Pro Bono

Chapter 9

9

H e’d been sure that he’d needed to get Vesper Ellis’s case into the hands of the police. He had to leave them alone now and trust that they’d do their jobs. There were still some things he could do that they wouldn’t.

He drove to his condominium, opened his computer, and went to work. Vesper Ellis was clearly the victim of some embezzling. It was difficult to imagine how anyone could have drained her accounts without someone inside the corporation doing the work. The most likely person would be the one the company was paying to maintain and control her portfolio.

He began with Patrick Ollonsun. He was listed as the advisor for her account at Great Oceana Monetary Fund, the account from which withdrawals had been made at the request of George Ellis after his death.

Warren found a page called About Us on the Great Oceana website. Ollonsun’s profile said he had graduated from Boston University nineteen years ago, which made him about forty-one years old. He had worked at two other well-known financial corporations before Great Oceana.

Warren collected all the incidentals—office address, phone numbers, home address on Mulholland Drive, posed picture, names of other people tagged in candid photographs. He went back to the Great Oceana site and identified a couple of those people. He went to their personal sites and found small bits of additional information—pictures of people in front of houses and cars, some labeled.

Vesper Ellis had told Warren that her husband had been the one who had selected and watched over their investments. Was it possible that Ollonsun didn’t know that George had died? Since Vesper hadn’t bothered to remove George’s name from the account, Ollonsun might not have known he was dead right away, but George had now been dead for three years.

When Warren had exhausted the information in easily available sources, he moved on to the other advisor who was listed for an account with discrepancies, Ronald Talbert at Founding Fathers Vested. As he collected the same sorts of information about Talbert that he had for Ollonsun, he felt increasingly impatient.

Time was passing while he stared at a screen. He had no idea where Vesper Ellis was, or what that time was feeling like to her. She could be alone and afraid, locked in some basement, or undergoing some brutality to force her to sign permissions for her robbery, knowing that the robbers would have little choice but to kill her afterward. She could be dead already, and if she was alive, all Charlie’s legal maneuvering might be too late.

He had to do things that had a chance of shortening the process of finding her. He called Tiffany Greene’s number.

She said, “Charlie?”

“Hi, Tiffany,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I had a question. Can you tell me what kind of car Vesper Ellis drives? Anything will help—new or old, big or small, color.”

“She has a new white Mercedes C-300. It’s a hybrid.”

“Thanks, Tiffany,” he said. “I really appreciate all your help.”

“Have you found her car?”

“For now, I’m just trying to find out everything I can, and see if I can get in touch with her. When I do, I promise I’ll tell her how concerned and helpful you’ve been. Thank you.”

He went through his closet and his dresser, selected a black KN95 mask, a black baseball cap, black leather gloves, and a black hooded sweatshirt. He looked in a drawer in his closet island and retrieved a half dozen AirTag transponders from among his travel gear. Then he took the battery out of his phone and went out.

Patrick Ollonsun’s house was in a gated development along Mulholland Drive. Warren had been inside the gate a few times to meet with clients who were in the midst of divorces or other legal issues. In each case he had used the excuse that he’d needed to have the client sign papers, but he had actually wanted to get a look at something in the house. He hadn’t wanted a client lying about something like damage done during a fight, or the environment a custodial parent was maintaining for the children. The houses were all large and two-story, with attached garages, pools and pool houses, and hot tubs. Each was on one to two acres of land.

Whenever he had entered before, a client had called to tell the guards manning the gate he’d been invited. He didn’t think that without the call the guards would let him in, and he didn’t want to be on the photographic record of who had been admitted to the complex this evening. The false excuses for a visit he could think of didn’t seem likely to work—that he was the attorney of one of the residents and was hand-delivering some papers he’d been working on, or that a client lived here but was in Europe and had asked him to pick up the mail and pay the bills. He couldn’t think of anything that a guard would hear and simply open the gate for him without calling for verification of permission. He was going to have to sneak in.

He turned off the road onto the flat surface of a scenic overlook that provided a panoramic view of the San Fernando Valley. He locked his cell phone in the glove compartment and walked to the boundary of the complex, climbed the wall, and dropped to the ground inside. He hid in some nearby bushes for a few minutes until he was sure he hadn’t triggered a silent alarm, and then walked toward Patrick Ollonsun’s address. As he walked, he was reminded that these people not only had a lot of living space, they also seemed to have more cars than anybody needed. There were all multiple-car garages, and there was also, near the end of each driveway, a parking lot for visitors. Most had cars parked there.

It took him about ten minutes to walk to Patrick Ollonsun’s house. There were lights on in windows all over the house, and other lights along the eaves. He made a slight detour to see the back of the house, where there were three cars, but none of them was Mrs. Ellis’s white Mercedes C-300. He kept going past the lot to the rear of the property and found a dark, shadowed area by the pool house where he could crouch and study the place.

He’d known that the chance of Vesper Ellis’s car being here was extremely unlikely, even if Ollonsun had something to do with her disappearance. Warren also knew that the car his two attackers had used had already been recovered by the police. He wasn’t sure that he would recognize the men if he saw them again, but the house was certainly illuminated enough to make a sighting possible. The swimming pool was not lighted tonight, nor the pool house, so he was able to watch from where he was, and he stayed.

He watched the lighted windows, and every few minutes he would see somebody walk across a room. The first was a middle-aged woman, and his heart sped up for a half second, until she turned to the side and he saw the hair she wore pulled tight behind her head was blond. Vesper Ellis’s hair was dark. The woman was also alone, something kidnappers could never allow. The next person he saw was a young girl with long blond hair, a T-shirt, and commercially shredded jeans. If their husband and father was a criminal, he certainly hadn’t brought that part of his work home with him. It didn’t make him seem innocent. All it did was strengthen the possibility that he was paying somebody to do the ugly stuff—somebody like the two men who had gone after Charlie Warren.

Warren went to the parking area behind the house to examine the cars. There was one that looked to him like the sort of car a financial services guy would drive to work. It was a black BMW 5 series that had been polished so well that it reflected a streetlamp about five hundred feet away. Warren reached in his pocket for one of the AirTags he’d bought about six months ago to keep track of his luggage on a trip to Europe. He lay on his back and wriggled under the side of the car near the back seat, reached up, and attached the AirTag to a brake line.

The second car was a red Lamborghini, not a car to use if a person wanted not to be noticed while he was doing something criminal, but he attached a second AirTag to it anyway. The third car was a staid white Prius. He attached one under that car too.

Warren went behind the pool house to climb the perimeter wall. He made it back to the outer fence of the complex in the same ten minutes the walk to the house had taken. He looked and listened until he was sure no car was coming and then scaled the tall fence and dropped to the outer side. He got into the rental car and drove.

He waited until he had descended to the flats and was miles away on Ventura Boulevard before he pulled over, replaced the battery of his phone, and looked at the screen. Detective McHargue had not called, and it was a few minutes past midnight. It meant that the cops had not opened some closet or looked under a bed and found Vesper Ellis’s body. He had now abandoned the hope that she was somewhere pleasant, simply putting off returning his calls.

He took the battery out again and drove. He knew that the silence didn’t mean that the police hadn’t found anything at all. It didn’t even mean they were still searching. He was aware that from here on they would only contact him if they thought he could contribute something they wanted. He was no longer going to be somebody they thought about much, and he didn’t want to be. He wanted them to concentrate on Vesper Ellis. She had now been missing for about seventy-two hours.

He drove toward the address where Ronald Talbert, the advisor for Mrs. Ellis’s Founding Fathers account, lived. When he found it, he was not surprised that the house was large. What surprised him was that this house, like the last one, was still lit at this hour. The Los Angeles finance people he’d known were usually in their offices by 9:30 A.M. Eastern time, when the New York markets opened. That was 6:30 A.M. Pacific time, and that meant that they had to be up and on the move by around 5:00 A.M. Pacific. That was less than five hours from now. He kept going until he was past the next curve and saw that there was a side street to the right, so he turned there and parked.

He moved to the sidewalk and walked to the edge of the property. The lights meant that someone in the house was probably awake. He hoped it also meant the alarm system hadn’t yet been activated for the night. He stepped on the edge of the grass by a wall that had beside it a row of identical twelve-foot trees of the new variety that seemed to grow a foot a month and walked up the sloping lawn, then cut to the driveway. He moved slowly, staying close to the side of the house, ducking under each window he passed, up to the garage. He stayed at the corner of the garage and only leaned out an inch or two to look at the windows. He saw that the upper floor windows of the house were dark. As he looked in a side window on the first floor he could see through a rounded arch a large living room and, on the distant wall, a television screen, which he estimated at seven feet wide, displaying human shapes clothed in some fabric that resembled burlap running and jumping and twirling while swinging swords at each other.

This didn’t necessarily mean everybody in the family was at home. Daddy might be driving Vesper Ellis’s body to the desert tonight. Warren stepped in front of the garage door and looked in the row of small windows along the top. There were two nearly identical-looking black SUVs inside. There was no white Mercedes C-300. He also saw that there was a human-size door on the right side of the garage. He had guessed that if people were still awake, the alarm system for the house had not yet been engaged. The garage was not attached to the house, but that didn’t mean it was on a separate circuit. Would anybody turn on the alarm for the garage but leave the rest of the alarm system off? He decided to take a chance that they hadn’t. He went to the side door, tried the knob, and found it wouldn’t turn.

Vesper Ellis’s time could be running out, and this could be a way to find her before that happened. He looked at the ground near the door for a place where a key could be hidden—a fake, hollow stone sold for that purpose, a brick, or single real stone to hide the key under. He didn’t find anything of the sort. He took out his wallet and began removing cards from it. He tried to push a credit card into the crack between the door and the jamb beside the knob, but the door was too tightly fitted. He tried his library card. It fit, but it was too worn, and simply curled at the end when it reached the plunger. No card worked. He put his wallet away. He saw the row of trash bins near the back of the garage.

He decided the blue recycling bin would be the best place to start. He opened the top and tried to see what was inside. He found a tuna can that had been opened, but the lid was still attached by a very small bit of uncut metal. He took off his KN95 face mask, cradled the can’s top in it, gripped the mask so it protected his hand from the sharp metal top, and inserted the top into the space beside the doorknob. He slid it up and down a bit, and then pushed, keeping his grip tight so it didn’t slip. The can top went in, bent just enough to slide along the beveled plunger, and moved it out of the way. He leaned on the door and it swung inward.

He went inside. The only light in the garage came from the door he’d just opened and the row of small windows along the top of the garage door. He knelt beside the first car, reached up under it and attached an AirTag to a wire bundle under the hood, then attached one to the other car, and stood up. He didn’t want to spend another minute at the Talbert house. He had been forcing himself to stay, each moment feeling increasingly risky and dangerous, and now he had done all he could expect to do. He stepped to the side door, went out, and closed it behind him. He left the can in the bin, moved past the house, and made the turn to cross the lawn. In a moment he was beside the wall lined with trees. As he started down the sloping lawn, the light in the house went dark. Someone would be arming the alarm system right now.