Instead of trying, he backtracked to a narrow dirt road he had passed a few minutes earlier. He turned onto it and headed up into the hills, counting on Stacey’s truck’s four-wheel drive to handle the rugged terrain. It was almost full dark now, and thick smoke blotted out the sky.
And he still had a long way to go.
21
Betsy Peabody sat on the dusty attic floor. Her back ached and her knees were complaining about all the ups and downs. Although the sun had set and the attic had vents on each end, the day’s heat was trapped inside and she was sweating like she had on steamy summer days in North Carolina, where she’d lived until her thirteenth year. Arrayed before her were cardboard boxes, some of them decades old, the cardboard so dry and brittle that it tore instead of bending. They’d been stacked in a corner, behind Hugh’s old Army footlocker and a dressmaker’s dummy she hadn’t used in ages and should probably try to sell or give away. Her fingers weren’t as nimble as they’d once been, and her eyesight seemed to get a little worse every week. Sewing was one hobby she’d had to give up on.
She had known that some of the boxes contained old photos; that was why she’d come up the folding ladder to look at them. Hugh had protested that she was in no shape to be climbing ladders, but she had ignored him and come up anyway. He hadn’t been up that ladder in the last seven or eight years, at least. He was three years older than her, but seemed considerably frailer, as if his height made him more vulnerable to gravity. She was closer to the ground, had a shorter distance to fall, and consequently worried less about it. And she had no problems with her balance, while he sometimes had to check himself against a wall as he was walking from one room to another. She knew in her heart that she would outlive him, and she could hardly bear the thought of going on alone. Losing Susan—albeit not to the grave—had not taught her resilience in the face of loss; it had only taught her to fear it.
She hadn’t intended to stay up here so long. A quick rummage through the boxes was all she’d had in mind. But she found that once she opened an album or one of the shoe boxes contained inside the larger cartons, she was drawn to page or thumb through everything. Some of the pictures were meaningless now—for instance, there was a set of five black-and-white snapshots featuring a couple, nicely dressed, the woman blonde and statuesque and wearing a strand of pearls so white they almost jumped off the paper, the man shorter, with thinning dark hair and black-framed glasses and an easy grin. They were at a restaurant or a nightclub, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves. But Betsy had no idea who they were or where the place was. She was certain she hadn’t been there. Relatives of Hugh’s perhaps, who she’d met in passing and then forgotten? There had been a lot of those; he wasn’t a man who kept up with family, not the way that she did.
Others, though, transported her to times and places of her past. Her seventh birthday party, on the back lawn in Durham with its gentle slope to the line of autumn-brilliant trees and the creek that whispered along behind them. The pictures were black-and-white but she could see the colors, the deep reds and rich golden yellows of the trees, and she could hear the burble of the creek passing over rounded stones, and even though the photos had been taken during the day, she could almost make out the croaking of frogs and the flutter of moths against the screen, almost see the intermittent flicker of fireflies that she and her sister Jean tried to capture in Mason jars.
There were pictures from her college days at USC, others from her long courtship by Hugh, and what seemed like album after album of shots of Susan as a baby, a toddler, and a child. Most of those had been taken in this very house, and Betsy was captivated by the changing décor, the painted walls giving way to wallpaper, furniture and appliances worn out and traded away for newer. There were glistening Christmas trees and early morning Easter egg hunts and Susan’s birthdays. Betsy had forgotten that she had allowed others to smoke inside the house, long ago, but she found three photos of a dinner party she and Hugh had thrown for one of his coworkers at Boeing, who’d gone to Europe for six months and returned with a French wife and a taste for smelly French cigarettes. He and the wife—Amélie, she recalled, though she couldn’t remember his name—were both puffing away in one of the shots, and in another he was holding a cigarette and a cocktail in the same hand, talking to Hugh’s supervisor George Marks, who had a lit pipe clenched in his teeth.
The rattle of the ladder startled her. “Hugh?” she asked.
“Who else would it be? The Boston Strangler?”
“You scared me.”
“Sorry,” he said. She didn’t think he was climbing; his head would have shown in the trap door by now. “When are you coming down? It’s past eight.”
“It is? I had no idea.”
“If you’d wear your watch—”
“Let’s don’t start that again. I don’t see any need to wear one in a house you keep full of clocks.”
“Except in the attic.”
“The old cuckoo clock you won’t let me throw out is up here. It’s laying on top of your footlocker.”
“That’s an antique,” he said. “Who knows what it’s worth?”
“You’re an antique. The clock’s junk, the cuckoo bird’s been dead for years, and it’s not worth anything if you don’t sell it to somebody.”
“What in heaven’s name are you doing up there, anyway? You’re missing your program.”
“I don’t care about the show. We have a DVR, if you’re worried.”
“I don’t know how to use the damn thing, you know that.”
“Anyway,” Betsy said, “I told you. I’m looking for pictures of the Shogren boy. In case there’s anything in them that would help those agents.” His memory was slipping more often these days. She didn’t think it was dementia, not yet, but she couldn’t help being worried just the same.
“Pictures from twenty years ago? I can’t see how knowing what he looked like then would do them any good. They could just look up ‘juvenile delinquent’ in the dictionary; his picture is probably there.”
“He couldn’t have been that bad. They let him join the Army.”
“They were clearly desperate. And the fact that he never went to juvenile hall only means that he never got caught doing whatever. It doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”
“I have two more boxes to look at, Hugh, then I’ll come down, all right? I’m just… I’m enjoying some reminiscing as I go.”
“Reminiscing is fine,” he said. “Just remember that you live in the here and now, and here and now it’s almost eight-thirty. You know you like to be in bed by nine.”
“I know. I also know the longer you talk to me, the longer this will take.”
“Fine,” he said. “If you’re not down by ten, I’ll holler again.”
“By ten you’ll be snoring loud enough to wake the dead. I’ll feel the floor shaking and I’ll know it’s safe to come down.”
She waited for a response, but all she heard was the ladder rattling briefly, and then his footsteps as he walked away from the opening.
She turned back to the boxes, and pulled out another album.
22
Tops & Tails had a reputation as the most upscale gentlemen’s club in Los Angeles County. Which, Sam knew, was a pretty low bar. But he was surprised when he arrived. The valets were neatly dressed and courteous, the club appeared clean and relatively brightly lit, and the dancers—those he could see—were attractive and seemingly healthy. He gave his name to the cashier and was escorted into the club manager’s office, where he met Jerry LaDue.
LaDue had a firm handshake, and he made good eye contact; Sam suspected it was something he’d learned, maybe in strip club management school. He had carefully trimmed auburn hair and a neat beard. He was forty-something, and he wore a dark suit and tie. With the exception of his decidedly flashy Patek Philippe timepiece, he looked more like a Midwestern funeral director than a strip club executive. The chronograph told Sam one more thing: a high-end strip club manager could make some
bank.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Agent Hanna,” he said when Sam had taken a seat across the desk from his. “We’re always happy to help out law enforcement. You guys don’t get enough credit, you ask me. Your job is dangerous and necessary.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Tonight—”
“And you’re with NCIS, right? Are you a vet?”
“Navy SEALs,” Sam admitted.
“Oh, wow! I’m doubly honored. Thank you for your service, sir.”
“You’re welcome,” Sam said. He was never quite sure how to respond to that line, which always came from people who hadn’t served. Often people who could have chosen to do so, but had decided the other way.
“So you want to be security-for-a-night?”
“That’s the idea.” Sam touched the lapels of his tuxedo jacket. “Is this okay?”
“It’s fine,” LaDue said. “A lot of people don’t expect a gentlemen’s club to be such a high-class joint, but we spare no effort. Everybody’s comfortable here: men, women, and, uhh, just everybody.”
“I’ll try to uphold your standards,” Sam said.
“I’m sure you will. It won’t get busy for another couple of hours, so I’ll have you shadow Jason for a while, until you learn the ropes.”
“I pretty much throw out people who are misbehaving, right?”
“But in a classy way. And on the DL—try not to make a scene.”
“I’ll do my best,” Sam said. But a scene would be made, and he would be in the middle of it. That was pretty much the point, after all.
* * *
The work, it turned out, wasn’t particularly demanding. Sam took a shift checking people’s IDs at the door, to make sure they were at least eighteen. After that he was a roamer, mostly walking around the club letting people know he was there, so they wouldn’t try anything untoward with the dancers—who Jason called alternately “the girls” or “the merchandise”—and the dancers, conversely, didn’t suggest anything untoward to the customers. The club had two private rooms, the more expensive of which was labeled the VIP room. The security man at that door was expected to make sure that anyone accompanying a dancer inside had paid the hundred dollar entrance fee, and otherwise to stand with his back to the room so that whatever took place within was unobserved. Unless, Jason explained, anybody who looked like a cop was in the place, in which case security had to walk through every few minutes. That could be complicated, Sam thought, since he was in fact a cop.
Every industry had its rules and customs, Sam knew, but he was a little surprised that this one’s were so rigidly formalized. Basically, the philosophy seemed to be that the dancers could handle themselves, and if they engaged in any illegal activity, that was on them, unless it looked like it would blow back on the club. The dancers, he learned, were all independent contractors, not employees, which limited the club’s liability to some extent.
Waiting for the club to fill up, he was chatting with a dancer who said her name was Brandii, “with two Is.”
“How long have you worked here?” he asked.
“About eight months, I guess. I work here and at Panthers in Hollywood, and sometimes in Las Vegas.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s okay, I guess. In another year and a half, I’ll like it better.”
“What changes then?”
“I have to work fully nude now, because I’m too young to work topless.”
Her statement caught him by surprise, and it took him almost a full minute to parse. “Oh,” he said when he’d figured it out. “Because—”
“They don’t sell alcohol at fully nude clubs, but they do at topless ones. So when I’m twenty-one, I’m switching over to topless. I’d be more comfortable that way.”
“So would I.” He looked away from her—knowing her age, even though she wasn’t currently fully nude or topless, he wasn’t remotely comfortable with the quantity of skin she was displaying. He had a daughter. If Kamran was nineteen and wanted to work as a stripper, he thought he would try to be supportive of her decision. But the temptation to brutally slaughter whoever had put that idea in her head would also be strong. And he’d have to lock Michelle into a cell to keep her from ripping the head off anyone who saw their daughter nude.
He didn’t want to make judgments about this girl’s parentage, but he figured there was a pretty wide gulf between them and he and Michelle, in some very important areas.
Gradually, the place filled with patrons, and as it did the music got louder and the energy more intense. He was kind of glad it was a fully nude club in one respect: the addition of alcoholic beverages to the mix of mostly male clientele and mostly naked female workers would have made for a potentially explosive situation. Which would have made his work as a bouncer more complicated, preventing him from doing what he was really here for.
He’d been at it for almost two hours when Callen came in, wearing an expensive suit with a dark shirt and no tie, too much gold jewelry, and way too much cologne. He was using his Russian-accented English, which he was almost as good at as his own natural accent. It always sounded a little off to Sam, but only because he knew Callen so well. If he had heard him for the first time tonight, he would absolutely believe he was a Russian citizen visiting the U.S., or one who had just moved here.
Sam signaled Callen which seat to take. Callen sat and watched the dancers, either enjoying their performances or doing a convincing job of pretending. Every now and then he tipped one, lavishly, but he turned down offers of lap dances.
Twenty minutes later, Kensi and Deeks came in. Deeks wore his own clothes and looked like Deeks. Kensi was more heavily made up than she would normally be, and wore a tight skirt with a slit up the side and a low-cut blouse. Some of the patrons momentarily forgot there was a dancer on the stage wearing nothing at all. Again, Sam showed them where to sit with the subtlest of hand signals. Keeping those particular seats empty all evening had been the hardest part of the job so far.
But the night was young, and he was pretty sure that wouldn’t last.
23
It was ten-thirty before Belyakov showed up, along with a retinue of five. Sam wasn’t sure if the proper description was bodyguards, thugs, or enforcers, but something along those lines, from the looks of them. Eric and Nell had been tracking Belyakov’s phone, and had reported that they’d gone to a Russian restaurant on Ventura in Studio City. Sam didn’t know about the food, but it was immediately apparent that the vodka had flowed freely.
Belyakov looked just like his pictures, if a little grayer and thicker through the face. The others were all considerably younger, all male, all solidly built. Two of them had flushed faces and laughed too easily, two were pretty quiet, and one looked like a guy with a chip on his shoulder and a perpetual mad-on for the world at large. He stuck close to the boss, and was the first one to the table, standing beside it and checking out the rest of the room, as if to make sure they weren’t walking into an ambush.
Which, of course, they were. It would be a pretty lousy ambush if the victims could see it coming.
They settled back in their seats watching Carly—Sam knew all the dancers’ names by now, even their real names in some cases—who was in her mid-twenties, lean and athletic, and gave a gymnastics performance on the pole that would have been impressive even if she hadn’t been wearing only a pair of plastic-soled shoes with seven-inch spikes. He supposed it was unlikely that pole dancing would ever become an Olympic sport, but if it did, he’d watch it.
Three more dancers came on. The Russians downed their drinks, complaining from time to time that no alcoholic beverages were available. Once, Sam went to the table and asked them to tone down the complaints. They were making the waitress nervous, he said, and the law didn’t allow full nudity and alcohol to be served up together. If they wanted hard drinks, he could direct them to a topless club not too far away, but if they chose to stay, it was soft drinks or bottled water, and no amount of griping would change that. He w
as respectful but stern, and he spoke directly to Belyakov, as if acknowledging the older man’s place in the pecking order. Belyakov responded by telling his crew to shut up and enjoy the show.
Finally, the moment he’d waited for all night came. One of the ruddy-faced Russians asked a dancer named Marcella, a curvy brunette with an amazing smile, for a lap dance. Before she could oblige, Deeks lunged from his chair, and grabbed Marcella’s wrist. “My lady wants a dance,” he said, pointing at Kensi. “We’ve been here a lot longer than these guys. They’re not even American!”
“I can get her next,” Marcella said, trying to ease her arm from Deeks’s grip.
His voice elevated by several decibels. “It’s taken her all night to be ready for it, but she’s ready now! One dance, come on!”
Sam started toward the commotion, making sure the other bouncers knew he was the closest. He intentionally took a path that was blocked by other patrons, watching the scene, and that slowed him down.
Deeks turned his attention to Belyakov, balling his hands into fists. “Look, guy, tell your punks to let the woman dance for my lady.”
At that, the bitter-looking guy rose. He was a little shorter than Deeks, but built, and with the confident air of a stone killer. “Sit down,” he said in thickly accented English. “Before you start something you cannot finish.”
Deeks held his ground for a good thirty seconds, then shrugged, said, “Fine, whatever. Come on, baby, this place sucks.”
“I like it,” Kensi whined. “I just want Marcella to dance for me.”
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