John Sandford - Wicked Prey

"Ah, shit."

The Los Angeles cop said, "Get outside Northwest, over where the Hertz vans stop. I'm in a black-and-white Toyota FJ."

Lucas went outside, spotted the FJ and walked over. The cop, whose name was Lance Barr, and who looked like the third banana in a so-so cop film, poked the door open for him; they shook hands and Barr said, "Nice threads for a Minnesota cop."

Barr looked pretty good himself, in a tan suit and white shirt, with an ice-blue tie and high-shine brown oxfords. He was wearing skinny sunglasses under his gelled black hair. Lucas said, "We have a special suit for a guy traveling to the Coast. Gives us a chance to get out of the Pendletons."

"I suspected that-but I'm a detective," Barr said, and he pulled out and they headed east into a lot of blacktop.

"What about the fire?" Lucas asked.

"Well, sometime early this morning, about, mmm, six o'clock or so, this chick's house goes up in smoke. The bottom floor, anyway, and most of the top floor. That's before we were even looking at her. Her next-door neighbor was up and heard the place go-said it sounded like a gas explosion-and the silly asshole ran in there with a fire extinguisher and put some of it out. He said he was afraid the girls were in there."

Two women lived in the house, Barr said, but one was traveling, the neighbors said.

"Anyway, this guy slowed the fire down, and the fire guys got there and put the rest of it out. The Shell Avenue station is only a half mile away, right down Venice Boulevard, so they were there in three minutes ' Somebody poured gasoline, and touched it off. It's totally fucked, of course, but there are still some unburned pieces. One of the guys called and said they looked at a computer, but it had been cracked open and the hard drive was missing, so…"

"Probably cleaned the place out," Lucas said. "Anybody got any photos?"

"Not that we've found. Still looking."

"Got tags on their cars?" Lucas asked.

"No. Their names aren't in the database," Barr said. "I mean, their names are, but there are a number of people named Elena Diaz and Martha Knofler, and none of them live in Venice."

"Knofler. She's the roommate?"

"Yup. Rug-munchers. That's what their neighbors say. Long-term commitment," Barr said. "One of the neighbors, though, thought, for some reason, that Martha's name is Laura, or Lauren, and she's pretty sure about it, but she doesn't know why, since she only knew them to nod to at Whole Foods."

"So their names are probably phony, and they cleaned the place out and then burned it," Lucas said.

"Cleaned it out, but they didn't clean out the shower drain, so we got some hair. If you get some hair in Minnesota, then we can put our girl on your crime scene…"

"Don't have any hair yet," Lucas said. "And they don't have any in Washington. You gotta start processing it, because we might need it' but what we really need to do is chase down this Knofler, and break her ass."

"We're working on that," Barr said. "We're looking in garbage cans for hard drives, though they're probably in a canal or out in the ocean ' or maybe she still has them, and when we catch her, we'll get them back."

"If the place burned at six, that'd be eight back home," Lucas said. "So Diaz, or whatever her name is, probably saw the TV broadcast at seven o'clock or so, and called out here. That'd be five o'clock ' That'd give Knofler an hour to get out."

"Must have rehearsed it, though," Barr said. "She wouldn't have had much time. They maybe already had the gas in the garage. And, they leased the place, so they didn't lose anything but some furniture and their security deposit."

"These guys are no dummies," Lucas said. They were passing a cluster of small, hot-looking apartments off Lincoln Boulevard, and a woman with a dog on a leash and three small children in shorts and flip-flops. "Man, if we'd gotten this Knofler ' Man."

Diaz and Knofler lived in a pink-stucco house on Carroll Canal Court, a blank-faced two-story cube with a forbidding incised-steel garage door and a canal in the backyard. The decoration on the garage door was of a sunflower, but that succeeded only in making it look more like a bank safe. A fire truck was still parked in the street, but the hoses had been reeled in and the firefighters were working in shirtsleeves.

Another cop, named Harvey Cason, was standing in the front door when they arrived, cleaning his teeth with a length of dental floss. He flicked the floss into the yard and said, "I'm gonna smell like a burned couch for the rest of the day."

"So, no change," Barr said. He introduced Lucas and Cason said, "Four cops?"

Lucas nodded: "Two in New York, one in Hudson, Wisconsin, and one of my guys last night. Plus they killed a civilian last night, and one of their own guys is dead with them-my guy got him."

"God bless him," Cason said, and he crossed himself.

"So whatcha got?" Barr asked Cason.

"Nothing since you left," Cason said. "There's some paper upstairs, but it's all wet and runny. We're looking for credit card receipts, official paper of any kind, you know. The crime-scene guys are looking for prints, hair, anything. We've got DNA, but no prints, so far. We need prints…"

"Working the neighbors?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. Looking for pictures, but they seem kind of camera-shy," Cason said. "They didn't go to block parties, they pretty much kept to themselves. Both of them did yoga; we're looking for a yoga place they might have gone."

"How do you know?"

"People would see them carrying yoga mats around," Cason said.

"What kind of cars?"

"Toyota and a Lexus. A minivan and an SC430 convertible."

There wasn't much more: Lucas stood in the doorway and looked in, but he wasn't going to find anything the crime-scene crew hadn't. He walked once around the house, and saw a tricycle in the canal, and wondered about it. A bicycle he'd have understood: you steal a bike, ride it, then throw it in the canal; that's the way of the world. Had somebody hijacked a trike?

When he got back around to the front, Barr and Cason had gone inside, and Lucas looked around, then wandered across the street, where a pretty woman, maybe forty or forty-five, was standing in the doorway, watching. Lucas said, "Hi."

She nodded. "How's it going over there?"

"Not well," Lucas said. "Somebody asked you if you had photos, right?"

"Yes, but we don't."

"How about photos of the street in general?" Lucas asked. "You know, something that might have their cars in it?"

"I don't think so, but I'll check," she said. "They killed some police officers?"

The woman had a peculiar California look, a something-like-coral blouse and aqua slacks, which worked for her, and long blond slightly messy hair that she'd probably paid some guy two hundred dollars to mess up. Lucas took her in, and said, "Yeah, and they executed this woman. A political worker, you know, she worked for a community organizing group. Happened to be there, and bam! Killed her in cold blood."

That woke her up a little. "You got this from the Minneapolis police?"

"I'm from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," Lucas said. "I was at the scene-my guy was the guy who was murdered. The woman…" He lifted his hands. "… I mean, why?"

"Ah, jeez, that's awful," she said, and she meant it. "Look, I'll go check my pictures, but I'm ninety-nine percent that we don't have any. We're not really picture people. I don't even know how to work my cell phone cam."

"Thanks." Lucas turned and looked down the street. "Don't see cars. Are any of the other people home?"

"Dick and Carly live right there. I saw Dick a minute ago." She pointed sideways across the street.