“We’ve been asking around here in New Orleans. We’re actually looking for his brother, a man named Clayton Deese,” Lucas said. “He’s the guy who killed and buried all those people we’re digging up in Louisiana. We think he might have run out there, looking for help from Beauchamps.”
“Jesus, must have had great family gatherings, huh?” Rocha said. “Sit around and bullshit about mugging techniques.”
“Why’s Beauchamps so high on your list?” Lucas asked.
“Because he’s involved in home invasions in Beverly Hills, Brentwood... uh, one in Pacific Palisades, two in Malibu, a couple in the Hollywood Hills... Like that,” Rocha said. “We picked up his prints on a pen we found in a driveway of one of the homes his gang hit, probably fell out of the door of their van. They’ve got a regular pattern: four guys, masked, driving a fake service vehicle—a plumber’s or an electrician’s, or maybe cable TV.”
“Same van, not stolen?”
“No, probably not stolen, as far as we know, but really common: a white Ford Transit. We think they’ve got magnetic license plates, or some other way, to get them on and off in a hurry. When they get to the house, we can see the Transit, but they’ve pulled the plates, so they’re not recorded on security cameras. There are a billion vans exactly like it in LA.”
“Interesting,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. They’ve thought about it, how to do it. They do their research, they know how many people are in the house, never hit anybody with a huge profile—no movie stars, nothing like that. The victims are always way rich, always have at least a few hundred million, and a couple were legitimate billionaires. Houses are always secluded, behind electronic gates. We think they use a code reader to pick up the signals between a victim’s car and the gates. They go in immediately after the owners come back from a night out. They pull in, close the gates, drive up to the front door, hit the door with a battering ram cut from a telephone pole—the victims have seen it; it’s one of their signature techniques—and they are all over the victims in a matter of a minute or so.”
“Anybody get killed?”
“Not yet, but they go in with guns, and they’ve beaten a few people pretty badly. They’ll kill somebody, sooner or later. They threaten to rape the wives or daughters, if they’re around. They loot the house. They don’t just take cash, they take watches, jewelry, coin collections, anything valuable that can be broken down and sold. No easily identifiable artworks, like paintings,” Rocha said. “Their net, believe it or not, is close to a million bucks a hit. They probably only clear two hundred thousand or so, but still.And no taxes. The people they hit are always very rich couples, and the wives usually have a pound of diamonds stuck in a bedroom safe,” Rocha said.
“And Beauchamps is involved in all of them?”
“Yes, we think so. We think he’s the leader. One victim had a solid gold paperweight commissioned by his wife. It was a lump of gold the size of my fist, made by melting down a pile of pure gold coins and having an artist sculpt it to look like the victim’s wife’s breasts. The raw gold was worth something like forty thousand dollars. Anyway, we put out a bulletin, and the Vegas cops happened to raid a fence a couple weeks after the home invasion and found the gold tits before the fence could melt them. One of the cops remembered our bulletin and called. The fence identified Keller—Beauchamps—from his mug shots.”
“Okay. He’s around.”
“Yeah. We’ve got one other suspect—and when I say ‘suspect,’ I mean ‘for sure’—named Jayden Nast. He’s a very large, violent black guy. He goes straight for the wives, tells them what he’ll do to them if they don’t pop that safe, how he’s going to pop her balloon knot. These are well-tended women who can’t deal with, uh, you know, the situation, the threats. It’s all very calculated: he’s a frightener and knows how to do it.”
“I don’t know... What’s a ‘balloon knot’?”
“You know, you look inside a balloon knot, it sort of looks like a sphincter muscle,” Rocha said. “Like an anus.”
“Got it,” Lucas said. “How’d you ID him?”
“One of the women gave him some lip and he smacked her in the face, broke her nose, knocked her down, and she grabbed hisankle and scratched him. He pulled her back up—by the hair—and she gave up the combination to the safe, but she kept her hand curled up and got us some solid DNA. He went in the database in 2011 on a felony assault charge, pled down, got out, but stayed in the base. So we’re sure.”
“Then we’re looking for Beauchamps or this Jayden Nast, who could take us to Beauchamps, who then could take us to Deese.”
“If you get even a whiff of Beauchamps or Nast, I want to hear about it,” Rocha said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a dozen billionaires on your back, and on the chief’s back, and on the mayor’s back, some of them major political donors, all of them demanding that the guy get caught and hanged?”
“You think that’s worse than chasing a cannibal?”
After a few seconds, Rocha said, “I gotta hand it to you, a cannibal serial killer would be right up there. But he’s not my cannibal, he’s yours. You coming out here?”
“Very soon,” Lucas said.
“Call me. Pay attention when I say that Nast is violent. We’ve backtracked him all the way to his gangbanger days down in South-Central. This is a guy who likes to hurt people. He supposedly once worked over an ex-girlfriend with brass knuckles, ruined her face. Everybody says one other thing: he hates cops. There are rumors that he’s killed cops. We don’t know if that’s true or where it might have happened. Probably not here, but the rumors are persistent. Pay attention, okay? A guy, with guns, who hates cops.”
“Gotcha.”
—
LUCAS HAD HADthe phone on speaker, and when he hung up Bob asked, “We going?”
“We’re going.”
“Hot dog. We going,” Bob said to Rae.
Rae said, “Be still my beating heart.”
