Private L.A. Read online

  “Certainly,” she said, all seriousness. “Hands down.”

  “Care to defend your nomination?”

  She crossed her arms, nodded, smiled. “With great pleasure, Mr. Morgan.”

  I liked Guin. The last time I’d seen her, back in January, the actress had been in trouble, and I had served as her escort and guard at the Golden Globes the night she won Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. Despite the danger she was in, or perhaps because of it, a nice chemistry had developed between us. But at the time, relationships were not clear-cut in her life or mine, and nothing beyond mutual admiration had developed.

  Earlier that evening, however, I had run into her leaving Patina, a first-class restaurant inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, where she’d been attending a birthday party for her agent. We had a glass of wine at the bar and laughed as if the Golden Globes had been just last week, not ten months before.

  She was leaving the next day, going on location in London, with much too much to do. But somehow we ended up back at my place, with a new bottle of wine open, and debating the sexiest movie scene ever.

  “The Postman Always Rings Twice?” I said skeptically.

  “I’m serious, it’s amazing, Jack,” Guin insisted. “It’s that scene where they’re in the kitchen alone, Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, the old Greek’s young wife and the drifter. At first you think Nicholson’s forcing himself on her. They wrestle. He throws her up on the butcher block covered with flour and all her baking things. And she’s saying, ‘No! No!’

  “But then Nicholson comes to his senses, figures he misread her, backs off. And Lange’s lying there panting, flour on her flushed cheeks. There’s this moment when your understanding of the situation seems certain.

  “Then Lange says, ‘Wait. Just wait a second,’ before she pushes the baking stuff off the butcher block, giving herself enough room to give in to all her pent-up desires.”

  “Okay,” I allowed, remembering it. “That was sexy, really sexy, but I don’t know if it’s the best of all time.”

  “Oh, no?” Guin replied. “Beat it. Be honest, now. Give me a window into your soul, Jack Morgan.”

  I gave a mock shiver. “What? Trying to expose me already?”

  “In due time,” she said, grinned, poured herself another glass. “Go ahead. Spill it. Name that scene.”

  “I don’t think I can pick just one,” I replied honestly. “Name several, then.”

  “How about Body Heat, the entire movie? I saw it over in Afghanistan. As I remember it, William Hurt and Kathleen Turner are, well, scorching, but maybe that was because I’d been in the desert far too long by that point.”

  Guin laughed, deep, unabashed. “You’re right. They were scorching, and humid too. Remember how their skin was always damp and shiny?”

  Nodding, I poured the rest of the wine into my glass, said, “The English Patient would be up there too. That scene where Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas are in that room in the heat with the slats of light, and they’re bathing together?”

  She raised her glass. “Certainly a contender. How about Shampoo?”

  I shot her a look of arch amusement, said, “Warren Beatty in his prime.”

  “So was Julie Christie.”

  There was a moment between us. Then my cell phone rang.

  Guin shook her head. I glanced at the ID: Sherman Wilkerson.

  “Damn,” I said. “Big client. Big, big client. I … I’ve got to take this, Guin.”

  She protested, “But I was just going to nominate the masquerade ball in Eyes Wide Shut.”

  Shooting Guin an expression of genuine shared sympathy and remorse, I clicked ANSWER, turned from her, said, “Sherman. How are you?”

  “Not very damned well, Jack,” Wilkerson shot back. “There are sheriff’s deputies crawling the beach in front of my house, and at least four dead bodies that I can see.”

  I looked at Guin, flashed ruefully on what might have been, said, “I’m on my way right now, Sherman. Ten minutes tops.”

  Chapter 2

  SPEEDING NORTH INTO Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway, driving the VW Touareg I use when the weather turns sloppy, I could still smell Guin, still hear her words to me before the cab took her away: “No more dress rehearsals, Jack.”

  Pulling up to Sherman Wilkerson’s gate, I felt like the village idiot for leaving Guin, wanted to spin around and head for her place in Westwood.

  Wilkerson, however, had recently hired my firm, Private Investigations, to help reorganize security at Wilkerson Data Systems offices around the world. I parked in an empty spot in front of the screen of bougainvillea that covered the wall above the dream home Wilkerson had bought the year before for his wife, Elaine. Tragically, she’d died in a car wreck a month after they moved in.

  Head ducked in the driving rain, I rang the bell at the gate, heard it buzz, went down steep wet stairs onto a terrace that overlooked the turbulent beach. Waves thundered against the squalling wind that buffeted various L.A. Sheriff’s vehicles converged on a crime scene lit by spotlights.

  “They’re in the fire, four dead men, Jack,” said Wilkerson, who’d come out a sliding glass door in a raincoat, hood up. “You can’t see them now because of the tarps, but they’re there. I saw them through my binoculars when the first cop showed up with a flashlight.”

  “Anyone come talk to you?”

  “They will,” he said, close enough that I could see his bushy gray brows beneath the hood. “Crime scene abuts my property.”

  “But you have nothing to worry about, right?”

  “You mean did I kill them?”

  “Crime scene abuts your property.”

  “I was at work with several people on my management team until after midnight, got here around one, looked down on the beach, saw the flashlight, used the binoculars, called you,” Wilkerson said.

  “I’ll take a look,” I said.

  “Unless it’s dire, tell me about it all in the morning, would you? I’m exhausted.”

  “Absolutely, Sherman,” I said, shook his hand. “And one of my people is coming in behind me, in case you have the driveway alert on.”

  He nodded. I headed to the staircase to the beach, watched Wilkerson go into his house and turn on a light, saw moving boxes piled everywhere.

  Either poor Sherman was leaving soon, or he’d never really arrived.

  Chapter 3

  MY CELL RANG when I was just shy of the yellow tape.

  It was Carl Mentone. Also known as the Kid, a twenty-something hipster, tech geek, and surveillance specialist I hired last year in one of my smarter moves.

  “You here already?” I asked.

  “Up on Wilkerson’s terrace,” the Kid replied. “Eagle’s perspective.”

  “Shoot what you can in this slop. Record what I’m transmitting.”

  “Smooth on both counts, Jacky-boy. I’ve got a lens hood, no need for infrared with the lights, and I’m already getting a feed from your camera to the hard drive.”

  “Don’t call me Jacky-boy,” I said, clicked the phone, saw a sheriff’s deputy coming to the tape, and shifted the pen clipped to my breast pocket. The Kid and I now saw the same things.

  “We’re asking people to stay away,” the deputy said.

  I showed him my badge. “Jack Morgan. Who’s commanding?”

  The deputy got lippy. “You may have clout over at LAPD, but …”

  I spotted an old friend moving out from under the tarps, called, “Harry?”

  Captain Harry Thomas ran the sheriff’s homicide unit. I’d known him since I was a young teenager. Sixty-two now, the homicide commander had been a friend of my father’s, back before my dear old dad crossed the line, bilked clients, and ended up dying in prison. There was a time, when the old man was going downhill, and before I joined the marines, when Harry Thomas was one of the few people who seemed to care what happened to me.

  Harry’s craggy face broke into a grin when he saw me. �
�Jack? What the hell brings Private out here in the middle of a storm?”

  Ducking the rope past the miffed deputy, I said, “Four dead bodies burning in a fire, and my client owns the house right above us.”

  “Public beach,” Harry said, glanced at Wilkerson’s home. “Thin reason to be inside my crime scene, unless your client wants to confess?”

  “He’s clean. But now that I’ve had to leave my incredibly lovely date in the lurch and I’m all the way here, I’m curious. Can I take a look?”

  Harry hesitated, said, “No funny business, Jack.”

  “Me?”

  “Uh-huh,” the homicide captain said, not buying it. “Boots and gloves.”

  A few moments later, wearing protective blue paper booties and latex gloves, I ducked under the tarp system that had been erected over the crime scene. The space stank of burned flesh. The victims, four men in après-surf wear, lay facedown in the wet ashes of a fire pit. Forensics techs were documenting the scene. I got out a tissue and pretended to blow my nose before passing it over the camera pen on my lapel to remove any raindrops.

  Harry said, “Dog walker found them. Crazy to be out in this storm. Lucky for us, though. We managed to protect it within an hour of when we think the shootings went down. Illegal to have a fire here with or without a portable pit. It was like they were begging for trouble. People are very touchy around here about the rules.”

  “C’mon, Harry,” I said. “You think someone double-tapped each of these guys over fire pit rules? This looks professional. A planned hit.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted, distaste on his lips. “Looks that way to me too.”

  “IDs?”

  “All locals. All die-hard surfers. One’s a former investment guy, tends bar now down the highway. Another’s a young vet who came back from Iraq with some issues. The other two: still waiting. They weren’t carrying wallets like the first two.”

  “Armed robbery gone bad?”

  “If one of them was carrying something valuable enough, I suppose.”

  “Or they all shared something in common, a secret, maybe, and this was revenge,” I replied, squatting to look at the sand around the corpses’ feet. “Rain and wind must have hammered this place. No tracks, no drag marks.”

  “That’s all she wrote until the lab work tells me more,” the homicide captain said. “But about that, Jack: I won’t be keeping you in the loop.”

  In an easy manner, Harry was telling me that, old friend or not, my time was up. I was about to rise from my crouch when I noticed a mustard-yellow card sticking out from beneath the dead bartender’s leg.

  Before anyone could tell me not to, I scuttled forward and snatched it up.

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Harry demanded.

  Back of the card was empty. I flipped it to face my camera pen, paused, handed it to a scowling Harry Thomas, and saw what was written in eighteen-point letters:

  NO PRISONERS

  Chapter 4

  THE KILLER WHO called himself No Prisoners drove an Enterprise rent-a-car toward a set of automatic doors in the City of Commerce in southeast Los Angeles. He pressed an app on his iPhone and the doors began to rise, revealing a large, high-ceilinged, cement-floored work space that had once housed a diesel truck repair shop, with three additional roll-up doors at the far end.

  He took the place in at a glance: two white delivery vans, six cots, a makeshift kitchen, four metal folding tables pushed together to create one large surface covered with computer equipment, and several tool and die machines, including a lathe, a grinder, and a welding torch with two tanks of acetylene.

  Five ruggedly built men turned from their work to watch him pull in out of the rain, park, get out, and draw the two Glocks from the pouch of his Lakers hoodie. None of the men looked remotely concerned. Not even a blink.

  The killer expected no less of them.

  “How’d it go, Mr. Cobb?” called one of the men, late twenties, with a gymnast’s muscles and the attitude of an alley dog that has fought for every scrap life has grudgingly yielded to him.

  “Outstanding, as expected, Mr. Nickerson,” the killer replied before setting the guns in front of a bald, lean Latino man who sported tattoos of the Grim Reaper on both bulging biceps. They were new tattoos, livid. “Break these down, Mr. Hernandez.”

  “Straightaway,” Hernandez said, accepting the pistols. He laid them on a heavy-duty folding table set up as a gunsmith’s bench. A sniper’s rifle sat in a vise awaiting adjustment.

  A slighter man, early thirties, with a bleached goat’s beard, got up from behind a row of iPads, all cabled to a large server beneath the tables. “Did the rain screw up the feed?”

  Cobb removed the sunglasses. “You tell me, Mr. Watson.”

  Watson took the sunglasses from Cobb, cracked open a hidden compartment in the frame, removed a tiny SIM card. While he fitted the card into a reader attached to one of the iPads, Cobb tugged off the baggy sweatshirt, revealing a ripped, muscular physique beneath a black Under Armour shirt. He reached beneath the collar of the shirt. An edge came up. He pulled.

  The beard, the latex, the blond wig, the entire No Prisoners disguise came off, revealing a man in his late thirties, with a gaunt, weathered face that time and misfortune had chiseled into something remarkable. Scars ran like strands in a spider’s web out from the round of his left jawline toward a cauliflower ear barely hidden by iron-gray hair.

  It was the kind of face people never forgot.

  Cobb knew that about himself, and he’d suffered for it in the past. He wasn’t going to make that mistake twice. He laid out the pieces of the disguise on a third folding table before looking to a wiry African-American man holding another iPad connected to a set of earphones hung around his neck.

  “Where are we, Mr. Johnson?” Cobb asked.

  Johnson stabbed a finger at the iPad. “From the traffic we’ve been monitoring, L.A. sheriff’s got their big guns on the beach.”

  “Better than we hoped for,” Cobb remarked before glancing to the fifth man, the largest of them all, curly red hair, ice-blue eyes, and a rust-colored, out-of-control beard that made him look like some crazed Viking. “Mr. Kelleher?”

  Kelleher nodded. “Associated Press brief ran fifteen minutes ago, four dead males on Malibu Beach shot gangland style and set afire.” He looked up. Puzzled. “That wasn’t the plan, Mr. Cobb.”

  Cobb regarded him evenly. “Burning them amplifies things, moves events along quicker, Mr. Kelleher. Other coverage?”

  Kelleher took that in stride, said, “All-news radio picked up the AP story.”

  “Outstanding,” Cobb said. “Start the social media component.”

  The big man nodded and went to sit next to Watson, who stroked his goat’s beard and looked at Cobb, smiling. “You caught just about everything. I edited it down to the pertinent sequence. Got sporty there, didn’t it?”

  Watson was by far the smartest man in the room, a genius as far as Cobb was concerned. He’d never known anyone like Watson: a man who could handle tasks of extreme physical endurance while digesting vast amounts of data and information at a baffling rate. When Watson worked with computers, it was like he was attached to them, his own brain melding with the processors, able to analyze, compute, and code with the same mind-boggling speed.

  “Let me see,” Cobb said, moved behind Watson. So did the other men.

  Watson gave his iPad a command and the slayings from Cobb’s perspective played out on the screen. Hernandez chuckled when Grinder, the barrel-chested surfer, pleaded for his life.

  “It’s like he’s saying ‘Don’t Tase me, bro,’” Hernandez said.

  The others weren’t listening. They were engrossed in the blinding-quick move Cobb had used to avoid being tackled by the final man to die.

  “Damn brilliant, Mr. Cobb,” said Nickerson. “You lost none of it.”

  Johnson scowled. “I still say you should have sent one of us. We’re expendable.”

  Cobb sti
ffened, felt angry. “No one here is expendable. Ever. Besides, why would I ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself?”

  “You wouldn’t,” Kelleher said admiringly. “First in.”

  “Last out,” Cobb said. “We are in this together.”

  Watson said, “Upload to YouTube now, Mr. Cobb?”

  Cobb shook his head. “Let’s wait, let them make the connection to the letter before we hit them with total shock and awe.”

  Chapter 5

  THE KID MET me up on Wilkerson’s rain-soaked terrace around one thirty that morning, about the same time the first news of the killings was reaching the Los Angeles airwaves.

  “You get it all?” I asked.

  “Everything you shot,” the Kid replied, tugging his hood down over hair he slicked back crooner style. “I didn’t get squat from my perspective. Smell bad?”

  “Horrible. Have Sci review the footage, then attach the files to Wilkerson’s personal stuff.”

  “Reason?”

  “Case someone says he did it and we need to prove he didn’t,” I replied, headed toward the Touareg, suddenly tired and wanting to sleep.

  On the drive home, as my headlights reflected off the water sheeting Highway 1, I considered calling Guin, but knew she had to be up in five hours, getting ready to head to London. Then, for reasons I can’t explain, my thoughts slipped to the only person I know who has never minded me calling at odd hours.

  I reached over to the touch screen on the dashboard, called up Justine’s number, which appeared with a photograph of her I’d taken a couple of years ago. She was standing in an avocado orchard above the ocean in Santa Barbara. It was late in the day. Golden light. A breeze was blowing. Justine was brushing her hair from her eyes and smiling at me.

  As I glanced at the photo, the full memory of that day came in all around me, as if I were there with Justine again in the orchard and the warm breeze blowing off the Pacific, back when it had all seemed perfect and inevitable between us.

  But then we ran into the same problem again—I couldn’t open up to her the way she wanted me to. The way she needed me to. So we decided we had to keep our relationship strictly professional. Whatever the hell that will mean.