The Last Good Guy

35

Burt and I drove to Cotton Point Estates. Sixteen homes plus Nixon’s old Western White House, now owned by a big-pharma go-getter and marked down to $63.5 million. Quite a ’hood. You could see the blue Pacific from almost anywhere, beyond the bright white plaster and stony old-world walls and clay-tile roofs and fountains and cypress and palms and flowers. Beautiful, serene, rigidly coiffed.

There was a private Cotton Point Estates beach path that Daley Rideout might or might not have used to arrive for her swim. The next nearest beach access was more than half a mile away, according to my phone maps. Without using the Cotton Point Estates beach access, Daley and her “friends” would have had to walk more than a mile and a half to and from Cotton Point. A long, rocky walk along a perfectly swimmable beach, just to get here and back. Which suggested to me that she’d come and gone right here where we were parked.

We watched the surfers out on the point. I surfed a lot until I went to war, then not. It was another thing that changed for me in Fallujah. Don’t know why. It wasn’t as if someone shot me off my surfboard in Iraq. Watching now made me want to do it again.

“She was here just two hours ago,” I said. “They escorted her here. They allowed her to come here.”

“They,” said Burt. “Friends or keepers, Roland?”

“Friends the day she left Nick Moreno’s condo with them,” I said. “She was comfortable with these men. But less than forty-eight hours later, she got cold feet and ran away. Made it as far as the 7-Eleven in San Clemente before they got her back under control.”

“They being SNR Security.”

“Specifically, it’s Donald, Glassen, and Revell,” I said. “Maybe they’re acting on orders. But maybe they’ve gone rogue.”

“On behalf of Pastor Reggie?”

“That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “We know he contracts SNR to patrol his church. We know he funnels some of his hard-earned fortune to Alfred Battle. We know that’s big money, pouring in through the Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry — the cathedral, the streaming sermons, the podcasts. But Reggie tried to hire me to find and deliver Daley to him instead of Penelope.”

“Leading you to believe what?”

“That Atlas doesn’t know where she is any more than we do.”

“Yet SNR Security does,” Burt said. “To what end?”

“To shake down Atlas for even more.”

Burt went quiet and stared out the window for a long beat. Drummed his thick fingers on the armrest. “But what if trying to hire you was just a way of putting you off his stink and keeping you close? And the SNR gentlemen are in fact already holding Daley for him? And he can get to her whenever he wants? In keeping with Penelope’s idea that the man is determined to seduce his own daughter?”

I’d considered that before Reggie Atlas had even left my downtown office. “Then he’s more dangerous than I thought.”

Burt looked at me, shook his head. “Really? Follow this through, Roland. If Penelope is correct about what Atlas did to her when she was a girl — and what he will do or has done to Daley — then at some point he’ll have to tuck Penelope in, once and for all. He absolutely can’t afford not to. And he’ll want a dirt nap for you, too — as party to what she knows. So of course he’d ask you to work for him. Keep you handy.”

Sitting here in a place approximating paradise, a place of sun and sea and riches, it was important to be reminded that there is a darkness in some men that is unstoppable unto death.

“Thanks for reminding me,” I said.

“Of what, Roland?”

“What we’re up against.”

He grunted.

“My next life I’m going to be a doctor,” I said. “Or a farmer. Or maybe I’ll learn to dance really well, and teach. Imagine — The Roland Ford Academy of Dance.”

“Just be a PI in your next life. Think how good you’ll be by then.”

We drove past each of the sixteen Cotton Point Estate properties again. The oceanfront lots are big and some of the homes are all but hidden. We drove slowly and loitered when good views of the houses presented themselves.

Spent the next couple of hours parked in different locations. Finally admitted we might be wasting our time.

That evening in my upstairs home office I poured a hopeful bourbon. I scoured IvarDuggans.com and my other online data dealers for a Cotton Point Estates property owned by Reggie Atlas and the breakfast-meat maven Marie Knippermeir.

No dice. When I deleted Reggie Atlas and Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry from the search, I found a brave new world of shell companies with Marie Knippermeir’s and Alfred Battle’s names behind them. But nothing in Cotton Point. How many more holdings they might have, and what shell companies had been formed to possess them, was anybody’s guess. Even the data miners could miss a nugget. I did have an idea who would know, and where I might find her. But getting her to talk to me at all might not be easy.

Nothing under Reggie Atlas as sole proprietor.

I looked out the window, saw Melinda and Liz taking up table tennis positions against Dick and Burt. Could be a good match, with Burt’s speed and Dick’s defensive consistency against Liz’s and Melinda’s tennis smarts. Styles make fights.

On my big oak desk, Clevenger’s computer slept. It wasn’t popping to life as often with the wasp-cam feeds. I worried about the battery life of the cameras, but they still had almost a quarter of their power left. I worried that Donald and Glassen had accomplished something ominous in their large, wicked glove box. But what?

I watched the setting sun pour gold on the pond and called Penelope Rideout.

“Roland, I’m so glad you called!”

Gunfire roared in the background, loud, chaotic, and plenty of it, the reports and echoes thundering through my phone. “Where are you?”

“I’m at Iron Sights, practicing up. She’s alive. Daley’s alive!”

Popopop pop pop popopopop.

Suddenly the gunfire quieted, then stopped.

“Can you hear me? I’m outside now. Man, that derringer kicks like a mule. Goes by the name of Smokey. I was so relieved to get your call today. It was like a window being thrown open in a dark room. Daley is okay and we’re going to get her back. I know it, I know it, I know it, Roland.”

“Why are you shooting?”

“I practice once a week with the Iron Ladies.”

“Practice for what?”

“For all the creeps,” she said. “No reason a girl shouldn’t have some security. So long as she’s safe and sane. Like you know I am!”

“Do you have a concealed-carry permit?”

“As of two weeks ago. Passed the class and got the approval. A hundred and fifty-six dollars and fourteen cents, plus training costs.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say. People with guns worry me. Especially ten percent killers.

“Roland, don’t worry. I’m not a gun nut. I’m not, like, off my rocker. Did you talk to the people who saw Daley?”

I told her about the call from my contact at the FBI, the anonymous tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the sergeant who had interviewed the four witnesses.

“Exactly what did the witnesses say about her?”

I synopsized carefully — the three men in their late twenties or early thirties, Daley’s apparent willingness to be there with them, her brief swim. None of the witnesses gave Daley and her companions much thought. One said that Daley and the young man she went into the water with looked like siblings.

“He’s brainwashed her,” said Penelope. “Stockholm syndrome. Patty Hearst. She’s too terrified to resist, so she’s psychologically thrown in with him. See?”

“It’s possible she’s cooperating with her captors. But I don’t think Atlas has control of her.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Reggie Atlas can convince anybody of anything. It’s what he does. He convinced you that I tried to seduce him. That he never drugged and raped me. That he didn’t father Daley. You still don’t believe me.”

“I’ll find Daley and bring her back.”

“I wish you trusted me,” said Penelope. “I know I’ve lied. I’m very sorry to have done that.”

“Let me do my job.”

“A minute ago I put eight nines in the black at fifty feet.”

I saw a brief but spectacular trailer of Penelope walking into the Cathedral by the Sea and shooting holes through Reggie Atlas.

“Penelope.”

“Yes, Roland?”

“Don’t do anything foolish. No matter what you think you know. Let me get Daley back to you. It’s what I do.”

“Prove it.”

I was about to answer when she ended the call.