Monday
Night
Twenty minutes later, after dropping Ray back at the station, Keri pulled up in the alley behind Britton Boudiette's house, flashed the high beams three times like she'd been asked, and then killed the lights and the engine.
Almost immediately, a female figure came out from a back bedroom of the house onto a second-story deck. She worked her way down the structure to the ground level, hurried over to the car, and quietly got in the passenger side.
Keri felt ridiculous. She was having a secret meeting in her car with a fifteen-year-old girl in the middle of the night. If the kid's parents found out, she wondered if they could press some kind of charge against her. She put the thought out of her mind and tried to take Britton seriously.
The girl was African-American, pretty, and athletic-currently dressed in flannel cartoon pajama bottoms and a pink T-shirt. She got right to the point.
"Ashley would kill me if she knew I was meeting with you. You absolutely, positively have to keep this on the down low. You can't tell anybody that I ever talked to you."
"I won't, unless absolutely necessary," Keri assured her, essentially promising nothing. Britton seemed satisfied anyway.
"Okay," she said. "I honestly don't know if any of this is going to help anything. Ashley's been sort of crazy lately."
"How so?"
"She has this new boyfriend, Walker Lee, who's the lead singer of Rave, which you probably never heard of but is a very cool band who just released their first single, "Honey." It's pretty awesome. Anyway, Walker's been a terrible influence on Ashley."
"In what way?"
"Well, it started with him getting a fake ID for Ashley, so she could come to the clubs and watch the band. Then there was drugs and drinking, not a lot, nothing crazy, but, you know, Ashley's only fifteen."
"Britton, you're not telling me anything I don't already know," even though Walker being the source of the fake license was news to her.
Britton seemed to waver for a moment, then went on.
"Then they started committing thrill crimes."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing malicious or violent, just stuff for the adrenaline high, you know? Two weeks ago, they stole a car and went joyriding. They've been having a lot of sex in public places where they could get caught. And last week-do you know where the Nakatomi Plaza is on Avenue of the Stars?"
"Yes."
Keri knew it well.
It was actually called Fox Plaza but it was often referenced as Nakatomi Plaza because that's what it was called in the movie Die Hard, at least before it blew up. The thirty-five-story skyscraper was located in the heart of Century City, a west-side enclave known for law firms and talent agencies.
"They hid out in the building until it closed," the girl said. "Then they spent the night up at the top, drinking wine and smoking pot. The next morning they snuck out. Ashley's parents thought Ashley was sleeping over at my house that night. I covered for her but between you and me, I didn't like doing it."
All this was interesting but if it was getting Keri anywhere, she couldn't see it.
"Here's the worst part though," the girl said. "Walker recently bought a gun."
"Why?"
"He's in some kind of trouble. I think someone's after him, and maybe him plus Ashley, I'm not sure. She said it had something to do with Walker losing some drugs he owed to someone. That's the main thing I wanted to tell you. She might be mixed up in something. I don't know. I do know that they were planning on running away to Vegas."
"To become stars of the music and fashion worlds, right?"
"I don't think so. I think it's more to escape whatever it is that's going on here." The girl exhaled. "Ashley's parents don't know any of this and you have to promise not to tell them. I'm only telling you because something in all this may be behind why she disappeared."
Keri patted the girl's arm.
"You're doing the right thing."
"Does any of it help?"
"I don't know yet. Maybe-"
"There's one more thing that you should know," the girl said. "This is something that you absolutely have to promise to not repeat because Ashley told it to me in the strictest secrecy."
"I understand," Keri said, again making no promises.
The girl studied Keri for a moment and then said, "Ashley's mom, Mia, comes from a lot of money. Her parents-meaning Ashley's grandparents-used a law firm here in LA for all their legal work, Peterson and Love. Do you know it?"
Keri nodded. It was one of the largest law firms in the city, very political, with several branches in other states. It had been around forever.
"Yes."
"Okay, well, they used their pull to get their daughter, Mia, a job at the law firm when she was fourteen, in the summer, between ninth and tenth grade. She did photocopying, ran errands, shelved books, and stuff like that."
"Okay."
"Well, Stafford was a partner in that firm at the time," the girl said. "He was thirty that summer. Anyway, he got Mia in his office one night after everyone left and he deflowered her."
"Deflowered?"
"Yeah, that means she was a virgin at the time," Britton said earnestly.
"Oh, right." Keri tried to keep a straight face.
"Don't get me wrong, it was consensual, but he was a full-grown man, a lawyer no less, and Mia was just a kid. She got pregnant. He wanted her to get an abortion but she refused and ended up having the child-Ashley. After that, Mia and Ashley moved to Paris for seven years and then came back here. Mia was twenty-two when they came back and Ashley was seven."
"This is…I don't know…wild," Keri said.
"Trust me, I know," the girl said. "Mia and Stafford struck things up again after that long gap and eventually they got married and he formally 'adopted' Ashley. He never technically denied being her birth father but by adopting her, most people just assumed he was her stepdad. Anyway, it was Mia's idea for Stafford to get into politics and she funded his campaigns. That's how he became a senator. No one outside their inner circle knows that he is actually the blood father. If the public ever found out how their family was created, his political career would be over. Mia confided all this to Ashley, who then told me when she was a little tipsy one night."
"I don't see how this fits into anything," Keri said.
"I don't either. I just thought you should know that Stafford isn't as squeaky clean as he'd like people to think. Personally, I don't like him."
*
After making sure Britton got safely back to her bedroom, Keri headed back to the station. On the drive she realized something. Mia may have wanted Keri to be heading up the case because they had a bond. But when Stafford backed her up, it wasn't because he thought she was the best person for the job. It was because he thought she was the worst.
If someone was going to end up snooping around in their lives and possibly stumbling on some of their secrets, he wouldn't mind if that someone was a rookie detective, an emotional basket case, someone who'd been reprimanded multiple times in her short career. If things went south, she was the perfect scapegoat. Keri realized she'd walked right into his trap.
And she had a bigger problem. She had no idea what else he was hiding.
