The Watchman by Robert Crais Page B

matter.”
    Bud finally looked at him. His eyes were hard stones hidden by flesh weakened with age.
    “Joe. What are you doing?”
    “I’m looking for Meesh.”
    “You aren’t just looking. I don’t want to be involved with anything like this. You want my help, but I don’t even want to know.”
    “I only have two leads back to Meesh—the men in the morgue and the Kings. If the Kings were in business with him, then they probably knew where he was staying and how to reach him. Maybe I can find him through them.”
    “They’re still missing.”
    “The feds must have something. Can you help with that?”
    “Pitman has their home and office under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He has their phones tapped. He even has someone watching their yacht. If those people fart, the feds will be on them. If you try to get close to anything they own, the feds will be on you, too.”
    “Then the men I killed are my last door back to him. What do you know?”
    Bud darkened, but glanced at the girl and wet his lips.
    “I gotta get my keys. Inside in the entry. That okay?”
    Pike nodded.
    Bud stepped into his house, but only long enough to fish his keys from a blue bowl inside the door. Pike followed him out to his car. Bud opened the Explorer and Pike saw the same cordovan briefcase he had seen in the desert. Bud took out three pictures. They were the security stills taken when the Barkleys’ home was invaded. Pike had seen them up in the desert, too.
    Bud handed them to Pike, and tapped the top picture.
    “This man was one of the original home invaders. You shot him in Malibu. He’s the only one of the five you shot who was also one of the home invaders.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “I don’t know. But this man—”
    Bud shuffled the pictures to point out a man with prominent cheekbones and a scarred lip.
    “—he’s the freak who beat the housekeeper. You recognize either of these other guys from Malibu or Eagle Rock?”
    “Who are they?”
    “Don’t know. We haven’t been able to identify any of the five people you put in the morgue. The Live Scan kicked back zero. No IDs were found on the bodies, and they weren’t in the system. You can keep these pictures, you want.”
    Pike stared at the pictures, thinking it didn’t make sense that none of the five had been identified. The type of man you could hire to do murder almost always had a criminal record. The Live Scan system digitized fingerprints, then instantly compared them with computerized records stored by the California Department of Justice and the NCIC files, and those files were exhaustive. If a person had ever been arrested anywhere in the country or served in the military, their fingerprints were in the file.
    Pike said, “That doesn’t sound right.”
    “No, it does not, but all five of these guys were clean.”
    “No IDs or wallets?”
    “Not one damn thing of a personal nature. You arrested a lot of people, Joe. You remember many shitbirds smart enough to clean up before they did crime?”
    Pike shook his head.
    “Me neither. So here we are.”
    Bud slammed his trunk, then stared at the girl.
    “I guess I should apologize, getting you involved in this mess, but I won’t. You could just give her back to Pitman. It’s your choice, playing it this way.”
    Bud studied Larkin for a moment longer, and Pike wondered what he was thinking. Then Bud turned, and with the new angle of light, Pike thought he looked as hard as ever.
    Bud said, “I’m trusting you won’t let this little girl down.”
    Pike watched Bud walk away, then returned to the Lexus and immediately drove away.
    Larkin said, “He seems like a nice man.”
    “He was a good officer.”
    “That’s what he told my dad about you, that you were a good policeman. What he said was, you were the best young officer he ever worked with.”
    Pike didn’t answer. He was thinking about the five nameless killers, cleaned up for crime with no criminal records. Pike thought he might still