It took a minute to talk my way past the Cyprus Shore guard. I played my ex-Marine card and he accepted it, an ex-jarhead himself.
However, this is a “double-gated community,” so that meant I had to get past the stately Cotton Point Estates guard as well. His name plate read Eccles. I produced my CDL and a “Damian Thomas, Locations” business card, which features a logo criminally similar to that of a famous motion-picture studio. Introduced Burt as my assistant. Told Eccles it was a Leo DiCaprio–Jennifer Lawrence picture, Iñárritu to direct, and I had only ten minutes. Smiled and confessed that Orange County wasn’t as dull as they said it would be. Eccles seemed to suspect that I was a liar, but the distant scent of Hollywood seduced him.
The beach was sparsely attended for a warm day. It’s a public beach but privately accessed. The waves were small and the tide was high, so there were more rocks than sand.
Two uniformed Orange County deputies came down to the beach behind us, a bulky sergeant and a muscular young man with a curt mustache.
When the sergeant asked us for ID, I gave him my PI’s license, which brought a long look from him.
“That Ford,” he said. His nameplate said Ionides. “I thought so.”
The younger deputy handed back Burt’s driver’s license.
“What happened to you?” asked the sergeant.
“I was looking for Daley Rideout and I found six bad guys instead.”
“Six. You were lucky.”
“I was, but the girl’s family is taking this hard,” I said. “They’re good people. So I’m still here. Did you see her?”
Ionides shook his head.
“Had anyone here on the beach seen her?” I asked. “Besides the tipster? I’d appreciate your help, Sergeant. Daley Rideout is mixed up with some very bad people.”
“So I understand.”
Ionides had a heavy, unsurprisable face and flat, wet eyes. He sized me up without a blink and handed me back my license. He had what he needed on me. I was the chickenshit cop who betrayed his partner and cost him his career. I was also the stand-up PI who’d helped the FBI save some lives recently, down in San Diego. But it would come down to a fourteen-year-old girl.
“Couple surfers thought they saw her when they were waxing up,” he said. “Weren’t sure. Mainly focused on the waves. She looked kind of like the picture we showed them. Same top—black, with Beethoven on it. She was with three older guys. She and one of them went swimming, didn’t stay out long. When the surfers came back in, they were all gone. Two other witnesses gave us similar statements. All four witnesses said she looked fine to them. Just a girl and a guy who went swimming. One said they looked like brother and sister. Nobody said she looked afraid. We missed her by ten minutes. Ten damned minutes.”
I texted my employer and told her there had been a reliable sighting of Daley less than three hours ago on the beach at Cotton Point. She appeared to be at ease and unharmed. She swam in the ocean. I was there right now and Daley was gone again.
Penelope called and I let it go to message.
35
////////////////////////
BURT and I drove to Cotton Point Estates. Sixteen homes plus Nixon’s old Western White House, now owned by a big-pharma go-getter and marked down to $63.5 million. Quite a ’hood. You could see the blue Pacific from almost anywhere, beyond the bright white plaster and stony old-world walls and clay-tile roofs and fountains and cypress and palms and flowers. Beautiful, serene, rigidly coiffed.
There was a private Cotton Point Estates beach path that Daley Rideout might or might not have used to arrive for her swim. The next nearest beach access was more than half a mile away, according to my phone maps. Without using the Cotton Point Estates beach access, Daley and her “friends” would have had to walk more than a mile and a half to and from Cotton Point. A long, rocky walk along a perfectly swimmable beach, just to get here and back. Which suggested to me that she’d come and gone right here where we were parked.
We watched the surfers out on the point. I surfed a lot until I went to war, then not. It was another thing that changed for me in Fallujah. Don’t know why. It wasn’t as if someone shot me off my surfboard in Iraq. Watching now made me want to do it again.
“She was here just two hours ago,” I said. “They escorted her here. They allowed her to come here.”
“They,” said Burt. “Friends or keepers, Roland?”
“Friends the day she left Nick Moreno’s condo with them,” I said. “She was comfortable with these men. But less than forty-eight hours later, she got cold feet and ran away. Made it as far as the 7-Eleven in San Clemente before they got her back under control.”
“They being SNR Security.”
“Specifically, it’s Donald, Glassen, and Revell,” I said. “Maybe they’re acting on orders. But maybe they’ve gone rogue.”
“On behalf of Pastor Reggie?”
“That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “We know he contracts SNR to patrol his church. We know he funnels some of his hard-earned fortune to Alfred Battle. We know that’s big money, pouring in through the Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry—the cathedral, the streaming sermons, the podcasts. But Reggie tried to hire me to find and deliver Daley to him instead of Penelope.”
“Leading you to believe what?”
“That Atlas doesn’t know where she is any more than we do.”
“Yet SNR Security does,” Burt said. “To what end?”
“To shake down Atlas for even more.”
Burt went quiet and stared out the window for a long beat. Drummed his thick fingers on the armrest. “But what if trying to hire you was just a way of putting you off his stink and keeping you close? And the SNR gentlemen are in fact already holding Daley for him? And he can get to her whenever he wants? In keeping with Penelope’s idea that the man is determined to seduce his own daughter?”
I’d considered that before Reggie Atlas had even left my downtown office. “Then he’s more dangerous than I thought.”
Burt looked at me, shook his head. “Really? Follow this through, Roland. If Penelope is correct about what Atlas did to her when she was a girl—and what he will do or has done to Daley—then at some point he’ll have to tuck Penelope in, once and for all. He absolutely can’t afford not to. And he’ll want a dirt nap for you, too—as party to what she knows. So of course he’d ask you to work for him. Keep you handy.”
Sitting here in a place approximating paradise, a place of sun and sea and riches, it was important to be reminded that there is a darkness in some men that is unstoppable unto death.
“Thanks for reminding me,” I said.
“Of what, Roland?”
“What we’re up against.”
He grunted.
“My next life I’m going to be a doctor,” I said. “Or a farmer. Or maybe I’ll learn to dance really well, and teach. Imagine—The Roland Ford Academy of Dance.”
“Just be a PI in your next life. Think how good you’ll be by then.”
We drove past each of the sixteen Cotton Point Estate properties again. The oceanfront lots are big and some of the homes are all but hidden. We drove slowly and loitered when good views of the houses presented themselves.
Spent the next couple of hours parked in different locations. Finally admitted we might be wasting our time.
* * *
—
THAT EVENING IN my upstairs home office I poured a hopeful bourbon. I scoured IvarDuggans.com and my other online data dealers for a Cotton Point Estates property owned by Reggie Atlas and the breakfast-meat maven Marie Knippermeir.
No dice. When I deleted Reggie Atlas and Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry from the search, I found a brave new world of shell companies with Marie Knippermeir’s and Alfred Battle’s names behind them. But nothing in Cotton Point. How many more holdings they might have, and what shell compan
ies had been formed to possess them, was anybody’s guess. Even the data miners could miss a nugget. I did have an idea who would know, and where I might find her. But getting her to talk to me at all might not be easy.
Nothing under Reggie Atlas as sole proprietor.
I looked out the window, saw Melinda and Liz taking up table tennis positions against Dick and Burt. Could be a good match, with Burt’s speed and Dick’s defensive consistency against Liz’s and Melinda’s tennis smarts. Styles make fights.
On my big oak desk, Clevenger’s computer slept. It wasn’t popping to life as often with the wasp-cam feeds. I worried about the battery life of the cameras, but they still had almost a quarter of their power left. I worried that Donald and Glassen had accomplished something ominous in their large, wicked glove box. But what?
I watched the setting sun pour gold on the pond and called Penelope Rideout.
“Roland, I’m so glad you called!”
Gunfire roared in the background, loud, chaotic, and plenty of it, the reports and echoes thundering through my phone. “Where are you?”
“I’m at Iron Sights, practicing up. She’s alive. Daley’s alive!”
Popopop pop pop popopopop.
Suddenly the gunfire quieted, then stopped.
“Can you hear me? I’m outside now. Man, that derringer kicks like a mule. Goes by the name of Smokey. I was so relieved to get your call today. It was like a window being thrown open in a dark room. Daley is okay and we’re going to get her back. I know it, I know it, I know it, Roland.”
“Why are you shooting?”
“I practice once a week with the Iron Ladies.”
“Practice for what?”
“For all the creeps,” she said. “No reason a girl shouldn’t have some security. So long as she’s safe and sane. Like you know I am!”
“Do you have a concealed-carry permit?”
“As of two weeks ago. Passed the class and got the approval. A hundred and fifty-six dollars and fourteen cents, plus training costs.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say. People with guns worry me. Especially ten percent killers.
“Roland, don’t worry. I’m not a gun nut. I’m not, like, off my rocker. Did you talk to the people who saw Daley?”
I told her about the call from my contact at the FBI, the anonymous tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the sergeant who had interviewed the four witnesses.
“Exactly what did the witnesses say about her?”
I synopsized carefully—the three men in their late twenties or early thirties, Daley’s apparent willingness to be there with them, her brief swim. None of the witnesses gave Daley and her companions much thought. One said that Daley and the young man she went into the water with looked like siblings.
“He’s brainwashed her,” said Penelope. “Stockholm syndrome. Patty Hearst. She’s too terrified to resist, so she’s psychologically thrown in with him. See?”
“It’s possible she’s cooperating with her captors. But I don’t think Atlas has control of her.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “Reggie Atlas can convince anybody of anything. It’s what he does. He convinced you that I tried to seduce him. That he never drugged and raped me. That he didn’t father Daley. You still don’t believe me.”
“I’ll find Daley and bring her back.”
“I wish you trusted me,” said Penelope. “I know I’ve lied. I’m very sorry to have done that.”
“Let me do my job.”
“A minute ago I put eight nines in the black at fifty feet.”
I saw a brief but spectacular trailer of Penelope walking into the Cathedral by the Sea and shooting holes through Reggie Atlas.
“Penelope.”
“Yes, Roland?”
“Don’t do anything foolish. No matter what you think you know. Let me get Daley back to you. It’s what I do.”
“Prove it.”
I was about to answer when she ended the call.
36
////////////////////////
THE next morning I decided to have another look at Pastor Reggie Atlas and headed to the Cathedral by the Sea.
Melinda, Frank, and I walked across the parking lot toward the church. We were on the early side because the Four Wheels for Jesus website had warned of an overflow ten a.m. service. Three golf-shirt-and-chino-clad SNR men stood outside the entrance, feet wide, hands folded in front of them, wraparound shades in place even though the morning was cloudy.
Up ahead of us was a young black couple. I saw that they drew the attention of the SNR men, who had three oddly similar expressions on their three oddly similar faces. The couple slowed and the woman whispered something to the man and they stepped away to let us pass. I caught the expression on the woman’s face as we went by—uncertainty and resolve. Then brief words rippling among the SNR men, impossible to hear from this distance, but I could sense that the words concerned the couple.
When I turned a moment later, the man and woman were heading back toward their car with some purpose, the man’s arm light on the woman’s arm, her back straight and her head high.
“I just hate that so much,” said Melinda.
A chuckle from the security men as we passed by.
As Reggie Atlas took the stage, a bar of morning sun broke through the coastal clouds and streamed through the cathedral glass. I sensed subterfuge in this but couldn’t imagine how Reggie could manipulate sunlight. A countrified rock band played an intro, some good pedal steel guitar. Reggie stopped halfway to the pulpit, raised his arms to the crowd, smiled The Smile. His usual wardrobe: white shirt, open-collared and long-sleeved, pressed jeans, white athletic shoes. His blond mop was purposefully styled.
Melinda—the healing, less garrulous Melinda—sat on one side of me, writing in a small leather-bound notebook that she had begun to carry. She was still running insane distances throughout the hills and valleys beyond my house, but she was looking up and behind her far less than she had before her confession a few evenings earlier. I respected the terror in her soul and the energy with which she tried to fight it. As I respected all the thousands of people caught in the same storm of bullets that night. How were they managing their fear? What about the ones who didn’t have Melinda’s willpower and gumption?
To my left sat Frank, enjoying his morning off. He had just added a regular Sunday-afternoon account, which meant a six-and-a-half-day workweek. On our drive to the cathedral, he had told Melinda and me that one of his sisters back in El Salvador had told him to watch out for an old friend of his—Angel Batista—who was rumored to be in the San Diego area. Frank explained that Angel was never a friend. He was a scrawny ratón who had turned into an MS-13 soldier and went by the nickname El Diabolico. Frank’s sisters feared him and his friends, and if Angel was in the San Diego area Frank hoped he wouldn’t show up in Fallbrook. For Angel’s sake, he said. Frank had no fear of him at all that I could see.
Off to one side stood a large screen devoted to Pastor Atlas. He was gigantic but detailed. In spite of this, many of the worshipers around us were tuned in to fourwheelsforjesus.com on their smartphones. I did likewise, watching the live-stream Reggie on the small screen doing everything that the actual Reggie was doing, just in a jerkier, slightly delayed kind of pantomime. I turned the thing off and put it in my pocket.
As before, Atlas welcomed his “family,” asked that we all hold the hands of the people next to us and close our eyes for prayer. He praised Jesus our Lord, and gave thanks for the life and love around us. He mentioned several people by name who were in need of special prayers this morning due to illness and accidents.
After Amen, he asked each of us to stand and introduce ourselves to anyone nearby we didn’t know. “None of us are strangers,” he said. “Remember who the disciples met on the road to Emmaus.” I met Dane and Tina, Sophie, J
im and Linda. After we had sat back down, Reggie reported that this past week the Onward Soldiers Fund had donated well over $2,300 to U.S. military deployed worldwide, the most in any week since the Cathedral by the Sea had opened.
Today’s sermon was “Jesus Is Action,” which Atlas began with a story of a revelation he had at the age of seven. He had been out in his tiny backyard, playing with his puppy, Sparky. Reggie saw that the puppy was happy but only interested in his chew toy. Reggie started wondering what made Christians different from any other religion if all they did was go to church on Sundays, sing some songs and pray some prayers, dropped a few dollars into the offering plate, but never did anything to make the world a better place.
“If all they were interested in were their toys? And I decided as a seven-year-old that being a Christian is not what you say but what you do. What. You. Do. And what does a seven-year-old Christian with a puppy do? I vowed to find a home for every dog and cat in the Creek Valley Animal Shelter in town!”
Melinda looked at me and smiled, then wrote something in her notebook. Frank sat up straight, hands folded, sleepy-eyed.
So did I. Drifted off a little, as I always do in church. Every once in a while my parents took us kids to a service. Usually Easter Sunday, Christmas Eve, or Memorial Day. A different church each time. Mom was especially suspicious of churches getting their hooks into you, telling you what to believe, with whom you should congregate, and charging you for the advice. Dad always sat with his eyes closed, fragrant with aftershave. A good suit and shoes. I realized I had just shaved for church, too, and put on a suit and shoes I’d had for years but that still looked new.
Reggie humorously recalled taking the dogs from the animal shelter one at a time, walking each on a leash, and pulling a wagon filled with cans of dog food and donated used dog leashes behind him, door-to-door, neighborhood-to-neighborhood, until he talked someone into taking the animal, a few free cans of food, and a complimentary used leash.
The Last Good Guy Page 22