“Donuts?” Bailey laughed.
“Nah, Duncan Froehman. They had a lot to say about who I should look into and how I should do it. Got to the point I offered them a ladder-”
“A ladder?” I asked.
“Yeah, so they could climb out of my ass.”
I barked out a laugh but Bailey was all business.
“So what’d you get?” she asked.
“Nada. Just a boatload of genius suggestions from Antonovich’s advisers about pretty much everyone in the film business and half the folks in television. Apparently everyone who labors to fill screens large and small is envious of Mr. Blockbuster.”
“I’m about to check out the cell phone records,” Bailey said. “Maybe they’ll give us something we can work with.”
“Already done, jefe,” Harrellson replied. “I made a copy and highlighted a few calls that might be worth checking out. Antonovich’s record has a million different numbers, but there are some calls after the first text message from our bad guy we should check out. The girl was pretty consistent. Same numbers every day. Only found one stray number that wasn’t a store or a club.”
He handed the pages to Bailey, and I moved next to her so I could see. On Russell’s cell phone bill, Harrellson had highlighted a few calls that were made after the first kidnapping message-but before the ransom e-mail was sent. I held out Russell’s phone records. “Do you recognize any of these highlighted numbers?” I asked.
Harrellson glanced back at the pages. “Not yet. But from what I’ve seen, a lot of these clowns have multiple numbers and they may not all be listed. So it’ll take a minute to run ’em all down.”
We moved on to Hayley’s phone records for the past month.
One highlighted number jumped out at me. Hayley had made a call to Brittany Caren just three weeks ago. Bailey and I exchanged a look.
Bailey pulled out her cell phone. “This time, I make the call.” She punched in the number. And got Brittany’s voice mail. Then she punched in another number.
“Russell, this is Detective Keller. I’ve been trying to get hold of Brittany Caren, but I keep getting her voice mail. Can you put me in touch with her?” Bailey listened for a moment. “I don’t know that she does.” Bailey listened again. “Yes, that’d be great. Thank you.”
Five minutes later we were back in the car and headed to Hancock Park.
“So how’d you get her to pick up the phone?” I asked.
Bailey was threading her way through the traffic, taking surface streets because after three o’clock, the freeways were anything but free. Especially the 101. It crawled like a giant metal beast with thousands of agonizingly slow-moving parts.
