His description fit Daley Rideout’s, down to her bouncy hair and bright blue eyes. He said she seemed to know the two SUV men. They were all talking. They seemed purposeful. She had rolling luggage and a guitar.
The men were in their late twenties or early thirties. One wore tan pants and a black golf shirt. He was big, looked strong, and had blond hair cut short on the sides and back but longer on top. The other wore the same clothes and a black windbreaker. Neat, clean-cut guys, Chan said. Could have been cops. Or Mormons. Ha.
“Did you go over to Nick’s after they left?” I asked.
“No. No reason to.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“Why would I do that?” he asked.
“Because you saw a very young teenage girl get into a vehicle with two men you’d never seen before. You watched through your window and you knew it looked wrong, which is why you didn’t mention her until I asked you.”
Chan slumped a little, then caught himself. “Look. I actually thought of calling the police. But the girl and the men looked okay with each other. They could have been family. There was no awkwardness. They got into the front and she got into the rear. Then the driver, the big guy, hopped out and went back into Nick’s condo. A minute later he came back and drove away. Not fast, just regular. What would I tell police? That’s intrusive. I believe in privacy, Mr. Ford.”
“I believe in good judgment, Mr. Chan. Yours was bad.”
“Did something happen?”
“Something always happens.”
I gave Chan a business card with a fifty-dollar bill paper-clipped to the back. I always carry at least one such item in my wallet. It has paid off more than once. “If you see either Nick or the girl, call me. You’d be doing both of them a favor.”
He looked down at the card and cash, shook his head, and sighed.
* * *
—
BACK IN THE garage I saw no signs of an alarm system. Rapped my fist on the door to the house. Waited, called out to Nick, and knocked again. Then picked the lock and went in through a small laundry room—guilty of breaking and entering, Your Honor—but driven by a certain quality of fear that I’ve learned to listen to. Learned as an Expeditionary Force Marine in Fallujah, going door-to-door, stepping into death’s living rooms. Learned again as a sheriff’s deputy on the not-always-friendly streets of San Diego County. And now, here in Encinitas, I stood listening to that special quality of fear, answered by the brash thump of my heart.
And by the muted drone of a TV coming from the floor above.
“Nick! Roland Ford here. I need to talk to you.”
Not a peep. Just the TV above me, a man’s still-faint voice followed by audience laughter. The kitchen was cool and the sinks were full of dishes. Coffeepot a quarter full. From the island kitchen I could see the dining room and the living room with the gas fireplace and the artificial logs. And the stairs leading up. The air conditioner huffed on and the blinds rattled softly.
From the foot of the stairs I called up again. Only the TV answered back. The steps were carpeted, and I took them quietly and two at a time. Lights on in the hallway. A home-office alcove to my left, with a view of another Las Brisas unit just a few yards away. A bathroom door stood open. I stopped at what looked like a guest room. Dog posters. Bookcases filled with paperbacks.
The TV grew louder as I approached the master bedroom. The door was half open and I could hear the sitcom clearly now, That ’70s Show.
“Nick!”
The audience laughed. I pushed the door open and peered inside. A big TV hung on the wall, facing the bed. Nick lay propped against the headboard, facing the screen with eyes open and man bun in place, the remote cradled in his extended right hand. In his left hand leaned a glass tumbler. The bullet had caught him squarely in the forehead, centered just above his eyes. A big-caliber bullet, probably fired from a silenced gun—or half the citizens of densely packed Las Brisas would have heard and reported it. Certainly Daley Rideout and Scott Chan. Just a trickle of blood off his nose because Nick Moreno had died before he could even move. The headboard was a gruesome spectacle. On the TV, youngsters shot hoops and cracked jokes. The smell of blood.
Because a defenseless young man had been murdered, and because I was a licensed private investigator who had introduced myself to neighbors, tried to purchase information from one of them, then illegally entered another’s domicile, I would have to call the police soon.
So I shot pictures of Nick with my phone.
And close-ups of the tattered pit bull–themed address book and the Labrador retriever appointment calendar I found on the office desk. I recorded his last three incoming messages on the landline answering machine. What I really wanted was his cell phone contacts, but his phone was likely in his pocket—it was nowhere else I searched.
I stood in the bedroom doorway again, considering “guaranteed loser” Nick Moreno. Twenty brief years. Someone’s son, and I had to figure they had loved him and held him when he was hurt and fussed over which of his school pictures to order and what to get him for Christmas and if they should really let him have that puppy he badly wanted.
I also considered the other man who happened to be here—one Roland Ford, making a living off the dead.
Here to help a young girl who had taken up with violent men.
Here to satisfy a contract with a paying client.
I can cast my actions as virtues as well as the next guy.
I took out my phone again and put it on camera, then reversed the direction for a selfie. Looked down at my big and scarred and not beautiful face filling the little black screen. Took my picture. Felt that I needed to keep this moment. Ford, at another crossroads he hadn’t known was there.
Then I went outside, locked my cell phone in the big toolbox bolted to the bed of my truck.
Walked back into Nick Moreno’s home and used his landline to call Detective Sergeant Darrel Walker at the San Diego Sheriff’s North Coast Station, which covers Encinitas. I broke off some toilet paper and wiped off the telephone handset. Put the paper in my coat pocket. Darrel and I had worked together once and almost gotten along.
Twenty minutes later I answered Nick Moreno’s doorbell and looked into Darrel’s unhappy face. Two uniforms and a crime-scene investigator with a rolling suitcase flanked him, all giving me their best grave expressions.
“Every time I see you something bad has happened,” said Darrel Walker.
“Here we go again.”
Darrel shook his head but not my hand, then stepped inside.
* * *
—
I WALKED HIM upstairs. The uniforms jangled heavily behind us and the CSI carried his suitcase rather than bump the cargo up the steps.
While they stood in the doorway of Nick Moreno’s bedroom I stepped into the office alcove and looked out the window at the sunny September morning. Four road bikers sped by on the street below, clustered tightly, knees high and their chests nearly prone to the bike frames. A pickup truck slowly followed, a young couple in front and two surfboards resting on blankets on the tailgate. A red SUV came from the other direction, towing kayaks. I was once a cyclist, a surfer, and a kayaker. Then a college kid, a Marine, a boxer, and a sheriff’s deputy. After getting knocked out in my pro boxing debut, I had a long talk with myself and took up ballroom dancing. I know. But even being large and heavy, I still feel light on the dance floor. Got third place in a waltz competition once, a nice little gold-finish trophy with a trim little dude and a woman in a lilting gown. There are few feelings as satisfying as another’s body working in tandem with your own. The rhythm and trust. The aspirations to grace.
“Ford?” asked Darrel Walker. “Talk to me while these people do their jobs.”
We sat in the small condo dining room. Darrel is bigger than I am, so the room felt even smaller. He records everything. I wa
lked him through my morning and the new client with a missing sister who was mixed up with the man upstairs. Described what Scott Chan had seen, my concern for Daley Rideout, the suspicious arrival and departure of the men. Said that I’d found the garage door leading into the house open. And had heard the TV upstairs. I told him what I could, given that I had client privacy to respect and a job to do.
He asked me if I’d taken pictures and I told him no, I’d left my cell phone in the truck.
“So you called me how?” he asked.
“The landline upstairs.”
“Convenient.”
“Very.”
“What else didn’t you take besides pictures?”
“Nothing. I didn’t touch anything but the phone and the garage doorknob. Even used TP to clean them up.”
“You know I can arrest you.”
“Except the girl took off with two men,” I said. “After one of them put a bullet in that young man’s head. Cut me loose to look for this girl, Darrel. You know what the minutes can mean. Everything I find I’ll bring to you.”
Dark eyes in a dark face, calculating. “I’ll talk to the girl’s sister and Oceanside PD. Probably get myself into a turf war. Maybe you should get out of here before I change my mind.”
Climbing into my truck, I pictured Daley Rideout leaving with two men. I pictured Nick upstairs in his bed. I pictured Penelope’s judging blue eyes. I turned on my phone, hit contacts for her number, then changed my mind.
3
////////////////////////
IT was after one o’clock by the time I drove onto the Monarch Academy campus in Carlsbad. A sign at the entrance said:
MONARCH ACADEMY
Home of the
CAVALIERS
Academy chancellor Dr. Judith Stahl was a stocky, middle-aged woman with short dark hair and round wire-framed glasses. She frowned as I told her about my meeting with Penelope Rideout. She called Penelope and got permission to talk to me. She was still frowning a few minutes later as she led me down the steps from Oxford Hall and into the September sunlight.
“This is wrong,” she said. “Daley should have been in American History at that time. I know she was here and on time yesterday for first period. I saw her. Academy security will get to the bottom of this.”
Chancellor Stahl marched us toward the admin building from which we’d just come, heels brisk on the walkway. The campus was new construction, two levels of right angles, darkly stained lumber, and smoked glass. We backdoored our way to the visitor check-in counter. The same armed and uniformed young man who had signed me in and paged the chancellor for me was still on duty. He rose in respect for his boss. His badge said “Cates.”
“Wayne,” she said. “Get Baxter over here ASAP and come to my office.”
“Yes, Chancellor.”
Her upstairs office was spacious and cool, with views of the Pacific beyond the hills. Chancellor Stahl’s secretary admitted Wayne, who quietly crossed the carpet and took a chair next to me, setting his laptop on his knees.
“Recap yesterday, and Daley Rideout,” said Stahl.
Wayne looked up from the laptop screen. “She passed through student main security at seven forty-one in the morning. According to her teachers, she was in class for periods one through three. She didn’t go through security for lunch in the commons. And none of her teachers after lunch flagged her as absent.”
“Explain why,” said the chancellor. “She was off-campus and in Encinitas by noon, according to Mr. Ford.”
“Yes, Chancellor,” said Wayne. “Her father, Richard Hauser, had signed on to the academy parent portal the evening before, and advised that Daley would be absent periods four through seven and of course lunch. Family matters.”
“And he confirmed with a call later? Per Monarch procedure?” she asked.
Wayne consulted his screen again. “Within the hour, yes, he confirmed.”
Someone did, I thought.
“But Daley did not check out through student security,” said Stahl. “And you didn’t see her leave? None of your people saw her leave?”
“That’s correct. Very busy, the lunch rush.”
“Then she could easily have left the academy alone and unaccompanied by an adult?”
Or accompanied by the wrong adult, I thought.
“I would have to agree, yes, Chancellor.”
Chancellor Stahl was fiddling with a pen, which she now dropped to the desktop glass with a clatter.
I cleared my throat. “How often does a student steal the portal password and book her own vacation getaway? Have a friend play Mom or Dad for the confirmation call? Maybe do it herself?”
An incriminating beat of silence.
“Of course that can happen,” said Wayne. “We ask them to change passwords often.”
“We’re an exclusive private academy,” said the chancellor. “Not a supermax prison.”
I asked about security video.
“Here,” said Wayne, looking up from his computer. “It’s all right here.”
He leaned forward and set the laptop on the chancellor’s desk, turning it so we could all see. I watched the screen quarter into rectangles, each showing a different entrance and/or exit.
My phone vibrated and I checked the caller number and name: Penelope Rideout. Let it go to message.
Wayne set the video calendar to the previous day, then sped the master clock forward to 11:40 a.m. In good, clear audio, the recorded lunch bell pealed through the campus public-address speakers. The lunch getaway lasted two frantic minutes. Boys and girls in their gray-and-white uniforms, slashing their ID cards through the turnstile readers, bursting into the parking lot to begin their fifty minutes of freedom. Juniors and seniors straight to their own wheels, underclassmen with moms and dads for getaway drivers, a jockeying battalion of high-horse luxury.
Cavaliers, baby.
But Daley Rideout was not one of them.
“I hate to keep being the bad guy here,” I said. “But there must be other ways to—”
“Get on and off campus?” snapped the chancellor. “Of course there are. They can sneak out when no one is looking. They can climb a six-foot chain-link fence. They can squeeze past the turnstiles two at a time or just jump the damned things.”
“They always find new ways past the video cameras,” Wayne said with a chuckle. The chancellor glared at him with frank contempt.
On my phone I brought up the picture of Daley and Nick. Both the chancellor and Wayne nodded.
“He picks her up after school sometimes,” said Wayne. “I spoke to her sister. She didn’t approve, but Daley defied her. I think Daley defies her sister often, Mr. Ford.”
“We should all get back to work,” said Judith Stahl, standing. “Please escort Mr. Ford out, Wayne.”
“I’d like to talk to some of Daley’s friends,” I said, not standing.
“We’d need to get Penelope’s and their parents’ approval first,” she said. “And that can take some time.”
“Time? Chancellor, Daley Rideout was last seen getting into an SUV with two men yesterday around noon, when she was supposed to be here at Monarch. I need to talk to some of her friends. Now. They might know who these people are and where they’re going. Every minute counts.”
She gave me a hard stare. “She has two good friends here at Monarch. I know where they are. I’ll handle this, Wayne.”
* * *
—
THE FOUR OF us sat at a picnic table in the shade of a coral tree in the now deserted lunch quad. Thin Alanis Tervalua regarded me from behind a wall of shiny black hair. Stout Carrie Calhoun was a corn-silk blonde with green, seldom-blinking eyes.
Trying not to alarm them, I told them who I was, then laid out the basics of Daley’s activities the day before as best I knew them, ending with her being seen
talking to two men in a silver SUV with a round blue emblem on the driver’s door. The men were both late twenties or early thirties. They were clean-cut and conservatively dressed. I told them this had happened at Nick Moreno’s place, omitting Nick’s fate and Daley’s departure with the men.
The girls watched me intently, Alanis with one brown eye not hidden behind her hair, Carrie with green, wide-eyed attention.
When they attempted furtive glances at each other, their cat was at least partially out of its bag. I heard the faint catch of Chancellor Stahl’s breath.
“Nick is, like, a totally cool guy,” said Alanis.
“He can be kind of edgy, too,” said Carrie.
Their glances caromed, and I guessed that Nick was not their subject at all. “What about the men in the SUV?” I asked.
“Well, there’s this club,” said Carrie. “And sometimes these two guys in an SUV take us there after school. Connor and Eric. They drop us off, but mostly we just Uber there and home.”
Carrie’s and Alanis’s descriptions of Connor and Eric were not unlike Scott Chan’s version of Daley Rideout’s escorts. And if they were the same men, it would account for Daley Rideout’s apparent comfort with them.
Time to go fishing: “Do they drive a silver SUV?”
“With a sign on the door,” said Carrie. “Of an eagle holding lightning bolts in its talons. It’s their security company.”
The sign that Scott Chan couldn’t quite see?
My phone thrummed again: Penelope Rideout.
“You two girls are absolutely foolish, taking rides with men you don’t know,” said Chancellor Stahl.
Alanis shrugged, but Carrie brought some force to her voice. “Monarch teaches us to trust our judgment and be our own security guards,” she said.
“Maybe we should revisit that policy,” said Stahl. Then she looked at me. “They’re talking about Alchemy 101. It’s a teen club in Oceanside. Live music, big-screen videos, vegan menu. No smoking, no alcohol.”
The Last Good Guy Page 2
