J. Black - The Survivors Club

“Would you mind giving me your contact information, just in case I can think of anything else to ask?”

He said, “This Hanley guy who died in Credo, you think Jaimie had anything to do with that?”

“Doubtful,” Tess lied. “I’m just talking to anyone who knew him.”

“Tell you what. Give me your card, and if I hear somethin’, I’ll give you a call.”

She did so, scrawling her home phone number as well.

Tess drove up by the road and parked. She’d turned on her laptop, and looked for tire treads that matched what she’d seen—just in case Jaimie had been to Barkman’s house. Then she started up the Tahoe and put it in gear, turning east on 82. A glance in her rearview mirror showed the white Ford belonging to Jaimie’s friend driving off the ranch and turning in the opposite direction.

Her mobile rang. It was Cheryl Tedesco.

“One of our techs found something interesting at Barkman’s place,” she said. “You remember that printer he had with all those slots for micro cards?”

Tess listened while Cheryl explained that Steve Barkman had hidden a micro SD card in plain sight.

“I remember a tech mentioning something about it at the scene. What exactly is a micro SD card?”

“A storage device. It’s tiny, but apparently, it packs a lot of gigabytes on it—actually terabytes. My tech tells me that one terabyte holds one thousand gigabytes.”

Tess would be impressed if she knew precisely what a gigabyte was. “Computer memory.”

“Uh-huh. He told me, no wonder they didn’t find anything on his laptop except a bunch of bookmarked web pages, Facebook, and other crap. He must have kept it all on the card.”

“Where did your tech find it?”

“First, you gotta understand how close it came to being thrown out. It was in that jar of pens and pencils on his bookcase. But fortunately, our guys are scrupulous in looking for and bagging evidence. You know how big a micro SD is?”

“Small?” Tess guessed.

“Try a little black rectangle you can put on the tip of your finger.”

“You think there will be a lot of info on Michael DeKoven?”

“That’s the hope.”

“How far along are you?”

“Well, it’s on the tip of my finger right now. I’ll keep you posted.”

CHAPTER 24

Michael, Jaimie, and Brayden said little on the flight over. Michael rented a Town Car at LAX and drove down to Laguna Beach.

No one talked.

Michael sat still, staring at the traffic but not seeing it. Stunned.

Chad.

His brother .

His little brother.

Chad was kind of a nonentity. He’d never progressed in any way—not in school, not in a career, not even in his social life. He was an overgrown, carefree child. Their mother used to call him an innocent.

Not that he was dumb. He wasn’t. Maybe all the pot he smoked and the beer and the fast food he consumed contributed to his…haziness, but he’d carved out his own little life in the Laguna beach house and he wasn’t a bother to anybody. They could just forget about him and go on with their lives.

Michael felt guilty. He should have paid more attention. They just left him out there on his own, thinking he was fine. Happy. But he must have run across some bad people. As head of the family, Michael felt responsible.

They checked into the Retreat at Laguna, then drove to the Laguna Police Department on Loma. It took Michael a while to find a parking space and they were late. They waited in the outside office until a detective came to meet with them. He was tall and Hispanic, with a pitted face and bad breath. His name was Pete Morales. He took them back to his office.

He didn’t talk long. They would have to go identify the body at the hospital morgue, and there was very little he could tell them.

“It looks like he was going surfing. His neighbor says he usually goes out between four and five-thirty in the morning. He was found just below the steps down to the beach by a couple of surfers—” he read their names. “They must have found him shortly after he was killed.”

Michael absorbed this. “Do you have any leads? Who do you think would do something like this?” Aware of Brayden sitting beside him, her hand on his arm, stroking over and over, as if she were in a trance.

Jaimie asked, “How was he killed?”

“He was choked.”

“Strangled?” asked Brayden.

Morales shifted in his seat. Michael noticed his pants were polyester. You’d think cops in Laguna Beach would dress better. “Yes.”

Brayden continued to paw at Michael’s arm. “Why would someone do that?”

“There could be a few reasons. An argument, maybe. Or a robbery, although no one took his board.”

Michael reflected that while Chad had few needs or even wants, he spent his money on surfboards. “So it wasn’t robbery then?”

“It doesn’t look that way, but I can’t be sure. We’re looking at everything.”

Michael disengaged his arm from Brayden’s grooming efforts and held the detective’s gaze. “So …what? You think it was for the hell of it?”

“We’re trying to find out who did this and why, but there aren’t any obvious pointers to anyone. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.” He shifted in his seat again. “Did Chad have any enemies?”

“Enemies?” Michael thought Chad was the least offensive person he knew. Easygoing, friendly, willing to go along to get along. “No. At least none that we would know about.”

“We have interviewed the two young men who found him. They said the same thing.”

Cheryl Tedesco called just as Tess was pulling into her driveway.

“There’s some great stuff on the micro card. I can’t send you anything official. This is FYI only. With your memory, you’ll probably be able to say this back to me verbatim.”

When Tess got off the phone a half hour later, she thought: Steve Barkman was a damn good investigator.

Tess saw in her mind George Hanley’s calendar—the three-day trip to LA written there. She’d found the ticket he’d paid for but never got a chance to use—the round-trip ticket to John Wayne Airport in Orange County.

Now she clicked on the link Cheryl had sent her. An AP article came up, no more than a few paragraphs—about a man whose remains were found near a mountain bike trail in Orange County.

The story was two years old.

Peter Farley was a systems analyst for a tech company in Orange County, an avid mountain biker who tackled the trails into Asteroid Canyon on the weekends. Asteroid was a canyon running through a relatively remote section of the Cleveland National Forest.

Farley had parked his vehicle in the wildcat parking lot at the entrance to the canyon. When he did not return to work after the weekend, a search ensued. His bike was found at the base of a short but steep hiking trail leading to a waterfall. Farley was found near the pool at the waterfall’s base, partially eaten and dragged into a hollow under the oak trees, buried under leaves and underbrush, his bloodstained wallet still in the pocket of his shorts.

The wounds appeared to come from a mountain lion. Hunters searched for the lion, but never found any sign of one. Not surprising, since a rainstorm had come through between Farley’s disappearance and the day he was found.

And then the kicker.

“In a cruel twist of fate, Mr. Farley was attacked previously at his home in Los Angeles by a pack of javelinas while walking his small dog.”

He’d saved the dog but was seriously injured in the attack when one of the javelinas bit into his femoral artery.