I glanced at my watch. Ben had been missing for
sixteen hours and twelve minutes.
'Is Gittamon with Lucy?'
'Yeah, he's searching Ben's room.'
'I'm going to see them. I want to tell them what we're dealing with.'
'Look, Cole, don't get spooky with all this. We don't know what we're dealing with, so why don't you wait until SID gets here?'
'Can you find your way back?'
'If you wait two minutes I'll go with you.'
I walked back up the hill without waiting. Starkey trailed after me, and called out from time to time for me to slow down, but I never slowed enough for her to catch up. Shadows from a past that should have been buried lined the path back up to my house. The shadows outnumbered me, and I knew I would need help with them. When I reached my house, I went into the kitchen and
phoned a gun shop I know in Culver City. 'Let me have Joe.' 'He isn't here.'
'It's important you find him. Tell him to meet me at
Lucy's right away. Tell him that Ben Chenier is missing.' 'Okay. Anything else?' 'Tell him I'm scared.'
I hung up and went out to my car. I started the engine, but sat with my hands on the steering wheel, trying to stop their shaking.
The man who took Ben had moved well and with
silence. He had studied when we came and when we left. He knew my home and canyon, and how Ben went down the slope to play, and he had done it all so well that I did not notice. He had probably stalked us for days. It took special training and skills to hunt humans. I had known men with those skills, and they scared me. I had been one of them. CHAPTER 6
time missing: 7 hours, 4 minutes
Beverly Hills makes people think of mansions and hillbillies, but the flats south of Wilshire are lined with modest stucco homes and sturdy bungalow apartments that would go unnoticed in any American town. Lucy and Ben shared an apartment in a two-story building shaped like a U, with the mouth facing the street and the arms embracing a stairway courtyard filled with birds-of-paradise and two towering palms. It was not a limousine street, but a black Presidential stretch was waiting by the fire hydrant outside her building. I wedged my car into a parking spot half a block down and walked up the sidewalk. The limo driver was reading a magazine behind the wheel with the windows raised and the engine running. Two men were smoking in a Mercury Marquis parked across the street in front of Gittamon's car. They were thick men in their late forties with ruddy faces, short hair, and the flat expressions of men who were used to being in the wrong place at the wrong time and weren't much bothered by it. They watched me like cops. I went up the stairs and rang her bell. A man I had never met before answered the door. 'May I help you?'
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It was Richard. I put out my hand.
'Elvis Cole. I wish we weren't meeting like this.' Richard's face darkened. He ignored my hand. 'I wish we weren't meeting at all.'
Lucy stepped in front of him, looking uncomfortable
and irritated. Richard was good at making her angry. She said, 'Don't start.'
'I told you this would happen, didn't I? How many
times did I tell you, but you wouldn't listen?' 'Richard, just stop, please.'
I said, 'Yes, now would be the time to stop.' Something sour flickered in Richard's eyes, bu then he turned back into her apartment. Richard was Lucy's age, but his hair was silver on the sides and thinning badly. He wore a black knit shirt, khaki slacks that were wrinkled from the plane, and Bruno Magli mocs that cost more than I made in a week. Even wrinkled and sleepless, Richard looked rich. He owned a natural gas company with international holdings.
Lucy lowered her voice as I followed her inside.
'They just got here. I called to tell you that he landed, but I guess you were on your way over.'
Richard had joined a solidly built man in a dark business suit in Lucy's living room. The man had steel-gray hair so short that he was nearly bald, and eyes that looked like the wrong end of gun sights. He put out his hand.
'Leland Myers. I run security for Richard's company.'
Richard said, 'I brought Lee to help find Ben since you people managed to lose him.'
As Myers and I shook, Gittamon came out of the hall with Ben's orange iMac. He huffed with the weight as he put it on a little table by her door.
'We'll have his E-mail by the end of the day. You'd be
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surprised what children tell their friends.' I was annoyed that Gittamon was still chasing the staged abduction theory, but I wanted to be careful with how I described what we found on the slope to Lucy. 'You're not going to find anything in his Email, Sergeant. Starkey and I searched the slope this morning. We found a shoe print where Ben dropped his Game Freak. It was probably left by the man who took Ben, and he was likely someone who served with me in Vietnam.' Lucy shook her head. 'I thought the others were dead.' 'They are, but now I think that the person who did this has a certain type of combat experience. I gave Starkey a list of names, and I'll try to remember more. She called SID to try for a cast of the print. Any luck, and we might get a pretty good guess of his
