Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(55)

“Wait a minute,” Tommy Eli said. “The fuckin’ cannibal?”


THE ELIS HAD two things relevant to the Gang of Four. The first was a scrap of lined yellow paper, ripped from a legal pad, with a license number scrawled on the back. While Tommy was paying the two guys who’d brought in the Loloma, Bobby had run around the block to watch them leave. He followed them to a Dodge Challenger with Oregon license tags. Bobby had written down the number, should it ever be needed.

Mallow called the number in to his office and was told that they’d get back to him as soon as they could.

The second was that in the negotiations for the Loloma jewelry, “Richard” had mentioned he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before because of the fuckin’ planes taking off.

The Elis had written down the date that the Loloma had come in, and Mallow called somebody at the Las Vegas sheriff’s office and asked them to call somebody at the Federal Aviation Administration to find out which way the planes had been taking off the night before they’d brought in the jewelry.

The narcs eventually took the Elis off to jail, though the brothers protested that they were victims, not perpetrators. The burglary guys were working through the office space inch by inch. They’d already solved a couple of burglaries and were hoping to solve more.

“That OxyContin was the biggest break we ever had back here,” Mallow told Lucas. “We never had a way to get inside before. I’m a happy guy. Thank you.”

“I’ll be happy if you can help me get to Deese,” Lucas said. “The rest of them are all yours.”


LUCAS WAS STILL at the Eli brothers’ office when Bob and Rae called about what they’d found at the medical center. “We got a subpoena on the way. We ought to know about the prescriptions and where they were filled inside the hour.”

And as they were talking about that, Mallow waved at him and then called, “Got the car. It’s a Hertz and it’s already been returned. Hertz has video, and they’ll give it to us, but they want some paper to cover their asses.”

Lucas asked to Rae, “Who’d you talk to about the subpoena?”

“An assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. You need one?”

“Yeah. We need to talk to Hertz.”


MALLOW DIDN’T WANT to go talk to Hertz because the Eli search was producing too much good material. Lucas talked to the assistant at the U.S. Attorney’s, stopped at the federal building and got the subpoena from a pretty young woman who said, “We know about you. You’re world-famous in the Justice Department.”

Lucas said, “Right,” but he liked pretty women and stayed to chat with her for a minute before he went on his way.

Lucas followed his iPhone GPS map to the Hertz office, which was in a car rental center south of the airport. The manager looked at the subpoena and then led the way into a back room, where he called up the video of the car rental. The renters were two men, one big and the other smaller, both wearing ball caps that obscured their faces.

At the end of the rental transaction, as the two were walking out to the car, one of the men half turned, and Lucas could see the side of his face. The manager hit a button and froze the image. “Oh, yeah,” Lucas said. “Marion Beauchamps. That’ll look good on the nightly news.”

He also looked at the paperwork on the rental. He’d never heard of the renter’s name, Harold Weeks, but it was Beauchamps for sure.

“The license is valid and so was the Visa card he used,” the manager said. He’d printed out all the rental information and gave a copy of it to Lucas.

Outside again, Lucas called Russell Forte in Washington and asked him to chase down the driver’s license number and the Visa card.

Mallow called, said somebody in his office had talked to the FBI and the FBI had called the traffic controllers at the airport tower. The night before the gang had sold the Loloma jewelry, the planes had been taking off to the west. “There’s one main east-west runway. There’s a mix of residential housing out there under the flight path—apartments, town houses, single family homes. They’ll be in there somewhere.”

“We’re getting close,” Lucas told him. “We may want to work something out with your SWAT squad. These guys are hard-core.”

“I’ll talk to the sheriff,” Mallow said.


RAE CALLED. All prescriptions were computerized and those issued by the hospital had been filled at a Walmart pharmacy. “Does that help?”

Lucas spotted the Walmart on his iPad: it was located off a stretch of the Beltway due west of the airport’s east-west runway. “Yes. Everything points to the same neighborhood,” Lucas said. “We need to get back to the hotel and figure out what to do next. I was planning to go to the TV stations and put Beauchamps’s face on the news, but, now that I think about it, that might not be a good idea. If they run, we’d just have to track them again, but for now we sort of know where they are.”

“See you at the hotel,” Rae said.

Lucas had worked his way out to Paradise Road, on his way back to the hotel, when Sandro Tremanty called from New Orleans. “Hey, Dad.”

“What’s up?”

“I heard you’re in Las Vegas,” the FBI agent said.

“Yeah. We’ve followed them this far, crossed their trail a couple of times. We’re starting to pin them down. Can’t promise anything.”