Fire Point (17 page)

56

Lock took his finger from the trigger and lowered his SIG as Tarian stepped out from behind the door. Her eyes were black and blotchy from where her mascara had run. At first she didn’t seem to register Lock’s presence. She looked straight past him and began to scream. She fell to her knees and began to crawl toward the dead body behind him. ‘No! No! Marcus!’

Lock went to her. He reached down with his free hand and pulled her back to her feet as he scanned the area around them for a shooter. ‘Tarian, listen to me. I need to get you out of here.’

‘My son!’ She was doing her best to break free.

Ty emerged from the kitchen, stepping into the hallway, his gun drawn. ‘What we got?’ he asked Lock.

‘Three dead that I’ve found. There could be more. I’m going to get her outside. What about the kitchen and the laundry room?’

‘Both clear,’ said Ty.

There was a door at the back. He could take Tarian out that way without her seeing the rest of the slaughter. He tried to pull her gently toward the kitchen door as Ty fell in behind to provide cover. He could hear an LAPD patrol car rolling its way up to the front of the house. Lock grasped Tarian’s arm at the elbow as he escorted her out of the hallway. She was in shock. He looked back to see a hole the size of a fist that had been blown in the bathroom door.

Tarian Griffiths had survived. They had a living, breathing witness. But the killer, or killers, was nowhere to be seen. If this was Krank’s bid for the history books, Lock figured that, no matter how devastating it would be for Tarian, it would still only figure as a footnote.

57

Lock took a sip of coffee and stared across the table at the two LAPD homicide detectives. His rush-hour traffic avoidance stunt had not exactly enamored him to the city’s finest. However, as was the way with the US justice system, he’d called an attorney, who had swiftly traded the offer of the information both Lock and Ty had about the killers in return for an agreement that any traffic infraction would be ignored. The way Lock saw it, it was a pretty sweet deal. He hadn’t exactly delivered Charles Kim and the other perps to them on a silver platter but as near as made no difference.

The interview itself had been good-natured. Again, in Lock’s experience, cops were always affable when you were making their life easy. That was human nature.

He had taken them through everything, from his initial contact with Tarian to their visit to the apartment in the Marina and his and Ty’s subsequent digging. The only time the two cops seemed to get hung up was when it came to his motive.

One of them had said to him, ‘You don’t strike me as the
pro bono
type. If you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘I’m not,’ Lock had told him.

‘So why with this job?’

Lock knew the answer. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, or at least he wasn’t going to admit it to two cops, but he knew. If he’d been asked for help by Teddy Griffiths or Peter Blake he wouldn’t have gone as far as he had. He would have bailed sooner. He wouldn’t have followed up, or asked Ty to get the contents of the hard drive forensically examined.

The answer he gave the lead detective was a shrug. ‘Didn’t do much good in the end, did it?’

The detective had smiled. ‘That’s not much of an answer.’

At that point Lock had been talking to them for almost four hours solid, with only one brief break to use the restroom and get fresh coffee. He was close to out of answers. He sure as hell wasn’t about to admit that he had feelings for Tarian Griffiths that went beyond a concern for her wellbeing. He thought of saying something glib, like ‘It’s nice to be nice,’ but chose not to. Instead they had to settle for another shrug.

The interview was winding down now. They’d shifted back to the small-talk that they’d begun with. Did he have another job lined up? Could he try to avoid driving head on into one of their patrol cars because next time they might not move over? His answers were, no, he didn’t have a next gig and, yes, he would do his best to be a more responsible driver.

They thanked him for his time, and walked him out into the corridor. That was it. The LAPD were actively seeking two individuals in connection with the murders of the four people found dead at the Brentwood house. They also had Krank and the others linked to a series of ongoing missing-person cases and one other active homicide where a young woman’s body had been found dumped in a canyon north of Malibu. They were confident they would find them, charge them, put them in jail, bring them to trial and send them to prison for the rest of their lives. As far as law enforcement was concerned, it had been a good end to a bad day.

Lock walked out into the cool night air where Ty, who’d been interviewed by a different set of cops, was waiting for him.

‘Wanna eat?’ Ty asked him.

‘Not really,’ said Lock.

Ty slapped his shoulder. ‘Too bad. I know a place not too far from here.’

58

The restaurant that Ty had selected was in fact a strip club with a buffet of such dubious hygiene credentials that it was a miracle the whole place hadn’t yet been condemned by the Department of Public Health. It was three blocks north of the Beverly Center and, in true Los Angeles fashion, came with a high-concept twist. The strippers, or ‘featured dancers’, as the billboard termed them, were also celebrity lookalikes. As far as Lock could see, the real entertainment came from trying to discern which celebrities they were supposed to look like. He wanted to find a regular place but Ty was insistent that, in times of high trauma, such establishments were best designed to take their mind off the day’s horrors.

As they took a seat at the bar, a dancer allegedly impersonating Beyoncé, but who was also sporting a worrying six o’clock shadow, was on the featured stage, giving it her all. Ty ordered them both a beer and they did what two men alone together in a strip club have a tendency to do when not yet drunk: they lapsed into an embarrassed silence.

Their beers arrived. Ty tried to engage the bartender in small-talk. The man took his money, brought the change, gave them a couple of comped tickets for the buffet and went back to drying glasses.

The two men sipped their beer for a few more moments. Lock had always wondered what Purgatory – the way station between damnation and salvation – would look like. He figured Ty had found it.

Ty seemed to agree. He drained his beer, gave a final scowl in the direction of ‘Beyoncé’ and stood up. ‘Sorry, man, this was a bad idea.’

Relieved, Lock left what remained of his beer, prayed he hadn’t caught a communicable disease from the bar stool and followed Ty out into the parking lot at the rear of the club. ‘There’s an actual restaurant with actual food a few blocks down. Italian. They might still be open,’ he said.

‘Sounds good,’ said Ty, getting into the passenger seat of Lock’s car.

Lock swung out of the parking lot and onto La Cienega Boulevard. It was getting late. The streets were beginning to clear. In millions of homes rolling news coverage still crackled with the killings in Brentwood. Much was being made of the fact it was the same street where O. J. Simpson had lived at the time of another of LA’s more notorious murders. But Lock knew as well as anyone that public attention would move on. It always did. There would be another outrage. A fresh mass shooting. It had reached the point where they had become monthly if not weekly events. He would have loved to believe that there was a ready-made solution. Experience had taught him differently.

Without warning, he pulled over to the side of the road. A taxi cab swerved round him.

‘You okay?’ Ty asked him.

Lock shook his head. ‘This isn’t over,’ he said quietly. ‘That thing today. That was a warm-up.’

‘How you figure that?’ Ty asked.

He wasn’t sure how he could answer in a way that would make sense. It was a hunch, but how had he reached it? He wasn’t sure, but he just knew that someone like Krank wasn’t about to go quietly.

‘The books that kid had about mass shootings,’ he said. ‘What did all those events have in common?’

‘Lot of dead bodies,’ Ty offered.

‘But today was different,’ said Lock.

Ty looked at him. ‘Looked pretty typical to me.’

‘But it wasn’t,’ said Lock. ‘Columbine. Sandy Hook. Isla Vista. They all ended with a suicide or death by cop. None of those shooters escaped, or even made any real attempt to escape. It was like they’d done what they’d come to do, made their point, and that was it for them. But today they made sure they were gone by the time anyone could get there.’

‘We only missed ’em by a few moments,’ said Ty.

‘Yeah,’ said Lock. ‘That’s what bothers me.’

Ty shrugged. ‘Not our problem anymore.’

‘You said it yourself – we missed them. That kind of makes it our problem.’

‘Ryan, you got the whole of LAPD and everyone else in law enforcement going after them. They ain’t gonna get away. Not for long. Now, can we eat?’

59

Gretchen and Loser hefted the last wooden crate into the back of the rental truck. Krank took one last look at the BMW. He took out the key fob from his pocket and dropped it on the ground next to the driver’s door.

The truck had been rented a week before, using a false ID and credit card. It wasn’t due to be returned for another week. They would drive it to the new location. It would be unloaded, then Loser had been tasked with driving it up the coast into Ventura County and dumping it. Once that was done it was quad bikes all the way. Those had already been purchased and stashed at what Krank lavishly referred to as the Ranch.

The Ranch was a parcel of land with a shack and a stream right next to their target, carefully chosen for its very specific geographical features. Krank didn’t own the Ranch. They would be squatting. But it would be temporary. Even more temporary since the events in Brentwood. He figured that they had maybe three days max.

That left only one question. Would Nature favor them? For the past few weeks the weather had been hot and dry. Now they all needed were the winds. Then they could begin. Columbine. Sandy Hook. Isla Vista. They would all be eclipsed – forever and completely.

Krank climbed into the back of the truck with Gretchen. It was too risky for them to ride up front in the cab with Loser. Theirs were the headline faces on the news.

He took one last look at Loser before he closed the door. ‘Drive slow, okay? If you get pulled over just follow what we agreed.’

Loser nodded. He closed the door. Darkness engulfed them. A few moments later the engine chuntered to life and they were moving.

60

Tarian opened the door and Lock walked past her into the hotel suite. It was one of eight at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica. Each one faced out onto the Pacific Ocean. Lock had made sure it wasn’t a hotel that Tarian had stayed at previously before he’d deemed it acceptable. Marcus would have spoken about his mother to Krank, and Lock didn’t want to take any chances that Krank might have connected a location Marcus had mentioned to where she’d be staying until he was captured. A sociopath like Krank would know as well as anyone that people were creatures of habit, especially when they were scared.

Tarian was in a bathrobe. Lock followed her through into the living area. ‘Thanks for coming, and arranging everything,’ she said.

‘How you holding up?’ he asked her.

‘It still seems completely unreal,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘All of it. I keep thinking I’ll wake up at home and none of it will have happened. The kids are still with Sylvia. She hasn’t told them yet. I wanted to do it. But I need a little time first.’

Lock understood what she was saying. Death was one thing, but a violent death, one that was wholly unavoidable, was different somehow. It came with a special bitterness that old age or lingering illness didn’t have. It was harder to move on from. If you weren’t careful, it could corrode you from the inside out.

She stopped talking and stared at him. ‘You’ve seen a lot of bad things, haven’t you?’ she said.

‘It doesn’t get any easier,’ said Lock. ‘You’d think it would, but it doesn’t.’

‘So why do you keep doing this kind of work?’ she asked him.

It was hardly a unique question. Women seemed to ask it a lot. Women he became involved with, at any rate.

‘It’s a drug,’ he said. ‘The adrenalin is a drug. And I’m good at it. Most of the time anyway.’

‘You couldn’t be blamed for what happened today. You weren’t even supposed to be there,’ Tarian said.

He didn’t detect any bitterness in her tone, though he wouldn’t have blamed her if he had. ‘You’re right. I’m not to blame, but that doesn’t stop me second-guessing.’

She crossed to the bar area, opened a small fridge and pulled out a bottle of white wine, then took a corkscrew out of a drawer and handed it to Lock with the wine. ‘Could you?’

Lock set to work while Tarian got two glasses. He filled a single glass.

‘You don’t want one?’ she said.

‘I need to have a clear head. In case anyone shows up here.’

She took a sip of wine. ‘Pretty good. The doctor gave me some pills to help me sleep. I think I’ll have this, then take one and go to bed. Or I can skip the pill and you can join me?’

She walked over and stood in front of him. ‘Don’t let me make a fool of myself here, Ryan. I need this.’
He leaned in, pinching her chin between his thumb and finger and kissed her softly on the lips. She kissed him back, harder.

Lock didn’t say anything. They stayed there for a few more seconds, her lips on his, her tongue sliding into his mouth. He pulled back.

“I can stay with you tonight. You need someone to hold you? Or you want a shoulder to cry on? I got that covered. But anything else will have to wait.”