Silver droplets exploded violently in the morning sunlight as Lillian Mara pulled the immense black Ford Expedition up almost against the fence. On the other side of the chain-link, the water in the Olympic-sized public pool churned as the Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks under-twelve swim team did their laps.
As usual, the other swim moms and dads gave Lillian dirty looks from their poolside camp chairs. She knew what they were thinking. There she was again, the evil, blond new lady in the business suit and big, idling, earth-warming SUV who didn’t even have the decency to get out of her car to watch her kid swim.
Sometimes she felt like getting out and explaining to them that the truck was actually her mobile office. As the newly transferred assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s LA office, she had to be available 24-7 to juggle case meetings with DAs and surveillance teams and undercover agents, and a secure, private communication link was a priority.
As if that matters to them, Lillian thought with a sigh. Everybody had an excuse, didn’t they? Oh, well. She guessed she would just have to live with all the mommy-war scorn.
Lillian sat up and held her breath as a sopping, thin-shouldered ten-year-old blond boy dragged himself out of the opposite side of the pool and headed for the starting blocks.
“C’mon, kiddo, you can do this,” Lillian whispered, cheering on her son Ian as he got into position. “Bend over more, just a little more. Chin against your chest. You have this, kid.”
She let out a groan as Ian jumped weakly and, as usual, landed flat with a loud, belly-flopping slap in the water. Then she laughed to herself.
“Won’t be the first time you fall on your face, little buddy,” she told her baby boy as she watched him thrash intently across the pool. “Take it from personal experience.”
Her phone, charging on the dashboard shelf in front of the speedometer, began buzzing. She snatched it up when she saw it was her husband, and pressed the FaceTime option.
She smiled as her goofily handsome husband, Mitch, appeared. He was the head of mechanical engineering at Northrop Grumman and was on a business trip to Brazil.
She turned up the volume on the phone as a couple of landscapers beside the pool’s parking lot fired up their air rakes.
“Hey, good-looking!” Lillian yelled. “Wearing your wedding ring still? Well, that’s a relief.”
“Just got the last of the carnival gals out of the room,” Mitch said, nodding.
They both laughed.
As if. Mitch, a hulking former combat marine, had proposed to her the day they both graduated from Irvine. He once told her that he truly liked only three things in this world. Her, running, and beer. They had six kids now, two of them in college, and were still going strong. They were lucky people.
“How’s Aquaman?” Mitch asked.
“I’m sorry to say I still don’t see too many Olympic diving team invitations in Ian’s near future,” she said with a wince.
Mitch said something, but she couldn’t hear him at all as one of the landscapers came directly behind the SUV, the air rake screaming in the painful decibel range now, like a 747 taking off.
“Hold on a second, Mitch. I can’t hear you,” Lillian said. The side window suddenly smashed inward.
Staggered by the abrupt explosion, glass still spraying around her, Lillian turned to see the hard face of the Hispanic landscaper in the blown-open window, already half in the car. Her glance went to his hand. There was something black in it rising toward her face.
She was pulling the.40 caliber in the pancake holster on her right side when the pepper spray hit. Gagging on chemical fire, her face burning, her eyes blinded, Lillian still managed to draw her service automatic as the air rake shrieked in her ears.
Then the landscaper smashed her in the jaw with his huge fist, hard enough to make her teeth click. The last things Lillian heard were the thump of her gun dropping to the foot well and the sound of the truck door opening. The seat belt loosened then, and she was sliding and falling, tumbling into a wave of black that seemed to rise up to meet her halfway.
CHAPTER 66
When Special Agent Mara came to, she was being carried by someone large and strong up a slate walkway. The house they approached was a white stucco, Spanish mission-style structure with a clay tile roof. The man carrying her smelled strongly of tobacco and coffee. The door looked like something from a castle, with dark wood timbers banded in iron.
She opened her mouth but couldn’t form words or even sounds. Drugs, she thought dully. She’d been drugged. The opulent door was creaking open when the black came back.
Music was playing when she woke up again. It was classical, a baroque cello concerto. Was it Bach? No, it’s Haydn, Lillian thought dreamily. She even knew the piece, she realized. Concerto in D Major.
She wondered idly where she was, but something told her not to worry so much. She kept her eyes closed as she listened to the deep, warm tones of the cello playing melody, then harmony, then melody again.
Lillian opened her eyes when she realized someone was humming along to the music. A cute, perky-looking young Hispanic woman was standing alongside her.
A nurse? Lillian thought. But no. It couldn’t be. The woman was wearing a shiny green- white- and- red Mexican-soccer shirt over yoga pants, with bright-pink-and-white Nikes. Her highlighted brown hair was pulled back in a tight, all-business ponytail.
Lillian blinked, quickly trying to wipe the last of the cobwebs from her foggy mind, assessing her situation.
She was in a dark, paneled room, some kind of office with wood blinds pulled down. There were bookshelves on one wall with no books in them. She was sitting, almost fully reclined, in a large leather office chair, her arms and legs strapped securely to the chair with thick, gray duct tape.
She remembered. Ian. The pool. The window crashing in.
Jesus, God, no, she thought as she began to shake hysterically, trying to break free. No, no, no. Just no.
“Relax,” the athletic young woman said, stroking the back of the FBI agent’s arm. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to hurt yourself. My name is Vida. I am going to help you, if you let me, Agent Mara. Or shall I call you Lillian?”
“What do you want?” Lillian sobbed. “Let me go. Why are you doing this to me?”
“There are many reasons. But for now, we’ll concentrate on one,” Vida said, lifting a stern finger. “Our organization is looking for a man who is in hiding. We believe that he may be in California. His name is Michael Bennett. Do you know him?”
“No,” Lillian said, staring at the woman. “You have the wrong person. I am an FBI agent, but I run the white-collar division. I don’t know anything.”
“That truly is a shame,” Vida said, turning on the heel of one of her pink-and-white Nikes and lifting something from the corner of the dark room. Lillian wheezed. It was a large, yellow-handled, heavy tool with an ax on one side and a sledgehammer on the other, known as a splitting maul.
The young woman hefted it neatly.
“No!” Lillian screamed as the young woman brought the sledgehammer side of the maul back and up and then down with authority onto Lillian’s left elbow, pulverizing it into splinters.
Vida turned up the music as Lillian shook and screamed and howled in pain. When the white noise of Lillian’s excruciation notched slightly back, Haydn was still playing merrily.
Vida lifted the sledge again.
“We’re going to try this one more time. With the ax part this time. Where is Bennett?” she said.
“In Northern California … near Susanville,” Lillian found herself saying between the sobs and the throbbing, center-of-the-sun agony that had become her left elbow. “I’m not … sure exactly where … I’d tell you his address if I could … but they wouldn’t tell me … in a million years.”
“How do you know this?” Vida said.
“An agent from the LA office,” Lillian continued in her pain-induced, haiku-like rhythm, “was sent up there … to pick his b
rain … about capturing Perrine … I do the books for the office … I saw the destination on the manifest.”
“An agent from the task force?”
“Yes.”
“What was the agent’s name?”
“Parker. Emily Parker,” Lillian said without hesitation. She hated herself. She knew she was putting others in jeopardy. But she was in so much pain. And afraid. God, was she afraid.
Vida dropped the splitting maul and consulted a binder in the corner of the room. She flipped a page, then flipped it back. Then she lifted a phone.
“Bring the van around,” she said into it.
Vida stepped back around to the rear of the office chair and pulled the gun from the waistband of her yoga pants.
“Just one more thing, Agent, and we’ll get you right out of here,” Vida said, raising the suppressed black-steel Smith amp; Wesson.22.
CHAPTER 67
A wagon train of fire trucks, ambulances, and cop cars was on the scene when we got to Venice.
There were beach cops everywhere, on four-wheelers and in 4x4s and pickups. Most of them were sporting M-16s. Crime-scene tape fluttered as aviation whipped past low overhead in a buzz of bright, shaking light.
There were dozens upon dozens of citizens pressed up against the crime tape. Most were shirtless. One interested observer seemed to be clad in nothing save a hotel towel. Coming out of the Vic, I looked over my shoulder as I heard a suspicious click-clack. But it was just some bushy-haired thirty-year-old skateboarder attracted to the bright, shiny flashing lights.
Getting out of the G-car, Emily and I stepped around someone’s little dog, hitched to a public water fountain, and went under the crime-scene tape. Behind us, a squad-car siren was going off and going off and going off like a broken alarm clock.
There was reason to be alarmed, all right. We’d been scouring the city all day, chasing leads to try to find the fifteen-year-veteran agent who’d been snatched in broad daylight. Her husband, who was FaceTiming with her at the moment of abduction, had called it in from Brazil, of all places, where he was on a business trip. I didn’t envy the man.
Especially now that we’d finally found his wife.
The crooked smile of a quarter moon shining above black water was the first thing to greet us as we walked down to the sand. There was the soft, distant boom-and-shush of waves crashing, the sound of the palm fronds rasping in the wind. We stepped under a second strip of crime tape and across a deserted bike path.
Beside the path, just in the sand and facing the water, Agent Mara sat in a wheelchair with two bullet holes in her head. A dirty blanket covered her loosely. There was blood on the right corner of her mouth. In her lap was a plain brown bag that, we had already heard from the first responders, contained her cut-out tongue.
She’d been strapped to a wheelchair with tie wraps, obviously killed somewhere else. This was just a dump site. Her left elbow had been demolished, I noticed in the glare of the five-hundred-watt halogen work light the crime-scene people had set up. It looked like it had almost been severed with some blunt-force trauma. She’d been tortured, no doubt.
We turned as Detective Bassman stepped out of the shadows, straight up to us.
“Hey,” he said. “We looked for video in the stores along Ocean Front Walk, but it’s not looking good. There’s no evidence here. No prints anywhere. No witnesses. No nothing. I got the coroner to red-ball the autopsy so we can get her back to her family as soon as possible. Did the husband get here yet?”
“Still in the air,” Emily said.
“Probably for the best. He shouldn’t see this. Unbelievable. I know I’ve given you feds some heat, and I’m sorry for that. I know how hard you guys work. I know how bad it feels when one of your family gets taken from you.”
He quickly handed Emily a stack of bills.
“Passed the hat around. Get her poor kids some ice cream or something from us, OK? Tell them the LAPD isn’t going to stop until we drop every last one of the people who hurt their mother.”
“Thanks,” Emily said. “I will.”
“Hey, Bassman,” I said as the big guy walked away.
“What is it, Bennett?”
“Maybe you’re not such an asshole after all,” I said.
He smiled, shrugged.
“Just don’t let it get around,” he said.
CHAPTER 68
It was hot when they woke that morning, and even hotter now at eleven as they went across the scrubby, grass-filled field under the pitiless sun.
Brian Bennett slapped at a monster horsefly that stung at his sweating neck. Man, he was starting to hate the country. The biggest lie in the world was how nature was supposed to be so invigorating and healthy. If there was one thing that he had learned out here, it was that nature was nothing but hot, dirty, smelly, and boring beyond the realm of human tolerance.
“Shit!” Brian yelled as the horsefly stung him again.
“Cursin’ now, Brian? Saints preserve us!” Eddie said, mimicking Seamus’s Irish accent to a tee.
Brian turned around to catch Eddie smiling, a napkin sticking out of his nose from a nosebleed he’d gotten about a quarter mile from the house.
Brian laughed despite himself. You had to hand it to the kid. He just kept at it 24-7. Jabbering, doing funny voices, making fun of things-himself, mostly-like some clown or court jester or something. A fool, Brian thought. That’s what he is. My brother Eddie, the fool. And he meant it in the best way possible.
“Quick question,” Ricky said from behind Eddie. “Why are we wandering the earth like a band of postapocalyptic nomads again? I hate to say this, big bro, but this Bataan death trek is quickly starting to teeter into the suck category.”
“You can go back any time you want, wimp,” Brian said angrily. “That goes for you, too, Eddie. I never asked you to follow me around. I couldn’t care less what you guys do.”
“Pardon me, but wasn’t it you who woke us up at the crack of dawn, Brian?” Ricky said. “I distinctly remember someone who looked a heck of a lot like you saying, ‘Get up, you idiot. It’s time to go.’ ”
“It’s OK,” Brian heard Eddie say to Ricky. “Brian’s just having one of his Brian moments. In other words, our big brother is going completely nuts.”
You can say that again, Brian thought as he trudged across the not-so-fruited California plain. What fifteen-year-old wouldn’t go nuts being exiled out here in the desert, like someone from the Bible?
And, just like a nut, he had woken that morning inspired to accomplish an important mission. He was going to walk until he found the river that Mr. Cody had driven them to a few weeks before. Not for any real reason. Because it’s there, Brian thought as he paced over the seemingly endless plain of dry land.
He thought he knew the general direction, but they were three hours into the hike, with no water anywhere. Has to be around here somewhere, he thought, sheepishly squinting up at the sky.
He hadn’t told Mary Catherine or Seamus about his plans. Hadn’t asked permission. Hadn’t even left a note. He knew it was slightly messed up to just get up and leave without saying anything, but that was pretty much the point. Dad was gone now. They were stuck out here, with no end in sight, and he was simply sick of it. The cows, the homeschooling lessons with the little twerps. Hell, he should just keep walking east until he made it back to Manhattan. Back to his friends. Back to his real life.
“I don’t know, but I’ve been told,” sang Eddie after a while, “this stupid walk is getting old! Sound off!”
“One, two,” Ricky sang.
“Wait, wait,” Brian said. “Shut up! Listen!”
They stopped in their tracks. There was a faint rushing sound coming from beyond the broken, distant tree line off to their right. They looked at each other for a beat, then started running. Brian in the lead, Ricky second, and Eddie dead last.
Brian stopped raising dust as he got to the ridge of the sandy riverbank. He just stood there, smiling. He stared at t
he sun twinkling silver off the fast-rushing water, stared at the green-brown surface of it, curving through the dry landscape like a ribbon of living glass. The slightly alkaline scent of the water was strong in the dry air. He’d never really smelled water before, at least not clean water.
I’ve done it, Brian thought. Set a goal for myself and accomplished it. A pointless one, maybe, but still. It felt pretty awesome.
“Hey, you did it! You actually found it, Pocahontas!” Eddie said, giving him a high five.
“Of course I found it,” Brian said nonchalantly as he leaped off the berm and down the sand, toward the rushing water.
CHAPTER 69
They were splashing around and skipping rocks twenty minutes later, when they saw the kayak come around the bend upriver.
The aging hippie in it smiled as he expertly paddled over to the shore beside them. At first, Brian got a little scared because the guy sort of looked like the Unabomber. But when he stepped out of the Day-Glo-yellow kayak twenty feet away, he was wearing rubber fishing waders that went up to his chest.
Just some harmless old nut fishing, Brian told himself.
The hippie lifted a palm after he beached the kayak.
“How,” he said like an Indian, then threw back his head and laughed. “Sorry. Always wanted to say that,” he said with a twinkling, blue-eyed wink. “Name’s McMurphy. Pleased to meet you, boys. You must be new around here. What brings you intrepid wanderers out this far into the great beyond? I don’t see any fishing poles. Let me guess. Fame, fortune, and adventure?”
“Boredom, actually,” Eddie said.
The man threw back his head again and cackled some more.
“Boredom,” McMurphy said, tapping a finger against his forehead. “That’s a good one, son. Boredom will work fine, too.”
Wow, Brian thought, staring at the guy’s wild eyes, his wild gray hair. This guy was pretty nutty. Too many tabs of acid? he wondered. He reminded him of someone. An old sixties actor. Dennis someone. He seemed harmless enough, at least.
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