Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  She pushed the chest of drawers away from the bedroom door and stepped out. Beauchamps was dead, no question of that. When she looked at his chest, the word that popped unwanted into her head was “colander.”

  She began talking. “Oh, God. Oh, jeez. Oh . . . shit. Oh my God . . .”

  She’d never seen a dead body before and this was an unsightly one, lying on the floor, eyes still open, looking at her, mouth slack, blood still oozing out into his shirt like a paper napkin sopping up spilt cranberry juice. She poked him once to see if he’d react but he didn’t. And there were all those bullet holes . . .

  Dead.

  She had to get out. Cox shopped at Whole Foods and had one of their tote bags. She grabbed it, stuffed her purse and several pairs of shoes in it. She rolled Beauchamps up on his side and pulled out his wallet and then slipped her hand into his side pocket for the money roll he kept there. Grimacing at the warmth of his blood-splattered hand, she unclasped the gold Rolex and pulled it off his wrist.

  His burner phone was sitting on the breakfast bar, and she threw it in the bag.

  All that done, she ran to the door to the garage, paused, saw two more paper grocery bags on the floor by the kitchen counter, grabbed them, ran back to the bedroom closet, stuffed the bags with the rest of her shoes, plus a plastic Tupperware box of jewelry, swept some cosmetics into the bag from the bathroom counter, added a baggie of cocaine, got her birth control pills and her sunglasses, yanked open the drawers of the other bureau—the one used by Beauchamps—saw nothing useful or valuable except for a wooden jewelry box that she thought might contain another Rolex, and maybe two, so she threw it in the bag also. She saw a box of 9mm ammo, grabbed it, and on the way through the front room picked up Beauchamps’s Beretta by the barrel and dropped it in the bag, too.

  With the two paper shopping bags and the Whole Foods tote, she stepped into the garage and tossed them in the backseat of Beauchamps’s Cadillac Escalade. Didn’t hear any sirens, but it hadn’t been but five minutes since the shooting. Still, she ran inside, got an armful of clothing from her closet, carried it out and dumped it in the SUV. Went back to the bedroom again, yanked all the drawers out of Beauchamps’s dresser and dumped them. The bottom drawer produced a bag of currency; she took it but didn’t stop to count it. Finally, she went back to the toppled dresser by the bedroom door, took out an armful of lingerie, including everything she had from La Perla, and a bunch of bras and underpants from Victoria’s Secret, carried it all to the car, threw it in the backseat.

  She pushed the button to lift the garage door, ran around to the driver’s side of the Cadillac, got in, and backed into the street, taking a second to drop the garage door again to give it back the simple anonymity of the rest of the street. A man was turning the corner, on foot, shaded by a red umbrella, walking an overheated, panting black-and-white dog. She twiddled her fingers at him and he waved back. And she was outta there.

  * * *

  —

  DEESE WAS on his way back to the house when Cox called on the burner and he asked, “Now what?”

  She screamed, “He killed Marion! He shot Marion! Marion’s dead! Marion’s dead!”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Lucas, Bob, and Rae spent a couple hours chilling out at the hotel. They took restless twenty-minute naps, gathered again and spent an hour making calls to home rental and real estate agents, with no luck. Late in the afternoon, with Lucas in the Volvo and Bob and Rae in the Tahoe, they headed south to the neighborhoods that were beneath the airport flight path. The heat was still ferocious, at 103 degrees, the sun like a molten glass marble.

  They were making the turn off Las Vegas Boulevard onto Warm Springs Road when a cop car, lights and siren, blew by, and then another, and Lucas called Rae and said, “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  Another cop was coming up behind, not running quite as fast, no lights or siren, and Rae said, “Looks like a big-time nothing.”

  “Let’s tag along and see where they go . . . Maybe this is a high-crime neighborhood,” Lucas said. But it didn’t look high-crime. It looked empty, with hot stretches of tan stucco houses with tile roofs, separated by steaming blacktop, nobody on the street.

  The cop who’d been behind them went by, while the cop ahead of them turned a corner. From that corner, they spotted a jam of cop cars outside a single-story house with an open garage door, cops going in and out. Another cop waved them off the turn down to the house. Lucas dropped his window and held his badge out. The cop came over, and Lucas said, “We’re U.S. Marshals tracking fugitives. We think they live around here. We need to take a look in case you guys found them.”

  The cop looked at the badge, then turned and pointed down the street and said, “You see that green car down there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s Lieutenant Harvey. He’s running the scene. Park there and check in with him.”

  “How many dead?” Rae called from the Tahoe.

  “One, is what I’ve heard,” the cop said. “I haven’t been down there myself.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY DROVE a block down to the scene, to the green car, and parked. On the street, they looked through the driver’s-side window of the green car. The window dropped two inches, and a plainclothes guy in the driver’s seat put a sandwich aside and asked, “Yeah?” chicken salad on his breath.

  Lucas showed him his badge and repeated what he’d told the cop at the corner. The guy said, “Tom’s inside. Lieutenant Harvey. Don’t step on anything.”

  Lucas nodded, and as he started away, the guy said through the crack in the window, “Nice shorts, Marshal,” and the window went back up. Rae stuck her knuckles in her mouth to keep from laughing, and Lucas looked down at his knees and said, “Best legs in Vegas, outside a gentleman’s club. So fuck him. And all his relatives.”

  Another cop stood inside the door, in the shade, and when Lucas badged him he held up a finger and called, “Lieutenant. The feds are here.”

  Harvey, a short, fat man with a drinker’s red nose and ratty white hair, walked over a minute later, frowned at Lucas, and asked, “Why are the feds here? Who are you?”

  Lucas explained a third time, and Harvey stepped back and crooked a finger. Lucas, Bob, and Rae followed him through the door to where Beauchamps lay faceup on the kitchen floor, his chest dimpled with bullet holes in the middle of a blood-soaked shirt.

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said.

  “You know him?” Harvey asked. “Who is he?”

  “Marion Beauchamps. He’s got a couple other aliases. He used to run a home invasion gang down in LA. He’s the brother of the Louisiana cannibal, and we think the cannibal—Clayton Deese—was with him,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy who arrived in town a a couple of hours ago, from New Orleans, named Richard, or Ricardo, Santos. You really want to talk to him: this is probably his work. He’s got a car we don’t know about. He could be checked into Caesars. You can get a full bio on Beauchamps from Luanne Rocha, who’s a sergeant in the Robbery Special Section of the LA cops. I’ve got her number for you.”

  Harvey wrote down Rocha’s information. Another plainclothes guy, this one in a baby blue golf shirt over lightweight chinos, had come up to listen in and now said, “Shit, Tom, you already cleared the case. There’s nothing left to do. Go down to Caesars and grab the guy.”

  Rae: “Let me tell you something. If you start running this thing down and you stumble over Deese, you can’t go in with a sissy baby blue golf shirt. Deese killed a lot of people and ate some of them. He’s got nothing to lose by shooting a few cops in baby blue shirts.”

  “I’ll pass the word,” Harvey said. “When I first looked at this boy, I had the feeling it’d get ugly.” He nodded at the body on the floor and the puddle of now purple blood that had seeped out from beneath it.

  Bob said, “Lucas here”—he tipped his th
umb at Lucas—“was shot by this bunch back in May. Pretty much in the heart. Luckily, he doesn’t have a heart. The thing you need to ask him about is the second house.”

  Lucas told Harvey about the double house arrangement in LA and the gunfight that followed.

  “You think they got another house around here? And they shot you?”

  “A second house wouldn’t surprise us, and it’s probably close by,” Rae said. “These guys are assholes, but not dumb assholes. And they did shoot Lucas. He used to be a lot taller and better-looking.”

  Harvey shook his head. “All right. You know anything about a blond woman?”

  “They may have a woman with them. Three guys and a woman. Now two guys. We don’t know her exact status,” Lucas said. “Beauchamps liked to chase women, but he didn’t want to have to chase them too hard. Some of the women were okay, but some might have been more than available. They’ve got the blonde’s prints down in LA . . .”

  Lucas told him the rest of it—about Deese, Smith, and Santos, about Deese’s brother Beauchamps, and Cole and the home invasions.

  “I gotta make some phone calls,” Harvey said, heading for the door. “A lotta phone calls.” To the cop in the baby blue shirt he said, over his shoulder, “You got it, don’t fuck it up. And change that shirt. You look like a target.”

  * * *

  —

  THE GOLF-SHIRTED COP introduced himself as Chuck Armie, and he walked them through the scene, staying away from a couple of technicians who were working through the bedroom. Harvey and Armie, with the head crime scene tech, had worked out the probable sequence of the shooting and laid it out for the marshals.

  “Any of the shooter’s blood anywhere?” Lucas asked.

  “Nope. But there are all kinds of bullet holes in the living room wall, behind where he was probably standing. It’s like the dead guy missed him six or seven times.”

  “That can happen,” Bob said. “The unknown shooter didn’t pick up his brass?”

  “No. It’s still here.”

  “Prints?” Rae said.

  The cop nodded. “Of course.”

  “You know how he got out of here?” Lucas asked. “Anyone see a car? How about the woman?”

  Armie bobbed his head. “The shooting got some attention, even with all the neighbors’ windows closed and the air-conditioning on. Two cars left after the shooting: a small sedan, maybe a Corolla or a Civic or a Passat, silver in color, and then an SUV. In that order. We got no plates. Your friend Santos is probably in the sedan, the woman in the SUV.”

  * * *

  —

  HARVEY CAME BACK. “We’ve got a fleet of uniforms coming in. We’ll walk through the neighborhood, talking to everybody we can about newcomers. We’ve got guys on the way to Caesars.”

  Lucas handed him a card and said, “Call us if anything happens. We’re really scratching around here.” He looked at Bob and Rae and tipped his head toward the door. “We gotta make some calls ourselves.”

  On the way back to the cars, Lucas told Rae to call Tremanty. “We need to register the phone calls going to Smith. I’ve gotta believe that Deese will call him. And Santos, probably, too. You gotta get Tremanty to set it up.”

  Rae nodded.

  Bob: “What else?”

  They talked about it. The Las Vegas cops would be all over Caesars, but they didn’t know Santos’s face as well as Lucas did. They needed to find out where he’d gotten a second car and where he might be staying, if he’d checked in anywhere.

  But Santos wasn’t the problem. Deese was.

  “Deese might be on his way out of town. Gotta believe the blonde called him and told him about Beauchamps,” Lucas said. “We might’ve missed him.”

  “Don’t say that,” Rae said. “We got this. We got it.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY WENT BACK to the Bellagio. Bob said he was going to stand in a cool shower for ten minutes, Rae was planning to lie down to think until they moved again. Lucas got online. The first thing he found was a Hertz agency at Caesars Palace.

  He called Rae. “I need to get over there. I’ll walk. When Bob gets out of the shower, self-park the Tahoe at Caesars and call me. We might need wheels in a hurry.”

  At Caesars, he showed his badge to the manager at the Hertz booth and learned that a man who met Santos’s description had returned a silver Corolla but had paid for it with an American Express card carrying the name Thomas R. Hobbs. The manager said, “The card went right through. He walked back around the corner. There.” He pointed to the end of the hall. “He was either going down to the Forum Shops or he has a room here. Or, I dunno, maybe he was going to gamble. But if marshals are looking for him, that seems kinda unlikely . . . that you’d find him sitting in front of a slot machine.”

  Lucas scratched his head, nodded, said, “I’ll look anyway. If the guy tries to rent another car, call me. Right away.”

  He gave the manager his card, and as he turned away, the manager said, “You know . . . if he’s, like, a fugitive . . . I don’t know, this guy was carrying a whole bunch of FedEx boxes, like he was delivering them. Does that sound right?”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CHECKED with the front desk, and one of the security men came out and told him that he’d already been talking to the Vegas cops and that there were three people named Santos staying at the hotel. They’d checked in two days earlier and appeared, from the registry, to be a husband, a wife, and a child. There was no one in the hotel named Hobbs.

  “So if he’s here, he’s under a different name,” Lucas said.

  The security man nodded. “I’ve got no idea how you’d find him. If you could give me a photograph, I could show it around to the cleaning staff, see if they remember him. Kind of a long shot, though.”

  “Why is it a long shot? If he’s in the hotel—”

  “We’ve got almost four thousand rooms here, in six towers. Ninety-nine percent of the rooms have closed doors. Twenty percent have “Do Not Disturb” cards on them. What can I tell you? It’s like finding one guy in a small city.”

  “Goddamnit.” Lucas looked around the crazy place; he could probably see five hundred people of all sizes and shapes, scurrying through the lobby and in and out of restaurants and the casino, and he wasn’t even in the main part of the building.

  He went out and talked to the head valet, who said, “Man, I got ten people a minute coming through here. I don’t remember the guy. Sorry. We could go down and look for the car.”

  Lucas gave him a card with his number on it, and Santos’s car’s license number, and asked him to look for it and to call him when he found it.

  * * *

  —

  RAE CALLED HIM. “We’re here.”

  “Cheesecake Factory,” Lucas said.

  On the way, the valet called. “We got that car.”

  Lucas hurried back to the front of the casino, and the valet took him to the parking structure and pointed out the car, which he said hadn’t been moved since it was first checked in. Lucas looked through the windows and saw absolutely nothing inside.

  “If he shows up and asks for the car, take a while to get it and call me,” Lucas told the valet. “This guy is dangerous, so don’t mess with him. Be polite.”

  He headed back to the Cheesecake Factory, called Harvey as he walked there, told him about the car.

  “We’ll put more pressure on the casino to find him,” Harvey said. “That small city thing is mostly bullshit: there may be that many people here, but in a small city not everybody has to get off one of six elevators. We’ll see if we can get a security guy on the elevator banks.”

  * * *

  —

  BOB AND RAE were waiting, pacing, and when Lucas showed up Rae said, “I caught Sandro at DFW. He was already on the plane. He’ll be her
e in a couple of hours. He said he’d get the phone thing going with Roger Smith. Could be too late. He’s sure Smith’s got a secure phone. Santos might even be calling somebody else, one of Smith’s employees. There’s no way to know.”

  “We were right on top of Deese until that asshole showed up,” Lucas said.

  Rae shrugged. “Sort of. We had the neighborhood right. Didn’t exactly have a fix on the house.”

  “I’ve worked deals where we had even less and it doesn’t take as long as you’d think to narrow it down,” Lucas said. “You talk to two or three houses per block, you’d find them eventually. Would have taken maybe two days. And if the Vegas cops had given us a couple of guys, we’d have had them in a day. Now . . .”

  “What?”

  “We’re sitting on his first car. If he goes to a valet, the head valet will call me. What are the chances?”

  “Slim, but not none,” Rae said.

  Bob said, “Two things: we’ve got no way to find him, unless he screws up. Even if we do find him, we don’t have anything on him, not really. There’s a chance that he doesn’t know where Deese is, even if he did originally.”

  Lucas nodded. “That’s a point. If he shot Beauchamps, he’d be a fool to have kept the gun, and I didn’t get that feeling about him, that he’s a fool. And if he shot Beauchamps, he’s probably in trouble with Deese. He could be as much in the dark as we are.”

  “Maybe Tremanty will have some ideas,” Bob said.

  “Fuckin’ FBI,” Lucas said. “But maybe he will.”

  They got a table, ordered chicken and shrimp and tacos, and coffee and shakes, and Lucas told them about the car and the four thousand rooms in six towers, and Rae said, “Listen, we’re not totally and finally fucked. Something good could happen.”