Gittamon squirmed uncomfortably.
'No one is doing anything improper down here.' 'Sergeant, I'm on your side--I'm even on Cole's side, as much as it pisses me off to say it, but we have a problem with this. Please. Ask your superiors or someone in the prosecutor's office. See what they think.'
Gittamon watched Pike and Richard's detectives
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moving through the brush. He glanced at Starkey, but all she did was shrug. He said, 'Ah, Mr. Cole, maybe you should wait up at your house.' 'What good would it do, Gittamon? I've already been all over this slope, so it won't make any difference if I keep looking.' Gittamon shuffled. He reminded me of the pug, nervous for a place to pee. 'I'll talk to the Hollywood captain. I'll see what he thinks.' Richard and Myers turned away without waiting for more and joined Fontenot and DeNice in the brush. Gittamon hunkered down beside Chen so that he wouldn't have to look at me. Starkey watched all of them for a moment, then shrugged at me. 'Look, I'll probably hear back on those names in a couple of hours. A regular guy sitting around in Des Moines doesn't just decide to do something like this one day; anyone who would do this is an asshole and assholes have records. If we get a bounce on one of those names you gave us, we'll have something to work with. Just wait upstairs and I'll let you know.' I shook my head. 'You're crazy if you think I'm going to wait.' 'We don't have anything else to work with. What else can you do?' 'Think like him.' I waved Pike over, and we climbed the hill to my house. CHAPTER 9
time missing: z9 hours, 08 minutes
When people look at Joe Pike, they see an ex-cop, ex-Marine, the muscles and the ink, dark glasses riding a secret face. Pike grew up at the edge of a small town where he spent his childhood hiding in the woods. He hid from his father, who liked to beat Pike bloody with his fists, then tool up on Pike's mother. Marines weren't frightened of brutal alcoholics, so Pike made himself into a Marine. The Marines saw Pike move well in the woods and the trees, so they taught him other things. Now Pike was the best that I had ever seen at those things and it was all because he once used to be a scared little boy in the woods. When you see someone, all you see is what they let you see.
Pike studied the canyon from my deck. We could hear Starkey and the others below, though we could not see them. The cut of the canyon funneled their voices, and would have funneled Ben's voice, too, if Ben had called out.
I said, 'He couldn't know when Ben would leave my house or be alone, so he needed a safe place to watch and wait. He was some other place until he saw Ben going down the slope, then he came here.'
Pike nodded at the finger ridge across the canyon.
'Can't see your house from the street below because of the trees and he needed a clear field of view. He had to
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be across the canyon with a spotting scope or glasses.' 'That's the way I see it.'
The opposite ridge was a crooked finger of knobby peaks that rose and fell as it stepped down into the basin. Residential streets threaded along its sides, cut by undeveloped wedges where the slopes were too unstable or too steep to hold houses.
Pike said, 'Okay, from where he was, he would have been able to see us here on your deck. That means we can see his hiding place.'
I went inside for my binoculars and the Thomas Guide. I found the page that showed the streets across the canyon, then oriented the map to match the direction of the ridge. There were plenty of places that someone could hide.
I said, 'Okay, if it was you, where would you be?' Pike studied the map, then considered the ridge. 'Forget the streets lined with houses. I'd pick a spot where the locals couldn't see me. That means I'd park where people wouldn't wonder about my car.'
'Okay. So you wouldn't leave your car in front of a house. You'd park on a fire trail or pull off the street into the brush.'
'Yeah, but I'd still want fast access to my vehicle. When I saw Ben, I wouldn't have much time to get to my car, drive here, park, then move uphill looking for him.'
It was a long way. Ben could easily be back in my house by the time someone got across.
'What about two men? One keeping watch, the other
waiting on this side with a cell phone?'
Pike shrugged.
'Either way, someone had to be on the far side, watching. If we're going to find anything, that's where we'll find it.'
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We picked out obvious reference points like an orange house that looked like a Martian temple and a row of six bearded palms in someone's front yard, and marked their locations on the map. Once we had reference points, we took turns glassing the far hillside for houses being remodeled, clumps of trees on undeveloped land, and other likely places where a man could wait for long hours without being seen. We located them on the map relative to our reference points.
Gittamon came up the hill while we glassed, and nodded at us as he left. I guess he thought we were just killing time. Myers and DeNice came up a little while after and got into the limo. Myers said something to DeNice, and DeNice gave us the finger. Mature. Fontenot trudged up the hill a few minutes later, then DeNice and Fontenot left in the Marquis. Myers went back down the hill to stay with Richard.
We glassed the ridge for almost two hours, then Joe Pike said, 'Let's hunt.'
Ben had been missing for twenty-one hours.
I thought about telling Starkey what we were doing, but decided that it was better if she didn't know. Richard
