The Sentry (21 page)

“Come through the tattoo place, and go out the back. You’ll see a stair. The man at the counter says anything, tell’m you’re with the band.”

Pike crossed between cars and went through the tattoo shop. A bald man with tattoos on his scalp and cheeks and a large metal ring through his nose was reading a James Ellroy novel behind the counter. He glanced up when Pike entered, but went back to reading when Pike pointed at the ceiling.

Pike passed walls lined with thousands of tattoo designs, then through a narrow back door and up a flight of metal stairs. Straw was waiting at the top, wearing jeans and a loose V-neck T-shirt that needed a wash. He showed Pike into a tiny two-room office suite without furniture. The only light came from a single lamp burning in the back room. The front room overlooking the street caught a wedge of light through the partially open door, but the windows overlooking the street were covered with black cloth spotted with small rectangular cutouts for viewing the street. The man in the orange shirt was cross-legged on the floor with his back against the wall. He stared at Pike with indifference and made no move to offer his hand.

It was a bare-bones hide, smelling of pizza, cigarettes, and body odor. Suitcases piled with rumpled clothes were in the corners near air mattresses mounded with sleeping bags. Empty soda cans and Starbucks cups spilled from a garbage bag. Straw’s team had come in light, and hadn’t planned on staying as long as they had.

Straw smiled as he gestured to the room.

“I’d say pull up a chair, but we don’t have chairs.”

“Mendoza and Gomer didn’t trash Smith’s shop. The man who killed them did it, and your guys might have seen him.”

Straw and the orange man stared for a moment, then the orange man tipped forward, interested.

“What does he look like?”

His voice was higher than Pike expected, and hoarse at the edges, as if he was getting over a cold.

“What’s your name?”

Straw answered for him.

“This is Kenny. Let’s leave it at first names.”

Kenny was watching Pike now, his eyes intense.

“Can you describe the guy?”

“Haven’t seen him.”

Kenny smirked as he slumped against the wall, his interest gone.

“Oh.”

“He wanted to know when people came and left, when the shop was empty, what kind of alarms there might be. That means he was here.”

“Yeah? So how do you know what he wants?”

Pike stared at Kenny, then looked at Straw.

“Because that’s what I would want. He’s hunting Wilson and Dru. He blooded the shop to flush them, and probably followed Wilson back to his house, but Mendoza and Gomer got in the way. This isn’t about a couple of bangers shaking down a cook. This is bigger.”

Straw and Kenny glanced at each other again as if they were having a silent conversation, then Straw shrugged at Pike.

“I don’t get it. Why all that business with the blood and the heads if he wanted to kill them? Why not just kill them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe to see where they’d go.”

Kenny grinned, bugging his eyes like Pike was an idiot.

“Maybe he’s crazy. If, you know, he’s real.”

Straw frowned at Kenny for a moment, thinking.

“Okay. I’m listening. What do you know?”

Pike walked them through his reasoning about the message left in Wilson’s shop and the conclusions he drew from the way in which Gomer and Mendoza were murdered. If Straw wondered how Pike knew so much about their bodies, he did not ask.

“Okay, I’m not saying I buy this, but if you’re right, and we saw the guy, how would we know?”

Kenny mumbled to himself.

“Wore a shirt, said KILLER. Don’t you remember?”

Then Kenny laughed to himself, but Pike was focused on Straw.

“You would have seen him more than once. After three or four passes, you realized you kept seeing him. A fifth pass, and maybe you wondered who he was and why he was interested in Smith’s shop.”

Kenny glanced at Straw.

“I don’t remember anyone like that. You?”

“Only the people who work in the other shops around here, but I’ll ask the guys. Maybe one of them saw something.”

Kenny crossed his arms and closed his eyes.

“Sure. You ask.”

A long-lens camera and a night vision spotting scope were on ballistic carry bags beneath the windows. A video camera hooked by a cable to a nearby laptop computer was part of the jumble. Pike had seen them when he entered, and now pointed them out.

“What about your vid?”

Straw shook his head, and was already moving to show Pike out.

“We tracked Azzara’s guys. We never turned the thing on unless we saw one of his bangers. That’s all we got.”

Pike glanced at the little rectangles cut in the fabric, backlit by the lights below. He wondered how many hours they spent seeing the world through the narrow patchwork windows.

“Check the vid. You never know.”

Kenny mumbled again, not opening his eyes.

“That’s right. You never know.”

Straw told Pike he would call if one of his people had seen something, then showed him out as if Pike had wasted enough of their time. Kenny didn’t open his eyes.

After Pike left, he drove back to the canals. It was later now, but not yet as late as when Gomer was murdered.

Pike did not return to the construction site. He parked on Venice Boulevard near Smith’s house, then approached on foot. Smith’s house. Steve Brown’s house. Pike thought of it as Dru’s house, and it was now the only dark house on the short, narrow alley. Jared’s light was on, but Jared was missing. Probably downstairs with his mother. Rocking the big screen.

Pike used the hidden key to unlock the gate, then went past the house to the fence at the edge of the canal. The smell of the water was strong. He quickly picked out the construction site where Gomer had been murdered. He was not trying to hide. He wanted to be seen.

Pike wondered if the killer used night vision gear. Pike had the equipment, but had decided not to use it. If the killer was here, Pike wanted him to feel like he had the upper hand. Pike noted the cuts and shadows along the banks and between the houses where a spotter could hide, and hoped the man was watching. His presence would mean he had not yet found Dru and Wilson, and they would still be alive. If the killer was watching, he might grow curious why Pike was in their yard, and decide to take a closer look. The killer might decide to kill him, which would be even better. The killer would need to move in close to use his knife, and Pike was fine with close. Pike wanted to learn what he knew.

Light danced on the water. Traffic noise from the surrounding streets was loud, as was the music and voices that bounced along the canals, but all of these living sounds would fade as the night grew deeper.

Pike waited alone in the dark, wondering where Dru and Wilson were, and how the man with the knife knew them, and whether or not they were living or dead. He wondered where they had come from, why they were here, and why he decided to put air in his tires on that particular morning at that particular gas station at that particular time.

None of it mattered, there in the darkness. He had told her he would take care of it. Told her they wouldn’t bother her again.

Pike whispered.

“I am here.”

Whoever and whatever she was did not matter. If she needed him, he would be there.

Pike whispered again.

P
ike changed locations several times during the night, drifting from Dru’s house to positions where he had a view of likely areas where someone watching the house might hide. Pike found no one, and as the eastern sky lightened, he grew convinced the killer no longer watched Dru’s house. This meant the killer had what he wanted or had tracked Wilson and Dru to another location. Either was bad, and left Pike hungry for a new trail.

At twenty minutes after nine that morning, Pike was crossing the Dell Avenue Bridge when Elvis Cole called.

“Laine came through. He messengered over a disk.”

Charles Laine. Dru’s neighbor with the surveillance system.

“Show anything?”

“It just arrived, but I need you here to look at it. I’ve never seen these people. I don’t know what they look like.”

Pike studied Dru’s house across the water with a lack of enthusiasm. Cole was right, but Mendoza and Gomer were dead, so even if they lucked into a glimpse of the abduction, leaving to view a recording of questionable value now felt like a waste of time. Then another possibility occurred to him that left him more interested.

“How many hours of camera time do we have?”

“Seven days from whenever he burned the disk, which was sometime last night. Why?”

Pike told Cole about his conversation with Straw and explained his belief in the killer’s professionalism. He had probably reconnoitered Dru’s house as well as the takeout shop, and was likely the person who jimmied the kitchen window. This meant it was possible the killer had moved past the camera.

“Okay, get here, and let’s see if this stuff is even usable. Laine told me we’ll be able to see a little of the street, but we won’t know what that means until we see it. We might see nothing but shadows.”

The trip through the city took forty minutes, but shortly Pike pulled up outside Cole’s A-frame and let himself into the kitchen.

Pike poured himself a cup of black coffee, grabbed a raisin bagel from Cole’s stock, and followed his friend to a desk in the living room. They pulled over chairs from the dining table with Cole sitting in front of his Mac. Cole slipped in the disk, and the drive spun up with a soft whine. Neither of them spoke while they waited, as if their expectation wrapped each man in silence.

A few moments later, a disk player appeared showing four screen-capture images. They were from each of the four cameras monitoring Laine’s home, one on either side of his house, one in the rear, and the front entry camera. Pike saw Cole relax when the images appeared.

“Here we go. The cameras record concurrently on different tracks. Laine said we can watch each track separately, and move back and forth like watching a DVD.”

Cole clicked on the entry image, which expanded to fill the screen. The picture was a ghostly wash of grays and blacks with a time code at the bottom showing the image had been recorded at PM 11:13:42 the night before. Cole glanced over.

“Not bad. We can see a little of the street here in the background, and the clarity is pretty good.”

It didn’t look so good to Pike. The camera was parallel to the street to focus on visitors who were in a small alcove at Laine’s front door. This left its field of view limited. The right third of the screen was the steel door. The center third was the alcove wall directly opposite the camera where a visitor would stand when they pressed the bell. The left third of the screen showed a narrow wedge of street in the camera’s peripheral background. If they were going to see anything useful, it would be in this narrow wedge.

Pike said, “Murky. It’s hard to see anything past the wall.”

“Think positive. This was shot at about eleven-fifteen last night with infrared light. The background will brighten up during the day.”

Cole crossed his arms and glanced over again.

“You want to look for the killer?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, think about it. Seven days means we have one hundred sixty-eight hours here. Fast-forward runs about eight times the real-time speed, so it will take us twenty-four hours to watch what’s here if we go back to the beginning. You really want to spend that much time looking for a guy we won’t recognize?”

Pike thought he could narrow the time.

“We can start smaller. The day they went missing, I checked their house around ten and you were there about one. Whoever jimmied the window did it during those three hours. Three hours isn’t so bad.”

Cole nodded, but it was a slow nod, and Pike knew he was thinking. Cole thinking was a good thing because he came up with good ideas.

“Tell you what, let’s start earlier that morning. If you’re right about the killer casing their place, he might have made two or three passes before he entered the property. He also might have followed Wilson home from his shop, so we might catch him on the follow. You see?”

Pike nodded. Good ideas.

“Also, if we get a glimpse of the abduction, we might see what kind of vehicles were involved and get an idea what condition Dru and Wilson were in when they were taken. This might help us find them even though Mendoza and Gomer are dead.”

“Start whenever you want.”

Pike wanted to get on with it.

Cole used the skip-reverse button to jump back through the recording in one-hour increments until the morning of the abduction. As the still images moved backward in time from night into day, Pike was relieved to see the images gained clarity, depth, and color.

When the time counter showed AM05: 13:42 on the morning of the abduction, Cole clicked the play button, then increased the playback speed. Though dim in the early-morning light, the real-time image now grew sharper. The landscape remained frozen, but the ambient light changed and colors grew richer as the time counter advanced.

They saw the first sign of life at 5:36. A figure zipped past on the far left side of the screen, and vanished before Cole hit the pause button.

Cole said, “Jogger.”

He reversed the recording, then replayed it in real time. A female jogger appeared out of the left edge of the screen with her back to the camera. Because the camera was parallel to the street, she looked as if she was coming from behind the left side of the camera on a slight left-to-right path, and was visible for only four seconds.

A second jogger appeared at 5:54, this time a young man with ropy Rasta hair who ran toward them on a path past the camera. Cole froze the image to study him.