“This doesn’t make anysense.” He pointed at the wall and I followed his finger, wondering if he was seeing something I wasn’t. “My paintings…Annie used to have a triptych I painted there on the wall, but…” His finger dropped. “I guess she just took it down.”
“Was it valuable?”
“No, it was…I mean, it was just something dumb I painted for her, for our birthdays once. Like I said, she probably got rid of it after we stopped talking. Annie’s not much of a sentimentalist.”
I thought of the wild, spiraling mural downstairs. “Did you paint that wall in the dining room, too?”
He gave a wan grin. “Yeah. Annie said everything in the house was too tasteful. She wanted me to fuck it up a bit, piss off her interior designer.”
“You’reverygood. I can see why you do it for a living.”
He shrugged. “I don’t, not really. It’s just for fun. So,” he said, changing the subject, “did she disappear before or after the burglary? Should we…” He threw his arms up. “Dust for prints? I don’t fucking know. Call her security firm? Call the cops?”
“There won’t be any prints,” I said. “This was a pro job. The cops won’t be any help, and your dad wants them kept out of this. But you should report the break-in to the security company, if only for insurance purposes. When your sister’s back, at least she’ll have a paper trail she can follow up.”
The idea that his sister would be returning put a little color back in Miller’s cheeks, as I’d intended.
I didn’t want him thinking what I was thinking right then.
“Maybe this doesn’t even have anything to do with Annie’s disappearance,” I added.
Miller’s snort told me I’d overplayed my hand. “Sure,” he said. “Maybe she’s just on vacay in Hawaii and forgot to let anyone know.”
At least he still had his sense of sarcasm. I took him out of the house after I led him through all the other rooms to see if anything else had been disturbed that he might notice. There was nothing. Whoever had done this had done it clean, and with purpose.
Privately, I wondered if that purposehadn’tbeen a break-in, but a kidnapping. Because nothing important seemed to be gone from the house, except Anaïs Beaumont.
* * *
Miller was listed as a contact for his sister’s security account, because it was the same firm that worked for his father. The security officers arrived fast, but that was the only good thing I could say about them. They pulled up on the road and walked down into the courtyard, where one of them gave me a long, hard look. I gave him a long, hard look right back while I listened to the other incompetent explain to Miller that none of this was their fault, and that his sister really should have been the one to call it in.
“There’s been a lot of this lately,” he told Miller. “Celebs everywhere getting turned over for their jewelry. Guess this is another one of those.”
That rang a bell. Hadn’t Freddy said something about burglaries in the Hills? Maybe that crew had over-farmed Hollywood and was moving out to Malibu.
“Alarm?” I asked.
The guards glanced at each other. One of them said, “Alarm never tripped.”
“Cameras?” I persisted.
They didn’t like me questioning them, but the same one grudgingly answered, “Someone hacked them.”
“How?” The guy actually shrugged, as though this wasn’t the job that put food on his table. “How?” I asked again. “Remotely or physically?”
“Remote,” the other guard told me.
A remote hacking, in combination with the neat glass cutting, serial burglaries… It pointed to a sophisticated crew.
“Mr. Beaumont,” one of the guards said, “our advice would be to call the police—”
“No,” Miller and I said in unison, which made it sound suspicious. But the private security pups were too well-trained to object to a firm client decision, although it earnedmeanother close stare.
“Sir, I didn’t catch your name,” said one of them.
“I’m personal protection,” I told them, and they relaxed at the lie. I was hired help, just like they were, maybe even a little higher up the ladder. That kind of limited thinking would probably get them killed one day. But that was their problem. “When was the hack?”
“Uh, a week back,” one of them said.
