Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(22)
“Nothing wrong with that,” Bob said. “And you can take your well-dressed sophistication with about two pounds of beach sand and pack it up your ass.”
“That’s the Marine Corps talking,” Rae said to Lucas. “The whole packing sand thing.”
“Ask Tremanty to check that phone number. We need to get over there—Pasadena, or wherever it is,” Lucas said. “She said forty-five minutes at three in the morning. At this time of day, it could be two hours. The fuckin’ traffic here is unbelievable.”
Rae called Tremanty, who was back to them in five minutes with an address for the hardwired phone. “You guys are like some kind of geniuses,” he said.
“We already knew that,” Lucas said, “but we try to keep it quiet.” He wrote the address in his notebook and said to Bob and Rae, “Altadena Drive. Suzie-Q knew where she was.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
They took both the Malibus, one silver, one black, Lucas driving on his own, Bob and Rae together, following their iPhone navigation apps up a number of freeways that began to sound like a bad California surfer song: the 405 to the 10 to the 110 to the 210—the thighbone connected to the hipbone, the hipbone connected to the iPhone—and then off into a welter of streets that began climbing the first low foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
The landscape was lush: towering royal palms mixing it up with darker, heavyset pines, and flowering bushes in scarlet and brilliant yellow, and everywhere two thousand shades of green, all behind wrought-iron fences with long, wide driveways.
They cruised, a hundred yards apart, past the target. The house was a sprawling, single-story ranch, with a curving driveway that led to a two-car garage partly obscured by foliage. A six-foot hedge ran along the front and sides of the property, separating it from its neighbors. They couldn’t see the backyard, but it looked as overgrown as the front.
After cruising the place, they drove out to a coffee shop on Lake Avenue and got coffee, and Bob also got donuts. Lucas brought up an Altadena map on his iPad and then a satellite view of the house, which told them almost nothing because of the heavy foliage across the whole block. They could see the bright blue corner of a swimming pool at the back.
“Did you see the house for sale across the street, a couple houses down the block?” Bob asked. “Bart Carver Realty?”
“I saw it, didn’t think about it,” Lucas said. “Why?”
“Because it looked empty, unswept, like maybe there’s nobody living there right now, or only part-time. You can see Suzie-Q’s house from there; you’re looking right up the driveway. If the for sale house is empty and we could get in there . . .”
“We’ve done it before,” Rae said to Lucas. “We can get comfortable, and it gets the cars off the street.”
“I’ve done it myself, but I knew the real estate guy,” Lucas said. He thought about it, then said, “I’d rather not ask Rocha for help, not until we know what we’ve got. She’d want in.”
“Why don’t we go lay some heavy-duty marshal shit on this Bart Carver?” Bob suggested. “Can’t hurt.”
Lucas nodded. “Okay. That’s better than anything I’ve got.”
AS A REAL ESTATE BROKER, selling million-dollar houses, Bart Carver should have been easy to find, but wasn’t—there was nobody at his office at eight o’clock, and the first of his associates that they managed to reach didn’t believe they were marshals and thought Lucas was trying to lure her out of her town house to sell her into sex slavery. The second associate had a similar attitude, without the paranoia, but agreed to call Carver and ask him to call Lucas.
Carver, who didn’t call back until ten o’clock, happened to be at a chamber orchestra performance that his wife made him go to—or so he claimed when they spoke with him. The house, he said, was indeed empty, but he couldn’t possibly let anyone in the place without checking with the owners, who’d certainly be asleep at ten o’clock. When Lucas doubted that and got loud, if not actually threatening, Carver agreed to try to call.
“Have them call me,” Lucas said.
The owners called Lucas ten minutes later. “We’re happy to cooperate with law enforcement officers, but that’s an expensive house and we don’t want it damaged in any way.”
“We will be sitting in a window with a pair of binoculars. Your neighbors will never know that we are even there,” Lucas promised.
“Could we talk about it tomorrow? We’re down in San Diego, but we’ve got to come up there in the morning.”
“Let me check with my guys,” Lucas said. “Hang on.”
“It’s already late,” said Rae, who’d been listening. “What are we gonna do in the middle of the night? Let’s bag out at the hotel, do some planning, meet the owners up here.”
Lucas agreed and told the owners that they’d meet in the morning. The guy they were talking to said, “Listen, wear jeans. And T-shirts . . . Maybe bring some gloves.”
“Why?”
“To scratch our backs if we scratch yours.”
THEY MET with the owners at a Jack in the Box. They turned out to be two burly, middle-aged gay men, Stephen Barnett and Luis Jimenez, who’d decided to get out of LA. “We expect that next summer will get days that are 120 degrees, if not hotter. It’ll be Saudi Arabia, only with margaritas and the dumber movie stars.”