Tim started forward, picking his way up the vast rise of chaparral, Bear doing the same fifteen yards to his right. The helicopters hovered just over the fence line.
Walker turned slowly to face Tim, his front shadowed, the spotlights blazing around him. Gun steady in both hands, Tim tried to shout at him over the sound of the rotors to stop moving.
Keeping his hands laced above his neck, Walker dipped his head as if in acknowledgment of the shouted commands. He raised a boot and took a final step. A clang and he dropped from sight, disappearing into the earth, an upended grate popping into view.
The deputies sprinted up the hill, Tim in the lead. He kicked the grate aside and swung his gun barrel and flashlight over the black hole. A fifteen-foot drop, walled in concrete, a hot reek of sewage and nothing else. The other deputies huffed up behind him.
Bear recoiled from the stench. "He jumped into the fucking sewage system?"
"You gonna go down there?" Maybeck asked, also yelling over the choppers.
"Not if I don't want to land on his gun barrel," Tim shouted. "I think it's a closed system. I want a schema of all the grates."
Freed raised his phone and stepped away.
"Let's start getting bloodhounds and more men up here, just in case there's an outlet," Tim said to the small huddle. "He's trained in mountain nav, so we need to move. Maybeck-guard this hole. Let's sweep the property and see if there are any other pipes he could crawl out of."
Freed was yelling into the phone with more animation than seemed necessary to be heard above the rotors' whomping. He slapped the phone shut and ran back over. "The contractor said they fucking routed the sewer system to the storm-drain channels."
"Goddamn it," Bear said.
"Do we sweep the hills?" Maybeck asked.
"We can't cover that kind of ground," Tim said. "There are drains and runoff channels all through these canyons. He can crawl out anywhere. Get more choppers in the air-that's our only shot."
Maybeck was bent, hands on his knees. "He's a First Force Recon marine. By the time more choppers get here, he'll be sipping margaritas in Mazatlan."
Tim reached Tannino at the staging point and told him to have police block off the surrounding roads. The marshal's grunt said it all-the Santa Monicas stretched long and far, touching countless streets and spilling out into numerous communities. The storm-drain network ran from beneath their feet all the way to the ocean.
It would be like trying to trap water in a fist.
Within ten minutes LAPD SWAT arrived in force, providing support and keeping watch over the various grates on the property. The deputies reconvened in the model unit and started picking through Walker's possessions. One of the helos had peeled off to recon the surrounding gullies, but Tim could see the other through the windows, a giant predatory insect, tilting forward as if tethered to the mountainside by the leash of its spotlight. A few minutes later, it was joined by two more.
To the chagrin of the overworked criminalists, cops and Service brass clomped through the house. They were hot on the trail at last, and preservation had to bend to the exigency of a fast search.
The legal file box in the corner haunted Tim's peripheral vision despite his efforts to focus elsewhere. Bear regarded it with a canine absorption usually reserved for In-N-Out Double-Doubles, toeing it just above the ESTEBAN MARTINEZ stamp. Standing with his arms crossed so his jacket bunched at his compact shoulders, Tannino alternated his attention among Tim, Bear, and the box, slowly piecing matters together. "Bear," he finally said, "why don't you go put that in your truck so you can deliver it promptly back to Counselor Martinez in the morning?"
"Right," Bear said, hefting it into the crook of an elbow. "Good idea."
Denley puzzled over a new answering machine by the fireplace. It had been removed from its box but still appeared unused, ensconced in bubble wrap. "No phone line, so what the fuck's he want with this?" he asked nobody in particular.
Thomas's face stayed drawn and bloodless, and he apologized to Tim at intervals. "I'm sorry, Rack. I thought you were him, you know, a ruse. Jesus, I almost…"
After dispensing another "Don't worry about it" that he hoped would have a longer shelf life than the two prior, Tim dug through the duffel bag, impressed with the range of equipment Walker had managed to accumulate. In his brief break between crime scenes, Aaronson had pegged Walker's bullets as homemade. The slugs were composed of an alloy containing titanium-titanium! — which would have required sophisticated equipment not present even at this most finished of Sunnyslope homes. Which raised the possibility of a cache elsewhere-a cache from which Walker, when he slipped through LAPD's net, could replenish. The disposable cell phone-another terrorist advance recently appropriated by fugitives-on the mantel was so cheap it didn't have a call-history feature. A single key beside it fit the front door.
Bear, crouching over the duffel as if regarding a picnic basket, said, "Looky here." He withdrew a DVD case and showed Tim the label. JUNE 1. As Bear stepped off to argue Aaronson into a laptop loan, the chief tapped Tim's shoulder with his cell phone. "Pierce Jameson wants to talk to you. They transferred his call from the command post."
Tim pressed the phone to his ear to hear Pierce say, "The hell's going on down there? My lawyer's en route."
"Wise choice." Tim let the silence stretch out an extra beat. "Your son was here."
"Ain't that something."
"Funny-he had the key, too."
"Well, we left the site as it was. Someone must've left a key behind."
"And you know what else is odd?"
"What's that?"
"You turned the electricity on in the model unit again, just this morning."
"I don't actually oversee the electrical for all of my companies, Deputy. There are quite a few of them. Companies. On that particular site, you might have heard that we had some problems with sewerage? 'Nuther round of testing coming up next week, the guys need somewhere to plug in their gear."
"I thought there would be a simple explanation."
"There usually is. Adios, 'migo."
"Wait a sec. About the 'sewerage'-"
"My contractor just informed me that our system accidentally got routed into the storm drains. I'm furious. With what this'll cost me to fix, heads are gonna roll."
"Yes," Tim said, "they will."
By the time Tim handed off the phone to the chief, Bear had the security footage paused at the appropriate frame on Aaronson's laptop.
The image unfroze to show Tess waiting in The Ivy's side drive as Porsches and Ferraris rolled through the valet. She wore a cocktail dress, staying hunched as if cold, her hands tucked under her bare arms. She held a ticket out to a valet, explaining something-Tim could read the words "purse" and "car" on her lips. The valet handed her a set of keys, then jogged off to retrieve another car. Tess glanced around, then climbed into the Mercedes Gelaendewagen positioned in the prize front spot.
"Wait a minute," Bear said. "Isn't that…?"
Tess leaned over to the driver's side and dug through the jacket hung over the seat. She came up with something and tilted it in her hands.
Chase's BlackBerry.
Tim chuckled with a kind of awed respect.
Tess worked furiously on the tiny keypad, glancing at intervals back at the restaurant. Her focus grew more intense, and she punched another flurry of buttons. The face of the BlackBerry was visible-given digital enhancement and a miracle, they might be able to discern what she'd typed. She did a double take as the valet taxied a Carrera back through the drive, and then she returned the BlackBerry to the jacket pocket and hopped out while the valet was distracted with the Porsche handoff.
She held up the ticket and explained something, gesticulating her confusion.