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Zalentine. Lionel’s philosophy was to sell the finest quality jewelry at the finest prices. By 1942, the year that Lionel gulped a huge glass of ice tea on one scorcher of a day and then sat down on a bench outside his shop and died, there were sixteen stores across California and Arizona. Lionel’s only son, Lansing Zalentine, had three favorite words, words he parroted in every meeting or company event. Lansing’s three words were
Expand, Expand, Expand
, and by his death in 1985, Zalentine Jewelers had expanded to over five hundred locations in the United States and Puerto Rico. Lansing’s oldest son, Vance Zalentine—the current Zalentine Diamond King—nearly doubled his father’s success by peppering shops in suburban retail malls across the United States and Canada. He had also moved the headquarters of the diamond franchise from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Vance married Amanda Whitaker, a former Miss Sacramento, in the late 1970s, and within a year she gave birth to a pair of identical twins—Adrien and Alain Zalentine.
    Cady recalled flying to Los Angeles three years earlier on a hasty one-day trip to interview the parents. Assistant Director Jund had made it abundantly clear that, due to the family’s stature in the community, he wanted his Special Agent in Charge to meet with both the diamond patriarch and his wife. Pure and simple politics: show the Zalentines that their sons’ murders would be receiving attention at the highest of levels.
    The one-time beauty pageant queen had been face-lifted and botoxed beyond anything this side of E.T. Amanda Zalentine sat still in the library, staring out the windows, off into the open space of the front garden. Mrs. Zalentine was a basket case and, if not for the melancholy look in her eyes, Cady would have thought her to be in a coma. Both her boys had been murdered, and so she sat, alone in the library, staring off into another time and place, most of her emotions medicated away.
    Her husband, Vance Zalentine, however, was a different cup of tea. “Those deviant little shits were nothing but trouble since they were five years old. They had this bond, were somehow hardwired into each other—one entity, almost—and eerie like a
Twilight Zone
.”
    The Zalentine mansion sat on a hillside in 90210, thirty acres screaming money, and the kind of place where if they refused to let you in, you’d need Eisenhower to plot the invasion. Mrs. Zalentine hadn’t been much help, nodding her head like a tilting bird to all of Cady’s questions. He switched gears and went into Zalentine’s workout room, the size of an airport runway, as Mr. Zalentine huffed and puffed on the Stairmaster.
    “It’s my fault, really,” Zalentine said, pointing a dripping arm toward the library from which Cady had just left Mrs. Zalentine. “I was so goddamned busy twenty-four-seven, I let the alky raise them. But I’ll never forget coming home early from a business trip one Friday afternoon, parking the Bentley, and then hearing a string of pops, like tires backfiring, coming from behind the pool house. I snuck around the gardener’s shed to see what was going on and I caught the little sociopaths red-handed.” Zalentine took deep gulps from his bottle of Evian and continued, “The twins had bought a dozen hamsters from some pet store, and here they were ramming these M-80 firecrackers up a hamster’s ass or sticking them down the poor thing’s throat and then lighting them off, one after another. Boom! Boom! Boom! Dead hamster parts all over the fucking lawn, a bloody mess. They were ten years old back then. I should have caned the living shit out of little twerps—you know, like they do in Singapore—then they might still be alive.”
    “Why did they stay out east after college?” Cady asked. “Why not come back home?”
    “That was my doing. I was hoping they might mature with time. So I trust-funded them with a generous monthly allowance in order to keep them fat and