Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  She looked up and said, “Not guilty!”

  “Tommy around?” Lucas asked.

  She turned to a door recessed into a short hallway and shouted, “Hey, Tommy. There are some cops looking for you. Might be federal.”

  Tommy Saito poked his head out of his office, looked at the three of them, and said, “Federal? Well, come in, I guess. What can I do for you? I pay all my taxes on time.”

  “Ahead of time,” the woman corrected.

  Saito held his office door open. Lucas led Bob and Rae in, where they found another wooden desk, sitting on a burnt-orange shag rug, with three visitors’ chairs facing the desk. Saito, a short, balding Asian American, maybe sixty years old, dropped into the chair behind the desk. The wall behind him was covered with framed photos, snapshots of the same woman and three children at a variety of ages, and some shots of other kids, even younger, who might be grandchildren.

  Lucas showed Saito his ID, then took copies of Deese’s, Beauchamps’s, and Nast’s mug shots out of his jacket pocket, unfolded them, and pushed them across the desk.

  “Have you seen any of these guys in here?”

  Saito looked at all three, pushed Nast’s back across the desk, and said, “We don’t get many black dudes in here. Of those we do, he ain’t one of them.”

  He lingered over Deese’s photo for a moment, then pushed it back across the desk as well. “This guy looks sorta familiar, but if he’s been in it was a long time ago. I’m saying, like, more than a year, and maybe a few. He’s got a face you remember.”

  He looked at Beauchamps’s photo the longest, then said, “This guy comes in every once in a while, checking out the divorced chicks. Usually takes one home with him—wherever home is. I don’t know why I think this, but I don’t believe he’s from right around here. Maybe he told me once that he comes over here for business reasons and likes to stop in for a burger, fries, and a divorcee.”

  “You know any divorcees he’s taken home?”

  Saito looked at the photo for another moment, then yelled, “Heather! Come here a minute, will you?”

  The woman came in, said, “I heard the question,” looked at the photo, then turned and peered at a window covered by drawn blinds, pointed a finger at Saito, and said, “Suzie-Q.”

  Rae: “Really? Suzie-Q?”

  Saito said, “That’s not really her name. We call her that because she used to play an old Creedence song on our jukebox every time she came in. She lives at one of the condos in Marina, I know that for sure. She walks over here couple times a week. What the hell is her name? I know it . . .”

  Heather had gone back to staring at the blinds, then said, “Jackman.”

  Saito said, “Barbara . . . ?”

  Heather said, “That’s it. Barbara Jackman.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WROTE the name in his notebook. Then he said, “A friend of Mr. Beauchamps said he could be contacted by calling here. Do you know why that would be?”

  Both Saito and Heather looked genuinely surprised; either innocence or excellent acting. Saito shook his head. “Not here. Are you sure it’s ours?”

  Lucas looked in his notebook and recited the number. Saito said, “That’s not our number,” but Heather said, “That’s a pay phone.”

  Saito said, “Really?” like he wished Heather had kept her mouth shut. Then to Lucas: “We have a pay phone back by the restrooms. Some of our customers don’t want to use their own sometimes . . .”

  “I know how that goes,” Rae said. “Don’t want your dealer calling you up or even having your cell number on his phone.”

  “Not just dealers . . . Okay, maybe sometimes,” Saito said. “But what are you gonna do? The phone kicks out two hundred dollars a week, so . . . we need the cash.”

  “If you want to get in touch with Beauchamps, you couldn’t call the phone and hope that he’s walking by. Not if he comes in only every few weeks,” Bob said.

  Lucas: “We were told you had to call after nine o’clock Los Angeles time.”

  Saito said, “After nine o’clock?” and looked again at Heather, who said, “It’s that goddamn Englishman. I kept telling you he was gonna be trouble.”

  Saito said to Lucas, “Ah, jeez. It’s gotta be Oliver. God, I hate that. He’s been with us for, what, eight years?”

  Lucas: “Oliver?”

  Saito sighed. “Oliver Haar. He’s this English guy that works the door at night. Got a hard nose, when he needs it, keeps the peace when required. The phone’s right down the hall from his spot at the door. He come on at six, works until we throw everybody out at two.”

  Bob: “Has he had any trouble with the law?”

  Heather: “There was a rumor—”

  Saito: “Just a rumor.”

  Heather: “That he needed to make himself scarce in London and wound up here. He’s at the door, the women like him—the accent, and all that.”

  Saito: “And he looks good.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. “We may want to talk to him later. Don’t say a word to him about this. And don’t give him a hard time, no hints there might be a problem. Just let him work. Okay?”

  “Are you going to watch him?” Saito asked.

  Lucas shook his head. “No. If Oliver is only passing messages, he might not have any idea of who he’s talking to—or even that he’s talking to bad guys. It could be he’s calling burner phones, which wouldn’t get us anywhere.”

  “I gotta say, I’d hate to lose him,” Saito said.

  “I wouldn’t,” Heather said. “He’s a jerk.”

  “You need a jerk on the door,” Saito said. “Especially one with refined British manners.”

  “I’ll give you that,” Heather said, grudgingly.

  “I leave all that up to you,” Lucas said. “Again, don’t tip him off. This is a serious matter and you don’t want to be touched by it. But it’s also possible Oliver’s completely innocent.”

  Heather shook her head, not buying it.

  * * *

  —

  RAE CALLED TREMANTY, who opened by telling her they’d found a seventh grave and were pretty sure they had eight. “The pressure is building.”

  “We’re working,” Rae said. “We need to find a woman named Barbara Jackman who lives in Marina del Rey. Could you have somebody look?”

  “You got an actual lead?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Call you back soon as I can,” Tremanty said.

  Lucas, Bob, and Rae went back to the Marriott. Tremanty called as they were walking in the door. “I’ve got an address and some details. She’s had three traffic tickets over the past five years—speeding—and a small amount of marijuana picked up on one of them, before it was legal out there. She had the baggie sitting on the passenger seat. She got a fine, nothing else. Her driver’s license has a current photo. She works part-time as a real estate agent. There’s a better photo on her website, but she looks a lot younger than her license, so it may not be up-to-date. I asked for a credit report. It’ll all be in the email.”

  In Lucas’s room, they pulled up the email from Tremanty. Jackman’s driver’s license had a Marina del Rey address, a condo on Marina City Drive. They spotted it on Google Maps, a half mile away, and decided to drive over.

  “I’m feeling too lucky,” Bob said. “It’s making me nervous. We’re not working hard enough for this.”

  * * *

  —

  JACKMAN’S CONDO, a tall, circular, cake-shaped building, had a gatehouse with nobody in it. They parked in a “No Parking” area, along a curb, Rae unrolling a “Marshal’s Service” dashboard sign, but then an employee of the condominium jogged over to run them off and wound up guiding them into a legitimate spot and showing them to the elevators.

  “Five dollars says she isn’t home,” Bob said, as they
went up. “It’s too easy, I’m telling you.”

  They found her door, knocked, and ten seconds later Jackman cracked the door, peered over the chain, and asked, “Yes?”

  * * *

  —

  “I WANT TO KNOW who told you I went home with him,” Jackman said, when Lucas asked. They were inside her apartment, looking over the marina and out toward the ocean. She was angry. “It’s Oliver, isn’t it?”

  Jackman was a tall, attractive forty-three-year-old—they got her age from her license—with bouncy honey-blond hair and darker eyebrows and real two-carat diamonds in her ears. If she worked only part-time at the real estate office, she had money of her own, Lucas thought.

  “We haven’t met an Oliver,” Lucas said. “Even if we had, we couldn’t tell you who our source was. Listen. We don’t think you did anything wrong. Your social life is your social life and we’re not interested. We want to know where you went, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know where, exactly,” Jackman said. “It’s over by Pasadena, north of the 210. It was a half hour from here, at eleven o’clock at night, in a Cadillac, and forty-five minutes coming home at three o’clock in the morning by Uber.”

  “That’s raw,” Rae said. “He didn’t drive you home?”

  “Called an Uber, put me out on the street,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since. If I had, I’d have given him another piece of my mind, on top of the piece he’d already got.”

  “You think you could find—”

  “No, I couldn’t. It was almost midnight when we got there, and I’d had a few drinks and wasn’t paying much attention. It’s a standard suburban, upper-middle California neighborhood that looks like a million other places. Saw a nice Spanish Revival house on the way—I’d put it at a million-five, maybe two, depending on condition. Now that I’m thinking about it, it was probably not in Pasadena but maybe Altadena. But you know what? Since you’re the FBI—”

  Bob: “Marshals Service.”

  “Whatever . . . I know how you could find him. He had a regular phone in the bedroom. When he went off to the bathroom, I called myself on it.”

  Rae: “You called?”

  “Yeah. So I’d have a record of his phone number, if I wanted to call him up. I never wanted to, it turns out. I didn’t tell him about calling myself, though.”

  Lucas: “You still have . . . ?”

  She got her purse, got her phone, thumbed through it, and said, “Ready?”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY LEFT, going down in the elevators, Bob said, “I’m telling you, it’s too easy.”

  “Gift horse,” Lucas said. “Don’t look in the mouth.”

  “I’m with Bob,” Rae said. “You haven’t been on many fugitive things like this, Lucas. Maybe one, down in Texas, right?”

  “A couple more up in Minnesota,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, but those were amateurs. You’ve only done one hard-core guy,” Rae said. “What you find out is, you always have trouble. It might be spread out, so you have trouble all the way through the operation, or everything can be sweet, but then, right at the end, a pile of trouble jumps up and bites you on the butt. Always.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, but it sounds like superstition,” Lucas said. They walked out through the lobby, and Lucas put his sunglasses on. “You two haven’t worked with a sophisticated, well-dressed investigator like myself, so you don’t appreciate how smoothly things can go. With you guys, it’s always combat fatigues, guns, kicking down doors.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Bob said. “And you can take your well-dressed sophistication with about two pounds of beach sand and pack it up your ass.”

  “That’s the Marine Corps talking,” Rae said to Lucas. “The whole packing sand thing.”

  “Ask Tremanty to check that phone number. We need to get over there—Pasadena, or wherever it is,” Lucas said. “She said forty-five minutes at three in the morning. At this time of day, it could be two hours. The fuckin’ traffic here is unbelievable.”

  Rae called Tremanty, who was back to them in five minutes with an address for the hardwired phone. “You guys are like some kind of geniuses,” he said.

  “We already knew that,” Lucas said, “but we try to keep it quiet.” He wrote the address in his notebook and said to Bob and Rae, “Altadena Drive. Suzie-Q knew where she was.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  They took both the Malibus, one silver, one black, Lucas driving on his own, Bob and Rae together, following their iPhone navigation apps up a number of freeways that began to sound like a bad California surfer song: the 405 to the 10 to the 110 to the 210—the thighbone connected to the hipbone, the hipbone connected to the iPhone—and then off into a welter of streets that began climbing the first low foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

  The landscape was lush: towering royal palms mixing it up with darker, heavyset pines, and flowering bushes in scarlet and brilliant yellow, and everywhere two thousand shades of green, all behind wrought-iron fences with long, wide driveways.

  They cruised, a hundred yards apart, past the target. The house was a sprawling, single-story ranch, with a curving driveway that led to a two-car garage partly obscured by foliage. A six-foot hedge ran along the front and sides of the property, separating it from its neighbors. They couldn’t see the backyard, but it looked as overgrown as the front.

  After cruising the place, they drove out to a coffee shop on Lake Avenue and got coffee, and Bob also got donuts. Lucas brought up an Altadena map on his iPad and then a satellite view of the house, which told them almost nothing because of the heavy foliage across the whole block. They could see the bright blue corner of a swimming pool at the back.

  “Did you see the house for sale across the street, a couple houses down the block?” Bob asked. “Bart Carver Realty?”

  “I saw it, didn’t think about it,” Lucas said. “Why?”

  “Because it looked empty, unswept, like maybe there’s nobody living there right now, or only part-time. You can see Suzie-Q’s house from there; you’re looking right up the driveway. If the for sale house is empty and we could get in there . . .”

  “We’ve done it before,” Rae said to Lucas. “We can get comfortable, and it gets the cars off the street.”

  “I’ve done it myself, but I knew the real estate guy,” Lucas said. He thought about it, then said, “I’d rather not ask Rocha for help, not until we know what we’ve got. She’d want in.”

  “Why don’t we go lay some heavy-duty marshal shit on this Bart Carver?” Bob suggested. “Can’t hurt.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. That’s better than anything I’ve got.”

  * * *

  —

  AS A REAL ESTATE BROKER, selling million-dollar houses, Bart Carver should have been easy to find, but wasn’t—there was nobody at his office at eight o’clock, and the first of his associates that they managed to reach didn’t believe they were marshals and thought Lucas was trying to lure her out of her town house to sell her into sex slavery. The second associate had a similar attitude, without the paranoia, but agreed to call Carver and ask him to call Lucas.

  Carver, who didn’t call back until ten o’clock, happened to be at a chamber orchestra performance that his wife made him go to—or so he claimed when they spoke with him. The house, he said, was indeed empty, but he couldn’t possibly let anyone in the place without checking with the owners, who’d certainly be asleep at ten o’clock. When Lucas doubted that and got loud, if not actually threatening, Carver agreed to try to call.

  “Have them call me,” Lucas said.

  The owners called Lucas ten minutes later. “We’re happy to cooperate with law enforcement officers, but that’s an expensive house and we don’t want it damaged in any way.”

  “We will be sitting in a window with a pair of binocula
rs. Your neighbors will never know that we are even there,” Lucas promised.

  “Could we talk about it tomorrow? We’re down in San Diego, but we’ve got to come up there in the morning.”

  “Let me check with my guys,” Lucas said. “Hang on.”

  “It’s already late,” said Rae, who’d been listening. “What are we gonna do in the middle of the night? Let’s bag out at the hotel, do some planning, meet the owners up here.”

  Lucas agreed and told the owners that they’d meet in the morning. The guy they were talking to said, “Listen, wear jeans. And T-shirts . . . Maybe bring some gloves.”

  “Why?”

  “To scratch our backs if we scratch yours.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY MET with the owners at a Jack in the Box. They turned out to be two burly, middle-aged gay men, Stephen Barnett and Luis Jimenez, who’d decided to get out of LA. “We expect that next summer will get days that are 120 degrees, if not hotter. It’ll be Saudi Arabia, only with margaritas and the dumber movie stars.”

  They were transferring their construction business to San Diego, they said, which they expected to stay cooler.

  “We’re moving down there piece by piece,” Barnett said. “There’s still some furniture in the house. I imagine you’re looking for Craig, right? Big black guy?”

  “We’re uncertain of the names they’re using,” Lucas said. Rae pushed the mug shots across the table, and they instantly picked out Nast.

  “He’s an asshole,” Barnett said. “When I say that, I’m insulting other assholes. He’d see us driving by and stick his thumb in his mouth and suck on it. I’ve been tempted to go after him with a baseball bat.”

  “You’d need a baseball bat,” Jimenez said. “The guy is huge. And he’s no debutante. He looks like he’s done hard time. He’s got the attitude.”