It had been a long time since nightmares filled Miles' sleep. He woke with a full-body shudder and clutched the sheets with tight fists. It was the same rigid position he'd woken to for fifteen years, when every night was another trip to his father's grave. Perhaps some part of him thought that he should be filling it, instead, and had forced him into that unnaturally composed position no matter how he drifted off to sleep. Every day had begun with him stretched out and ready for a coffin. Ever since his epiphany he'd discovered the simple wonder of waking up on his side, or even with his face smashed flat against the pillow.
But this was a coffin sort of morning.
"Still alive," he murmured. "You have to still be alive." Pess lifted her head from where she'd pillowed it on his chest. Her presence soothed his still-racing heart, and Miles wondered if it might not be a good idea to bend the rules on more nights than this. She was certainly shedding all over the sheets, but he did send everything out to a very good cleaner.
He turned off the alarm before it could sound; as usual, he'd woken five minutes before he'd set the buzzer, and as usual, he hadn't needed its backup. He slid from his sheets and stumbled to the bathroom to study just how badly the restless sleep had left its mark. Worse than he'd expected—he'd grown unaccustomed to a nightly schedule of psychological terror—but better than most men would have looked. Unaccustomed on that particular day or not, he did have years of practice.
With rigid, efficient motions, Miles splashed ice cold water on his face and the dark circles under his eyes obediently retreated. Next came a hot towel and a straight razor (it gave a closer shave), followed by a narrow-toothed comb and whatever Austrian-made styling product he'd been using ever since his childhood move to Germany. A company shipped it as needed; he signed the bill and focused on other things. After his toiletries had been attended to, his wardrobe followed: undershirt. Socks. Trousers. And then, decisions needed to be made.
Shirt: a fine cotton, rather than silk, as he had no idea where the day might take him. Waistcoat: expertly tailored with a faint black-on-black pattern of traditional paisley. Cravat. Jacket: from a local tailor, rather than a European hand. That only made sense, for an American cut for a jacket was slightly boxier and far more forgiving, and he would be in the field.
But, as he smoothed his lapels and felt the last piece of his wardrobe fall into place, Miles couldn't help but acknowledge the other elements to those clothing decisions. This particular shirt had French cuffs, and he'd chosen the cufflinks he'd worn on a notably satisfying day in court. Some illogical, buried part of him still thought they were lucky. His jacket's cut was tied to here, his childhood home, rather than his teenage years. And the waistcoat's embossed paisley bore more than a slight resemblance to feathers. Phoenix was still not allowed to be dead; Miles doubted very much that he possessed the regenerative powers of his namesake.
It was all very symbolic and utterly useless for actually finding the man. Miles made a derisive noise at his pointless, timewasting sentimentality, and walked to the kitchen with crisp steps. Maya was still asleep on the couch when he passed. She was contorted into a bizarre position with her face flat against the pillow, he noted with some envy. As she shifted and the blanket moved with her, he saw that she'd stripped down to her underwear. Blanching, he hurried through the kitchen door and resolved to give her plenty of time to wake and get dressed.
"I smelled food," Maya soon yawned, walking in and rubbing her eyes. Her initiate's robe was rumpled but serviceable, and thankfully present. "Nice apron."
Miles slid her breakfast onto a plate and gestured with the spatula. "Eat as much as you can. Time spent eating is time wasted once we have our goal in hand." He checked the oven clock as he removed the apron and hung it neatly: twelve minutes to seven. With any luck, that goal would be provided to them very soon.
"What is this?" Maya asked suspiciously. "It's eggs, but it's... green. I don't think you can cook."
"A spinach omelette." She hesitated. "Spinach has iron, it's good for you. Eat."
"Dinner was better," Maya grumbled as she obediently began shoveling food into her mouth. For all her complaints about forcing her to eat spinach, her plate vanished faster than his.
At 7:00:06, Miles' phone buzzed noisily against the granite countertop. "Detective, you're right on time."
"Yeah, I've been waiting to call, Mr. Edgeworth, so I didn't wake you up. I was..." A loud yawn sounded like it nearly cracked Gumshoe's jaw. "I was sleeping in my car for a couple of hours before I needed to go back to Detective Starr."
Miles' mouth thinned. "You've had this information for hours?" Before the apologies could start, he said with irritation, "No, I told you to call at seven, rather than as soon as you heard something. The important thing is that you clearly have learned something about Sanders' whereabouts." Maya leaned in excitedly as Miles waited for his reply.
"I sure did, Mr. Edgeworth. I started asking around his neighborhood and people told me right where he'd gone. Some people were getting home late, so it was pretty easy to find people to talk to."
Miles blinked. "They did? They they weren't willing to talk to us."
"Yeah. Um. They, uh, remembered the two of you. You, uh... kinda didn't fit in around there." The last bit tumbled out in a sloppy heap, like Gumshoe hated to say it and hoped that Miles wouldn't actually make out any of the words. "It sounded like Sanders was pretty shaken up about everything that happened. He's up with a friend at Pyramid Lake, fishing."
"You're sure about this?" He'd heard the lake's name before, though Miles wasn't terribly familiar with it. He recalled that lake was at least an hour north of the city, maybe two in traffic, and they didn't have time to waste on a pointless drive.
"Two different people said it, sir. One was a nice old lady that said she was watching Sanders' house while he was gone." Though that was all Miles had expected to hear, Gumshoe continued, "I found all that out by one thirty or so—"
Dammit. Well, it's not like we could have found Sanders and accosted him for information in the middle of the night, I suppose.
"-And spent the next few hours pulling up his history for you. Since I know you, ah, didn't check him out that much before you called him as a witness."
No, he hadn't. Phoenix had promised Miles that this witness had something very important to share with the court, and if he was wrong on that, he would never ask for another favor as long as they both lived. Then he'd slung around variations on "finding the truth" until Miles agreed to call Sanders to the stand, in part out of curiosity as to what light he might bring to the case and in part to shut Wright up.
"It's all in your email now, sir. The full report and all the files."
Miles clicked his phone to speaker mode and sat it on the counter. "Give me and Ms. Fey a rundown of Sanders, Detective, since you've already familiarized yourself with him."
"Oh, hey, pal." Another yawn.
"Hey, Gumshoe!" Maya smiled hugely at the phone. "Thanks for doing all of this! We'll find Nick today for sure! Mr. Edgeworth says he'll know right where to look for Nick once we talk to him!"
I don't think I was quite that optimistic...
"Yeah? Yeah! Yeah, I bet we will, pal! Okay! Dylan Sanders is 37 years old and divorced. He works as a mechanic at a place on Atlantic. Sounds like he's pretty good." This much Miles knew, and he made an impatient noise for Gumshoe to get on the useful information. "A lot of money goes to child support. I guess that's why he lives where he does."
"Why'd he get divorced?" Maya asked, and shrugged when Miles turned to her with a raised eyebrow.
"Uh. 'Inconceivable differences,' I think it was?"
Wonderful, the (misspoken) catch-all term that told them absolutely nothing.
"Sounds like he had a pretty rough time of it, sir. His wife filed the papers, and it didn't seem like it was his idea at all. And that all came just a year after the VA started denying his disability claims."
...I am an idiot. A blind, thundering, irresponsible idiot.
"Uh... Mr. Edgeworth?" Maya asked hesitantly, and risked putting a hand on his shoulder. "That noise you're making is really weird. Did you swallow your tongue? Do you need CPR?"
Miles snatched the phone off the counter. Even if I was admitting him as a witness as a favor to Wright, I still should have researched the man this much! "The VA? He was in the military?"
"Er. Uh. Yeah. Did I say something wrong, sir?"
"For how long? Where was he deployed? What branch? Why was he discharged?"
"That. Uh. Wow, things just got super intense. Lemmee find that spot in the report... here it is. He was in the Army, sir. He served in Iraq."
Goddammit. For me to have overlooked this... I should have been tracking this man down immediately after going to Phoenix's apartment. Miles felt as ill as he had when seeing that drying blood on the carpet.
"He, uh... let's see. Got injured in the line of duty and received an honorable discharge. Got a medal and everything. Hey, good for him!"
"What is your assessment of the man's character?" Miles asked. "Will it be safe for me to confront him?"
"Confront him? Oh, he seems like a great guy, from everything in the record and what people were saying on his street. I can't imagine you'd have any problems with him, sir."
"What's going on?" Maya mouthed.
Miles ignored her for the moment. "Thank you, Detective. I may be in touch, although I'll try not to interrupt your work with Starr. I think this may well be all that we need." He hung up without waiting for a goodbye, and with an irritated hiss, practically flung the bowl with Pess' breakfast down to the floor. "Let's go. Sanders isn't just their helpful neighborhood mechanic; he's close friends with Lucy." For all they knew, he could be sleeping with the attractive young woman next door.
"What?" Maya yelped, and followed him as he stormed out of his condo and down the hall. "How do you know that?"
Their footsteps on the stairs were too loud to hold a conversation over, and so he waited to answer her until they were in the garage. "How did Lucy escape her perjury charges?"
The girl had misrepresented herself to Miles as being abused by her terrible, violent big brothers, and shown a few old scars to demonstrate exactly why she was willing to testify against her own family. She'd been a quavering little girl in his office; on the stand and out of his control, she'd revealed her true purpose in volunteering as a witness: lying through her teeth to get her murderous family off the hook. The case seemed so straightforward that he hadn't even investigated enough to know that she'd spoken with Phoenix at his office, too.
He was doing a terrible job with screening people on this case.
"After you guys figured out that her testimony couldn't have taken place when she said?" Maya thought back. "She convinced the judge that she'd gotten confused, and accidentally used... military... time..." Her mouth hung open, and her eyes were wide.
"And he accepted it," Miles said grimly, "because upon review, she'd peppered her testimony with so many obscure references that it was agreed that she truly did have an obsession with military culture." He texted his destination to the LAPD; they would want that siren to get them through the worst of the morning traffic on I-5. That done, he turned and smiled thinly at Maya. "And I think we know why Lucy Rhodes appeared in a jacket cut for someone twice her size, that was beyond threadbare and uses a camouflage pattern not seen since the turn of the century."
Her fist balled. "Let's go get him," Maya said with narrowed eyes, and slammed the other hand down on the siren. This time, she didn't need to brace herself when he shot out of an underground garage.
Their frantic pursuit lasted two blocks before Miles had to slow down to twenty miles per hour, then ten, even with the siren working to clear traffic. Rush hour had commenced and there was simply too much of it. "We'll be working against the flow of morning traffic as we head north," he tried to convince himself as he wove between cars that weren't moving quickly enough for his tastes. "This will clear soon enough."
Rush hour traffic clearing in Los Angeles was a fond dream at best, but they were at least in constant motion. That was more than the rest of the people on the roads could say, even those optimists in the carpool lane. Traffic was distinctly lighter by the time they reached Sun Valley, and he could set a constant pace of thirty, forty, fifty miles per hour. By the time the freeway angled upward and they began to pull out of the San Fernando Valley, he was able to turn the siren off. It still rang in his ears, and he suspected Maya had a headache to match the one pounding in his skull.
Sure enough, they both stayed silent through the last stretch of developed housing. Silence was a strange look on Maya Fey. By the time either of them seemed ready to speak again, they were well into the bare, rocky mountains north of Los Angeles. It was a clear day, yet the city had dropped out of sight behind them. Semi trailers chugged patiently up the steeply graded freeway in what he'd thought was the far right shoulder, but apparently served as a slow traffic lane for truckers who didn't want to overheat their engines on the long climb. Even most cars on the main road were driving five or ten miles below the limit.
Without civilization nearby, Miles felt exposed like a raw nerve. His car remained his sole comfort. Its V8 purred as the freeway vanished below their tires. Five or ten miles over the limit was nothing for him, although he did consider turning the siren back on to excuse the excess speed. Just as quickly, he dismissed the idea. He couldn't take the noise. The siren's presence within the car had to be legal permission enough.
"It's really different," Maya abruptly said, startling him. "Being on this side of everything."
"On this side?" Miles repeated. "Do you mean hunting for a kidnapping victim, rather than being one yourself?"
"That," she allowed, "but I meant having the whole police force backing you up instead of trying to keep you from investigating things. It's kind of nice."
"But," Miles anticipated.
"But it doesn't really seem fair. I know that you're all trying to save lives, but we do, too."
That they did, and so he considered his answer with the gravity it deserved. Besides, it was a good distraction as they tried to make fast time on the last stretch to Pyramid Lake. "I believe it comes down to the relative scope of the dangers, Ms. Fey. You certainly do protect the innocent, but these are innocents who, through fault of their own or not, have been implicated in existing crimes. From case names you know that he represents the individual and I represent the state. Those aren't simply words. I have to be aware of forty million innocents whose lives might be ruined or ended at any moment. You are on the side of his client. I am on the side of every person you meet."
"Oh." Maya twisted a lock of hair around her finger. "That sounds, uh, big."
Yes, he supposed this was a higher level of dialogue than she typically encountered at the Wright & Co. office. Thinking about Phoenix hurt, and Miles added, as much to soothe himself as her, "But both halves of that argument are very important. I can only fight so fiercely when I know that any flaws in the state's evidence will be identified." This case had reminded him of that need rather severely. If Phoenix hadn't met with Dylan Sanders, Jude Rhodes would have been sentenced to death simply for being a getaway driver. And with the rest of the case seeming so straightforward, Miles had been unforgivably sloppy in understanding every possible angle surrounding it. Being matched by Phoenix was one thing, but he'd never considered that a high school dropout who couldn't even afford new clothes would be able to outwit him.
And those are not true faults of hers, Miles added grimly, but arrogance has certainly shown me up these past few days.
"So if it's your job to protect everyone, then why does that detective hate you so much? Aren't you two on the same side?"
Miles glanced at her, then back to the road. He'd forgotten that Maya hadn't been around for Skye's trial. "It's... a long story." He tried to summarize it as best he could, though his gut still twisted at the acknowledgement that he hadn't simply coached witnesses or stifled truths during his darker days, but had actually gotten a man sentenced to death on forged evidence. That the LAPD had handed that evidence to him hardly mattered.
He wondered how SL-9 would have gone if Phoenix Wright had been standing opposite him.
"Oh," Maya said quietly as he finished. "Nick told me a little of what I missed when I was up at Kurain, but he didn't go into detail on some things. Like... like all of that." She studied her hands for a mile or two. "But you just said that Detective Starr isn't a good detective. Can we get someone else on the case?"
"What?" Miles frowned. "No, and I said nothing of the sort."
"But her testimony was all mixed up and she lied about how she caught Ms. Skye. How can we trust someone like her to find Nick? She hates lawyers."
"No. She did have a shameful performance there, I'll admit, but it's because she hates prosecutors. Not defense attorneys. She saw the chance to take down the Chief Prosecutor, and I'm sure she was salivating over the entire thing being associated with me, as well. We all have our weaknesses. Hers is, well, me. I'm sure she's giving it her all to find Wright, don't worry."
"Would she give it her all to find you?"
Miles couldn't help but smirk. "Then, I might wish for another detective on the case."
"Angel or Gumshoe being responsible for saving your life. Pick one."
"Nrgh."
"Pick one!"
"I. Er. Gumshoe," Miles decided. "I can certainly fault his skill, but I can't ever fault the man's dedication."
"Yeah, he went crazy trying to impress you last night." Maya shot him a weighty look. "You should probably tell him thanks more than you did. Don't be a jerk, okay? He found out what we needed to know."
"I was not 'a jerk.' I did thank him."
"Yeah, but your thanks can sounds like slaps in the face."
Miles grumbled. He had thanked the man as he hung up. Hoping that praising Gumshoe would stop Maya's complaints, he said, "He was a key factor in saving you, you know. He retrieved the evidence that turned the entire case around on Engarde." And then crashed his car in his enthusiasm to get that evidence to the courthouse, but she didn't need to hear that bit. Richard Gumshoe, idiot savant had to be an encouraging figure to have in mind as she considered Phoenix's inevitable rescue.
"We'll have to make it up to you," Maya said after another few miles.
This girl's thought process was bewildering. "You and Gumshoe? Make up what to me?"
"Not me and Gumshoe," Maya said, like Miles was the peculiar one. "Me and Nick."
"It seems to me as if we're all working on saving Phoenix, not only me."
"Yeah, but you reminded me about when I got kidnapped. You two guys worked together so hard to save me. I tried to be brave, but I was so scared, and I just... you saved me. And now Nick's in trouble, and so it's you and me rescuing him. It's always you helping, so we need to thank you. Thank you nicely, that is, not like how you thank Gumshoe."
He gave her a slight smile without turning from the road.
"Or," Maya teased, in brighter spirits as they spotted the turnoff sign for Pyramid Lake, "you could just get taken by someone scary, too, and let the two of us rescue you!"
"You already have," Miles said.
"Oh," she said softly, and stayed quiet until they were parked. "This feels more like home," Maya said for an obvious topic change when they were standing on warm blacktop, near a small cluster of buildings and the lake beyond.
Miles eyed the landscape critically. It was as brown and bare as what they'd driven through on the freeway. Worse, it had been a dry year, and so the reservoir was topped with an ugly white waterline scar. All in all, he had no idea why someone would choose to spend their time here. His cell phone barely had service and he doubted there was a single building in sight with air conditioning.
"Mountains, I mean," Maya added. "My mountains are much prettier than these mountains. They have rivers and trees and nice buildings." She squinted into the distance, where a side road wound off through scrub trees that gave little shade. RV trailers and motorhomes dotted the landscape. "We don't have barbecue pits like those, though," she said thoughtfully. "Maybe I'll make that change as Master, someday."
Miles ignored her. Pretty mountains or not, the only thing he cared to have towering above him was a well-designed skyscraper. He dug through the trunk, past the emergency car equipment, and into the evidence kit that he kept handy for casework. All he needed was the small pair of binoculars, and he pocketed them. "Let's go. Hopefully Sanders is within view."
"What if he's not, and he's just out on the lake somewhere?" Maya looked suspiciously at a boat rental station as they approached the lake. "Do you know how to drive one of those?"
Miles thought back to one of his worst days of the past few years, and how he'd been forced to maneuver a battered speedboat back to a different boat rental, bewildered and alone. "I... can manage." They'd move in a direction vaguely like 'forward,' anyway.
Fortunately, there was no need to step into a boat. Dylan Sanders had some of the darkest skin that Miles had ever seen, so dark that sunlight made it gleam blue instead of gold. He'd stood out in the courthouse crowd, and he also stood out on a fishing boat gliding its way around the lake. As Miles watched Sanders through the binoculars, certain that the tiny man in the lenses was his man, Sanders noticed the two standing near the boat launch, pointed to them, and said something to his companion.
Then, to Miles' distinct surprise, the boat puttered to life and headed directly for them. Gumshoe's assessment of the man's character appeared to be correct. Few criminals would see a state prosecutor pop up for a surprise follow-up visit and head over to chat.
"Mister, uh, Prosecutor Sir," Sanders said respectfully when his friend had looped ropes around a pier and he'd hopped to the dock. "I can't say that I expected to see you here. At... at all."
"But you came right toward me," Miles pointed out. "For which I thank you." See. He could thank people just fine, Maya.
"Well, I figured it had to be important if you drove all the way out here to talk to me. And that could only be you standing there. Even here in LA, I've never seen anyone else who, uh..." He wiggled his fingers at the base of his throat. "Wears one of those."
"It is important," Miles said, and turned away slightly as he tried to figure out the best way to approach this conversation. Sanders didn't give any indication of being unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement, but he was also close friends with Lucy. Miles found it hard to see how those two facts could co-exist, and he was getting very tired of not being able to understand what was going on.
Sanders' voice grew solemn. "What did she do?"
Miles looked at him, startled.
"Hey, Jim," Sanders said to his friend in the boat. "I packed some food in a cooler in the truck. Why don't you go get started on lunch, and put away the catches in the other bin? This fellow and I might need to talk for a little bit, first."
"Sure," said his friend warily. "Is something wrong?"
"Nah, nothing's wrong. You want a sandwich?" Sanders asked Maya, though without looking away from Miles. "I made plenty. I guess it'd be an early lunch for you, but we were on the lake before dawn."
"I can stay," Maya said uncertainly.
Miles glanced at the parking lot with plenty of other people nearby, and the pickups with truck beds open to the day above. He caught Maya's wrist and murmured to her, "Sanders appears to want privacy, and we need to make him talk. But don't take any risks. If you don't want to go with this man, I see a restroom near the beach. If you do go, don't get in the truck." He couldn't tolerate losing someone else right now.
Maya nodded, very seriously, and turned to Jim with a bright, broad smile. "You know me, I love to eat!"
"I, uh, don't know you at all," said Jim, rubbing the back of his head in confusion.
"Well, then let me introduce myself! I like food! Which you're going to share with me! Let's go!" Maya led him off with determination, still smiling brightly even as she toted a bucket full of bass.
"And now we have privacy," Miles noted after the sound of footsteps had faded. They could still hear the slap of water against the dock, and the far-off sound of laughing children as they played on a beach, but that was all meaningless chatter.
"Yup." Sanders swallowed. "So I'll ask you again: what did she do?"
Judging the situation as best he could, Miles barely resisted the urge to attempt to rub his so-called lucky cufflinks. With a deep breath, he risked telling the truth. "After giving me a threatening letter over her brothers' convictions, Lucy broke into the apartment of..." What could he even call Phoenix? 'The other lawyer you talked to?' 'The man defending Jude and Aaron?' Something old and tired, buried deep inside him, protested every label that ran through his mind. It was like his mouth worked on its own. "She broke into the apartment of my best friend, Phoenix Wright."
Sanders frowned. "The other lawyer. Didn't know you were friends." There was something about his face that shouted kindness. He was worn like an old pair of shoes in desperate need of polish, but that overwhelming sense of kindness spoke of someone who always made it obvious when he was friends with someone. It made the uncertainty about his feelings toward Lucy all the more confusing.
"I... try to maintain professional distance in the courtroom."
"You're good at it."
Miles laughed bitterly and glared at the bright sunlight reflecting off the lake. It was making his eyes water. "She broke into his apartment and... and assaulted him, quite violently. An abduction was then made. We're attempting to track the two down now."
"And you're hoping I'll be able to tell you," Sanders guessed, but the slow, uncertain way he said that made Miles' heart sink. "I'll answer any question you have, but I've got two questions of my own, first."
"All right."
"What you just told me... I understood all of it, but you were trying to hide a lot of things behind all those professional words." Sanders' face tightened, and he looked suddenly ten years older. "In plain English, what did she really do?"
"She hit him with a steel rod and cut him open with the remains of his glass coffee table," Miles said after a pause. His voice sounded strange; so tight and strained. And would the sun please move behind a cloud? His eyes wouldn't stop watering. "There was blood... a significant amount of blood." Plain English. The man wanted plain English. "So much blood."
"Shit," Sanders said, and dropped his head. When he raised it again, his eyes were watering, too. "I'm sorry."
Miles nodded silently. He didn't trust his voice right then.
"Okay, then I promise I will answer anything, just like I said, but my second question is: why do you think I know where she is?"
Because you have to. Because I don't know what else I can do, who else I can ask. Miles took a deep breath and hoped that his voice wouldn't waver. "You gave her your old Army jacket, didn't you?"
Sanders froze, then sighed and nodded. "Yeah."
"You've told her old stories from your military days. She was able to fill her testimony full of enough references to make her look like an expert." It was hard not to treat Sanders like a witness on the stand. That approach would certainly fill Miles with more confidence, but this man had no legal obligation to talk to him. If Miles upset him, he might well drive away, and the one thin thread they had to cling to would snap. He chose his next words delicately. "I spoke with others on your street, and it sounds like almost everyone stays away from 'Lucifer.' But she knows about your Army days. You offered to fix her car."
"Lucifer," Sanders repeated, and laughed humorlessly. "You have indeed been talking to people in my neighborhood."
"I hope I haven't offended you." Referencing an insulting nickname might have been foolish, even with the care he'd taken. He'd meant to show how certain he was of all that he was saying, but...
"No, no. It's fine. I never called her that, but it was because I was trying to put some distance between us. She's the one who started calling herself Lucifer. She always hated 'Lucy.' Thought it was old-fashioned."
"So you were close, but then... why were you trying to put distance between you?"
Sanders sighed, rubbed a hand over his face, and looked at him. "I see a concessions truck just set up in the parking lot. I need a drink for this."
A few minutes later, they were back in an isolated part of the shoreline. Sanders had a beer; Miles, an iced tea. "When Lucy was sixteen, her parents drove off a curve on the PCH," Sanders said without preamble.
Miles winced. The Prosecutors' Office was fond of holding retreats in San Francisco, and they were encouraged to carpool rather than fly, to 'encourage sustainability.' (It seemed to him that they could simply stay in their own city and save not only on jet fuel, but gas as well.) He was usually the only driver willing to risk the sharp turns and steep drops of the Pacific Coast Highway, rather than the less-than-scenic freeway trek through the Central Valley. That willingness was because of his car's handling. The Rhodes parents couldn't have afforded anything close to his vehicle, and it was all too easy to remember turns where a slow reaction could take a car right near the edge... or off it.
"They did it on purpose," Sanders added glumly, and Miles' eyes widened in surprise. "The family... they were hitting a rough patch. Way past rough. Looking back on a few conversations I had with them, and knowing now what they were planning to do... well, they were hoping the insurance money could pull their kids out of the hole they'd dug for them."
"That didn't happen," Miles guessed.
"They upped their coverage in the month right before they did it," Sanders sighed, and took a long drink. "They upped it a lot. That kicked off an investigation, and the wreckage got checked out like it wouldn't have, otherwise. No problems with the brakes, and it all got labeled 'insurance fraud.' The kids got nothing."
Miles felt a generalized pang of sympathy that vanished as soon as he remembered who those 'kids' were.
"Aaron was nineteen, so he was old enough to keep the family together and keep his brother and sister out of the foster system. They were happy about it, although in the end it would have been better to split them up. He did his best to try to make enough money to pay the mortgage, but the thing is..."
"Yes?" Miles prompted.
"I don't know if I should say this."
"Everything you share with me will only be used in this investigation."
"It's not classified or anything, it's just..." Sanders took another big drink, and looked pained when he murmured, "Jude and Aaron are morons."
"Ah."
"Couldn't hold down a job, couldn't bring in a steady paycheck, and they were going to lose the house and each other. That was when Lucy stepped in. That girl, she's smart. She'd see commercials on TV and talk about how she was going to go to one of those night school programs and learn how to be a nurse, and I knew she could do it."
But clearly, that hadn't happened.
"I tried to look out for them. I thought the boys might do with some structure in their lives, but they didn't want to listen to me about a recruiter. Lucy would, though. So I talked to her about my Army days, and said that they might want to consider it. She might want to, too. They've got medical training in the service, you know. She could learn to be a nurse." Sanders smiled sadly. "For a while it seemed like she might do it. She'd come over to my place and help me work on my car, just so we could talk."
Dylan Sanders paid child support, Miles recalled. Gumshoe hadn't mentioned this, but he was suddenly very sure that support went toward a daughter.
"But things kept getting rougher for them," Sanders said softly, "and they needed a quick fix, and..."
"And?"
"And so Lucy got mean." The last word twisted the space between them like a knife. Miles didn't want to speculate, Sanders didn't want to continue, and so the silence hung there for a long, raw beat. "Her brothers couldn't think worth a damn, but they could hurt the people she wanted them to hurt. She was the barrel and they were the bullets; they went wherever she aimed. Jude and Aaron trusted their little sister, and now it was her looking out for them."
"A dangerous game to play."
"For a while, it worked for them. A long while, if I'm being honest. They were able to shake down money out of people, but eventually some of those people had friends, and so they needed to keep them in line, too, and..." Sanders shook his head. "I could see them heading down, fast, and eventually I just had to cut the rope and let them fall. I wasn't going to get mixed up in whatever Lucy was getting that family into."
Miles' heart sank again. Truth rang through the man's words, but if what he said was really accurate, it sounded like he hadn't been in close contact with Lucy for years. This explained so much they'd already encountered—the jacket, the Army references, Lucy in the master bedroom, a lack of fingerprints on file for her while her thuggish brothers were known criminals—and yet it was closing doors for what he needed to do now. "Then... why did you offer to fix their car?"
Sanders stood there long enough that Miles almost repeated his question, but then the man abruptly hiked up one leg of his cargo pants. They were the only people in sight not in short pants, Miles realized; with his formal trousers on, he hadn't thought to question Sanders wearing the same length. That analysis fled as soon as he saw what was under the pant leg: a smooth metal bar. Nodding at his surprise, Sanders let that leg fall, then hiked up the other. His original leg was still there, but was under a mass of puckered scar tissue. Burn scars, almost certainly. "There was an IED," he said slowly. "Command thought the road was clear and it wasn't."
Nodding mutely, Miles tried to force Gumshoe's voice out of his memories. Got injured in the line of duty and received an honorable discharge. Got a medal and everything. Hey, good for him! A medal seemed a poor exchange for the agony this man had certainly gone through after that bomb blast. "I'm sorry."
"Not yours to apologize over." Sanders swallowed. "I woke up with part of me under our truck, but at least I was breathing. There was a dust storm that had made it tough to see, so it was hard, but I was breathing. I, ah." He squinted at the lake, and his eyes started watering again. "His name was Robin Graves. Robbie. From this little town in Arkansas, and there wasn't a day that went by when I didn't call him a hick and laugh at him, and he'd make a joke about the evil big city people, and. Yeah." He sighed. "He was my best friend."
The words sent Miles' eyes back to watering, too. Damn that reflected sunlight.
"It was hard at first, making money when I got home, even after my leg healed up. I'd learned about repair work in the service, but I couldn't stand to be around anything with an engine. Which, well, when you live in Los Angeles..." He shrugged and downed the rest of his beer. "I talked to brain docs for as long as the VA paid for it, and eventually I got it turned around in my head to where I'd keep people safe by keeping their cars safe. Then I got a handle on everything. It helped me fight off those demons in my head. That all probably sounds stupid."
"No, it doesn't. I'm a prosecutor because of when..." Miles wiped at one tear that he couldn't help but give its proper label. He inhaled and exhaled, hard. "My father was shot to death in the same elevator as me, and I still have to take the stairs." Admitting that to this near stranger was one of the most bizarre things he'd done in years, but from the startled look morphing into absolute and total empathy, he knew he'd done the right thing.
"So you understand," Sanders said. "These were kids whose folks died in a car, and even though I knew they were dangerous and this could be dangerous for me, I saw them driving a death trap of their own. I had to fix it. I couldn't sleep at night. I saw them getting into an accident on the freeway, in a middle lane where no one could get to them easily, and in my head they were burning."
If Sanders hadn't fixed that car, the people at that studio might still be alive. Lucy would have had no way to transport Phoenix. And yet he understood, because Miles walked up to the twelfth floor every day at work.
"So I'm sorry," Sanders said. "I don't talk to Lucy. I can't tell you where she's taken your friend."
Miles nodded, his head bowed. Coming up here had been a terrible idea. He felt like an open wound.
"But," Sanders continued, and Miles' head snapped up, "I know exactly what that car has left to give before it dies. You climbed up the mountains to get here, the same as me."
Miles thought back to the steep grade, to the semi trucks inching along the outside lane.
"It can't do that. It can barely take a hill at all, and it had under fifty miles left on it before the entire thing fell apart. She was supposed to use those miles to find something else to drive, and obviously she didn't, but at least you know she's still in the city somewhere. And this family had no friends left, and no money, so I don't see any way for her to get a different car unless she stole it."
"It's nearly fifteen miles between her house and his apartment."
"Then take that range down to thirty-five."
She was still in the city, within an hour's drive of Phoenix's apartment at the very most, and constrained by the natural geography. The police had been unable to find the car and no noise complaints to 911 had matched up with this case. An hour's drive. No big hills. Within that range, she needed isolation or insulation to shield any noise and a place to stash her car. Miles felt his heart start pounding; renewed hope was like a jolt of electricity straight into his chest. "Thank you. God, thank you."
Sanders smiled. "Sure. You're pretty okay for a lawyer."
"You might be the first person who's ever said that to me," Miles half-choked, half-laughed, and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. I'm going to do it. I am going to save you. "I, ah, need to..."
"Yeah, go, go, don't waste any more time. Good luck with your friend!"
"Yeesh," Maya said when he approached the pickup, and hopped off the bed where she and her companion had dug into lunch with enthusiasm. "Finally. Not that you haven't been great company, Jim—"
Jim held up his hands as if to say 'no offense taken.'
"But I am actually getting full, which I thought was impossible, and wait, have you been crying?"
Miles kept walking. "We're heading to the police. We need to establish a search area and start narrowing down the potential locations. Once we're on the road, I want you to call Starr and see if she's found out anything that can help us further limit our search. As well, we'll need to run searches on stolen cars just to eliminate the chance that she's in a different vehicle. I doubt she is, it would be a signal fire pointing toward her, but we need to check."
"You found out something?" Maya asked with delight as they both pulled their seatbelts on.
"I found out something." Miles let out a choked laugh as he shifted into gear and set off faster than the park probably wanted him to drive. He had needed that conversation, on a deeper level than he'd known. "Here," he said to Maya, and handed her his phone. "The contacts are all in there."
She nodded and began hunting. Miles considered the requests he'd made and held up his hand before she could get too far into her to-do list. "But first, send a text. Pretend that you're me when you do."
"Okay, to who?"
"Detective Gumshoe."
"Okay... got him," Maya said, and poised with her thumb over the keypad. "What do you need him to look for?"
"Nothing just yet." Miles merged onto the freeway and poured on the gas. "Just tell him thank you."