Private L.A. (3 page)

Ducking the rope past the miffed deputy, I said, “Four dead bodies burning in a fire, and my client owns the house right above us.”

“Public beach,” Harry said, glanced at Wilkerson’s home. “Thin reason to be inside my crime scene, unless your client wants to confess?”

“He’s clean. But now that I’ve had to leave my incredibly lovely date in the lurch and I’m all the way here, I’m curious. Can I take a look?”

Harry hesitated, said, “No funny business, Jack.”

“Me?”

“Uh-huh,” the homicide captain said, not buying it. “Boots and gloves.”

A few moments later, wearing protective blue paper booties and latex gloves, I ducked under the tarp system that had been erected over the crime scene. The space stank of burned flesh. The victims, four men in après-surf wear, lay facedown in the wet ashes of a fire pit. Forensics techs were documenting the scene. I got out a tissue and pretended to blow my nose before passing it over the camera pen on my lapel to remove any raindrops.

Harry said, “Dog walker found them. Crazy to be out in this storm. Lucky for us, though. We managed to protect it within an hour of when we think the shootings went down. Illegal to have a fire here with or without a portable pit. It was like they were begging for trouble. People are very touchy around here about the rules.”

“C’mon, Harry,” I said. “You think someone double-tapped each of these guys over fire pit rules? This looks professional. A planned hit.”

“Yeah,” he admitted, distaste on his lips. “Looks that way to me too.”

“IDs?”

“All locals. All die-hard surfers. One’s a former investment guy, tends bar now down the highway. Another’s a young vet who came back from Iraq with some issues. The other two: still waiting. They weren’t carrying wallets like the first two.”

“Armed robbery gone bad?”

“If one of them was carrying something valuable enough, I suppose.”

“Or they all shared something in common, a secret, maybe, and this was revenge,” I replied, squatting to look at the sand around the corpses’ feet. “Rain and wind must have hammered this place. No tracks, no drag marks.”

“That’s all she wrote until the lab work tells me more,” the homicide captain said. “But about that, Jack: I won’t be keeping you in the loop.”

In an easy manner, Harry was telling me that, old friend or not, my time was up. I was about to rise from my crouch when I noticed a mustard-yellow card sticking out from beneath the dead bartender’s leg.

Before anyone could tell me not to, I scuttled forward and snatched it up.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Harry demanded.

Back of the card was empty. I flipped it to face my camera pen, paused, handed it to a scowling Harry Thomas, and saw what was written in eighteen-point letters:

NO PRISONERS

THE KILLER WHO
called himself No Prisoners drove an Enterprise rent-a-car toward a set of automatic doors in the City of Commerce in southeast Los Angeles. He pressed an app on his iPhone and the doors began to rise, revealing a large, high-ceilinged, cement-floored work space that had once housed a diesel truck repair shop, with three additional roll-up doors at the far end.

He took the place in at a glance: two white delivery vans, six cots, a makeshift kitchen, four metal folding tables pushed together to create one large surface covered with computer equipment, and several tool and die machines, including a lathe, a grinder, and a welding torch with two tanks of acetylene.

Five ruggedly built men turned from their work to watch him pull in out of the rain, park, get out, and draw the two Glocks from the pouch of his Lakers hoodie. None of the men looked remotely concerned. Not even a blink.

The killer expected no less of them.

“How’d it go, Mr. Cobb?” called one of the men, late twenties, with a gymnast’s muscles and the attitude of an alley dog that has fought for every scrap life has grudgingly yielded to him.

“Outstanding, as expected, Mr. Nickerson,” the killer replied before setting the guns in front of a bald, lean Latino man who sported tattoos of the Grim Reaper on both bulging biceps. They were new tattoos, livid. “Break these down, Mr. Hernandez.”

“Straightaway,” Hernandez said, accepting the pistols. He laid them on a heavy-duty folding table set up as a gunsmith’s bench. A sniper’s rifle sat in a vise awaiting adjustment.

A slighter man, early thirties, with a bleached goat’s beard, got up from behind a row of iPads, all cabled to a large server beneath the tables. “Did the rain screw up the feed?”

Cobb removed the sunglasses. “You tell me, Mr. Watson.”

Watson took the sunglasses from Cobb, cracked open a hidden compartment in the frame, removed a tiny SIM card. While he fitted the card into a reader attached to one of the iPads, Cobb tugged off the baggy sweatshirt, revealing a ripped, muscular physique beneath a black Under Armour shirt. He reached beneath the collar of the shirt. An edge came up. He pulled.

The beard, the latex, the blond wig, the entire No Prisoners disguise came off, revealing a man in his late thirties, with a gaunt, weathered face that time and misfortune had chiseled into something remarkable. Scars ran like strands in a spider’s web out from the round of his left jawline toward a cauliflower ear barely hidden by iron-gray hair.

It was the kind of face people never forgot.

Cobb knew that about himself, and he’d suffered for it in the past. He wasn’t going to make that mistake twice. He laid out the pieces of the disguise on a third folding table before looking to a wiry African-American man holding another iPad connected to a set of earphones hung around his neck.

“Where are we, Mr. Johnson?” Cobb asked.

Johnson stabbed a finger at the iPad. “From the traffic we’ve been monitoring, L.A. sheriff’s got their big guns on the beach.”

“Better than we hoped for,” Cobb remarked before glancing to the fifth man, the largest of them all, curly red hair, ice-blue eyes, and a rust-colored, out-of-control beard that made him look like some crazed Viking. “Mr. Kelleher?”

Kelleher nodded. “Associated Press brief ran fifteen minutes ago, four dead males on Malibu Beach shot gangland style and set afire.” He looked up. Puzzled. “That wasn’t the plan, Mr. Cobb.”

Cobb regarded him evenly. “Burning them amplifies things, moves events along quicker, Mr. Kelleher. Other coverage?”

Kelleher took that in stride, said, “All-news radio picked up the AP story.”

“Outstanding,” Cobb said. “Start the social media component.”

The big man nodded and went to sit next to Watson, who stroked his goat’s beard and looked at Cobb, smiling. “You caught just about everything. I edited it down to the pertinent sequence. Got sporty there, didn’t it?”

Watson was by far the smartest man in the room, a genius as far as Cobb was concerned. He’d never known anyone like Watson: a man who could handle tasks of extreme physical endurance while digesting vast amounts of data and information at a baffling rate. When Watson worked with computers, it was like he was attached to them, his own brain melding with the processors, able to analyze, compute, and code with the same mind-boggling speed.

“Let me see,” Cobb said, moved behind Watson. So did the other men.

Watson gave his iPad a command and the slayings from Cobb’s perspective played out on the screen. Hernandez chuckled when Grinder, the barrel-chested surfer, pleaded for his life.

“It’s like he’s saying ‘Don’t Tase me, bro,’” Hernandez said.

The others weren’t listening. They were engrossed in the blinding-quick move Cobb had used to avoid being tackled by the final man to die.

“Damn brilliant, Mr. Cobb,” said Nickerson. “You lost none of it.”

Johnson scowled. “I still say you should have sent one of us. We’re expendable.”

Cobb stiffened, felt angry. “No one here is expendable. Ever. Besides, why would I ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself?”

“You wouldn’t,” Kelleher said admiringly. “First in.”

“Last out,” Cobb said. “We are in this together.”

Watson said, “Upload to YouTube now, Mr. Cobb?”

Cobb shook his head. “Let’s wait, let them make the connection to the letter before we hit them with total shock and awe.”

THE KID MET
me up on Wilkerson’s rain-soaked terrace around one thirty that morning, about the same time the first news of the killings was reaching the Los Angeles airwaves.

“You get it all?” I asked.

“Everything you shot,” the Kid replied, tugging his hood down over hair he slicked back crooner style. “I didn’t get squat from my perspective. Smell bad?”

“Horrible. Have Sci review the footage, then attach the files to Wilkerson’s personal stuff.”

“Reason?”

“Case someone says he did it and we need to prove he didn’t,” I replied, headed toward the Touareg, suddenly tired and wanting to sleep.

On the drive home, as my headlights reflected off the water sheeting Highway 1, I considered calling Guin, but knew she had to be up in five hours, getting ready to head to London. Then, for reasons I can’t explain, my thoughts slipped to the only person I know who has never minded me calling at odd hours.

I reached over to the touch screen on the dashboard, called up Justine’s number, which appeared with a photograph of her I’d taken a couple of years ago. She was standing in an avocado orchard above the ocean in Santa Barbara. It was late in the day. Golden light. A breeze was blowing. Justine was brushing her hair from her eyes and smiling at me.

As I glanced at the photo, the full memory of that day came in all around me, as if I were there with Justine again in the orchard and the warm breeze blowing off the Pacific, back when it had all seemed perfect and inevitable between us.

But then we ran into the same problem again—I couldn’t open up to her the way she wanted me to. The way she needed me to. So we decided we had to keep our relationship strictly professional. Whatever the hell that will mean.

Blowing out a rueful breath, I wondered if I was ever going to get over a woman I still love but just can’t seem to be with, at least on her terms. And maybe mine. It’s complicated. Justine is a psychologist, a fine one. She also works for me, and—

My cell phone rang so loudly I jerked the wheel and skidded before righting the Touareg. The touch screen was flashing caller ID. I stabbed the answer button, said, “David Sanders, how are you?”

“Not good, Jack,” Sanders croaked. “Not fucking good at all.”

Sanders was a powerful entertainment lawyer who’d been a discreet client of Private’s several times in the recent past. And every time Sanders had called, it had been like this, in the middle of the night, with some mess to be cleaned up.

“You ever sleep, Dave?” I asked.

“Not when I’m dealing with a shitfest of potentially titanic proportions,” Sanders growled. “I want to hire Private. You personally. I’d like you leading.”

“I’m …”

“Hired,” Sanders insisted. “Be at LAX at seven thirty. The heliport. Bring a forensics team with you and someone who knows kids.”

“Kids? Where are we going?”

“Ojai,” Sanders said. “Thom and Jennifer Harlow’s place.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“A very scary uh-oh,” Sanders said before hanging up.

THE STREETS IN
Santa Monica were still slick and blustery around five fifteen that morning as Justine Smith climbed out of her car in shorts and a sweatshirt, drinking water and groaning. Her muscles hurt in places she hadn’t known she had muscles. And yet here she was, back for more punishment.

Am I a masochist at some level? Is that why I work too much, my love life is a zero, and my body feels like someone whacked it with two-by-fours?

Unable to formulate a coherent answer, Justine stiffly crossed the street toward a light-industrial building with a garage door that bore a sign reading “Pacific Crossfit.” Justine had a hate-love relationship with Crossfit, which was tougher than any other exercise program she’d ever followed. No high-tech machines. No mirrors. No fashion statements. Just Olympic free weights, gymnastics equipment, and the guts to perform brief, insanely intense workouts that often left her soaking wet, gasping on the floor, and sore for days.

Justine came from academics, not law enforcement, but her current job at Private required her to be kick-ass strong. So when she’d discovered that many US Special Forces operators, firefighters, and cops were switching to Crossfit for their physical training, she’d signed up at the gym, or “box,” closest to her.

The first few weeks she honestly thought she was going to die during the workouts. Rather than let the new regime defeat her, however, she had embraced it with her typical zeal. No matter what, she’d been first at the door on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings, even before the ex-SEALs and LAPD SWAT team cops who usually showed up for this early class.

Six months
, she thought, then admitted that she still feared Crossfit. But she absolutely loved the fact that she could now do twenty dead-hang pull-ups, deadlift two hundred and twenty-five pounds. And her abs were ripped. There was no other way to describe them.

The coach opened the door to the box from inside. A blue Toyota Camry rolled up to the curb and a guy Justine had never seen before climbed out stiffly.

She crossed through a small lobby, past a changing room, and out into the box itself. She glanced at the whiteboard on the wall before starting her warm-up. When she saw the workout of the day written there, her stomach fluttered with anxiety.

“ ‘Grace: thirty clean and jerks for time’?” a man’s voice groaned behind her. “That’s crazy. I can’t move from the box jumps yesterday.”

Justine looked over her shoulder and saw the new guy, midthirties, curly brown hair, trimmed beard and really, really nice hazel eyes.

“Soreness is a way of life here,” Justine said.

He smiled at her. A really nice smile. “Paul,” he said, holding out his hand. “It’s my fifth class.”

She smiled back, shook his hand, and said, “Justine. A little over six months.”

“Does it get better?”