He said, “I need a listing for Stentorum Real Holdings, please. That’s in Los Angeles.”

Larkin looked up.

“What did you say?”

“Stentorum Real Holdings.”

“That’s one of my father’s companies.”

The information computer came on with the number. Cole copied it, but never looked away from the girl. When he finished, he went to the table. He put his pad on the table, then turned it so she could read it. Stentorum Real Holdings.

“Your father owns this?”

“I own it, too, technically. It’s one of our family’s companies.”

The water stopped and Pike stepped from the bathroom. He was shirtless and scrubbed, as if he had come home needing to wash away wherever he had been or whoever he was with. A spiderweb of old scars draped his chest where he had been shot. He pulled on his sweatshirt.

Cole said, “We need you.”

Cole waited until Pike joined them.

Pike said, “What?”

“Larkin’s father owns something called Stentorum Real Holdings. Stentorum is trying to buy 18185, along with six other buildings from the same owner. They optioned the right to buy four months ago, but their option is about to lapse.”

Cole stared at Pike, with Pike staring back, his face unknowable and empty. Larkin sensed it was bad, but didn’t understand why because she didn’t yet know what they knew. Cole was letting Pike make the call, what to tell her, what not.

Larkin shook her head.

“What does that mean? Are you sure? My father is buying the building where we found the bodies?”

Pike reached across the table and offered his hand. Larkin placed her fingers on his. Pike squeezed. Cole had seen Pike do push-ups on his thumbs; push-ups using only the two index fingers. Pike popped walnuts like soap bubbles, but not now.

Pike said, “Stay with me, okay? Harden up, because it’s about to get worse.”

Five minutes ago, Cole thought Larkin looked twelve. Now she looked one hundred years old. She glanced at Cole, then looked back at Pike and nodded.

“Bring it. Both barrels.”

“Your father and Gordon Kline both knew Meesh was Khali Vahnich. They worked out a deal with Pitman to keep you in the dark. Pitman said it wasn’t his idea. Said it was your dad’s.”

Cole watched her hand in Pike’s. Her fingers tightened until the tendons stood out, but nothing showed on her face.

“Why would they do that?”

“Don’t know.”

“Were they in business together, these disgusting people and my father?”

“That’s what it looks like, yes.”

Larkin leaned back and laughed, but still she held on to him.

Cole said, “We’re just guessing about these things. We’ll ask.”

“I grew up with this! I know a business dispute when I see it! They couldn’t close the deal, so somebody has to eat the deposit. Vahnich killed the Kings. Now he wants me and my-”

She stared at the endless sheets of phone numbers before looking up.

“Was it my father?”

Cole didn’t understand what she was asking, but Pike seemed to know and answered her.

“I’ll find out.”

Her face paled, her eyes showing the kind of pain you’d feel if you were being crushed, as if the last bit of love were being wrung from your heart.

She said, “I don’t want to find out. Please don’t find out. Please do not tell me.”

Then Cole realized what she had asked of Pike-was her father the person telling Vahnich where to find her?

Cole said, “We’re guessing too much. Let’s go be detectives.”

Cole got up and went to the door. Pike lingered behind for a moment, then followed him out.

38

Larkin Conner Barkley

LARKIN WATCHED Pike leaving, and in the moment he stepped outside, he was framed in the open door of their Echo Park house like a picture in a magazine, frozen in time and space. A big man, but not a giant. More average in size than not. With the sleeves covering his arms, and his face turned away, he seemed heartbreakingly normal, which made her love him even more. A superman risked nothing, but an average man risked everything.

When he glanced back before he pulled the door, she saw the emptiness in his face, the gleaming dark glasses; then the door closed and she was alone.

“Make it right. Please make it right.”

Said it to the empty house, then felt stupid and ashamed of herself for saying it.

She was more frightened now than even those times when the men from Ecuador were shooting. If her father had abandoned her, then she was truly alone, more alone than she had ever felt or known or believed could be possible. Larkin felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience. She felt outside her own body, yet the air seemed alive on her skin, and the house was so quiet the silence was noise. Like being in the same place twice at the same time, each overlaid on the other and not quite connected. Except for the fear, she felt nothing. She tried to make herself feel something else. She thought she should be angry or resentful, but a switch had been thrown and now she was empty.

Larkin went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She wanted to see if the emptiness showed on her face the way she saw it on Pike’s. She couldn’t tell. Looking at herself, she saw her father. She had his eyes and ears and the line of his jaw. She had her mother’s nose and mouth.

She said, “I don’t care.”

She didn’t care what he had done. He was her father. If Pike could carry his father, she could carry hers.

Larkin went back to the table and studied the lists of phone numbers and the phone trees she had been tracing. She found Khali Vahnich’s number, then searched for it through each of the twenty-six single-spaced pages. Each time she found it, she marked it. When she finished with the twenty-six pages, she went back to the beginning and picked out the numbers Vahnich had called.

She found it near the bottom of the second page. She saw the number and recognized it because it was so familiar.

Vahnich had called her company’s corporate headquarters. The Barkley Company.

Larkin saw the number and thought, Wow, this is bizarre, because all she felt was the strange out-of-body sensation with the air humming on her skin. Her vision blurred, so she knew she was crying, but she didn’t gasp or sob and her nose didn’t clog; it was as if someone else was crying, and she was watching it from the inside.

She wiped her eyes so she could see better, and kept searching through the list. She found the number twice more, then stopped because, really, what was the point?

Joe and Elvis were right. Her father was connected with these people, and now they were both in trouble. Vahnich was trying to use her to get something from her father or punish him, and either way, he was fucking it up.

Pike’s father had been a monster. Her father was a fuckup. Didn’t matter. She loved him.

“Make it right.”

She was speaking to herself.