would bitch and Starkey might feel obligated to remind us that Gittamon had told us not to jeopardize their case. They might have to worry about making a case, but all I cared about was finding a boy.
We snaked our way across the canyon to the opposite ridge; school had not yet let out, adults were still working, and everyone else was hiding behind locked doors. The world gave no sign that a child had been stolen.
Everything looked different from a thousand yards away. Close up, the trees and houses were unrecognizable. We checked and rechecked our map against the
landmarks that we had noted and tried to find our way.
The first place we searched was an undeveloped area at the end of a fire road. Unpaved fire roads wrap through the Santa Monica Mountains like veins through a body, mostly so that county work crews can cut brush and eliminate fuel before fire season. We parked between two driveways at the end of the pavement and squeezed around the gate.
Even as we parked, Pike said, 'He wasn't here. Parking between these houses is asking to be seen.'
We followed the fire road anyway, jogging together to make better time as we searched for a view of my louse. The brush and scrub oak were so thick that we never once saw my house or my ridge or anything other than sky. It was like running in a tunnel. We jogged even faster going back to my car.
Seven spots that had seemed likely from my deck were exposed to the neighbors. We scratched them off the map. Four more locations could only be reached by parking in front of houses. We scratched them, too. Every time we saw a home for sale we checked to see if it was occupied. If the house was empty, we went to the door or hopped the side gates to check for a view of my home. Two of the houses could have been used as a blind, but neither showed signs of that kind of use.
Joe Pike has been my friend and my partner for many years; we were used to each other and worked well together, but the sun seemed to sprint across the sky. Finding likely spots took forever; searching them even longer. Traffic picked up as soccer morns and carpools delivered children from school; kids with skateboards and spiky hair watched us from drives. Adults on their way home from work eyed us suspiciously from their SUVs.
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I said, 'Look at all these people. Somebody saw something. Someone had to.' Pike shrugged. 'Would they see you?' I looked at the sun and dreaded the coming darkness. Pike said, 'Slow down. I know you're scared, but slow down. We move fast, but We don't hurry. You know the drill.' 'I know.' 'If you hurry you'll miss something. We'll do what we can, then come back tomorrow.' 'I said I know.' Most of the streets were shoehorned belly to butt with contemporary houses built in the sixties for aerospace engineers and set designers, but a few of the streets held stretches that were either too steep or too unstable to carry a foundation. We found three of those stretches with unobstructed views of my home. The first two were nearly vertical troughs on the inside of sharp curves. You could use them for blinds, but you would need climbing spikes and pitons to hang from the slope. The third was more promising. A shoulder on the point of an outside curve sloped downhill near the foot of the ridge. A house at the beginning of the curve was being remodeled, and more homes sat on the far end, but the point itself was houseless. We pulled off the street and got out of my car. Starkey and Chen were tiny dots of color climbing up to my house. I couldn't tell who was who, but it would have been easy with binoculars. Pike said, 'Good view.' Two small cars and a dusty pickup were parked off the road near us. They probably belonged to the men who worked at the construction site. One more car wouldn't stand out. I said, 'It'll be faster if we split up. You take this side of the shoulder. I'll cross the top, then move down the far side.' Pike set off without a word. I worked my way across the top of the shoulder parallel to the street, trying to find a footprint or scuff mark. I didn't. Gray knots of brush sprouted over the slope like mold, thinning around stunted oaks and ragged pine trees. I moved downhill in a zigzag pattern, following erosion cuts and natural paths between great stiff balls of sagebrush. Twice I saw marks that might have been made by someone passing, but they were too faint for me to be sure. The shoulder dropped away. I couldn't see my car or any of the houses on either side of the little point, which meant that the people in those houses couldn't see me. I looked across the canyon. The windows in Grace Gonzalez's house glowed with tight. My A-flame hung from the slope with its deck jutting out like a diving board. If I were surveilling my house, this would be a fine place for it. Pike appeared silently between the brush. 'I went down as far as I could, then the slope dropped away. It's too steep on that side for anyone to use.' 'Then help me with this side.' We searched the ground beneath two pines, then worked our way farther down the slope toward a single scrub oak. We moved parallel to each other and ten meters apart, covering more ground that way. Time was everything. Purple shadows pooled around us. The sun kissed the ridge. It would sink faster, racing with the night. Pike said, 'Here.' I stopped as I was about to take a step. Pike knelt. He touched the ground, then lifted his glasses to see better in the dim light.
97 . 'What is it?'
'Got a partial here, then another partial. Moving your way.'
Dampness prickled my hands. Ben had been missing for twenty-six hours. More than a day. The sun settled even faster, like a sinking heart.
I said, 'Do they match with the print we found at my place?'
'I couldn't see that one clearly enough to know.' Pike stepped over the prints. I moved toward the tree. I told myself that these prints could have been made by anyone: neighborhood kids, hikers, a construction worker come looking for a place to piss; but I knew it was the man who had stolen Ben Chenier. I felt it on my skin like too much smog.
I stepped across an erosion cut between two balls of sagebrush and saw a fresh footprint in the dust between two plates of shale. The print pointed uphill, leading up
from the tree. 'Joe.' 'Got it.'
We moved closer to the tree, Pike approaching from the left and me from the right. The tree was withered, with spiky branches that had lost most of their leaves. Thin grass had sprouted in the fractured light under the branches. The grass on the uphill side was flat, as if someone had sat on it.
I did not move closer.
'Joe.'
'I see it. I've got footprints in the dirt to the left. Can you see?'
'I see them.'
'You want, I can get closer.'
Behind us, the sun was swallowed by the ridge. The
