“They couldn’t deal with a full-out raid with cops coming from both front and back, though, so they shot it out. We don’t know for sure when Beauchamps left the front house, but probably the night before. He could have actually snuck back, between the two hedges, while the fight was going on, right past the SWAT guys, but there was a bed in the second house that was apparently his and it had been slept in.”
“Then why did they all park at the target?” Lucas asked.
“We’re not sure, but I think I can guess,” Bob said. “The garage at the target house looked like a two-car, but it had been remodeled years ago to take four. We’d already seen that, which made us think that all four guys were there. We’d seen four coming and going in three different cars. The house in back had only a two-car garage. We think Beauchamps and Cole lived there and Nast and Vincent lived at the front house. Then Deese showed up. We have his prints, Deese was definitely there at some point. I think he moved into the back house with his pickup and Cole started parking that BMW at the target house.”
“We took seven hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash and gold out of the BMW, by the way,” Rae said. “Almost another half million out of the two houses, put together.”
“The other thing was, the whole place was alarmed,” Bob said. “They had yard alarms, both front and back. The guys coming in from the back woke them up. By the time the guys from the front went in with the flashbangs, they were already up and armed.”
“Would have taken a lot of research to see the alarms,” Lucas said.
“Even with lots of research, we might not have seen them,” Rae said. “The things were the size of your finger, attached to trees, hooked up wirelessly. We might not have seen that hedge, either. I mean, you really can’t see it, even in the daylight, from the next yard. It looks like one thick hedge. You can’t see that it’s two, with a path between.”
There had been hundreds of shots fired during the fight: three empty thirty-round magazines had been found scattered around the windows from where Nast had been firing the full auto, and another magazine in the gun itself, which was mostly empty when he went down. Vincent had gone through one seventeen-round magazine and had been working through another when killed.
Lucas never found out how many rounds the cops had fired, but it was probably several times the number fired by Nast and Vincent.
Deese, Beauchamps, and Cole had driven away during the fight, and they weren’t alone. Several neighbors on both streets had also fled, and a man across the street had seen the occupants of the back house driving away in a SUV and a white pickup. They’d never been seen again. One of the neighbors thought there was a woman with them, a blonde. The LA cops had found a fourth set of prints in the back house, small, like a woman’s, but they’d gotten no hits from the feds.
* * *
—
“THERE WERE SWAT guys who were supposed to stay up on the street, by that back house, in case there were runners, but when the shooting started and people started screaming about cops going down they ran around the house and left nobody back in the street,” Rae said. “There was nobody in the street for twenty minutes. We think Beauchamps and the others just got in their vehicles and drove away. The garage door was open, but the overhead door lights had been broken out.”
“Seems like bad discipline by the SWATs,” Bob said. “But when you got cops down, everything tends to go up in smoke. I don’t blame those guys for leaving the street. They were risking their necks trying to help.”
* * *
—
ONLY ONE SWAT team member had been injured, which was nothing short of a miracle given all the gunfire. He’d taken a single round in what the press releases called his hip, but Rae said was his butt. “I’m not saying he’s a half-assed cop, but he’s a half-assed cop.”
The wound was actually more serious than Lucas’s. The cop was hospitalized for almost six weeks, and he still hadn’t returned to duty in August.
The LA cops and the LA County Sheriff’s Department had launched an all-out search for Beauchamps, Cole, and Deese and had found exactly