“Just like that, he told you he was my father.”
“He was dying. I tried to get a statement while I worked on him, but he took the stories from his pocket and told me he had been trying to find you—”
“What stories?”
“The newspaper stories. You’re the same Elvis Cole they wrote the stories about, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“He had these clippings. He pushed them at me and told me you were his son, but then he passed. That’s it. I figured you’d recognize the tats if you knew him, me thinking he was your father, but it sounds like you don’t.”
I didn’t answer.
“Mr. Cole?”
My voice came out hoarse, and the catch embarrassed me.
“I don’t know my father. I don’t know anything about him, and so far as I know he doesn’t know me.”
Ruiz was quiet for a while, then cleared her throat.
“Maybe you should come take a look. Just in case.”
“Yeah. Maybe I should.”
“I’ll tell you where we are.”
After I copied the address, I put down the phone but still did not move. I had not moved in hours. Outside, an owl flicked past the open glass doors. Three raccoons scratched across the deck, peered in without seeing me, then departed as quietly as a whisper. I must have been waiting for Ruiz to call. Why else would I have been awake that night and all the other nights except to wait like a child lost in the woods—a forgotten child waiting to be found.
Alone with a troubled heart, I went to see the dead.
“Behind it all stands the city of Los Angeles, populated with the best and worst humanity has to offer and served and protected by a police force that also mirrors the best and worst in human nature.”
—The Denver Post
L.A. REQUIEM
The sun burns hot and the infamous Santa Ana winds blow ash from mountain fires of distant San Gabriel choking the glittering City of Angels. Joe Pike, a private investigator, learns that his ex-girlfriend Karen Garcia has been brutally murdered. Her father calls on Pike and his partner, Elvis Cole, to help keep an eye on the LAPD as they search the city for her killer. But what starts out as routine for Pike and Cole turns into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse and the reputation that everyone in Los Angeles has something to hide becomes a reality as a deadly dark web of conspiracy threatens to destroy Pike and Cole’s twelve-year friendship—if not their lives.
Published by Ballantine Books.
Available at bookstores everywhere.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2000 by Robert Crais
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2000.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-56737-6
v3.0
Robert Crais, Demolition Angel
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