Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  A dog started barking inside, and then Lucas heard a woman’s voice: “Be quiet, Willa. Shhh.”

  * * *

  —

  NOTHING WAS MOVING at the back door, so Lucas walked back around to the front. A short, stocky brown-haired woman was standing on the stoop. Rae held up her ID and badge and asked her if there was anyone else in the trailer and the woman said, “No,” and Rae asked her if it was okay if they took a look.

  “I really have a problem with law people pushing into my house,” the woman said.

  “We’re not pushing,” Rae said. “We’re asking permission. If you say no, we won’t. But we will get a warrant, which means we’ll all be standing here for two or three hours, in the heat, until we do. And then if there’s nobody in there, it’ll all have been an annoying waste of time.”

  Bob added, “We’re looking for some very dangerous people—the people you are renting from. There’s a murder warrant out for one of them and armed robbery warrants out for all of them.”

  The woman: “What!”

  Rae: “You see why we can’t take a chance that you’re hiding someone. The last time we went after them, they shot two law enforcement officers.”

  “What!”

  Bob said, “We don’t want to look at any of your personal papers or other possessions, we want to make sure we don’t get shot in the back. That’s the truth. So . . .”

  The woman let them in, said her name was Kerry Black, not Kelly, as the manager had said. Bob and Rae cleared the place. That done, all five of them, plus the black-and-white border collie, Willa, crowded into the kitchen.

  Black said she’d rented the trailer from a blond woman after seeing an advertisement on the Las Vegas Craigslist. “She said she wanted somebody reliable who wouldn’t wreck the place and said Willa was okay. They wanted only three hundred a month, which was great for me. I couldn’t even believe it.”

  Lucas: “How do you get in touch with them?”

  “I don’t. I mail the rent on the first of the month. If there are problems, I’m supposed to talk to the manager.”

  “You don’t have a phone number?”

  “No. All I’ve got is an address,” she said. “I’ll tell you, though, I watch my checking account and they haven’t cashed my July or August checks yet.”

  “Not picking the checks up?” Rae said to Lucas. “Maybe they don’t care about money.”

  Lucas asked if the owners had left anything behind, and Black said “Well, the furniture. There’s some junk in a closet and some barbecue stuff and a grill.”

  “The junk in the closet—could we see it?”

  The closet contained a cardboard box of Blu-ray movie disks and some country music CDs, old venetian blinds, an ancient vacuum cleaner with a frayed electric cord, a bowling ball in a bag that looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, two cases of empty beer bottles, and a litter of dead flies. Black said she’d looked in there when she first rented the place, but then closed the door and hadn’t really looked in since except when she’d played some of the movies.

  “Did you put them back in the box?”

  “No, they’re sitting on top of the DVD player.”

  Lucas told her that they would talk to the FBI about sending a crime scene team around to check all the left behind stuff for fingerprints and asked her not to touch any of it.

  “Do you think I’ll get kicked out of here?” she asked. “I’m going to college, but I don’t have any money and I’m waitressing my way through and this place is a super deal for me and Willa . . .”

  “I don’t know why you’d get kicked out. But if the owners come back, you gotta call us. Be really, really careful if they do,” Lucas said. He wrote down the address where she sent the rent in his notebook.

  * * *

  —

  OUTSIDE, Bob said, “We’ve gotta have the crime scene guys check that grill.”

  Rae: “Ah, jeez, I don’t want to think about that.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS SAID, “Somebody’s lying to us, and I don’t think it was that kid. I think it’s the manager. Though I can think of some complicated ways that it might not be.”

  “Tell me,” Bob said.

  “Well, we set off an alarm back at the Forum. Somebody spotted one of us—probably me—and made a call here, where the phone was answered. That means there’s a connection here. And I don’t think it was the kid.”

  “She’s got the cheap rent,” Rae said.

  “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s her. I don’t think she’s that good a liar. And I doubt they’d consider her reliable. I think it’s probably the manager. I think she takes messages and relays them. Somebody spotted me in the Forum and called her. Then, she waited to see if we’d show up. That would tell them that we’re watching the phone and we know about this place. So she’s probably got another burner phone that we don’t know about that goes directly to Beauchamps or one of the others. And Beauchamps probably dumped that phone immediately after she called.”

  “If you’re right, we’ve gone backwards.”

  “Unless Earl, the phone guy, can pull up the call she made. She probably called right after she took the call from the Forum and right after we showed up. If he can find it, we could still be hanging in.”

  “We could try for a warrant to search her trailer,” Rae said.

  Lucas shook his head. “We wouldn’t get it. We don’t have anything like what we’d need for a warrant. For one thing, it could be the kid. But it could be somebody like the manager’s neighbor. She’s home all day with the baby, nothing going on, then three marshals show up at her front door. She’s gonna talk about it.”

  “I asked her not to,” Rae said.

  Bob: “Right. That was a half hour ago. I bet she’s told only eight of her closest friends, after having them double-swear to keep it secret.”

  Lucas said, “I’ll call Tremanty and have him call Earl. I don’t think he can do what we want him to without any phone numbers, but we can try.”

  “Maybe get some dessert over at the Cheesecake Factory?” Bob said. “You know, while we wait for Earl to call back.”

  “I think we need to go talk to this Toni and Calvin Wright, see if they have anything interesting to say about the home invasion,” Lucas said.

  Bob groaned. “We’re not going to get to the Cheesecake Factory, are we? Ever?”

  “It’s open late,” Rae said. “And I want to talk to the Wrights, too. If I gotta be there, so do you.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED the Wrights using the number he’d gotten from Mallow, the Las Vegas cop. Toni Wright answered, said that Mallow had told them that Lucas would be calling. Lucas said, “I know it’s getting late . . .”

  “Not in Vegas. Come on over,” Wright said.

  The Wrights lived in a walled residential community called Kensington Gardens, in what would be the shadow—in the daytime—of two bland condominium towers northwest of the Strip. On the way there, Rae said, “Oh my God,” and pointed. “Another Cheesecake Factory.”

  “I’m being taunted by God,” Bob said, as they drove past.

  “I don’t think you’re important enough for that,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  TONI AND CALVIN WRIGHT resembled each other: dark-eyed with short dark hair, gym-conditioned, sleek as otters. “These men were all over us,” Calvin said. “They knocked down the door one minute after we came in, we never had a chance. Toni and I study tae kwon do, so we can take care of ourselves in a straight-up fight, but they had guns. They knew what they were doing. Never had a chance.”

  “They said if we didn’t open the safe, they’d rape me until I did or I couldn’t,” Toni said, and she started to cloud up. “There was nothing Cal could have done, either. They’d have kil
led him.”

  The men wore ski masks, but the physical descriptions fit Beauchamps, Deese, and Cole: Beauchamps, large and blocky; the other two, mid-height and thin. “Somebody else drove their car, but we didn’t see him,” Calvin said. “We know because when they went out the door, the car started up before they could have gotten to it.”

  “Could be the woman,” Rae said to Lucas.

  Toni Wright said her loss in jewelry would be over a half million dollars. “I had a collection of vintage Indian jewelry made by Charles Loloma, the most famous Indian artist ever. The thing is, the stones themselves aren’t worth much—coral and lapis lazuli and turquoise, and so on. Some of the settings were gold, but really, in terms of dollars, not more than a few thousand if you melted it down. If they’re looking for real money, they’d have to sell it intact, and there wouldn’t be many buyers. Indian art dealers, that’s about it. I’ve been trolling through some local places, seeing if I can spot any of it.”

  “If they sold it to Indian art dealers, how much would they get?” Lucas asked.

  She said, “It’s worth a quarter million, retail. So . . . you’d know better than me how much they’d get from a fence. I had twenty-two pieces, some of Loloma’s best things. If they broke them down for the gold and the stones, it’d be a tragedy and be worth only a few thousand, if that.”

  “What about the rest of the half million?” Bob asked.

  “I had a hundred and fifty thousand in a pair of earrings that Cal gave me when we got married. Great stones—three carats each, E color, flawless, brilliant cut.”

  Calvin Wright said, “Great stones, but they’re nothing, like, unique. They’re not like the Loloma stuff. Pull them out of the settings and they’re totally anonymous.”

  Toni said, “The rest of it was gold and platinum bracelets, three watches, plus a ring by Belperron and a pearl necklace. Not really a collection, but the Belperron was worth a ton. I’d kill to get it back.”

  Lucas began, “This person, Belle Perron . . .”

  “One name. Belperron is her last name, Suzanne Belperron, she was French. Long gone now,” Toni said.

  “So the ring would be, what, worth more intact or in pieces?”

  “Oh. Far, far more intact. It’s like the Loloma, each one is unique,” she said. “I gave the police copies of the insurance photos; we haven’t settled with the insurer yet, there might be a lawsuit.”

  There had also been currency in the safe, mostly in dollars, but also an uncertain amount in euros and Chinese renminbi—the Wrights thought the total would be the equivalent of five or six thousand dollars. Toni Wright had managed to save her diamond-encrusted wedding ring by turning it around on her finger so that it displayed only its thin platinum band.

  When they’d cleaned the safe out, the robbers had locked chains around the Wrights’ ankles, with the chains looped around a couch. They’d put the Wrights’ cell phones on the kitchen counter. “We had to carry the couch into the kitchen before we could get to our phones and call the police,” Calvin said. “That took a while, fifteen or twenty minutes, you know, because we had to go up the steps to the kitchen and then down the hallway. It was a tight squeeze. And that goddamn couch was heavy.”

  Rae looked at Lucas and said, “It’s them. No doubt about it. They did the couch thing in LA.”

  “One thing that you should know that I didn’t think of until tonight,” Calvin said. “It might not be important, but it was dark and we never saw their car, really. There’s not much traffic here, and I think I saw their taillights going out the exit. They turned left, went west, but there’s not a lot to the west of us—we’re right on the edge of town. They could have been going to the parkway and then east, but it’d be a weird way to do it. Or they could have been going out to the Beltway, but that’s right on the edge of civilization.”

  Lucas: “So, you think wherever they’re hiding might be on the west side of town rather than downtown or the Strip or . . .”

  “Or anywhere east, yeah. Don’t know if that helps.”

  “The small stuff helps,” Lucas said. “We add it all up and it helps.”

  “One other small thing, but I’m not sure I’m right about this because Cal says he didn’t see it,” Toni Wright said. “One of them, not the big man but one of the others, was wearing jeans, and there was something about one of his legs. It . . . It was fat around the knee, like he might have had a bandage on it. The other leg looked like, you know, nothing, but this one looked too fat. To me anyway. I wondered if he might have had to go to a doctor for something.”

  Rae: “You’ve got a good eye.”

  “There’s a major medical center out here,” Calvin Wright said. “If he’s out here on the west side and he got bit by a dog, or something, he might have gone to their emergency room.”

  Bob said to Lucas, “He probably would have paid cash.”

  Lucas: “Especially if he got a prescription.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY LEFT the Wrights and ended the evening at the Forum’s Cheesecake Factory. The air had cooled dramatically by midnight and had become light and pleasant. They’d walked over from the Bellagio. And since the casinos never closed, there were still people on the streets. Bob, who’d led the way, ordered a Very Cherry Ghirardelli Chocolate Cheesecake, Rae went with the Lemoncello Cream Torte, while Lucas chose the Hot Fudge Sundae. Lucas had asked the waitress if the sundae was decent and she said, “It’s fabulous. I gotta tell you, if it was me, I’d be sticking my feet in that ice cream. I’ve been standing up for fourteen hours straight.”

  “Not in this one job, for God’s sakes?” Bob said.

  “Two jobs,” the waitress said. “This one pays the rent, the other feeds the slots.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THE DESSERTS came, Lucas summed up: “We know they’re here. The bad thing is, they probably know that we’re here. They could go on the run again. We only found them because we got lucky with the phone. If they figure that out, and they probably will, they’ll stop using Haar and throw the phone away. If we’re going to find them, we’ve got to do it quick or we’ll have to start over.”

  “Then what’s next?” Bob asked.

  “You guys check the hospitals tomorrow morning, see if you can find the guy with the hole in his leg. I’ll get back with Mallow and see who’s fencing what around town and what places handle high-end Indian jewelry.”

  “Sounds like legwork,” Bob said.

  “Yes. In 105-degree heat.”

  “We should feel honored,” Rae said to Bob. “We’ll be doing actual detective-like things.”

  Bob sang, “I wanna be an airborne Ranger, fight and fuck and live in danger . . .”

  “Think your partner is suffering from heatstroke already,” Lucas said to Rae. And, “I’m going to bed.”

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  The police raid on the Altadena house had spooked Beauchamps and Cole. Everything had been going so smoothly and had ended so cataclysmically, with both Nast and Vincent shot to death by the cops.

  Cox wasn’t an idiot but seemed oddly unaffected by the raid. She thought Nast was a jerk and had gotten what he deserved and didn’t seem to register the fact that they’d been outrageously lucky to ride away untouched—that what had happened to Nast and Vincent could as easily have happened to her.

  Her answer: “Well, it didn’t, so why sweat it?” The three men looked at her, simultaneously shook their heads, and Cox went back to brushing her shoes.

  * * *

  —

  IN VEGAS, they’d stayed five nights at the trailer park, all four of them. Cox slept in the bedroom with Beauchamps, but during the day Deese and Beauchamps went out, both men with beards now, wearing sunglasses and hats. When they were gone, Cox and Cole would test their new relationship, watching porn on the trailer’s te
levision and then trying out what they’d learned. Beauchamps seemed oblivious to their budding relationship; Deese watched them suspiciously.

  Cox had gotten in touch with the Airbnb agent the first full day they were in town and by the sixth day the woman got them into two separate houses, cheap but fully furnished.

  And they started talking about a house invasion: they needed cash and they needed it soon.

  They’d lost the van in the raid and decided to go to two vehicles. They’d leave Deese’s truck a few hundred yards from the target house and go in in Beauchamps’s Cadillac. On the way out, after the robbery, Beauchamps and Deese would be dropped at the truck. There were a lot of surveillance cameras in Las Vegas, and cops looking for three men in a vehicle, in the area of the home invasion, would see only two in the truck and a man and a woman in the Cadillac.

  That was all right with Cox—she was willing to be a getaway driver as long as she could pretend that she believed nobody would get hurt. The truth was, other people’s pain didn’t bother her much. Not being as dumb a bunny as the men thought she was, she also knew that if people got hurt, the criminal penalties increased and the cops got more interested.

  So Beauchamps and Cole did the basic research, scanning local magazines that took pictures at charity events, the women all in jewelry and their hottest dresses. When they had a list, they went to the cheapest all-cash motel they could find that had WiFi and used Cole’s laptop to research the people.

  When they’d whittled the list down to four candidates, they checked the houses on Google Earth, spotting getaway routes and possible security problems. They eliminated a condo right away and finally settled on the Wrights.

  Deese picked up some current-looking license plates from a junkyard—five hundred bucks, no questions asked. They bought a railroad tie at a nursery, the kind used for landscaping, and two door handles at a Home Depot to affix to the tie, to make a battering ram.