A steady string of cars began arriving at about eight forty, all with children aboard. They parked near the main house and the kids hopped out with their backpacks and lunch pails. Several men, women, and children began emerging from the bunkhouse and the cottages.
The adults were all young, well groomed, and conservatively dressed. Something of an earlier America about them. Their children likewise. Backpacks and book bags. Some had hair still damp from the shower. Most of them stopped for a moment after getting out of the vehicles, as if stunned by the fierce morning sunlight. Then hustled to the big red barn.
A middle-aged couple stood before the open barn door and welcomed the children in. He was large and burly and wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a tie; she was almost as tall but slender, in a long summer dress. Her hair up in a bun. Much talking and shaking of hands among the adults as the kids disappeared inside.
The drop-off cars headed back toward the gate.
Two men in khaki pants and black golf shirts, wearing black boots and carrying duffels, came from the main house and got into one of the silver Expeditions. Adam Revell and another young man, both in blue SNR security guard uniforms, climbed into a second Expedition and followed the first down the road.
Everybody coming or going, I thought. Neat people. Brisk people. They seemed to have a purpose. Or at least a routine.
* * *
—
THE DOVE HUNTERS stumbled onto me a few minutes later, following a steady stream of birds flying straight over my position.
“Oh, sorry,” said the older one. “Didn’t even see you here.” He eyed me suspiciously from behind yellow shooting glasses, considered my shotgun, and looked in the direction of my telescope, well hidden under dead branches and a handy tumbleweed.
Up came his son, certainly, same shape and sharp eyes, same yellow glasses. “How you doing so far?” he asked.
“A little slow here,” I said.
“They’ve been flying right over you for twenty minutes,” said Dad.
“Are you sure?”
“You should have your eyes checked,” said Dad. “Seriously.” His eyes roamed my face.
I shrugged.
A drone flew past in front of us, west to east, a couple hundred yards out. Right along the Paradise Date Farm fence line.
“Fish and Game,” said Son.
“We don’t know that for sure,” said the father. “Those drones don’t come out past the fence.”
“Are they out here often?” I asked.
“The drones? Now and then,” said Dad.
Took my time, didn’t want to seem too interested. “Do you ever talk to the date farm people?”
“No,” said Son, shaking his head. “Dove season is harvest time for them.”
“There must be lots of trucks heading out for market,” I said.
“Trucks come and go all the time,” said Dad. “So do a lot of nice silver SUVs, and plenty of passenger cars. People living there. Not just workers. More than you’d think.”
We exchanged hunters’ pleasantries for a minute or two: How’s the twenty-gauge Red Label swing? You shooting seven-and-a-halfs or eights? They had killed a rattler last week early morning, a big one, and told me to watch out.
“Well, nice talking,” said Dad. “But get those eyes of yours checked. You could have had your limit by now.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Later,” said the son.
* * *
—
BURT AND FRANK finished up work at two. Loaded up the old white truck and stood in the front-porch shade for a few minutes, awaiting pay. Burt wore his sweat-soaked painter’s cap in a mission-accomplished style, bill upward.
Finally a man came out and handed Burt a check. I recognized him. I’d watched him through the window of Pastor Reggie Atlas’s office last Sunday, tidying up the Cathedral by the Sea courtyard after the hot dog, burger, and donut extravaganza. Same clothes. Same blond buzz cut, ruddy face, and pit-bull ears. Same black golf shirt and khakis and shiny black duty boots.
Burt examined the check and seemed to be trying to get Pit Bull Ears into a conversation, but no luck. The man looked down at Burt with undisguised amusement and I wondered if things would escalate. Burt hates being treated like he’s short. It’s one of the few things that gets to him.
But the man went back inside without incident, and the front door closed silently. Burt slid the check into his wallet with the bills. The window washers got into their truck.
A moment later the dust and the shimmering waves of heat swallowed that truck whole, and it was gone.
18
////////////////////////
BURT’S hard-won pictures jumped to life on the computer monitor in my home office. Seven images in all, counting the mystery freezers. Burt was unhappy that he couldn’t shoot the farmhouse interiors because the house was full of people. And that the barn windows were shuttered.
But he had managed to sneak four shots of the hangar’s interior. Behind the tractors, ATVs, and other work vehicles that had been visible through the roll-up doors stood two long work benches. Hard to tell what kind of work, if any, was done on them. Bench vises, electric sanders/polishers, a drill press, a band saw, coffee cans of what looked like nuts and bolts, soldering guns, toolboxes.
Burt frowned at the screen, scrolled back and forth between the images. “I could only get four shots before the big guy came back in,” he said. “Every time I tried again, there he was. A lion tattoo on one palm. He introduced himself as Connor Donald.”
Connor Donald, I thought. Muscle Blond. My attacker. Leader of the pack.
I booted up my tablet and entered his name in the IvarDuggans.com search field. Then set the dedicated wasp-cam laptop on the desk.
And once again let my eyes roam Burt’s shots of the inside of the Paradise Date Farm hangar.
“What’s that in the background, Burt? It looks like a security-screen door. The perforated steel ones you can see through from inside but not from the outside.”
“That’s exactly what it is. Donald went in and came out four times that I saw. Used a key each time.”
“No one else?”
“Just him.”
How I would have loved to see through that security-screen door.
Burt and I turned our attention to the custom laptop that Dale Clevenger had built and loaned us. It was dedicated to receive the live feeds from his four wasp cameras. It was large for a laptop, very heavy, and encased in red aluminum. I’d opened it and propped it up at one end of the desk.
Clevenger’s four wasp-cams were motion-activated and the batteries were good for eight hours of streaming. The power shut down automatically after thirty seconds of inactivity. You could check the remaining battery life for each camera. Dale had programmed the laptop computer so all four cameras could stream at once, the screen quartering itself to accommodate them. From Dale’s computer, the live video could be sent to other devices, either live or later.
Wasp-cam one was up now, a view of the main house. We watched a silver Expedition roll into a parking place in front of the house and stop on a pillow of dust. Adam Revell and his partner got out and headed into the house.
“On the left is Revell,” I said, “Daley’s acquaintance from Alchemy 101 nightclub. And possibly one of the six helmets who put me in my current condition. The other guy I don’t know.”
A few seconds later, the screen split in half for the camera-one feed—two date pickers trundling from one of the storage sheds with empty wicker baskets in both hands. They were talking. Waves of heat shimmered around them. Dale Clevenger’s video was very clear. As if on cue, camera four came to life on the laptop screen when an authentic wasp landed on it, legs straddling the lens, wings fanning in the sunlight as it checked things out.
By then, my disorganized thoughts were
trying to advance, lining up like swells from different directions but headed for the same beach:
Daley Rideout.
Connor Donald.
SNR Security—khakis, black golf shirts, and silver Expeditions.
Uniforms and camouflage. Pistols, boots, and tattoos.
A barn full of schoolchildren and a cache of modified game freezers and protective gear.
An all-white lineup.
“Burt, who are these people and what are they doing?”
“They are Americans, acting out their version of the American Dream.”
“But what does keeping Daley Rideout have to do with the American Dream?”
“It makes sense to somebody,” Burt said.
But none to me. And more important, where was she and what had they done with her? A cool tingle came from the old boxing scar on my forehead. I tried to be open and receptive. I tried to quiet my mind and let the scar do its magic. Then it stopped. No tingle, no warning, no guidance. I’d failed to hear its message. My scar is no parlor trickster and will not perform on cue.
So I stared at my desktop monitor, at Burt’s hard-won picture of the unrevealing interior of the metal hangar, confronting the terrible truth that Daley Rideout had been gone for nearly a week and I had failed to retrieve her. Seven days is statistically disastrous for abducted children. The small candle in this darkness was that she’d been seen alive more recently on the beach at San Onofre, and very early the next morning at a convenience store in San Clemente.
* * *
—
IVARDUGGANS.COM HAD PRECIOUS little information on Adam Revell, but an image of his California driver’s license confirmed that I had the right guy.
Connor Donald was another story.
His picture was dated three years ago. Same casually handsome face. Shorter hair then. He was square-jawed, with a focused and present look in his eyes.
“Who would have thought that?” asked Burt. “Dumb-looking beefcake like him?”
Burt had already read the IvarDuggans bio. He reads faster than anybody I’ve ever known. He can absorb and retain the information on a book page or a monitor screen after looking at it for six or eight seconds. He once mentioned a speed-reading program his parents had given him for his fifth birthday, this plastic gadget with a long rectangular window through which phrases would pass as fast as you could push a lever. He said he got so fast it was like reading thoughts. He sold it to a friend and bought cherry bombs. He also claimed that his uncorrected vision was 20/10 and actually improving with age, attributable to homeopathic remedies.
“Give me a minute, Burt, will you?”
“A wet dose of arnica 6C and a daily euphrasia douche would help your vision a lot, Roland.”
“Noted.”
Our Connor Donald was twenty-nine years old, born in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, graduated top of his class from a public high school and got a football ride to Penn State. Quit the team after one season, forfeiting the money to study physics and philosophy. Graduated summa cum laude, hired by JPL, moved on to Aero-Dynamics in Orange County, California; then General Atomics of San Diego.
“A rocket scientist,” I said.
“And more.”
Four years ago, Donald had joined a Christian mission—Lions of the Lord—in Somalia, sponsored by the Western Evangelical Alliance, which, I remembered, was matching the Cathedral by the Sea’s Onward Soldiers Fund donations one-to-one. The adventure had turned into a nightmare when three of the missionaries and six of their armed bodyguards were murdered by Somali rebels. I recalled the gruesome horror, well covered by the press and media. One of the slaughtered ministers was a San Diego woman.
I linked from IvarDuggans to a New York Times article about the killings. There, Connor Donald talked at length about the day it happened. Surprise. Guns and machetes. Young men—just boys, by the look of them.
“I don’t know why they left me alive,” he said. “Unless it was so I could witness to the world.”
Donald’s IvarDuggans biography said that he left General Atomics shortly after the tragic African mission. He had apparently gone unemployed for two years, until the founding of SNR Security.
The IvarDuggans SNR folder informed me that the security company was privately held and tightly guarded its public image. Donald was believed to have been an original investor and possibly SNR Security’s first chief operating officer.
Back to Connor Donald: His bio had not been updated for a year.
Last known address, Buena Vista, California, home of Paradise Date Farm. I thought again of the beating I’d taken out there, and of the snarling lion tattooed on Connor Donald’s palm. Felt the cracked rib still aching in my chest, and the tight lump at my hairline.
Donald had no criminal record, no property or tax liens, no known associates I recognized.
An IvarDuggans query asked for “corroboration and updates on this subject.”
“Nice career moves,” said Burt. “From scientist to crusader to security guard to date farmer.”
I’d been thinking the same.
“Everything’s connected by SNR,” I said. “Daley. Alchemy 101. Paradise Date Farm. Even the Cathedral by the Sea, which interested Daley and repulsed her sister. The SNR guy at Paradise who wrote you the check? He’s part of the church, a deacon or an elder. I saw him there last Sunday.”
Burt studied me with curious, unemotional eyes. He produced his wallet and handed me the check.
It was drawn on a Paradise Date Farm account at San Diego Valley Bank. Signed precisely by Eric Glassen.
“Okay,” said Burt. “Another SNR connection to the church.” A moment later, Eric Glassen’s pugnacious mug was staring back at us from the all-knowing ether of IvarDuggans.
He was thirty-four, five years older than Connor Donald. And like Donald, Glassen had an unusual, almost contradictory, academic résumé—double undergrad degrees in mechanical engineering and history from UC Riverside. Grew up in San Bernardino. Surfed, had a rock band, played four years of varsity football as a cornerback.
He’d been arrested for assault in a bar fight when he was twenty-two, charges dropped. At twenty-three, a DUI that stuck. Employment at manufacturing companies in Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle. A brief stint in the UFC as a middleweight, professional record of 6-8, retired in 2014. Hired by Corvus Protection in 2015 and SNR Security two years later.
“Looks like a tough customer,” said Burt. “And that six-and-eight record in the UFC couldn’t have left him in a good mood.”
As a fighter who had done some losing, I agreed.
19
////////////////////////
LATER that evening, after Burt had left, I did another Internet search for information on SNR Security. The SNR website gave me the paragraph I’d already seen: The San Diego company was two years old, privately held, and specialized in armed and unarmed personal and property protection. It offered no grander mission statement than that, no pictures or bios of company officers, no testimonials from satisfied clients, no shots of their headquarters, no phone number, no jobs tab, no links to more. The one-page site did have a street address and a “Contact Us” email address, and a background graphic of the SNR logo I’d seen on the door of Adam Revell’s SUV—the eagle with the lightning bolts.
The more search words I tried, the more I saw how publicity-shy the company was.
SNR Security declined to comment for this story.
SNR Security could not be reached.
SNR Security did not answer our inquiries.
There was a humorous story by a San Diego Union-Tribune business columnist trying to find out what the letters SNR stood for.
SNR Security didn’t return any of my ten emails over the next ten workdays.
So I decided to ask them face-to-face just exactly what their initials stood for.
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In SNR Security’s contemporary but sterile lobby, I was greeted by a smiling woman in a blue security uniform who smilingly told me that SNR had no public relations department per se, but she would certainly help me if she could.
Smiling, she told me that SNR didn’t stand for anything specific—the letters were chosen because they were easy to remember.
When I asked to speak with her supervisor, she seemed sorry to tell me there were no SNR personnel available to talk to me at this time. She broke this news to me with a smile, and said their website had an email address, I just had to click on “Contact Us.”
I shared with her my plight of ten unreturned emails and she told me she would look into it.
I told her I’d be happy to wait while she did so, but she told me, with a smile, that it would take some time.
So I sat in a contemporary but sterile chair and waited for less than one minute.
As if on cue—likely the old hidden-camera trick—a blue-uniformed security guard with a surfer’s tan and a crew cut came through a door behind the reception counter, squeaked across the shiny marble floor in black combat boots, and asked me to leave.
He was not smiling. The gun at his side was black and fat as a family Bible.
I stood and asked him how he liked working for SNR, and he asked me again to leave or he would call the police.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you are trespassing and have been asked to exit the building.” He lifted a phone from his belt and arranged a thin speaker wire running down from a bud in his ear.
I smiled at both of them, and left.
I’m still not sure what SNR stands for. Say Nothing Real? Just because I happen to live in the city where they do business apparently does not give me a right to know.
I’m sure their security services are terrific. But they should get a more transparent name.
* * *
—
The Last Good Guy Page 11
