God, I hate that. He’s been with us for, what, eight years?”
Lucas: “Oliver?”
Saito sighed. “Oliver Haar. He’s this English guy that works the door at night. Got a hard nose, when he needs it, keeps the peace when required. The phone’s right down the hall from his spot at the door. He come on at six, works until we throw everybody out at two.”
Bob: “Has he had any trouble with the law?”
Heather: “There was a rumor—”
Saito: “Just a rumor.”
Heather: “That he needed to make himself scarce in London and wound up here. He’s at the door, the women like him—the accent, and all that.”
Saito: “And he looks good.”
“All right,” Lucas said. “We may want to talk to him later. Don’t say a word to him about this. And don’t give him a hard time, no hints there might be a problem. Just let him work. Okay?”
“Are you going to watch him?” Saito asked.
Lucas shook his head. “No. If Oliver is only passing messages, he might not have any idea of who he’s talking to—or even that he’s talking to bad guys. It could be he’s calling burner phones, which wouldn’t get us anywhere.”
“I gotta say, I’d hate to lose him,” Saito said.
“I wouldn’t,” Heather said. “He’s a jerk.”
“You need a jerk on the door,” Saito said. “Especially one with refined British manners.”
“I’ll give you that,” Heather said, grudgingly.
“I leave all that up to you,” Lucas said. “Again, don’t tip him off. This is a serious matter and you don’t want to be touched by it. But it’s also possible Oliver’s completely innocent.”
Heather shook her head, not buying it.
* * *
—
RAE CALLED TREMANTY, who opened by telling her they’d found a seventh grave and were pretty sure they had eight. “The pressure is building.”
“We’re working,” Rae said. “We need to find a woman named Barbara Jackman who lives in Marina del Rey. Could you have somebody look?”
“You got an actual lead?”
“Maybe.”
“Call you back soon as I can,” Tremanty said.
Lucas, Bob, and Rae went back to the Marriott. Tremanty called as they were walking in the door. “I’ve got an address and some details. She’s had three traffic tickets over the past five years—speeding—and a small amount of marijuana picked up on one of them, before it was legal out there. She had the baggie sitting on the passenger seat. She got a fine, nothing else. Her driver’s license has a current photo. She works part-time as a real estate agent. There’s a better photo on her website, but she looks a lot younger than her license, so it may not be up-to-date. I asked for a credit report. It’ll all be in the email.”
In Lucas’s room, they pulled up the email from Tremanty. Jackman’s driver’s license had a Marina del Rey address, a condo on Marina City Drive. They spotted it on Google Maps, a half mile away, and decided to drive over.
“I’m feeling too lucky,” Bob said. “It’s making me nervous. We’re not working hard enough for this.”
* * *
—
JACKMAN’S CONDO, a tall, circular, cake-shaped building, had a gatehouse with nobody in it. They parked in a “No Parking” area, along a curb, Rae unrolling a “Marshal’s Service” dashboard sign, but then an employee of the condominium jogged over to run them off and wound up guiding them into a legitimate spot and showing them to the elevators.
“Five dollars says she isn’t home,” Bob said, as they went up. “It’s too easy, I’m telling you.”
They found her door, knocked, and ten seconds later Jackman cracked the door, peered over the chain, and asked, “Yes?”
* * *
—
“I WANT TO KNOW who told you I went home with him,” Jackman said, when Lucas asked. They were inside her apartment, looking over the marina and out toward the ocean. She was angry. “It’s Oliver, isn’t it?”
Jackman was a tall, attractive forty-three-year-old—they got her age from her license—with bouncy honey-blond hair and darker eyebrows and real two-carat diamonds in her ears. If she worked only part-time at the real estate office, she had money of her own, Lucas thought.
“We haven’t met an Oliver,” Lucas said. “Even if we had, we couldn’t tell you who our source was. Listen. We don’t think you did anything wrong. Your social life is your social life and we’re not interested. We want to know where you went, that’s all.”
“I don’t know where, exactly,” Jackman said. “It’s over by Pasadena, north of the 210. It was a half hour from here, at eleven o’clock at night, in a Cadillac,