Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(18)

“And Beauchamps is involved in all of them?”

“Yes, we think so. We think he’s the leader. One victim had a solid gold paperweight commissioned by his wife. It was a lump of gold the size of my fist, made by melting down a pile of pure gold coins and having an artist sculpt it to look like the victim’s wife’s breasts. The raw gold was worth something like forty thousand dollars. Anyway, we put out a bulletin, and the Vegas cops happened to raid a fence a couple weeks after the home invasion and found the gold tits before the fence could melt them. One of the cops remembered our bulletin and called. The fence identified Keller—Beauchamps—from his mug shots.”

“Okay. He’s around.”

“Yeah. We’ve got one other suspect—and when I say ‘suspect,’ I mean ‘for sure’—named Jayden Nast. He’s a very large, violent black guy. He goes straight for the wives, tells them what he’ll do to them if they don’t pop that safe, how he’s going to pop her balloon knot. These are well-tended women who can’t deal with, uh, you know, the situation, the threats. It’s all very calculated: he’s a frightener and knows how to do it.”

“I don’t know . . . What’s a ‘balloon knot’?”

“You know, you look inside a balloon knot, it sort of looks like a sphincter muscle,” Rocha said. “Like an anus.”

“Got it,” Lucas said. “How’d you ID him?”

“One of the women gave him some lip and he smacked her in the face, broke her nose, knocked her down, and she grabbed his ankle and scratched him. He pulled her back up—by the hair— and she gave up the combination to the safe, but she kept her hand curled up and got us some solid DNA. He went in the database in 2011 on a felony assault charge, pled down, got out, but stayed in the base. So we’re sure.”

“Then we’re looking for Beauchamps or this Jayden Nast, who could take us to Beauchamps, who then could take us to Deese.”

“If you get even a whiff of Beauchamps or Nast, I want to hear about it,” Rocha said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a dozen billionaires on your back, and on the chief ’s back, and on the mayor’s back, some of them major political donors, all of them demanding that the guy get caught and hanged?”

“You think that’s worse than chasing a cannibal?”

After a few seconds, Rocha said, “I gotta hand it to you, a cannibal serial killer would be right up there. But he’s not my cannibal, he’s yours. You coming out here?”

“Very soon,” Lucas said.

“Call me. Pay attention when I say that Nast is violent. We’ve backtracked him all the way to his gangbanger days down in South-Central. This is a guy who likes to hurt people. He supposedly once worked over an ex-girlfriend with brass knuckles, ruined her face. Everybody says one other thing: he hates cops. There are rumors that he’s killed cops. We don’t know if that’s true or where it might have happened. Probably not here, but the rumors are persistent. Pay attention, okay? A guy, with guns, who hates cops.”

“Gotcha.”


LUCAS HAD HAD the phone on speaker, and when he hung up Bob asked, “We going?”

“We’re going.”

“Hot dog. We going,” Bob said to Rae.

Rae said, “Be still my beating heart.”

Bob said, “You didn’t tell Rocha about the phone number.”

“I want to take a look at this bar, see who we can find,” Lucas said. “Rocha would take down Deese if she had the chance, but she really wants Beauchamps and Nast. That’s her priority, not ours. If she grabs Beauchamps, we might lose our connection to Deese.”

“I’ll buy that,” Rae said. “If we get Deese, we’ll probably get Beauchamps anyway. Might not work the other way around. When are we leaving?”

“I’ll call Russ Forte’s assistant,” Lucas said. “We’ve got reading to do . . . I’m thinking tomorrow morning—early.”


GETTING FROM New Orleans to Los Angeles wasn’t as simple as it should have been, and they didn’t get out early. Checkin always took time, with the bag full of guns and armor that Bob and Rae traveled with, and they finally made it into LAX on a Delta flight at one o’clock in the afternoon.

Because feds were so identified with SUVs, and local cops with beaters, they rented two Chevy Malibus from Avis. Lucas had been in Los Angeles any number of times and usually stayed in Santa Monica, at Shutters on the Beach. He didn’t think it was likely that the Marshals Service would go for rooms at Shutters, so they checked into the Marina del Rey Marriott. They didn’t get suites, which disappointed Bob and Rae, but they did get views of the marina and, Bob noticed, a Cheesecake Factory. They were a ten-minute walk from Flower Child’s Bar and Grill on Washington Boulevard.

They were out of the hotel by four o’clock; the day was clear and warm, the temperature in the upper 70s, with only a fitful breeze coming off the ocean and into their faces as they walked down to the bar: all reasons to live in LA, including the smell of the ocean.

Flower Child’s was in a low, two-story stucco building a few blocks from the Pacific, with a pink-striped awning over the sidewalk. The awning was also decorated with painted flowers, marijuana leaves, and ukuleles.