When Last Seen Alive (20 page)

And Gunner didn’t know how it would end.

He was vaguely aware of a nagging regret. Had he brought this on himself? Was this the ignoble way he was going to die—pricked by a poison needle and put to sleep, like a tired old dog that hadn’t the strength to bark anymore—because he hadn’t had the brains to
lie
in exchange for his life? To just tell the man he’d fallen prey to what he wanted to hear, and nothing more? The words would have been so simple to say:
“Okay. You win. You want me gone, I’m gone.”

But he had tried to negotiate instead. To salvage some fragment of his self-esteem by insisting the Defenders give up Jack Frerotte. As if he had been in any position to bargain. Trying to dictate terms to someone who had nothing to lose by killing him had been the height of reckless machismo. Had it cost him all the days he’d had left to walk God’s green earth?

The answer lay at the black, bottomless core of the gray spiral continuing to draw him down, closer and closer to what he knew was death. And in his ears, a slow, inexorable beat prevailed:

Thump … thump … thump …

The sound of a poor man’s heart shutting down for good.

“I still say he ought’a see a doctor,” Winnie Phifer said.

Gunner shook his head. “No.”

“Winnie’s right, Gunner. You don’t know what them fools might’a given you,” Mickey said.

“I’m fine. Get the hell out of here, both of you.”

The trio was in Gunner’s office, Gunner stretched out on his back on his couch, the others looming over him, watching him labor to keep their faces and the room around them all in focus. It was Saturday morning. Winnie had found the investigator unconscious in front of the barber shop’s back door, rolled up in a ball on the ground like an oversize infant someone was trying to give away. She’d brought him inside all by herself, waited for Mickey to show up a few minutes later to decide what to do with him. Mickey shook him by the shoulders and slapped his cheeks a few times to bring him around, then asked him what had happened. Gunner didn’t remember all of it, but he remembered enough to bring his two nurses to the brink of calling an ambulance for him.

Winnie snorted, her motherly concern gone unappreciated, and left. Mickey stayed behind, thicker skinned and harder headed than she. Dillett the Ridgeback was nowhere in sight.

“You gonna call the cops?” Mickey asked.

“No. Not yet, anyway.” Gunner tried to sit up, changed his mind when his stomach started doing somersaults. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my car anywhere?”

“Didn’t see it out front when I came in. Maybe it’s around the corner, or somethin’. You want me to go look?”

Gunner nodded. He didn’t have to tell his landlord why the car was a priority; a ’65 Ford Cobra convertible in mint condition wasn’t going to last five minutes left unattended anywhere, security system or no security system, and Mickey knew that as well as anybody.

“That cop Poole called you twice yesterday,” Mickey said. “He said—”

“I know what he said. Forget about it,” Gunner told him irritably, waving him out the door. He had meant to call Poole to ask for an extension on his forty-eight-hour deadline relative to the Everson case, but forgot. Now Poole would doubtless be on his ass all weekend.

When he was finally left to recuperate alone, Gunner did something that would have made his landlord proud. He said a silent prayer of thanks. He was alive. His head felt like an urn filled with sand, and his body ached everywhere, but he was alive. Some would have called him lucky, others blessed. Gunner was convinced he’d been a little of both.

After his fleeting moment of gratitude had passed, he made a second attempt to get to his feet, managed to pull the stunt off this time. He wobbled over to his desk and sat down before the thought occurred to him that he should check his pockets, make sure the Defenders hadn’t added insult to injury by robbing him blind. They hadn’t; his money and wallet were in their usual places, seemingly untouched. His keys, however, were gone, replaced by something else: a small hand-drawn map.

It was childishly rudimentary, just a series of labeled parallel and perpendicular lines directing him to a remote location in the Angeles National Forest, between forty and fifty miles north of Los Angeles proper. Beneath a small red cross near a crooked line identified as San Francisquito Canyon Road, someone had scrawled a brief message:

We’re gonna be watching you, brother.
Thanks for the use of the ride.

A sure sign that Mickey wasn’t going to find Gunner’s car outside after all.

• • •

As expected, Gunner’s cousin Del Curry bitched the whole drive out to the site depicted on the Defenders’ map, pausing only to check his Hyundai’s mirrors during lane changes.

Gunner had known the purpose of this expedition would shake the self-employed electrician up like this, but he was trying to suffer his cousin’s whining in silence all the same, still feeling the last diminishing effects of his drugging the night before. It wasn’t easy.

“I’m not a grave digger, man,” Del kept saying. “Why the hell’d you have to call
me
for this?”

“I needed a ride, and you’ve got a car. Any more questions?”

“Mickey’s got a car, doesn’t he?”

“Mickey had to work today. You don’t.”

“But this kind of shit is police work, Aaron.”

“I called the police. Poole was out in the field, and Emilio Martinez has the day off. Jesus, Del, you’re acting just like an old woman!”

And so it went between them, Del crying like a baby, Gunner giving him hell for it, though in truth, Gunner was just as reluctant to do what they were about to do as his cousin. That the map was leading them to the location of Thomas Selmon’s body, Gunner had little doubt, and after nine months in the ground, he knew the corpse was likely to be as appetizing a sight as an autopsy in progress. But he had demanded Jack Frerotte’s head in exchange for his disinterest in the Defenders of the Bloodline, as misguided as that promise had been, and now it seemed he was going to get it, ready or not. Providing, of course, the Defenders hadn’t ditched his car this far out in the middle of nowhere just to add an exclamation point to his kidnapping.

Gunner had suggested this last possibility to Del simply to try and quiet him, putting no credence whatsoever in it himself.

San Francisquito Canyon Road was a twisty, winding two-lane that climbed up into the Angeles National Forest eight miles above Interstate 5, between Castaic Lake to the south and Elizabeth Lake to the north. The terrain it sliced through was all rough and tumble, a rocky, heavily foliated landscape of steep angles and narrow ledges that seemed the very definition of desolate. It was a long way to go to dump a body, Gunner mused, but few places would have been better suited to the purpose, especially at night.

About nine miles into their upward trek toward Elizabeth Lake, Del pointed and said, “There it is.”

The Cobra had been pulled off the northbound side of the road and left to rest on a slight strip of shoulder there, jammed into a small niche in the hillside. It was covered in dust, but otherwise appeared to be unharmed. Del turned his boxy little Hyundai in behind it, leaving the Korean car’s tail protruding about a foot or two out into the road, and both men climbed out to inspect the red convertible more closely. They still hadn’t seen more than two cars go by in either direction since they’d left Castaic Lake.

To Gunner’s utter relief, the Cobra was indeed safe and sound. None of the indignities that could have easily befallen it under the circumstances—knife-shredded seats, soda-stained carpeting, a dented and key-scarred exterior—were in evidence. Apparently, whatever else the group was or wasn’t, the Defenders of the Bloodline were not common vandals.

“I don’t believe it,” Del said.

“Yeah. Neither do I,” Gunner agreed.

“Maybe something’s missing. There’s gotta be something missing, right?”

Gunner had already made a quick assessment. “The keys,” he said.

Directing Del to watch for opposing traffic, nonexistent as it was, he opened the Cobra’s driver’s side door, felt around the floorboard beneath both seats. “Nothing,” he said when he was finished, shaking his head.

“They had you come all the way out here to get the damn car, and didn’t leave the
keys?”

“No. I don’t think so.” He was looking past Del to the other side of the road, where the hillside fell off sharply to continue its descent to level ground.

“What?”

“Come on.”

Gunner started across the silent highway, didn’t bother to look back to see if his cousin was following him as instructed. He reached the edge of the drop and looked down, out over a wall of thick vegetation and jagged rock that would be difficult to traverse on foot, but not impossible.

Del came up behind him, said, “You think they threw ’em down there?”

“Not exactly. Do me a favor and go get those gloves I brought along, huh?”

“The gloves? You mean—”

“Just go get ’em, Del. Hurry the hell up.”

Del reluctantly did as he was told, had to wait for a badly crumpled Toyota pickup truck easing its way downhill to pass before he could cross back to Gunner’s side of the road. Gunner took the gloves out of his hand without a word, slipped them on, and then stepped over the guardrail, cautiously making his way down the treacherous incline, step by tenuous step.

“Are you sure you know what the hell you’re doing?” his cousin called after him, staying put right where he was.

Gunner didn’t even answer him, too busy watching his footing and looking for his missing keys simultaneously.

He was expecting a brief search, and that was exactly what he got. In less than ten minutes, he spotted his keys with relative ease, approximately twenty feet down the hillside from the road above, and out of its direct line of view. Someone had set them at the center of a small, level clearing, then arranged a circle of seven stones around them. Creating a marker only an idiot could miss.

“I think I found him!” Gunner shouted up to Del.

“Hey, you down there! Get up here now!” someone above him barked with authority. It was somebody other than his cousin.

Gunner stepped out to where he could see who the man was, though he already had a good idea. Squinting against the sun, he saw his cousin standing at the edge of the road where he had been earlier, joined now by a uniformed L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy. The deputy had his sidearm out and trained at Del’s waist as he tried to keep an eye on him and peer down the hill at Gunner at the same time.

Debunking the old myth, the investigator thought, that you could never find a cop when you needed one.

Six hours later, Yolanda McCreary was waiting for him when he got home.

She was sitting in her rental car out front, flipping through the pages of a magazine she had no genuine interest in. She looked like she’d been there awhile. She got out of the car the minute he pulled the road-weary Cobra into his driveway and started toward him, giving him no chance to decide ahead of time how he would tell her the bad news. Not that a few more minutes would have made any difference; he’d been trying to solve that problem now since he’d left Castaic Lake and still he hadn’t found the right words to say.

So he just came right out and said it: “We think we found your brother’s body.”

In the worst-case scenario he had pictured of the moment, McCreary would crumble, fall to her knees at the sound of this declaration and refuse to rise, spilling tears on the earth like a steady rain. But nothing as dramatic as all that happened. His client surprised him. All she did was turn her eyes away, bringing a hand to her mouth, and cry in silence. Gunner watched the tears run down her face unabated and said nothing, granting her the right to grieve as she saw fit.

After a while he broke down, said, “Come on inside, I’ll get you a drink.”

They entered the house and settled in the living room, side by side on Gunner’s tattered couch. He offered her a beer, but she shook that off, asked if he had something stronger. He brought her some Crown Royal on ice and kept the beer for himself.

“What happened?” she finally asked.

He told her everything, omitting nothing but the agreement he’d made with the Defenders to win his release from their custody. He said they’d only snatched him to offer Frerotte on a silver platter, hoping the gesture would buy them some time, both with Gunner and the police. McCreary either believed that or never let on that she didn’t. All she seemed to care about was the body Gunner had watched a Sheriff’s Department anthropological forensics team unearth for the better part of the day.

“Are you sure it was Tommy?”

“We won’t be absolutely sure until the coroner’s office does a positive ID. But I’m pretty sure it was him, yeah. There was a wallet on the body full of your brother’s ID, and the clothes seemed to match the ones I saw in that photograph I told you about, the one I found in Jack Frerotte’s house Wednesday night.”

McCreary nodded solemnly, bit her lip to keep from crying again. “How long will it take them to do an ID?”

“I don’t know. A couple of days, at least. The body was pretty badly decomposed, dental records are all they’re gonna have to work with, I’m afraid.”

She turned, looked in his eyes directly. “So what now? I mean, what do you plan to do in the meantime?”

Gunner hesitated, disappointed that she’d found it necessary to raise the question now, so soon. Sitting this close to her, confronted yet again with the smoothness of her skin and the fine lines of her body, saying the words he was about to say was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, knowing as he did where it would lead.

“I don’t have
any
plans for the meantime. My job is done,” he said.

She gave a little laugh, thinking he must be joking. “What?”

“I’ve done what you paid me to do, Ms. McCreary. The rest is out of my hands.”

She shook her head, said, “No.”

“You hired me to find out what happened to your brother, and I’ve done that. You know he’s dead, and you know who killed him. Beyond that—”