driver’s side of the Cadillac, got in, and backed into the street, taking a second to drop the garage door again to give it back the simple anonymity of the rest of the street. A man was turning the corner, on foot, shaded by a red umbrella, walking an overheated, panting black-and-white dog. She twiddled her fingers at him and he waved back. And she was outta there.
* * *
—
DEESE WAS on his way back to the house when Cox called on the burner and he asked, “Now what?”
She screamed, “He killed Marion! He shot Marion! Marion’s dead! Marion’s dead!”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Lucas, Bob, and Rae spent a couple hours chilling out at the hotel. They took restless twenty-minute naps, gathered again and spent an hour making calls to home rental and real estate agents, with no luck. Late in the afternoon, with Lucas in the Volvo and Bob and Rae in the Tahoe, they headed south to the neighborhoods that were beneath the airport flight path. The heat was still ferocious, at 103 degrees, the sun like a molten glass marble.
They were making the turn off Las Vegas Boulevard onto Warm Springs Road when a cop car, lights and siren, blew by, and then another, and Lucas called Rae and said, “Maybe it’s nothing.”
Another cop was coming up behind, not running quite as fast, no lights or siren, and Rae said, “Looks like a big-time nothing.”
“Let’s tag along and see where they go . . . Maybe this is a high-crime neighborhood,” Lucas said. But it didn’t look high-crime. It looked empty, with hot stretches of tan stucco houses with tile roofs, separated by steaming blacktop, nobody on the street.
The cop who’d been behind them went by, while the cop ahead of them turned a corner. From that corner, they spotted a jam of cop cars outside a single-story house with an open garage door, cops going in and out. Another cop waved them off the turn down to the house. Lucas dropped his window and held his badge out. The cop came over, and Lucas said, “We’re U.S. Marshals tracking fugitives. We think they live around here. We need to take a look in case you guys found them.”
The cop looked at the badge, then turned and pointed down the street and said, “You see that green car down there?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s Lieutenant Harvey. He’s running the scene. Park there and check in with him.”
“How many dead?” Rae called from the Tahoe.
“One, is what I’ve heard,” the cop said. “I haven’t been down there myself.”
* * *
—
THEY DROVE a block down to the scene, to the green car, and parked. On the street, they looked through the driver’s-side window of the green car. The window dropped two inches, and a plainclothes guy in the driver’s seat put a sandwich aside and asked, “Yeah?” chicken salad on his breath.
Lucas showed him his badge and repeated what he’d told the cop at the corner. The guy said, “Tom’s inside. Lieutenant Harvey. Don’t step on anything.”
Lucas nodded, and as he started away, the guy said through the crack in the window, “Nice shorts, Marshal,” and the window went back up. Rae stuck her knuckles in her mouth to keep from laughing, and Lucas looked down at his knees and said, “Best legs in Vegas, outside a gentleman’s club. So fuck him. And all his relatives.”
Another cop stood inside the door, in the shade, and when Lucas badged him he held up a finger and called, “Lieutenant. The feds are here.”
Harvey, a short, fat man with a drinker’s red nose and ratty white hair, walked over a minute later, frowned at Lucas, and asked, “Why are the feds here? Who are you?”
Lucas explained a third time, and Harvey stepped back and crooked a finger. Lucas, Bob, and Rae followed him through the door to where Beauchamps lay faceup on the kitchen floor, his chest dimpled with bullet holes in the middle of a blood-soaked shirt.
“Goddamnit,” Lucas said.
“You know him?” Harvey asked. “Who is he?”
“Marion Beauchamps. He’s got a couple other aliases. He used to run a home invasion gang down in LA. He’s the brother of the Louisiana cannibal, and we think the cannibal—Clayton Deese—was with him,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy who arrived in town a a couple of hours ago, from New Orleans, named Richard, or Ricardo, Santos. You really want to talk to him: this is probably his work. He’s got a car we don’t know about. He could be checked into Caesars. You