And his chances of finding Shogren were slim to none. The TV news had said he was believed to be holed up in the hills somewhere, with a hostage. They described the gold LeSabre, and showed a picture of the hostage, an old woman whose name was meaningless to Martin. There had to be thousands of homes in those hills, most them empty, and still more wilderness where a skilled Ranger could easily lie low for days or weeks.
None of that mattered. He would find Shogren or die trying. If the authorities found the Ranger first, they would try to take him alive. Maybe they’d succeed, though that seemed unlikely. In that event, he would watch the trial bitterly, knowing that Shogren would probably die in prison and not by his hands.
If he found Shogren first, the outcome would be different.
Maybe this was really what he’d trained for, worked for, fought for his whole life. The opportunity to avenge his best friend’s torture and murder. He had loved Bobby like a brother. Strike that—Martin had a brother, and they didn’t get along very well. He loved Bobby more. In the end, Bobby had given him up, but that wasn’t his fault. The guys who’d tortured him were also Spec Ops, also trained in resisting torture, and therefore skilled at administering it. They had caused Bobby unimaginable agony, then they’d killed him.
And Shogren was the ringleader.
Shogren had to pay.
He had to die, and Martin had to kill him. It was as simple as that, really. Life, in its purest essence, was the process of dying. You started dying the moment you were born, and when you were finished, however long or short a time you’d had, you’d succeeded in doing the only thing every living being really had to do.
Martin was determined to push Shogren to succeed right away.
When he got to the hills, he found one roadblock after another, and a robust law enforcement presence. He’d been up in those hills before, raced down the length of Mulholland Drive, which he believed was one of L.A.’s most magnificent wonders. Looking at them from this angle, though, he felt weighted down by the impossibility of the task he had set himself. They were so big. There were so many places to hide. He was one man.
He had only one slim advantage: Shogren was on the run, hiding out from everyone and everything he had ever known. Martin knew exactly how that felt. He knew what he would do.
He took to the smaller roads, and found an unstaffed roadblock. It was a simple enough matter to move the barricades, drive through, then replace them.
He was inside the perimeter.
Time for a little search and destroy.
44
Deeks was driving, for a change.
Kensi preferred to drive, but Kensi was an odd combination of control freak and chaos witch. She thrived on what would appear, to an ordinary human being, to be an absolute lack of organization. To her, though, it all made sense. Her legendary messes were like complex spells that bestowed magical powers on anyone who could understand them. And woe be unto anyone who dared disturb them!
By the same token, she liked to drive because it bothered her not to have her hands on the wheel, not to choose the vehicle’s speed and direction. It had probably driven her nuts to be a passenger in the helicopter earlier, reduced to giving the pilot verbal instructions rather than just taking the stick and flying it herself.
When they traveled in her car, she insisted on driving. But this old thing wasn’t hers. It was a Forest Service 4x4 that had 214,000 miles on it. Judging from its performance, most of those had been hard miles, maybe climbing uphill over boulders and trees. It reminded Deeks of some mules he’d heard about, who didn’t want to get going but then once in motion, didn’t want to stop.
And it was a kick to drive on roads closed to all other vehicles. He swerved back and forth, from his lane into what would ordinarily be oncoming traffic, then straddled the center line, weaving this way and that.
“What are you doing?” Kensi asked.
“I’m enjoying freedom.”
“Freedom? That’s what freedom means to you? The ability to drive like a toddler with one of those fake steering wheels that straps onto the back of the front seat?”
“I don’t think they make those anymore, Kens. I haven’t seen them for a long time, anyway.”
“Sure they do,” Kensi said. “They’re just a lot fancier than when I was a kid. They have electronics now, and—”
“Wait, you had one of those?”
She met his gaze, just for an instant. “Watch the road,” she said.
“For what? We’re the only vehicle on it.”
“Bears, then. Or deer, whatever.”
“Bears. I’m watching for bears, now.”
“Anyway, yes, I had one. It didn’t do anything, though. Well, it turned. And the horn beeped, for a while. Until one day it was cracked. I guess it only beeped when it was airtight.”
“So you think you just beeped it so many times that it cracked?” Deeks asked. “Or do you think maybe your dad took a razor blade to it, because you were driving him nuts?”
“I’m sure he didn’t…whoa. I never thought of that. Do you really think that? A man would take a razor blade to his beloved child’s favorite toy?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“I don’t believe it. I can’t.”
“Denial is a river—”
Kensi cut him off. “Don’t say that. It’s the stupidest thing there is.”
“Oh, you think? There are a lot of contenders for that title.”
“You probably know all of them. You probably comb the internet looking for the stupidest things someone could possibly say, just so you can say them. But not now. Not while I’m having a parental identity crisis.”
“Parental identity? You know who your dad was.”
“I know who he was, but if he slashed my car horn, I don’t know what he was. Some kind of a monster? Maybe he had multiple personalities.”
“I’m just kidding, Kensi. I’m sure you just wore it out. You probably punched it too hard. You always did have a good left jab.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“I’m positive.”
“How could you possibly know?”
“Because I know you. And you’re wonderful. Therefore, your father was too good a man to do something like that to his loving daughter.”
Nell’s voice sounded in their ears before Kensi could respond. Deeks hoped that whatever it was would distract Kensi from the whole business about the horn, because he had dug himself in so deep he couldn’t even see the sky anymore. “Calling all cars,” Nell said. “Calling all cars. Sorry, I always wanted to say that.”
“What’s up, Nell?” Kensi asked.
“I might have something for you. You said the Peabodys lost track of the Shogrens, years ago, and the Shogrens pretty much disappeared from the radar. Well, it took a while, but I managed to track them down. They moved to a town called Geneva, Alabama, near the Florida Panhandle. I’m reading between the lines a little here, but it looks like they went because Woody Shogren’s father was ill. I can’t find any real estate transactions, so either they rented from a private party, or they lived in the father’s home. Anyway, he died, and not long after that, Woody and Dinah divorced. She married a cosmetic surgeon she met in Florida, who—get this—had a practice in the Valley. They came back to L.A., and after a year or so, bought a home off Coldwater Canyon.”
“Small world,” Kensi said.
“No joke. I guess she really likes it there,” Nell continued. “Anyway, they lived there in wedded bliss for about two years, when he divorced her and married one of his patients, who he had turned into a kind of living Barbie doll.”
“Yuck,” Deeks said. “That’s really putting the plastic in ‘plastic surgery.’”
“What happened to Dinah then?” Kensi asked.
“She traded up. She’s currently married to a Wall Street investment banker, and living in the Hamptons, in a house that’s been featured in Architectural Digest twice.”
“Nice work if yo
u can get it,” Deeks said.
“Exactly. Point is, the house in the hills is empty. It’s been for sale since they split up, but you know what real estate’s been like. Hal Shogren was already in the Army when all this happened, so neither of the stepfathers adopted him, and he never changed his name. But chances are good that he visited his mom when she was back out here as Dinah Spellman. Now she’s Dinah Douglas, or Dinah Shogren Spellman Douglas, or whatever.”
“So where is this empty house?” Kensi asked.
“I said ‘Calling all cars,’ but I was really just calling you, because you’re the closest to where he saw it.”
“Okay,” Deeks said. “Where do we go?”
“It’s complicated,” Nell said. “Get to Mulholland, and I’ll direct you from there.”
“Roger Dodger,” Deeks said. “Over and out.”
“Like I was saying,” Kensi said. “The stupidest things.”
* * *
“Turn here,” Shogren said.
Betsy eyed the road. “Where? There aren’t any—”
“There!” He pointed, throwing his arm right across her field of view. She batted it away.
“Use your words,” she said.
“Just make the turn.”
“That’s not much of a road. More of a path.”
“It’s wide enough.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“Do you always ask questions? Just do it.”
She slowed, flipped down the left turn signal—not that anyone was around to see it—and swung onto the narrow track. He was right, it was wide enough for one car. Not for two, but there were some turnouts where somebody could pull off and let another vehicle pass.
She wouldn’t need to use those, not today.
She felt like she’d been driving all day, pulling off the road whenever aircraft flew overhead, taking side roads any time Shogren thought there might be Forest Service personnel or firefighters out. She had breathed in so much smoke she thought her lungs must be at least dark gray. Sometimes they’d gone right by flames, so close she could hear the roar and feel the heat. She was more than ready to get out of the car.
After about a half mile, the road met a perpendicular one that was still dirt, but considerably wider and more frequently used. “Which way?” she asked.
He studied for a moment. “Right.”
She turned right. “I hope you know where we’re going.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” he said.
“Mister, you threw my husband out of our car, pointed a gun at me, and kidnapped me. I think I have a right to worry about anything and everything.”
“The only thing you have to worry about is doing what you’re told,” he said.
“Why? Why do you even still need me? There’s nobody up here. The fire’s still raging, and wherever you’re taking us is probably going to burn down while we’re there. So what good do I do you now?”
She was taking a chance, she knew. If he decided she was right, he might just kill her now. But if his natural opposition to everything she said held true, he would defend his decision not to have killed her yet, and in so doing, be arguing in favor of keeping her alive. Once he had taken that position, she hoped, he would have a harder time reversing course.
“God, you talk a lot.”
“I talk when I’m nervous. Forgive me for being a little on edge.”
“There’s a driveway up there, see? On the right? Turn in there.”
“Is this your—” Betsy caught herself just in time. She’d been about to say “your parents’ cabin,” but that would have given her away. Instead, she shifted gears. “—your place?”
“It doesn’t matter to you what it is, or whose place.” He spoke the next words slowly, as if she were a first-grader. “All. You. Have. To. Do. Is. Drive.”
“I’m driving! I’m just curious. And like I said, nervous.”
“We’re there,” he said. “Turn!”
“I’m turning.”
Two stone columns flanked the driveway. A stone gargoyle sat at the top of each one. The one on the right seemed to be laughing, and the other was scowling fiercely. Beyond them, the driveway arced around to come to a stop in front of a beautiful contemporary house, mostly glass, it seemed, and white where it wasn’t. It swept along the curve of the hillside, graceful as a bird in flight. Most of it was elevated off the ground, adding to the birdlike aspect; at ground level there was just a door, with a full-length window beside it.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay, this is where we’re going?”
“Am I speaking English? Yes, this is where we’re going.”
“Can I get out of the car? Because I really have to pee.”
“Like I need to know that. There are bathrooms inside.”
“Does the water work?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“If this is—”
“What?”
“Never mind,” Betsy said. “Are we going in?”
“Yes,” Shogren said. A pile of logs, at least a cord and maybe more, were stacked against a low wall across the driveway from the house, underneath a slanted roof. He picked one up, carried it across the drive, and hurled it through the big front window, shattering the glass. “Yes, we’re going in.”
45
“This would be so much faster from the air,” Callen said.
“Yeah, but you heard what that helicopter flight was like,” Sam replied. “No way to fly low enough over these hills to really search until the fire’s out. Or at least considerably smaller. We’re getting satellite imagery all the time, wherever the smoke is thin enough. If he’s up here, we’ll find him.”
“Even with all the bodies looking, it could take weeks to check out every corner of these hills. If he’s here, he’s not going to stay long. He had an escape route ready before any of this started. They all did, we know that. He just needs to hole up until it’s time to go. Then he’ll be out of the country, probably to someplace with no extradition to the United States.”
“He thought he was conducting a simple transaction,” Sam reminded him. He was driving the light-green Forest Service pickup on a pavement covered with so much white-gray ash it looked like a dirty snowfall. “If it had gone according to plan, he could have chilled in a fine hotel for a couple of days, until departure time. He wasn’t expecting to be on the run, with every cop in the county looking for him. He had to change plans in a hurry. So he’s gone to ground, probably someplace he’s familiar with. He’d want to know the ways in and out, know the neighborhood so he could spot anything that looked out of place.”
“I get it, in theory,” Callen said. “I’m just not sure the theory is right. What if he came up here, then changed his mind and went to the beach? Or back to someplace like the Sea Vue, where nobody asks questions?”
“He still has the hostage,” Sam said.
“Unless he’s killed her and dumped the body.”
“Granted, that’s a possibility. But even if he did that, if he came back into the city, we’d have picked up the car.”
“Unless he stole another one.”
“There are always going to be other potential scenarios, G. We can’t check out all of them. Best we can do is go with what seems to make the most sense, given the facts we know. We know Betsy Peabody was still driving the car when it turned up this way, out of the Valley. We know the car hasn’t shown up on camera again since then. So we proceed on the assumption that they’re still here in the hills, until we know something definitive that contradicts those facts.”
“Yeah,” Callen said sullenly. He agreed with everything Sam was saying. At least, on the surface. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that Shogren was too smart to do what made the most sense for him. He would change it up, somehow. The trick was figuring out how.
Probably, Callen figured, what was upsetting him was not the futility of searching the whole of the Hollywood Hills—at least, those part
s not currently ablaze, which narrowed it down quite a bit—but his own failure to nab Shogren at Belyakov’s rented house. He’d genuinely believed that Belyakov hadn’t told any of his men that he was undercover. He thought he’d convincingly played the part of a Russian tough guy. Granted, it had all had to happen quickly, because they hadn’t known when the deal was going down. And as it turned out, they’d pulled the switch just in time; twelve hours later and it would’ve been done.
His guess was that Belyakov had let something slip to Yegor when they’d been drinking together by the pool the night before. Yegor was no fool, and with his background, no doubt a suspicious sort to begin with. Belyakov might have said something he hadn’t considered dangerous, and Yegor had put it together with his naturally distrustful outlook. Callen didn’t know what he could have done differently, to ensure a better outcome, and that still bothered him.
He hadn’t intended for all those men to wind up dead. That had always been a possibility, even if he hadn’t been involved, because of the nature of the transaction. But if his presence had not made it almost inevitable, it had certainly upped the odds.
And then Shogren had escaped, with millions of dollars and a hostage—whose daughter, not incidentally, Callen had just shot to death on an L.A. street. It was no wonder, he decided, that he felt so jaundiced about the whole affair. It was the kind of thing that the acronym SNAFU had been coined to describe.
Finding Betsy Peabody alive and reuniting her with her husband would help improve his outlook. Arresting Shogren and ensuring that he faced justice for his many crimes would, too. But even those results couldn’t bring the dead back to life, or heal Deeks’s friend Tony Scarlatti.
Callen wasn’t predisposed toward depression, although sometimes he wondered if there was a darkness at his center that was responsible for his seeming inability to form lasting romantic relationships, his preference for solitude over company. Sam Hanna was the best partner he’d ever had—maybe the best friend, too—but still, there were plenty of times they parted ways at the end of the day that he was glad to be seeing Sam’s back. Certainly Callen’s early life had not been something out of a storybook, unless perhaps one written by Charles Dickens or filmed by Tim Burton. That kind of upbringing doubtless had long-term psychological ramifications, and Callen was still dealing with those. Always would be, he guessed.
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