Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  “No, he’s worried about his personal safety. If these marshals grab you, you’ll be looking at the death penalty and you might be tempted to make a deal. Rog wants you gone and he’s willing to pay. He thinks you probably need the money.”

  “How much?”

  “Quarter million.”

  Deese laughed. “Man, I had a quarter million six months ago and I spent it. That ain’t gonna do it. Tell him to call me when he gets real.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  When Lucas got back to the Tahoe after talking with Smith and Santos, Bob asked, “Well?”

  “We’re looking for a guy named Martin Keller, or Martin Lawrence, who may live in Marina del Rey, or maybe Los Angeles or Las Vegas, and who has done time.”

  “Who’s he?” Rae asked.

  Lucas replayed the conversation he’d had with Roger Smith, and Rae said, “If Keller or Lawrence has been in the system, Tremanty can find him for us. We’ve got to tell him about this.”

  Lucas called Tremanty, put the phone on speaker so the others could hear, repeated the conversation with Smith a second time, with some editing, and included the phone number Smith had given him. Tremanty asked, “You’re going to Los Angeles?”

  “Depending on what you find out,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll put a priority on this and bounce everything we’ve got to your federal email. If either of those names are real or known aliases and he’s in the system, you’ll have it before you get back to your hotel.”

  “All right. There was another guy there, with Smith. He said his name was Dick.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  Lucas described him, and Tremanty said, “His name is Richard, or Ricardo, Santos. He’s a second-generation Cuban American; his grandparents left the country when Castro came in. He seems to be Smith’s assistant, but there are rumors that he’s Smith’s connection to the other bad boys in New Orleans. He has a degree in chemistry from the University of Miami.”

  “Chemistry? Really?”

  “Apparently legit. Of course, a chemistry degree can be used for a lot of things that aren’t legit.”

  “I can tell you he makes a nicely foamed cappuccino,” Lucas said.

  “There you go,” Tremanty said. “I’ve started a file on him; not much in it—yet. I’ll send it to you, with the files on Martin Keller or Martin Lawrence.”

  Bob: “Back to the suites?”

  * * *

  —

  THEY GATHERED in Lucas’s room and looked over his shoulder as he paged through the incoming FBI files.

  Martin Keller/Lawrence’s real name was Marion Beauchamps. He was first arrested for armed robbery in New Orleans in the early 2000s. He spent two years in the C. Paul Phelps Correctional Center, released a year early for good behavior. He never showed with his parole officer, and a brief investigation indicated that he’d gone to Los Angeles. Louisiana put a hold on him with the Los Angeles police, but he was never picked up.

  He was arrested in Los Angeles in 2010 on a robbery charge under the name Raymond Carter, but was released on bail before his true identity was determined, and he never showed for trial.

  He was arrested again in 2014 under the name of Martin Keller after he was badly beaten in a fight at a nightclub, which he’d apparently started, a serious miscalculation on his part. When he was transported in an ambulance, he was found to be holding an ounce of cocaine. Through a processing error at Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center, he was not confined to a secure ward and walked out of the hospital on his own, again before his real identity had been established.

  A note in his file said “Contact LuAnne Rocha, Los Angeles Police Department, Robbery Special Section.”

  “Nobody’s heard from him in years,” Rae said. “He could be anywhere. He could be dead.”

  “Maybe LuAnne Rocha knows,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  THE PHONE NUMBER that Smith had provided went to a bar in Venice, California, called Flower Child’s. Lucas had been both in Marina del Rey and Venice. “They’re on the coast, right next to each other, and right there in LA,” he told Bob and Rae. “Smith might even have been telling the truth about some of this.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED LuAnne Rocha, identified himself.

  “We’re looking for a guy named Marion Beauchamps, who you guys have arrested under the names Raymond Carter and Martin Keller, but you might also know him as Martin Lawrence . . .”

  “I mostly believe you, but how do I know for sure you’re not actually Beauchamps calling to find out what I know?” Rocha asked.

  Lucas routed Rocha through the U.S. Marshals Service to Russell Forte, who confirmed Lucas’s identity, and Rocha called back. She had a sweet soprano voice that might have belonged to a young kindergarten teacher. “If you find him, let me know. That asshole has caused me more trouble than any other ten guys I can think of,” she said sweetly.

  “He’s still in LA?”

  “Almost for sure. I hadn’t heard that Lawrence name, though. Where did you get that?” she asked.

  “We’ve been asking around here in New Orleans. We’re actually looking for his brother, a man named Clayton Deese,” Lucas said. “He’s the guy who killed and buried all those people we’re digging up in Louisiana. We think he might have run out there, looking for help from Beauchamps.”

  “Jesus, must have had great family gatherings, huh?” Rocha said. “Sit around and bullshit about mugging techniques.”

  “Why’s Beauchamps so high on your list?” Lucas asked.

  “Because he’s involved in home invasions in Beverly Hills, Brentwood . . . uh, one in Pacific Palisades, two in Malibu, a couple in the Hollywood Hills . . . Like that,” Rocha said. “We picked up his prints on a pen we found in a driveway of one of the homes his gang hit, probably fell out of the door of their van. They’ve got a regular pattern: four guys, masked, driving a fake service vehicle—a plumber’s or an electrician’s, or maybe cable TV.”

  “Same van, not stolen?”

  “No, probably not stolen, as far as we know, but really common: a white Ford Transit. We think they’ve got magnetic license plates, or some other way, to get them on and off in a hurry. When they get to the house, we can see the Transit, but they’ve pulled the plates, so they’re not recorded on security cameras. There are a billion vans exactly like it in LA.”

  “Interesting,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. They’ve thought about it, how to do it. They do their research, they know how many people are in the house, never hit anybody with a huge profile—no movie stars, nothing like that. The victims are always way rich, always have at least a few hundred million, and a couple were legitimate billionaires. Houses are always secluded, behind electronic gates. We think they use a code reader to pick up the signals between a victim’s car and the gates. They go in immediately after the owners come back from a night out. They pull in, close the gates, drive up to the front door, hit the door with a battering ram cut from a telephone pole—the victims have seen it; it’s one of their signature techniques—and they are all over the victims in a matter of a minute or so.”

  “Anybody get killed?”

  “Not yet, but they go in with guns, and they’ve beaten a few people pretty badly. They’ll kill somebody, sooner or later. They threaten to rape the wives or daughters, if they’re around. They loot the house. They don’t just take cash, they take watches, jewelry, coin collections, anything valuable that can be broken down and sold. No easily identifiable artworks, like paintings,” Rocha said. “Their net, believe it or not, is close to a million bucks a hit. They probably only clear two hundred thousand or so, but still. And no taxes. The people they hit are always very rich couples, and the wives usually have a pound of diamonds stuck in a bedroom safe,” Rocha said.

 
“And Beauchamps is involved in all of them?”

  “Yes, we think so. We think he’s the leader. One victim had a solid gold paperweight commissioned by his wife. It was a lump of gold the size of my fist, made by melting down a pile of pure gold coins and having an artist sculpt it to look like the victim’s wife’s breasts. The raw gold was worth something like forty thousand dollars. Anyway, we put out a bulletin, and the Vegas cops happened to raid a fence a couple weeks after the home invasion and found the gold tits before the fence could melt them. One of the cops remembered our bulletin and called. The fence identified Keller—Beauchamps—from his mug shots.”

  “Okay. He’s around.”

  “Yeah. We’ve got one other suspect—and when I say ‘suspect,’ I mean ‘for sure’—named Jayden Nast. He’s a very large, violent black guy. He goes straight for the wives, tells them what he’ll do to them if they don’t pop that safe, how he’s going to pop her balloon knot. These are well-tended women who can’t deal with, uh, you know, the situation, the threats. It’s all very calculated: he’s a frightener and knows how to do it.”

  “I don’t know . . . What’s a ‘balloon knot’?”

  “You know, you look inside a balloon knot, it sort of looks like a sphincter muscle,” Rocha said. “Like an anus.”

  “Got it,” Lucas said. “How’d you ID him?”

  “One of the women gave him some lip and he smacked her in the face, broke her nose, knocked her down, and she grabbed his ankle and scratched him. He pulled her back up—by the hair—and she gave up the combination to the safe, but she kept her hand curled up and got us some solid DNA. He went in the database in 2011 on a felony assault charge, pled down, got out, but stayed in the base. So we’re sure.”

  “Then we’re looking for Beauchamps or this Jayden Nast, who could take us to Beauchamps, who then could take us to Deese.”

  “If you get even a whiff of Beauchamps or Nast, I want to hear about it,” Rocha said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a dozen billionaires on your back, and on the chief’s back, and on the mayor’s back, some of them major political donors, all of them demanding that the guy get caught and hanged?”

  “You think that’s worse than chasing a cannibal?”

  After a few seconds, Rocha said, “I gotta hand it to you, a cannibal serial killer would be right up there. But he’s not my cannibal, he’s yours. You coming out here?”

  “Very soon,” Lucas said.

  “Call me. Pay attention when I say that Nast is violent. We’ve backtracked him all the way to his gangbanger days down in South-Central. This is a guy who likes to hurt people. He supposedly once worked over an ex-girlfriend with brass knuckles, ruined her face. Everybody says one other thing: he hates cops. There are rumors that he’s killed cops. We don’t know if that’s true or where it might have happened. Probably not here, but the rumors are persistent. Pay attention, okay? A guy, with guns, who hates cops.”

  “Gotcha.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HAD HAD the phone on speaker, and when he hung up Bob asked, “We going?”

  “We’re going.”

  “Hot dog. We going,” Bob said to Rae.

  Rae said, “Be still my beating heart.”

  Bob said, “You didn’t tell Rocha about the phone number.”

  “I want to take a look at this bar, see who we can find,” Lucas said. “Rocha would take down Deese if she had the chance, but she really wants Beauchamps and Nast. That’s her priority, not ours. If she grabs Beauchamps, we might lose our connection to Deese.”

  “I’ll buy that,” Rae said. “If we get Deese, we’ll probably get Beauchamps anyway. Might not work the other way around. When are we leaving?”

  “I’ll call Russ Forte’s assistant,” Lucas said. “We’ve got reading to do . . . I’m thinking tomorrow morning—early.”

  * * *

  —

  GETTING FROM New Orleans to Los Angeles wasn’t as simple as it should have been, and they didn’t get out early. Check-in always took time, with the bag full of guns and armor that Bob and Rae traveled with, and they finally made it into LAX on a Delta flight at one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Because feds were so identified with SUVs, and local cops with beaters, they rented two Chevy Malibus from Avis. Lucas had been in Los Angeles any number of times and usually stayed in Santa Monica, at Shutters on the Beach. He didn’t think it was likely that the Marshals Service would go for rooms at Shutters, so they checked into the Marina del Rey Marriott. They didn’t get suites, which disappointed Bob and Rae, but they did get views of the marina and, Bob noticed, a Cheesecake Factory. They were a ten-minute walk from Flower Child’s Bar and Grill on Washington Boulevard.

  They were out of the hotel by four o’clock; the day was clear and warm, the temperature in the upper 70s, with only a fitful breeze coming off the ocean and into their faces as they walked down to the bar: all reasons to live in LA, including the smell of the ocean.

  Flower Child’s was in a low, two-story stucco building a few blocks from the Pacific, with a pink-striped awning over the sidewalk. The awning was also decorated with painted flowers, marijuana leaves, and ukuleles.

  Inside, a central bar divided a front room from a room in back. The bar was wrapped with thin lighted tubes in pastel pink, green, and yellow that made it look like a vintage jukebox. The front room had open tables of various sizes and was brightly lit, with customers reading newspapers as they ate. The back room was darker and lined with booths, about a third of them occupied.

  They took a booth in the very back, Bob on one side of the table, Lucas and Rae on the other. A waitress came over and said, “The burgers are great . . . What do you want to drink?” She was wearing turquoise eye shadow, a tube top, and short shorts, and had a collection of rings piercing the lip of her navel. A tattoo of a boa constrictor started at the nape of her neck, ran down her back beneath the tube top, reappeared below it, and followed her spine down into her shorts. She was chewing gum.

  “Nice ink,” Bob said.

  “Thanks. An old boyfriend did it for me. It goes all the way down between my cheeks.”

  “That’s a lotta fine information,” Rae said.

  “Well, you know . . .” she said, rolling her eyes. “Whatever . . .”

  They all got burgers and fries, and Lucas got a Diet Coke and Bob and Rae ordered Dos Equis. A song that sounded vaguely familiar to Lucas was playing through the sound system but he couldn’t quite place it. Bob identified it as “Plastic Fantastic Lover” by Jefferson Airplane, “which is about right for this place.”

  When the waitress came back with the Coke and beers, she told them that a flower child tribute band played in the back room in the evenings: “Mamas and Papas, Lovin’ Spoonful—that kinda shit. I get outta here before it comes on, to tell the truth. I’m afraid it’ll suck the brain right outta my ear.”

  “Is the owner a flower child?” Lucas asked.

  She snorted. “No. He’s whatever he thinks the bar should be. It used to be called Hang Eleven, because he thought he might get the wannabe surfers. Before that, it was called Duder’s, because of that movie. And, before that, it was called Shredder’s. The name changes, nothing else does. We even use the same ‘Under New Management’ sign. Tourists and locals during the day, middle-aged meat rack at night. Guys with gold chains.”

  “Guys still do that?” Rae asked.

  “They do here.” She checked out Lucas, then Bob. “If you two’re looking for love, you’d do okay.” And to Rae: “You’re more upscale.”

  Made them laugh, and when she went to get the burgers Bob said, “She’s workin’ us for tips.”

  “Probably gonna get ’em, too,” Rae said.

  * * *

  —

  THE BURGERS were great, like the waitress said, the fries hot, salty, grea
sy, like they should be. They were halfway through the meal when a couple of uniformed LA cops came in, pulled off their sunglasses, and looked around. They picked a booth in the back, and both of them looked long and hard at the three marshals as they went by. The waitress knew the two, called them by their first names.

  After they ordered, they were still looking at Lucas and Rae—they couldn’t see Bob from where they were sitting—and Rae muttered, “The cops made us.”

  “Yeah, I think.” He fished his ID out of his pocket and said, “Be right back.”

  With the waitress nowhere in sight, he slid out of the booth, walked over to the cops, and laid the ID on the table. “Appreciate it if you could keep quiet about this,” Lucas said.

  “Something happening here?” one of the cops asked.

  “We’re looking for a guy who might come in here sometimes,” Lucas said. “You know the owner?”

  “Tommy? Yeah. He’s okay,” one of the cops said, “mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “He used to sell a little cocaine and weed, to make ends meet. Not so much the last couple of years, though. Too much competition.”

  “You think he’d talk to us?”

  “Oh, sure. He’s friendly enough. He likes to have cops come by—keeps the riffraff down. He’s got an office upstairs, the stairway’s back by the restrooms. Name’s Tommy Saito. He’s usually up there afternoons and evenings, if he’s not down here.”

  Lucas rapped his knuckles on the table. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY’D finished the meal and paid and over-tipped, they wandered down the hallway in back, past the restrooms, then up a flight of wide wooden stairs to the office suite. A door with a tall glass window had a sign that said “Come In,” so they went in, where they found a heavyset woman sitting behind a wooden desk, going through what looked like charge slips and pounding on a dictionary-sized calculator.