Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

“Why do you want to talk to Clay?” Tommy asked me.

Clay Harris had worked for my father as an investigator, and when I took over Private, he was on the payroll.

I didn’t like him, but he was great at surveillance. He could stay on a tail or sit in a vehicle for days at a time. He looked like an unemployed factory worker, could blend into a crowd on the street. And he knew his way around electronics.

But he was a cheat and a liar.

Clay Harris had fattened his expense report. He had done work on the side. And one day he sold photos of a client in a compromising position. I found out.

That’s when I fired him.

Next day, Harris went to Tommy, who gave him a job.

Thinking about him now, standing in the crowd, smirking as I was marched off to jail, put Clay Harris in a new category. He disliked me. He had the skills to hurt me. And I couldn’t say murder was out of his league.

I said to Tommy, “I want to talk to Clay about Colleen.”

CHAPTER 117

I TOOK THE 5, heading toward the Tehachapi mountain range linking Southern and Central California.

Clay Harris lived on a dirt road in an isolated area made up of remote ranches, parks, and forest service land. From the satellite view, I knew his house was at the edge of a three-hundred-acre parcel, marked for development then abandoned when the bubble burst in 2009. Harris’s house was two miles away from any other man-made thing.

I took the 126 to Copper Hil

l Drive, which sent me past a minimall and then a cluster of migrant-worker housing. After the development, there was nothing to see but dry scrub and low hills, copses of native trees, and miles of flat land untouched by the hand of man.

“Here’s our turn,” I said, taking a left onto San Francisquito Canyon Road.

Tommy had been talking about himself since we left Hancock Park, filling the air with self-aggrandizing stories about his bodyguard service to celebrities, the stunts the A-listers pulled. But he stopped talking as my headlights lit up the chain-link fence and signs reading “Harris. No Trespassing.”

I slowed as the house came into view, parked on the shoulder, turned off my headlights.

The house was at the end of a long drive, placed far back on the property; a ranch-style rambler, white with dark trim and a plain front porch.

There was a clump of mature native oaks in the yard and more oaks at the fence line, but what grabbed my attention was a brand-new Lexus SUV at the top of the drive.

I knew how much Clay Harris had earned when he worked for me, and assuming Tommy hadn’t quadrupled his income, the Lexus didn’t fit. Unless someone had given him about seventy-five thousand dollars.

I reached across my brother and opened the glove box, took out a gun.

“I don’t think you have a license for that,” Tommy said.

“Let’s just keep this between us, okay, Junior?”

We got out of the car and edged along the chain-link fence, getting cover from the trees. The gate latch was open, an oversight on the part of Mr. Harris, I thought. We were still thirty feet from the porch when the motion detector found us.

Lights blazed.

A siren blared across the open land followed by a fusillade of bullets.

Harris was unloading a semiautomatic, and shots were whizzing through the trees. Then there was a pause in the shooting.

Had Clay Harris seen us? Or was he just firing in response to the alarm? Thinking coyote. Or bear. Or, If you’re on my property, you’re dead.

I whispered, “You take the back door and I’ll take the front.”

“No, Jack. You take the back.”