Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(21)

“We’re working,” Rae said. “We need to find a woman named Barbara Jackman who lives in Marina del Rey. Could you have somebody look?”

“You got an actual lead?”

“Maybe.”

“Call you back soon as I can,” Tremanty said.

Lucas, Bob, and Rae went back to the Marriott. Tremanty called as they were walking in the door. “I’ve got an address and some details. She’s had three traffic tickets over the past five years—speeding—and a small amount of marijuana picked up on one of them, before it was legal out there. She had the baggie sitting on the passenger seat. She got a fine, nothing else. Her driver’s license has a current photo. She works part-time as a real estate agent. There’s a better photo on her website, but she looks a lot younger than her license, so it may not be up-to-date. I asked for a credit report. It’ll all be in the email.”

In Lucas’s room, they pulled up the email from Tremanty. Jackman’s driver’s license had a Marina del Rey address, a condo on Marina City Drive. They spotted it on Google Maps, a half mile away, and decided to drive over.

“I’m feeling toolucky,” Bob said. “It’s making me nervous. We’re not working hard enough for this.”


JACKMAN’S CONDO, a tall, circular, cake-shaped building, had a gatehouse with nobody in it. They parked in a “No Parking” area, along a curb, Rae unrolling a “Marshal’s Service” dashboard sign, but then an employee of the condominium jogged over to run them off and wound up guiding them into a legitimate spot and showing them to the elevators.

“Five dollars says she isn’t home,” Bob said, as they went up. “It’s too easy, I’m telling you.”

They found her door, knocked, and ten seconds later Jackman cracked the door, peered over the chain, and asked, “Yes?”


“I WANT TO KNOW who told you I went home with him,” Jackman said, when Lucas asked. They were inside her apartment, looking over the marina and out toward the ocean. She was angry. “It’s Oliver, isn’t it?”

Jackman was a tall, attractive forty-three-year-old—they got her age from her license—with bouncy honey-blond hair and darker eyebrows and real two-carat diamonds in her ears. If she worked only part-time at the real estate office, she had money of her own, Lucas thought.

“We haven’t met an Oliver,” Lucas said. “Even if we had, we couldn’t tell you who our source was. Listen. We don’t think you did anything wrong. Your social life is your social life and we’re not interested. We want to know where you went, that’s all.”

“I don’t know where, exactly,” Jackman said. “It’s over by Pasadena, north of the 210. It was a half hour from here, at eleven o’clock at night, in a Cadillac, and forty-five minutes coming home at three o’clock in the morning by Uber.”

“That’s raw,” Rae said. “He didn’t drive you home?”

“Called an Uber, put me out on the street,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since. If I had, I’d have given him another piece of my mind, on top of the piece he’d already got.”

“You think you could find—”

“No, I couldn’t. It was almost midnight when we got there, and I’d had a few drinks and wasn’t paying much attention. It’s a standard suburban, upper-middle California neighborhood that looks like a million other places. Saw a nice Spanish Revival house on the way—I’d put it at a million-five, maybe two, depending on condition. Now that I’m thinking about it, it was probably not in Pasadena but maybe Altadena. But you know what? Since you’re the FBI—”

Bob: “Marshals Service.”

“Whatever . . . I know how you could find him. He had a regular phone in the bedroom. When he went off to the bathroom, I called myself on it.”

Rae: “You called?”

“Yeah. So I’d have a record of his phone number, if I wanted to call him up. I never wanted to, it turns out. I didn’t tell him about calling myself, though.”

Lucas: “You still have . . . ?”

She got her purse, got her phone, thumbed through it, and said, “Ready?”


WHEN THEY LEFT, going down in the elevators, Bob said, “I’m telling you, it’s too easy.”

“Gift horse,” Lucas said. “Don’t look in the mouth.”

“I’m with Bob,” Rae said. “You haven’t been on many fugitive things like this, Lucas. Maybe one, down in Texas, right?”

“A couple more up in Minnesota,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, but those were amateurs. You’ve only done one hardcore guy,” Rae said. “What you find out is, you always have trouble. It might be spread out, so you have trouble all the way through the operation, or everything can be sweet, but then, right at the end, a pile of trouble jumps up and bites you on the butt. Always.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, but it sounds like superstition,” Lucas said. They walked out through the lobby, and Lucas put his sunglasses on. “You two haven’t worked with a sophisticated, well-dressed investigator like myself, so you don’t appreciate how smoothly things can go. With you guys, it’s always combat fatigues, guns, kicking down doors.”