Fear No Evil

Chapter 20

Los Angeles

I dreamed of Bree in Paris.

She was in some dimly lit jazz club, sipping from a champagne glass and looking like a bombshell in stiletto heels and a sleek, formfitting black dress with a slit high up the right thigh. She was alone at a table near the stage but kept glancing over her shoulder toward the shadowy back of the club, as if she were expecting someone. A quartet and a single singer came onto the stage.

The drummer sat at his kit and stomped several times on his bass drum. Then he stomped on it some more, then again and again.

That’s when I startled awake and realized someone was pounding on my hotel-room door. I lurched out of bed, peered through the keyhole, and saw Ned Mahoney standing there in workout gear.

I opened the door. “I’m bagging the gym, Ned, I didn’t sleep well last—”

“I just got a call from Pat Loughlin,” Mahoney said. “They’ve lost communication with the two agents guarding the widow White and her family out in Pasadena. He’s coming to get us in ten minutes.”

I set a world record for showering, shaving, and dressing, grabbed a to-go cup of coffee in the lobby, and went out the front door just as LA Supervising Special Agent Loughlin pulled up in a black Suburban. Mahoney came out the door behind me, puffing and staring at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d beaten him.

“It’s a talent,” I said and climbed in the back.

The second Mahoney shut the passenger-side front door, Loughlin pulled away. “We need this like a thumb in the eye,” he said. “I’m thinking we could be in for a frickin’ shitshow.”

“When was the last time you had contact with the two agents?” I asked.

“Half past three this morning,” Loughlin said. “Supposed to check in again at five thirty. When they didn’t, they got called. When they didn’t answer, I got called. I called their personal phones. When they didn’t answer, I called Ned.”

“No one’s knocked?” Mahoney asked.

“Sheriff’s deputy rang the bell at the front gate of the estate.”

“Estate?”

“Correct,” Loughlin said. “No answer. I told her to stand down, wait for us.”

We’d stayed at a hotel in Burbank, so it didn’t take long for us to get to the old and tony neighborhood in Pasadena. An LA County Sheriff’s patrol car sat idling ahead of us on the street where Amelia White’s parents lived and where the FBI agent’s widow had retreated with her children in a time of grief and crisis.

The deputy told us no one had gone in or out of the gate since she’d arrived, and that was nearly forty-five minutes ago. Loughlin thanked her and pulled over to park.

“I have no frickin’ idea what we’re dealing with here, so let’s play it by the book. Everyone in armor. I have four vests in the trunk.”

After studying the place on Google Earth, we walked up to a gate in the seven-foot ivy-covered wall that surrounded the three-acre estate of the widow’s father, Jeffrey Reising, who’d made a fortune in the aerospace industry. The gate was built of steel covered with planks of whitewashed barn board, and the lower right corner featured a small placard with the name and phone number of a security company.

Loughlin rang the bell at the intercom, got no answer, then called the security company, identified himself, and asked if they’d had any alarms at the Reising residence during the night. When the dispatcher replied in the negative, he asked her to unlock the front gate and disarm the system.

Two minutes later, there was a click, and the gate swung open.