The First Rule

by Robert Crais

  “You don’t know me.”

  Pike settled the pack, and continued his run.

  3

  WHEN PIKE REACHED HIS JEEP, he drove directly to Frank Meyer’s home. Pike had lied to Terrio. He had seen Frank three years ago, though they had not spoken. A mutual friend told Pike about Frank’s new house in Westwood, so Pike cruised by. Pike also cruised by the little ranch home Frank and Cindy owned in Studio City a few years before that. Frank Meyer had been on Pike’s team, so Pike liked to make sure he was doing okay even though the two hadn’t spoken in years.

  The Westwood house was taped off as an active crime scene, though the crush of lookie-loos and newspeople that would have been present the day before were gone. A black-and-white radio car was out front, along with two SID wagons, an unmarked sedan, and a single TV news van. Two female officers posted to protect the scene were slumped in the radio car, bored out of their minds with nothing to do except listen to their iPods.

  Pike parked a block behind their car, then studied Frank Meyer’s house. He wanted to know how Frank died, and was thinking he would break in later that night when a tall, thin criminalist named John Chen came down the drive to an SID wagon. Chen was a friend. Pike would have called Chen anyway, but Chen being here was a stroke of good fortune that would save time.

  Chen’s vehicle was directly in front of the radio car. If Chen left, Pike would follow. If Chen returned to the house, Pike would wait.

  Pike was waiting to see what Chen would do when his phone rang. The caller ID read John Chen.

  Pike said, “Hello, John.”

  Chen was a paranoid. Even though he was alone in his vehicle his voice was guarded, as if he was worried about being overheard.

  “Joe, it’s me, John Chen. I’m at a murder scene in Westwood. The police are coming to—”

  “I’m behind you, John.”

  “What?”

  “Look behind you.”

  Chen emerged from his wagon. He stared at the radio car as if the officers would jump out to arrest him.

  Pike said, “Farther back. I’m on the next block.”

  Chen finally saw him, then shriveled back into his wagon.

  “Did the police already come see you?”

  “A detective named Terrio.”

  “I was calling to warn you, bro. They found a picture of you with the vic. I’m sorry, man. I only heard about it this morning.”

  “I want to see what happened in there.”

  Chen hesitated again.

  “It’s a mess.”

  Chen, warning that he would see something awful, but Pike had seen awful things before.

  Chen sighed.

  “Okay, listen—two dicks from West L.A. are inside. I don’t know how long they’ll be.”

  “ I’ll wait.”

  “They might be here all day.”

  “ I’ll wait.”

  “All right. Okay. I’ll call when it’s clear.”

  Pike could tell Chen wasn’t comfortable with him being out here, but Pike didn’t care about that or how long he might have to wait. Chen reemerged from his wagon and slouched back to the house, shooting nervous glances at Pike over his shoulder.

  Pike got out of his Jeep, pulled on a pair of spare jeans and a plain green windbreaker so he would be less memorable, then climbed back behind the wheel. He studied Frank’s house. A sloping front lawn led to a two-story brick home with a steep slate roof, surrounded by elm trees and feathery hedges. The house looked stable, traditional, and strong, and was suited to the Frank Pike knew. Pike liked that. Frank had done all right for himself.

  After a while, a man and woman who were likely the West L.A. detectives came down the drive, got into the unmarked sedan, and drove away. Chen called as Pike watched them.

  “You still out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll come get you. We won’t have much time.”

  Pike met Chen on the sidewalk, then followed him to the house. The two uniforms appeared to be dozing, and no one was visible in the media van. Neither of them spoke until they reached the front door, when Chen handed Pike a pair of blue paper booties.

  “Gotta put these over your shoes, okay?”

  They slipped on the booties, then stepped into a large circular entry with a winding staircase up to the second floor. A towering grandfather clock stood guard at the stair, standing tall over a rusty crust of blood footprints that dotted the floor.

  Pike felt odd, entering Frank’s home, as if he were intruding into a place where it was understood he would never be welcomed. He had glimpsed Frank’s life from the outside, but never from within. He had never met Cindy, or the boys, and now here he was in their home. Pike heard movement upstairs, and Chen glanced toward the sound.

  “That’s another criminalist, Amy Slovak. She’ll be up there a while.”

  Pike followed Chen through the entry to a large, open family room adjoining a dining area. An irregular pool of drying blood covered the floor midway between the dining table and the hall. Bright green yarn had been stretched from the blood pool to two metal stands in the living room, two strands to one of the stands, a single strand to the other. These stands marked the probable location of the shooters. A jumble of footprints crossed and crisscrossed the drying pool where one or more of the shooters had walked through the blood. A second, smaller stain was visible across the family room.

  Chen nodded toward the big stain at their feet.

  “Mr. Meyer was here. His wife and one of the boys there by the French doors. The nanny was in her room. I can give you a pretty good take on how it unfolded.”

  A blue three-ring binder was open on a nearby table where Chen had been making sketches. He flipped to a scaled floor plan showing the location and position of the bodies, along with recovered shell casings.

  “The family was probably having dinner when the shooters broke in. You saw the door. Bam, they scared the shit out of everybody. Meyer probably advanced on them, brief struggle, boom, boom—he had cuts on his face like they hit him with a hard object, probably a gun—and that’s when they killed him.”

  Pike studied the three strands of yarn.

  “They shot him three times?”

  “Yeah, once high on his hip, once in the side, and once in his back. Two shooters, like they were trying to put him down fast. This suggests he was fighting. The others were shot once in the forehead at close range, which suggests a deliberate execution.”

  The others. Cindy and the boys.

  The ugly stain where Meyer bled out looked like the Salton Sea. Meyer had been a good fighter. He had superb training and great instincts, else Pike would never have made him part of his team.

  “How many men all together?”

  “Four, which makes this one a little different. The earlier invasions, there were only three guys. They added a fourth.”

  “Four guns?”

  “Looks like, but we’re still running the casings and bullets. It’s the shoe prints. We’ve got four distinct shoe prints.”

  Pike glanced at the black smudges on door jambs and handles.

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Gloves. We didn’t get anything from the earlier crime scenes, either. No identifying prints, no DNA, no nothing except the shoes. C’mon, I’ll show you where we found the nanny.”

  Chen led Pike across the dining room, through the kitchen, then past the laundry room to a tiny bedroom where the door and jamb were split.

  “See how they crunched the door? It was locked. She was probably trying to hide.”

  Chen glanced at his notes.

  “Ana Markovic, age twenty. Two shots close range, one in the face, one in the chest, two casings here in the room. Both nine-millimeter. Did I mention that?”

  “No.”

  “These guys used nines. All the bullets and casings we found—nines.”

  The room was a small place to die, filled by a bed and a table, with only a casement window for light. Pictures of a smiling young w
oman hugging Frank’s boys were taped over the desk, part of a birthday card the kids had made of construction paper. We love Ana.

  Pike said, “Her?”

  “Uh-huh. An au pair.”

  Smears of blood on the floor and the door indicated she tried to crawl away after being shot.

  Pike said, “Did she describe them?”

  “Uh-uh. She was unconscious when the uniforms found her. They got her over to UCLA, but she’s not going to make it.”

  Pike stared at the streaks of blood. It was easy to imagine her outstretched hand.

  “Does Terrio have any suspects?”

  “No one we’ve identified. If he has someone from the other side, I couldn’t tell you. They haven’t issued any warrants.”

  SID was the science side. The other side was shoe leather—whatever detectives turned from informants and witnesses.

  “How many people have they killed?”

  “Four. If the nanny dies, five.”

  “Not here, John. All together.”

  “Eleven. Hey, that’s why they set up a task force. They’re using divisional dicks from all over the city.”

  Chen suddenly glanced at his watch, looking uncomfortable.

  “Listen, I gotta get busy. Those dicks are coming back.”

  Pike followed Chen back to the dining room, but he still wasn’t ready to leave.

  Pike said, “Let me see the pictures.”

  Criminalists, coroner investigators, and homicide detectives photo-documented everything. Chen would have photographed the scene before he made the sketches.

  “Bro, these people were your friends. You sure?”

  “Let me see.”

  Chen went to his case and returned with a black digital camera. He scrolled through the images until he found what he wanted, then held it so Pike could see.

  The image was tiny, but Pike saw Frank splayed on the floor. He was on his back, his left leg straight and right leg cocked to the side, floating in a pool of deep red that shined with the flash. Pike had wanted to see if the red arrows were inked on his arms like Deets said, but Frank was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, rolled to his forearms.

  “I want to see his face. Can you zoom it?”

  Chen adjusted the picture, then held out the camera again. Frank was cut beneath his right eye in two places, indicating he had been hit more than once. Pike wondered if Frank had been trying to disarm the man or men closest to him when the men across the room shot him.

  Pike said, “Was a time, he would have beat them.”

  Chen said, “What?”

  Pike felt embarrassed for saying it, so he didn’t answer.

  “You want to see the wife and kids?”

  “No.”

  Chen looked relieved.

  “You knew him pretty well?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was he holding?”

  “Frank wasn’t a criminal.”

  “All the other vics in the string were dirty. That’s part of the pattern.”

  “Not Frank.”

  Chen read something in Pike’s voice.

  “Sorry. They probably made a mistake. Assholes like this, they probably hit the wrong house.”

  “Yes,” Pike said. “They made a mistake.”

  “Listen, I gotta get back to work. I gotta get you outta here.”

  Pike followed the hall back to the front door, but he did not immediately leave. On the way in, they had passed what appeared to be a home office.

  Photographs of Frank and his family hung on the walls. Movie posters from The Magnificent Seven, Shane, and the original Star Wars, Frank’s three favorite films. Frank used to joke he was a Jedi. He called Pike Yoda.

  Pike studied the pictures, comparing the Frank he had known with the Frank who had lived in this house. When Pike met Frank for the first time, Frank was fresh out of eight years in the Marine Corps, having seen service in Central America and the Middle East. Frank had been young and lean, but had the chunky build of a kid who would put on weight quickly if he stopped working out. The Frank in these pictures had gained weight, but looked happy and safe.

  Pike found a picture of Frank and Cindy, then moved to a picture of Frank and Cindy with the two boys. Cindy was squat and sturdy, with short brown hair, happy eyes, and a crooked nose that made her pretty. Pike studied more pictures. The two boys, then the four of them together, father, mother, children, family.

  Pike moved through the office until he came to a space on a shelf with an empty frame. The frame was the right size for the El Salvador picture.

  Pike took a breath, let it out, then found Chen back in the dining room.

  “Show me his family.”

  “You want to see what they did to his wife and his kids?”

  Pike wanted to see. He wanted to fix them in his mind, and have them close when he found the men who killed them.

  4

  PIKE LIVED ALONE IN a two-bedroom condo in Culver City. He drove home, then stripped and showered away the sweat. He let hot water beat into him, then turned on the cold. Pike didn’t flinch when the icy water fired his skin. He rubbed the cold over his face and scalp, and stayed in the cold much longer than the hot, then toweled himself off.

  Before he dressed, he looked at himself in the mirror. Pike was six foot one. He weighed two hundred five pounds. He had been shot seven times, hit by shrapnel on fourteen separate occasions, and stabbed or cut eleven times. Scars from the wounds and resulting surgeries mapped his body like roads that always came back to the same place. Pike knew exactly which scars had been earned when he worked with Frank Meyer.

  Pike leaned close to the mirror, examining each eye. Left eye, right eye. The scleras were clear and bright, the irises a deep, liquid blue. The skin surrounding the eyes was lined from squinting into too many suns. Pike’s eyes were sensitive to light, but his visual acuity was amazing. 20/11 in his left eye, 20/12 in his right. They had loved that in sniper school.

  Pike dressed, then put on his sunglasses.

  “Yoda.”

  Lunch was leftover Thai food nuked in the microwave. Tofu, cabbage, broccoli, and rice. He drank a liter of water, then washed the one plate and fork while thinking about what he had learned from Chen and Terrio, and how he could use it.

  Jumping Pike in broad daylight on a residential street to ask a few questions was a panic move. This confirmed that after three months, seven invasions, and eleven homicides, Terrio had not developed enough evidence to initiate an arrest. But a lack of proof did not necessarily mean a lack of suspects or usable information, what Chen had called “shoe leather” information. Professional home invasion crews almost always comprised career criminals who did violent crime for a living. If caught, they would be off the streets for the period of their incarceration, but would almost always commit more crimes when released. Experienced investigators like Terrio knew this, and would compare the date of the original robbery to release dates of criminals with a similar history, trying to identify high-probability suspects. Pike wanted to know what they had.

  Pike went upstairs to his bedroom closet, opened his safe, and took out a list of telephone numbers. The numbers were not written as numbers, but as an alphanumeric code. Pike found the number he wanted, then brought it downstairs, sat on the floor with his back to the wall, and made the call.

  Jon Stone answered on the second ring, the sound of old-school N.W.A pounding loud behind him. Stone must have recognized Pike’s number on the caller ID.

  “Well. Look who it is.”

  “Got a couple of questions.”

  “How much will you pay for a couple of answers?”

  Jon Stone was a talent agent for professional military contractors. Stone used to be a PMC himself, but now placed talent with the large private military corporations and security firms favored by Washington and corporate America. Safer that way, and much more profitable.

  Pike didn’t respond, and after a while the N.W.A was turned down.

  Stone said, “T
ell you what, let’s table that for now. You go ahead, ask, we’ll see what develops.”

  “Remember Frank Meyer?”

  “Fearless Frank, my man on the tanks? Sure.”

  “Has Frank been working?”

  “Frank was one of your guys. You tell me.”

  “Has he been on the market?”

  “He retired ten years ago, at least.”

  “So you haven’t heard any rumors?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Frank getting involved with people you wouldn’t expect.”

  Jon snorted.

  “Fearless Frank? Get control of yourself.”

  “He didn’t like being called Fearless Frank. It made him uncomfortable.”

  Stone lapsed into silence, probably embarrassed, and Pike went on.

  “Less than two hours ago, a police detective named Terrio told me Frank was dirty. He believes Frank was using his import business for something illegal.”

  “Why was a cop talking about Frank?”

  “Frank and his family were murdered.”

  Stone was silent for a time, and when he spoke again, his voice was low.

  “For real?”

  “A robbery crew broke into their home two nights ago. Frank, his wife, their kids. They zero in on targets with a cash payoff—dope dealers, money launderers, like that. Frank wasn’t their first.”

  “I’ll ask around, I guess. I can’t believe Frank went wrong, but I’ll ask.”

  “Another thing. You have juice with Fugitive Section or Special Investigations?”

  Now Stone grew wary.

  “Why?”

  “You know why, Jon. If Terrio’s task force has any suspects, Fugitive Section or SIS will be trying to find them. I want to know what they have.”

  Fugitive Section detectives specialized in tracking down and apprehending wanted felons in high-risk situations. Special Investigation Section were elite operators who ran long-term, covert surveillance on criminals suspected of committing violent serial crime. With their expertise, skill, and experience, retired Fugitive Section and SIS operators commanded top dollar at private security firms, and Jon Stone had placed more than a few into fat corporate jobs.