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  “They look good,” my cloddish Sergeant Veo said, reaching down to Ky’s plate. I let Ludo slap his hand away. I wished he’d slapped him harder. Veo was such an ass. When Felicity had asked her squad members to help with the backyard, the only one who hadn’t shown up was Veo, citing a back injury. I noticed that didn’t stop him playing golf that weekend. He’d posted the photos all over Facebook.

  “Here, Cavan, taste this.” Ludo was all lovey-dovey now, holding a charred shrimp to my lips.

  “This is so good!” Ky squealed, looking up from his plate. Ludo had struck gold once again. I saw three shrimp tails on Ky’s plate and a fourth on its way to demolition. I bit into the shrimp Ludo gave me. It was amazing.

  “You are such a good cook,” Ana said, her grumpiness back in place. “How’d you do it?”

  “We went to a cooking class together,” Felicity said. “But he didn’t need it. He was just being kind.”

  “You went to a class…why didn’t you tell me? I would have gone!” Ana wailed. She and Felicity tended to fight over him a little, but Ludo loved it. So did I. I had a dreadful inclination toward jealousy and preferred women to be fighting over him than men.

  Ludo grinned at Ana. “You were on your honeymoon, sweetie.”

  “Oh.”

  “So you’ll come next time!” Ludo picked some charred Brussels sprouts off the grill with the Rösle Curved Grill Tongs we’d given Harry as a garden-warming present. Harry put all the steaks onto plates and the chicken onto a platter.

  “Try this, Ky. It tastes just like candy, I promise.” He popped the charred half of a Brussels sprout onto the kid’s plate. Ky only ever ate with a spoon and he shoveled the vegetable in his mouth.

  “That’s good,” he said, looking surprised.

  The women began to fuss over him, trying to pile stuff onto his plate.

  “I’m not hungry,” Ky said and skipped off down the path singing to himself, wringing his hands as he went.

  Felicity looked crestfallen.

  “God, I’m sorry,” Ana said. “I got so excited when he started eating.”

  Ludo said nothing. For once I wasn’t the object of his ire. I hoped.

  “He won’t eat anything I make,” Harry muttered to me. “I got so excited when he ate those shrimps.”

  I didn’t know what to say. So far, it was shaping up to be a fiasco of a celebration.

  Ludo picked off more pieces of vegetable, putting them onto a plate.

  “If we got these in a restaurant, we’d pay a pretty penny for them,” Felicity said. She picked up one and chewed it. “Mmm…sweet, crunchy and then savory. This is really delicious. Try one, Steve.”

  She turned to Veo, whose cell phone rang. He sat, staring at the readout for so long that it attracted everyone’s attention. His gaze went from the phone to me, to Ludo, back to the phone, and back to Ludo.

  “What is it?” Ludo asked, sounding tense.

  Veo shook his head. “I don’t even know how to tell you this. But unit three just found another man chained up at the back of Luke Masterson’s property. They say he’s in real bad shape.”

  Chapter Two

  Everyone reacted at the same moment, but Ludo’s voice was loudest. “I’m coming with you,” he said when he realized Veo was heading to the scene. I wanted to go, too.

  Veo nodded. It probably wasn’t even a question in his mind at that point.

  “Ludo.” Felicity hugged him. “Please be safe.” She gave me a look of such utter panic that I gave her a swift hug. She was worried about him, and with good reason. We all knew what had happened to Ludo. I was the only one who knew why.

  “I’ll drive,” my sergeant said. “I’ll drop you back to your car later.”

  “Hell, I’ll come, too, and you can drop me back as well.” Erik walked out with us apparently oblivious to his wife’s indignant stare.

  Erik sat up front with Veo. Ludo and I were in back. I glanced at my lover, whose face looked tense, his eyes fixated on Veo as if the man weren’t moving fast enough. Veo spent a lot of time on his cell phone almost whispering as we zipped through quiet streets. At the corner of Brooks and Rose I wondered why we were heading south when the Masterson property was north in Pacific Palisades. This wasn’t the ideal neighborhood at night. We were right on the borderline between the nice part of Venice and the rough, crime-ridden section. Besides which, we were heading the wrong way.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Veo caught my gaze in the rearview mirror.

  “Somebody’s following us,” he said calmly. “I noticed the vehicle out front when we left the house. I’m shaking the tail. I called dispatch for an ID on the registration.”

  This surprised me. Actually I wasn’t sure what surprised me more. The fact that somebody was following us or that Veo noticed it. Maybe he wasn’t the vacuous, brainless twit I’d always imagined him to be.

  “Ah,” he said with a satisfied grin, “lost him.”

  “What was he driving?” I asked.

  “Porsche,” Ludo said, his tone gloomy. I glanced at him. How and when had he seen the vehicle? Had he noticed it before Veo said something?

  He stared up at the sky.

  Veo opened his window and dropped his mobile light onto the top of his car. He had all kinds of neat tools at his disposal that I sure didn’t have, such as the police lights, a mini siren, which as far as I know he’s never used, and a computer system on his dashboard to check license plates.

  Apparently that wasn’t working because Erik was fiddling with it trying to get it up and running. Veo zipped along the Pacific Coast Highway now, the streets slick and wet. I wondered if it had been raining. It always amazed me how LA could have inclement weather in one section and balmy conditions just a few blocks away.

  “Almost there,” he said, speeding now, weaving between vehicles in a dangerous way. He made a right on Sunset, veering up the hill away from the ocean. He glanced in the rearview mirror at us. He seemed excited to be attending the unfurling scene with the first victim of the bizarre house. As far as I knew, Luke Masterson was still in prison awaiting his trial for his crimes against Ludo. My lover had testified before a grand jury and would have to take the witness stand again in the ensuing criminal proceedings…so who the hell could have imprisoned and beaten yet another man on Masterson’s property?

  “The Cabal must have taken him there,” Ludo said, almost to himself. He had a strange way sometimes of reading my thoughts. He looked shaken now, and I wondered about the wisdom of taking him to the house. He turned to me, his eyes the stranger but hypnotic amber color they went just when he was on the verge of turning were.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. In the privacy of the backseat, my fingers crept toward his. I could feel the spikes of hair emerging on the back of his hand.

  Oh, no. He couldn’t damn well turn in front of my boss and my partner for cripes’ sake. He only ever turned at dawn…when we were making love he sometimes turned immediately afterward. Once he’d turned during the only argument we’d ever had. I was guessing that right now he was angry, not horny, and there was nothing I could do to help him.

  His fingers scraped over mine, his nails blossoming into his wolf claws. Veo turned up the street my former partner and I had taken so many months ago when I first rescued Ludo. His fingers kept stroking mine. I could tell he was trying to calm himself. I already knew that my lover had been betrayed by his own mother, who’d sold him to a New York businessman as his sex slave. When I found him, Ludo had been savagely beaten, repeatedly raped.

  On Marinette Road, we swerved onto the decadent, lush, tree-lined street with its sign marking the entrance to Will Rogers State Park. I heard Ludo’s low moan and grabbed his hand. His claws were receding now…thank God.

  I felt my life flashing by like a movie on fast-forward. Nothing had changed much since I’d been here the first time.

  “You okay, Ludo?” Veo turned around.

  “Is he alive?” Ludo whis
pered.

  Veo didn’t respond. He held my gaze in the rearview mirror and I sensed the victim’s condition was bad.

  “He’s alive. We’re just in time. They had trouble getting him out of the cage,” Veo said.

  Cage.

  I shivered. What the fuck? The more I knew about people the more I liked animals. Ludo seemed to relax a little. I squeezed his hand, the early prickles of were-fur I’d felt had gone.

  We would have had trouble picking out the house in the total darkness that this exclusive little neighborhood prided itself on had it not been for the jumble of police vehicles, neighbors in pajamas huddled around yellow police tape and, oh joy, reporters.

  “Stay in the car, please?” I begged my man, but his mute misery said it all. He had to come with us. On second thought, I wouldn’t feel safe leaving him alone. We parked and got out, Veo flashing his badge.

  Only a few people turned to check us out. I noticed the spark of recognition in a couple of the onlookers’ eyes. They knew who Ludo was. I put a protective arm around his lower back. He walked close to me as Veo held up the yellow tape and we stepped under it. Christ…I could smell the blood on the air and saw the fear and disgust in the uniformed officers’ eyes.

  “Has he spoken yet?” Veo asked.

  “No. We’re surprised he’s even breathing on his own but we just got him on a ventilator,” one of the paramedics told him.

  “I want to see him,” Ludo said.

  Veo turned, beckoning him with a quick flick of his fore and middle fingers. The figure on the gurney looked more like a long blob of sausage than a human being, but the eyes…oh, the eyes…their pained, hopeless expression in the midst of all that gore just ripped at me.

  It took me a moment to take it all in. If anything, this was worse than what I’d seen with Ludo. This man had been torn apart and somebody had redressed him. It was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. His fierce wounds seeped blood and other horrible things through the crisp clothing.

  “Ever seen anything like this?” Veo asked me. He looked visibly shaken.

  “Who called this in?” I asked as the man on the gurney looked up at me, not Ludo. I could see the surprise on my lover’s face. He’d fully expected to recognize the man.

  But he didn’t.

  I did.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “That’s my brother!”

  § § § §

  The only person around us who didn’t think it was weird that I didn’t want to ride in the ambulance with him was Ludo. He didn’t question my desire not to travel with Jackson but he insisted that we go. In the ambulance, the wailing sirens sounded frightening. The paramedics were working on cutting away his clothing as we raced toward the hospital.

  I felt sick as I saw the stuff they were hooking him up to.

  “Can’t find a vein,” one of them said.

  “Here, at the knee,” the second one said. They were so busy talking to one another and reporting the patient’s condition to the waiting staff at Cedars-Sinai that it took me a moment to realize they were talking to me.

  “What’s his name?” the paramedic asked, obviously not for the first time.

  Ludo looked at me. He didn’t know. I’d never discussed my brother with him.

  “Jackson,” I responded. “Jackson Redding. He might also be using Carmichael but I doubt it.”

  A wave of bitterness washed over me. I knew Ludo would have questions. I’d always thought he could read my mind and that he’d somehow known about Jackson.

  At the hospital, the ambulance sped into the receiving bay and the emergency response crew removed the gurney. They were so fast I was lucky to glimpse the doctor’s face as he examined my brother’s eyes with a small flashlight.

  It was Dr. Samada, the same man who’d treated Ludo.

  “Take him in, prep him for an Endotracheal tube. I’ll be right there.”

  I’d been in the cop business long enough to know that this meant my brother was having problems breathing on his own.

  The crew raced off with the gurney.

  “I’m no longer in the emergency room,” Samada told me when I got out and shook his hand. “But when I heard it was a trauma case and who it was, I had to be here.” He looked Ludo up and down. “You look fantastic.”

  “I feel pretty good, thanks to you.” Ludo gave him a small, tight smile. “At least…until this. I’m sorry we have to see you again under these circumstances.”

  Samada nodded. “Do we know who did this to him?”

  I glanced at Ludo. He’d mentioned a “cabal” on the way to the crime scene.

  “I think it was the same people who abducted me but judging by the wounds I saw on…Jackson…I’d say he was used for bait,” Ludo said.

  “Bait?” the doctor and I said in unison.

  Ludo looked so upset that the doctor dropped his questions. The investigating police officers had just arrived and Samada went over to them. The three men talked. I caught the inquiring glances they sent our way.

  “And for your information,” Ludo said to me, his tone icy. “I can read your mind but if your brother isn’t in it to begin with, how am I supposed to fucking do that?”

  It was such a bizarre statement that our mutual angry glances soon turned to amusement. The cops approached us. They were from my division and I’m sure the smiles on our faces seemed wholly inappropriate to the occasion. I barely knew either man since both had just joined us, but they introduced themselves as Detectives Jimmy Fulton and Anson Tripp.

  “This is…we’re sorry this happened to your brother,” Fulton ventured.

  “I’m sorry too.” I took a deep breath. “I might as well tell you we’re not close. Haven’t seen him in twenty years.”

  “But you’re sure it’s him.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure it’s him.” My mind was whirling now. “It’s his eyes,” I said. “Very distinctive pale lavender. He’s got my mom’s eyes.”

  “You could tell even in the moonlight?”

  I nodded. “Christ…I have to call her.”

  “You want me to call Mom and Dina?” Ludo asked me, his beautifully accented voice caressing my soul.

  “Yes.” I was devastated. I thought Jackson had just vanished from our lives and I’d been grateful. Now I felt guilty.

  “You’re the guy Cavan found on the property last year, aren’t you?” Fulton asked Ludo.

  “Yeah. I’m naked shack guy.” I could see their shocked expressions as he slid open his cell phone. “I’ll call Dina first,” he said to me. “She has to go over and pick up Mom. Then I’ll call her and you can tell her. I’m sure it’s going to be a shock.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.” I almost added babe but was glad half of my brain was still working. My mother was wheelchair-bound. She really didn’t need this crap right now.

  Ludo moved away from us when my sister took the call.

  “Any idea how your brother wound up in a cage in somebody’s basement?” Fulton asked me.

  “He was in the basement?” I shook my head. “Nobody told me. He was already outside when we got there.”

  Fulton nodded and flipped open his notebook. “Actually, we got the report when two guys broke into the house to rob it. As you know, Masterson’s been in jail all this time and he’s struggled to hold on to the house. His sister from Maine showed up yesterday and she’s been trying to figure out how to auction off his Hollywood memorabilia to pay off some of his attorney fees and other bills.”

  “What happened to his dogs?” I asked. It was a weird question, but they apparently didn’t think so.

  “We heard he had what…four dogs? I know it looks like your brother’s been torn apart by a pack of wild animals but there are no dogs on the property. Masterson gave all his away to friends. Anyway, his sister went to the house yesterday morning and arranged a couple of meetings with professional auctioneers, Sotheby’s, some company called Julien’s Auctions…and a couple of people she found on Craigslist.

  “Two o
f the Craigslist guys went over tonight, and the neighbor called the cops. When the guys were arrested they were freaked out about what they saw in the basement.”

  “My brother.”

  The two detectives looked at each other.

  “Well, no…they saw a huge dog. A kind of wolf they said. Anyway, we went to investigate and then we saw…him.”

  “Was he…was he in a cage like I heard?”

  “Yeah…bolted to the wall but the only blood we could see was from his wounds so wherever he’d been attacked, it happened someplace else.”

  “And no sign of a wolf?”

  “None,” said Tripp, speaking for the first time.

  Ludo came back over to us. “Dina just got to the house…they’re on their way.” He looked at the cops. “She’s taken it pretty hard. I think she’s in shock.”

  We all walked into the hospital. I paced the waiting room of the emergency ward as Ludo stood by the windows, watching me. The cops went into the surgery bay. I knew that the only reason we were allowed so close to the action was because we were a cop family. I blew out a sigh.

  My brother.

  I hadn’t seen him in easily twenty years, just like I’d told Fulton and Tripp. My mother had given birth to him when she was just sixteen, and although my mom was in love with her boyfriend, later to be her husband and my dad, her own mother had forced her to give up Jackson in what was, as far as I know, one of California’s earliest open adoptions.

  By the time he was fourteen and I was a year old, his adoptive parents couldn’t cope with him and gave up custody of him. He came to live with us and my earliest memories of him are painful. I adored him and he tickled me. It wasn’t harmless. He tickled until it hurt. When I was three, he tried to drown the family dog, then me, when I rescued that poor flailing pooch.

  I almost died. He was very upset when I survived, according to my mother who pulled her professional strings and sent Jackson to a special camp for violent and disturbed youths. He was there six months, but when he returned, he was no better. In fact, to my four-year-old mind, he was worse. Now eighteen, he refused to go back to his birth parents. Legally speaking he was a free agent, but I worried about a guy like Jackson being turned loose on the world.