Gone (Michael Bennett 6)

A WAGON TRAIN OF FIRE trucks, ambulances, and cop cars was on the scene when we got to Venice.

There were beach cops everywhere, on four-wheelers and in 4x4s and pickups. Most of them were sporting M-16s. Crime-scene tape fluttered as aviation whipped past low overhead in a buzz of bright, shaking light.

There were dozens upon dozens of citizens pressed up against the crime tape. Most were shirtless. One interested observer seemed to be clad in nothing save a hotel towel. Coming out of the Vic, I looked over my shoulder as I heard a suspicious click-clack. But it was just some bushy-haired thirty-year-old skateboarder attracted to the bright, shiny flashing lights.

Getting out of the G-car, Emily and I stepped around someone’s little dog, hitched to a public water fountain, and went under the crime-scene tape. Behind us, a squad-car siren was going off and going off and going off like a broken alarm clock.

There was reason to be alarmed, all right. We’d been scouring the city all day, chasing leads to try to find the fifteen-year-veteran agent who’d been snatched in broad daylight. Her husband, who was FaceTiming with her at the moment of abduction, had called it in from Brazil, of all places, where he was on a business trip. I didn’t envy the man.

Especially now that we’d finally found his wife.

The crooked smile of a quarter moon shining above black water was the first thing to greet us as we walked down to the sand. There was the soft, distant boom-and-shush of waves crashing, the sound of the palm fronds rasping in the wind. We stepped under a second strip of crime tape and across a deserted bike path.

Beside the path, just in the sand and facing the water, Agent Mara sat in a wheelchair with two bullet holes in her head. A dirty blanket covered her loosely. There was blood on the right corner of her mouth. In her lap was a plain brown bag that, we had already heard from the first responders, contained her cut-out tongue.

She’d been strapped to a wheelchair with tie wraps, obviously killed somewhere else. This was just a dump site. Her left elbow had been demolished, I noticed in the glare of the five-hundred-watt halogen work light the crime-scene people had set up. It looked like it had almost been severed with some blunt-force trauma. She’d been tortured, no doubt.

We turned as Detective Bassman stepped out of the shadows, straight up to us.

“Hey,” he said. “We looked for video in the stores along Ocean Front Walk, but it’s not looking good. There’s no evidence here. No prints anywhere. No witnesses. No nothing. I got the coroner to red-ball the autopsy so we can get her back to her family as soon as possible. Did the husband get here yet?”

“Still in the air,” Emily said.

“Probably for the best. He shouldn’t see this. Unbelievable. I know I’ve given you feds some heat, and I’m sorry for that. I know how hard you guys work. I know how bad it feels when one of your family gets taken from you.”

He quickly handed Emily a stack of bills.

“Passed the hat around. Get her poor kids some ice cream or something from us, OK? Tell them the LAPD isn’t going to stop until we drop every last one of the people who hurt their mother.”

“Thanks,” Emily said. “I will.”

“Hey, Bassman,” I said as the big guy walked away.

“What is it, Bennett?”

“Maybe you’re not such an asshole after all,” I said.

He smiled, shrugged.

“Just don’t let it get around,” he said.

CHAPTER 68

IT WAS HOT WHEN they woke that morning, and even hotter now at eleven as they went across the scrubby, grass-filled field under the pitiless sun.

Brian Bennett slapped at a monster horsefly that stung at his sweating neck. Man, he was starting to hate the country. The biggest lie in the world was how nature was supposed to be so invigorating and healthy. If there was one thing that he had learned out here, it was that nature was nothing but hot, dirty, smelly, and boring beyond the realm of human tolerance.

“Shit!” Brian yelled as the horsefly stung him again.

“Cursin’ now, Brian? Saints preserve us!” Eddie said, mimicking Seamus’s Irish accent to a tee.

Brian turned around to catch Eddie smiling, a napkin sticking out of his nose from a nosebleed he’d gotten about a quarter mile from the house.

Brian laughed despite himself. You had to hand it to the kid. He just kept at it 24-7. Jabbering, doing funny voices, making fun of things—himself, mostly—like some clown or court jester or something. A fool, Brian thought. That’s what he is. My brother Eddie, the fool. And he meant it in the best way possible.

“Quick question,” Ricky said from behind Eddie. “Why are we wandering the earth like a band of postapocalyptic nomads again? I hate to say this, big bro, but this Bataan death trek is quickly starting to teeter into the suck category.”

“You can go back any time you want, wimp,” Brian said angrily. “That goes for you, too, Eddie. I never asked you to follow me around. I couldn’t care less what you guys do.”