much you could have done to help your son through this ordeal. But instead, you chose to try to profit —to profit— from what’s happening to him.”

Barney’s fists were clenched on the table. Reina’s eyes were filled with tears.

“Woman,” he said to me, his words as unsteady as mine, “you better get your fat ass back out that door you just broke or I swear to God, I’ll pick you up and throw you through it.”

“We’ll talk,” Reina blurted out. Barney and I looked at her.

“You shut your mouth.” Barney pointed at his wife’s face. “That’s fifty-five grand you’re danglin’ over the edge of the goddamn toilet bowl right now, Reina. That kind of money can set us up for the rest of our lives. If we talk to this bitch, our deal with the TV people is worthless.”

“I’m not here to get an exclusive!” I snarled. “I want to save your son!”

“He ain’t worth saving!” Barney roared back at me. He stood up, and we were nose to nose. His breath was warm on my cheeks. “You don’t get it, do you? We haven’t told the world our son’s not a killer because heisone, and we ain’t goddamn liars!”

I had to step back, hold the door frame. My head swirled.

“Daisy weren’t his first,” Barney said. “Boy started young and just never stopped.”

CHAPTER67

I WAS THROWN OUTof the Hansens’ house. It wasn’t the first time I’d been kicked out of a place, but it was maybe the most dreadful I’d ever felt about it happening. Barney Hansen stood on his porch and fired a stream of abuse at me all the way to my car, but I hardly heard what he said. His words about his son in the family kitchen were ringing in my ears.

Daisy weren’t his first.

It was maybe a twenty-minute drive to the nearest diner. The army-green truck wasn’t present in my rearview, thankfully. I parked and settled on a stool at Rosie’s and ordered the biggest thing on the menu without really looking at what it was. A guy in a greasy chef’s apron poured me weak black coffee while I frantically checked back through the files on my phone, looking for Troy’s previous arrests. My head thumped with humiliation at the idea that I could have missed mention of a violent crime in Troy’s past. Then, when I discovered his record was clean, I felt stupid for entertaining the notion that both the police and I, not to mention the army of web sleuths, could’ve overlooked anything as obvious as that.

Even though I wasn’t a practicing lawyer in California, I knew some back channels I could go through to check if there were any sealed or secret convictions attached to Troy’s name. I sat tapping at my laptop. My confidence rose slightly when I discovered there were none.

So what was Barney Hansen talking about? If Troy had indeed killed before, he hadn’t been charged. Had his parents covered for him? Was that the source of the misery and terror I’d seen in Reina Hansen’s eyes when she peered out of the shadows behind her ferocious husband?

Briefly, I considered trying to gather the funds to find out. An offer of sixty thousand dollars might blow RealFeal Productions’ fee out of the water and allow me to simply ask the Hansens whatever I wanted to know. I talked myself out of that idea pretty quickly. Something about Barney Hansen’s hungry eyes and mean little smile told me he was the kind of guy who liked being listened to and that he’d get a real kick out of watching people bid fiercely for the privilege.

As the diner cook set my breakfast of sausages, eggs, toast, bacon, grits, and a side of pancakes in front of me, I got a text from Jamie about the army-green pickup just two minutes before the hundred-dollar deadline. His resources told him that the truck had been listed as stolen from a residence in Anaheim, near LA. It didn’t comfort me to know the vehicle I’d spotted twice — that was possibly tailing me — was a stolen vehicle that had indeed come all the way from LA, but I filed it away to worry about later. I didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on it now.

I checked my email and saw a file from Detective Will Brogan waiting for me. It was a scan of a sheet of paper with the Public Utilities Commission logo and a list of times, dates, and street addresses. Brogan’s email told me it was a list of telephone-pole service calls assigned to Troy Hansen. I began to cross-check these against the last known locations of each of the ten missing people in the box.

My heart sank as I went down the list of addresses, comparing a map on my phone to one on my laptop screen. Troy had indeed serviced utility poles within a five-mile radius of each of the locations where the missing people were last seen and within two weeks of when they were last seen.

He had indeed been the Public Utilities Commission employee who replaced the box near the Muscle Beach homeless camp where Jarrod Maloof disappeared, and that replacement had occurred only eight days before Jarrod went missing.

In the case of Dennis Maynar, who was last seen walking to his car in the parking lot of his accounting firm in Bell Park, Troy had been working on a pole two blocks down from that building on the very same day.

And Troy had repaired a Public Utilities Commission–owned telephone outlet at the ranger building at the edge of Franklin Canyon Park a mere month before Maria Sanchez disappeared on a hike.

There was no denying it anymore. What I was finding indicated that wherever Troy Hansen went, he left a trail of vanished people in his wake.

CHAPTER68

I CLOSED MY EYESand tried to chase off the thoughts that were again darkening my mind. I’d spent days and nights and buckets of precious hope trying to save Troy Hansen, when it was becoming ever clearer that it was just his natural weirdness I’d sympathized with. I wondered at my failure to recognize Troy as a psychopath, since my track record for choosing truly misunderstood underdogs to root for had been near perfect. Maybe I was getting old. Maybe the move to California had rattled me.

Or had my vision been clouded by having Baby to care for as my sister and my business partner? I dejectedly typed in Dorothy Andrews-Smith’s address, opened the Google Maps Street View, and looked at her house. It was a perky little white-stucco job with clay roof tiles and red bougainvillea crowding the front door. Dave Summerly’s words floated back to me.

Dorothy Andrews-Smith was killed by a fucking gang, Rhonda.

I know she was. And you will too.

I looked again at the glut of hits for Dorothy Andrews-Smith online. Her disappearance had tickled the interest of anLA Timesjournalist who seemed to believe Southern California was the West Coast hub of America’s opioid crisis.

Dorothy, a deeply tanned grandmother who dripped with colorful jewelry in every online photograph, had been an outspoken opponent of the operation of a nightclub at Redondo Beach. She’d gone to the local papers and a number of online groups with accusations that the nightclub owners were selling fentanyl-laced cocaine to the young people who partied at the club. She had even submitted an application to the Redondo Beach mayor’s office opposing the club’s extension into a neighboring mechanic’s workshop. A couple of overdoses in the area had given Dorothy’s complaints traction, and the club’s extension, which might have made the owners millions of dollars, was rejected. TheTimesstopped just short of suggesting that the club, the Update, was cartel-owned.

---