The Last Detective

Richard said, “I can't believe this is all you have, one crappy half-assed hole in the dirt, and your only explanation is that Rambo stole my son. Jesus.”

  DeNice glanced around the hill.

  “Maybe they just didn't look hard enough.”

  Fontenot nodded.

  “Bubba, I hear that.”

  Myers nodded at them, and Fontenot and DeNice spread out over the hill.

  Gittamon leaned closer to the print.

  He said, “Can you make a cast of this, John?”

  Chen pinched a bit of soil and let it dribble through his fingers. He didn't like what he saw, and frowned, sourly.

  “You see how fine and dry the soil is, like salt? Soil like this won't hold its structure. You got soil like this, you can lose a lot of detail when you make the pour. The weight of the plastic deforms the impression.”

  Starkey said, “Everything's a drama with you. I've worked fifty blast sites with this guy and it's always the end of the world.”

  Chen looked defensive.

  “I'm just telling you. I can frame the impression to help with the structure, then seal the soil before I pour, but I don't know what I'll get.”

  Starkey got up.

  “You'll get a cast. Stop whining and start working, John. Jesus.”

  Richard watched DeNice and Fontenot searching through the brush, then shook his head. He checked the time.

  “Lee, this is going to take forever at this rate. You know what to do. Hire more people if we have to and bring in whoever we need. I don't care what it costs.”

  Starkey watched Gittamon like she was hoping he would say something, and she spoke up when he didn't.

  “If more people come out it'll end up like a zoo down here. It's bad enough now.”

  Richard slipped his hands into his pockets.

  “That isn't my problem, Detective. My problem is finding my son. If you want to arrest me for obstruction or some silly thing like that, I'm sure that'll make a good story in the local news.”

  Gittamon said, “No one's talking about anything like that. We just have to be concerned with preserving the crime scene.”

  Myers touched Richard's arm. The two of them had a low conversation, then Myers turned back to Gittamon.

  “You're right, Sergeant, we need to worry about preserving the evidence and also the case against whoever took Ben. Cole shouldn't be here.”

  I stared at him, but Myers held the same unreadable expression. Gittamon looked confused.

  I said, “I don't get your point, Myers. I've already been here. I was all over this slope searching for Ben.”

  Richard shifted his shoulders impatiently.

  “What's not to understand, Cole? I never practiced criminal law, but I'm enough of a lawyer to know that you'll be a material witness in whatever case arises. You might even be named as a party. Either way, your presence creates a problem.”

  Starkey said, “Why would he be a party?”

  “He was the last person to see my son alive.”

  The canyon grew hot. Sweat leaked from my pores and blood pushed hard through my arms and legs. Chen was the only one who moved. He tapped a sheet of rigid white plastic into the soil a few inches from the shoe print. He would frame the print like that to support the soil, then spray a thin clear sealant not unlike hair spray to bind the surface. Framing the soil would lend strength. Binding its surface would yield structure. Stability was everything.

  I said, “What are you saying, Richard?”

  Myers touched Richard's arm again, just as he'd done outside Lucy's apartment.

  “He's not accusing you, Cole. It's nothing like that, but it's clear that the man on the phone bears a grudge against you. When everything comes out, maybe it will turn out that you used to know him and didn't like him any more than he likes you.”

  “I don't know what he's talking about, Myers.”

  Richard said, “Myers is right. If his lawyer can establish that the grudge goes both ways, he'll argue that you purposefully contaminated the evidence against him. He might even claim that you planted evidence. Look at O.J.”

  Starkey said, “That's bullshit.”

  “I used to be a lawyer, Detective. Let me tell you that when you're in court, bullshit sells.”

  Gittamon squirmed uncomfortably.

  “No one is doing anything improper down here.”

  “Sergeant, I'm on your side—I'm even on Cole's side, as much as it pisses me off to say it, but we have a problem with this. Please. Ask your superiors or someone in the prosecutor's office. See what they think.”

  Gittamon watched Pike and Richard's detectives moving through the brush. He glanced at Starkey, but all she did was shrug.

  He said, “Ah, Mr. Cole, maybe you should wait up at your house.”

  “What good would it do, Gittamon? I've already been all over this slope, so it won't make any difference if I keep looking.”

  Gittamon shuffled. He reminded me of the pug, nervous for a place to pee.

  “I'll talk to the Hollywood captain. I'll see what he thinks.”

  Richard and Myers turned away without waiting for more and joined Fontenot and DeNice in the brush. Gittamon hunkered down beside Chen so that he wouldn't have to look at me.

  Starkey watched all of them for a moment, then shrugged at me.

  “Look, I'll probably hear back on those names in a couple of hours. A regular guy sitting around in Des Moines doesn't just decide to do something like this one day; anyone who would do this is an asshole and assholes have records. If we get a bounce on one of those names you gave us, we'll have something to work with. Just wait upstairs and I'll let you know.”

  I shook my head.

  “You're crazy if you think I'm going to wait.”

  “We don't have anything else to work with. What else can you do?”

  “Think like him.”

  I waved Pike over, and we climbed the hill to my house.

  9

  time missing: 19 hours, 08 minutes

  When people look at Joe Pike, they see an ex-cop, ex-Marine, the muscles and the ink, dark glasses riding a secret face. Pike grew up at the edge of a small town where he spent his childhood hiding in the woods. He hid from his father, who liked to beat Pike bloody with his fists, then tool up on Pike's mother. Marines weren't frightened of brutal alcoholics, so Pike made himself into a Marine. The Marines saw Pike move well in the woods and the trees, so they taught him other things. Now Pike was the best that I had ever seen at those things and it was all because he once used to be a scared little boy in the woods. When you see someone, all you see is what they let you see.

  Pike studied the canyon from my deck. We could hear Starkey and the others below, though we could not see them. The cut of the canyon funneled their voices, and would have funneled Ben's voice, too, if Ben had called out.

  I said, “He couldn't know when Ben would leave my house or be alone, so he needed a safe place to watch and wait. He was some other place until he saw Ben going down the slope, then he came here.”

  Pike nodded at the finger ridge across the canyon.

  “Can't see your house from the street below because of the trees and he needed a clear field of view. He had to be across the canyon with a spotting scope or glasses.”

  “That's the way I see it.”

  The opposite ridge was a crooked finger of knobby peaks that rose and fell as it stepped down into the basin. Residential streets threaded along its sides, cut by undeveloped wedges where the slopes were too unstable or too steep to hold houses.

  Pike said, “Okay, from where he was, he would have been able to see us here on your deck. That means we can see his hiding place.”

  I went inside for my binoculars and the Thomas Guide. I found the page that showed the streets across the canyon, then oriented the map to match the direction of the ridge. There were plenty of places that someone could hide.

  I said, “Okay, if it was you, where would you be?”

  Pike studied the m
ap, then considered the ridge.

  “Forget the streets lined with houses. I'd pick a spot where the locals couldn't see me. That means I'd park where people wouldn't wonder about my car.”

  “Okay. So you wouldn't leave your car in front of a house. You'd park on a fire trail or pull off the street into the brush.”

  “Yeah, but I'd still want fast access to my vehicle. When I saw Ben, I wouldn't have much time to get to my car, drive here, park, then move uphill looking for him.”

  It was a long way. Ben could easily be back in my house by the time someone got across.

  “What about two men? One keeping watch, the other waiting on this side with a cell phone?”

  Pike shrugged.

  “Either way, someone had to be on the far side, watching. If we're going to find anything, that's where we'll find it.”

  We picked out obvious reference points like an orange house that looked like a Martian temple and a row of six bearded palms in someone's front yard, and marked their locations on the map. Once we had reference points, we took turns glassing the far hillside for houses being remodeled, clumps of trees on undeveloped land, and other likely places where a man could wait for long hours without being seen. We located them on the map relative to our reference points.

  Gittamon came up the hill while we glassed, and nodded at us as he left. I guess he thought we were just killing time. Myers and DeNice came up a little while after and got into the limo. Myers said something to DeNice, and DeNice gave us the finger. Mature. Fontenot trudged up the hill a few minutes later, then DeNice and Fontenot left in the Marquis. Myers went back down the hill to stay with Richard.

  We glassed the ridge for almost two hours, then Joe Pike said, “Let's hunt.”

  Ben had been missing for twenty-one hours.

  I thought about telling Starkey what we were doing, but decided that it was better if she didn't know. Richard would bitch and Starkey might feel obligated to remind us that Gittamon had told us not to jeopardize their case. They might have to worry about making a case, but all I cared about was finding a boy.

  We snaked our way across the canyon to the opposite ridge; school had not yet let out, adults were still working, and everyone else was hiding behind locked doors. The world gave no sign that a child had been stolen.

  Everything looked different from a thousand yards away. Close up, the trees and houses were unrecognizable. We checked and rechecked our map against the landmarks that we had noted and tried to find our way.

  The first place we searched was an undeveloped area at the end of a fire road. Unpaved fire roads wrap through the Santa Monica Mountains like veins through a body, mostly so that county work crews can cut brush and eliminate fuel before fire season. We parked between two driveways at the end of the pavement and squeezed around the gate.

  Even as we parked, Pike said, “He wasn't here. Parking between these houses is asking to be seen.”

  We followed the fire road anyway, jogging together to make better time as we searched for a view of my house. The brush and scrub oak were so thick that we never once saw my house or my ridge or anything other than sky. It was like running in a tunnel. We jogged even faster going back to my car.

  Seven spots that had seemed likely from my deck were exposed to the neighbors. We scratched them off the map. Four more locations could only be reached by parking in front of houses. We scratched them, too. Every time we saw a home for sale we checked to see if it was occupied. If the house was empty, we went to the door or hopped the side gates to check for a view of my home. Two of the houses could have been used as a blind, but neither showed signs of that kind of use.

  Joe Pike has been my friend and my partner for many years; we were used to each other and worked well together, but the sun seemed to sprint across the sky. Finding likely spots took forever; searching them even longer. Traffic picked up as soccer moms and carpools delivered children from school; kids with skateboards and spiky hair watched us from drives. Adults on their way home from work eyed us suspiciously from their SUVs.

  I said, “Look at all these people. Somebody saw something. Someone had to.”

  Pike shrugged.

  “Would they see you?”

  I looked at the sun and dreaded the coming darkness.

  Pike said, “Slow down. I know you're scared, but slow down. We move fast, but we don't hurry. You know the drill.”

  “I know.”

  “If you hurry you'll miss something. We'll do what we can, then come back tomorrow.”

  “I said I know.”

  Most of the streets were shoehorned belly to butt with contemporary houses built in the sixties for aerospace engineers and set designers, but a few of the streets held stretches that were either too steep or too unstable to carry a foundation. We found three of those stretches with unobstructed views of my home.

  The first two were nearly vertical troughs on the inside of sharp curves. You could use them for blinds, but you would need climbing spikes and pitons to hang from the slope. The third was more promising. A shoulder on the point of an outside curve sloped downhill near the foot of the ridge. A house at the beginning of the curve was being remodeled, and more homes sat on the far end, but the point itself was houseless. We pulled off the street and got out of my car. Starkey and Chen were tiny dots of color climbing up to my house. I couldn't tell who was who, but it would have been easy with binoculars.

  Pike said, “Good view.”

  Two small cars and a dusty pickup were parked off the road near us. They probably belonged to the men who worked at the construction site. One more car wouldn't stand out.

  I said, “It'll be faster if we split up. You take this side of the shoulder. I'll cross the top, then move down the far side.”

  Pike set off without a word. I worked my way across the top of the shoulder parallel to the street, trying to find a footprint or scuff mark. I didn't.

  Gray knots of brush sprouted over the slope like mold, thinning around stunted oaks and ragged pine trees. I moved downhill in a zigzag pattern, following erosion cuts and natural paths between great stiff balls of sagebrush. Twice I saw marks that might have been made by someone passing, but they were too faint for me to be sure.

  The shoulder dropped away. I couldn't see my car or any of the houses on either side of the little point, which meant that the people in those houses couldn't see me. I looked across the canyon. The windows in Grace Gonzalez's house glowed with light. My A-frame hung from the slope with its deck jutting out like a diving board. If I were surveilling my house, this would be a fine place for it.

  Pike appeared silently between the brush.

  “I went down as far as I could, then the slope dropped away. It's too steep on that side for anyone to use.”

  “Then help me with this side.”

  We searched the ground beneath two pines, then worked our way farther down the slope toward a single scrub oak. We moved parallel to each other and ten meters apart, covering more ground that way. Time was everything. Purple shadows pooled around us. The sun kissed the ridge. It would sink faster, racing with the night.

  Pike said, “Here.”

  I stopped as I was about to take a step. Pike knelt. He touched the ground, then lifted his glasses to see better in the dim light.

  “What is it?”

  “Got a partial here, then another partial. Moving your way.”

  Dampness prickled my hands. Ben had been missing for twenty-six hours. More than a day. The sun settled even faster, like a sinking heart.

  I said, “Do they match with the print we found at my place?”

  “I couldn't see that one clearly enough to know.”

  Pike stepped over the prints. I moved toward the tree. I told myself that these prints could have been made by anyone: neighborhood kids, hikers, a construction worker come looking for a place to piss; but I knew it was the man who had stolen Ben Chenier. I felt it on my skin like too much smog.

  I stepped across an erosion cut b
etween two balls of sagebrush and saw a fresh footprint in the dust between two plates of shale. The print pointed uphill, leading up from the tree.

  “Joe.”

  “Got it.”

  We moved closer to the tree, Pike approaching from the left and me from the right. The tree was withered, with spiky branches that had lost most of their leaves. Thin grass had sprouted in the fractured light under the branches. The grass on the uphill side was flat, as if someone had sat on it.

  I did not move closer.

  “Joe.”

  “I see it. I've got footprints in the dirt to the left. Can you see?”

  “I see them.”

  “You want, I can get closer.”

  Behind us, the sun was swallowed by the ridge. The pooling shadows around us deepened and lights came on in the houses on the far ridge.

  “Not now. Let's tell Starkey. Chen can try to match the prints, and then we have to start knocking on doors. This is it, Joe. He was here. He waited for Ben here.”

  We backed away, then followed our own footprints up the hill. We drove back to my house to call Starkey. We had seen her leave almost two hours ago, but when we tooled around the curve she was parked outside my front door, no one else, just Starkey, sitting behind the wheel of her Crown Vic, smoking.

  We swung into the carport, then hurried out to tell her.

  I said, “I think we found where he waited, Starkey. We found prints and crushed grass. We've gotta get Chen out to see if the prints match, and then we have to go door-to-door. The people who live over there might've seen a car or even a tag.”

  It came out of me in a torrent as if I expected her to cheer, but she didn't. She looked grim, her face dark like a gathering storm.

  I said, “I think we have something here, Starkey. What's the matter with you?”

  She sucked down the last of her cigarette, then crushed it with her toe.

  “He called again.”

  I knew there was more to it, but I was scared she would tell me that Ben was dead.

  Maybe she knew what I was thinking. She shrugged, as if that was an answer to the things I wasn't brave enough to ask.

  “He didn't call you. He called your girlfriend.”