Read Online The Last Detective by Robert Crais - Free Book Online

man would not have been able to see him through the thick brush, which meant that he had located Ben by the sound of the Game Freak. Then, when he found him, he took a healthy ten-year-old boy so quickly that Ben had no chance to call out.
    I said, “Starkey.”
    “There's bugs down here, Cole. I fuckin' hate bugs.”
    She was examining the ground a few feet away.
    “Starkey, forget the names I gave you from my old cases. None of those people are good enough to do this.”
    She misunderstood.
    “Don't worry about it, Cole. I'll have SID come out. They'll be able to tell what happened.”
    “I already know what happened. Forget the names from my case files. Just run the people who served with me, and forget everything else.”
    “I thought you said none of those guys would do it.”
    I stared at the ground, then at the thick brush and broken land, thinking hard about the people I had known and what the best of them could do. The skin on my back prickled. The leaves and branches that surrounded us became the broken pieces of an indistinct puzzle. A man with the right skills could be ten feet away. He could hide within the puzzle and watch us between the pieces and we would never see him even as his finger tightened over a trigger. I lowered my voice without realizing it.
    “The man who did this has combat experience, Starkey. You're not seeing it, but I can see it. He's done this before. He was trained to hunt humans and he's good at it.”
    “You're creeping me out. Take a breath with that, okay? I'll have SID come out.”
    I glanced at my watch. Ben had been missing for sixteen hours and twelve minutes.
    “Is Gittamon with Lucy?”
    “Yeah, he's searching Ben's room.”
    “I'm going to see them. I want to tell them what we're dealing with.”
    “Look, Cole, don't get spooky with all this. We don't know what we're dealing with, so why don't you wait until SID gets here?”
    “Can you find your way back?”
    “If you wait two minutes I'll go with you.”
    I walked back up the hill without waiting. Starkey trailed after me, and called out from time to time for me to slow down, but I never slowed enough for her to catch up. Shadows from a past that should have been buried lined the path back up to my house. The shadows outnumbered me, and I knew I would need help with them. When I reached my house, I went into the kitchen and phoned a gun shop I know in Culver City.
    “Let me have Joe.”
    “He isn't here.”
    “It's important you find him. Tell him to meet me at Lucy's right away. Tell him that Ben Chenier is missing.”
    “Okay. Anything else?”
    “Tell him I'm scared.”
    I hung up and went out to my car. I started the engine, but sat with my hands on the steering wheel, trying to stop their shaking.
    The man who took Ben had moved well and with silence. He had studied when we came and when we left. He knew my home and canyon, and how Ben went down the slope to play, and he had done it all so well that I did not notice. He had probably stalked us for days. It took special training and skills to hunt humans. I had known men with those skills, and they scared me. I had been one of them.

6
            
    time missing: 17 hours, 41 minutes
    B everly Hills makes people think of mansions and hillbillies, but the flats south of Wilshire are lined with modest stucco homes and sturdy bungalow apartments that would go unnoticed in any American town. Lucy and Ben shared an apartment in a two-story building shaped like a U, with the mouth facing the street and the arms embracing a stairway courtyard filled with birds-of-paradise and two towering palms. It was not a limousine street, but a black Presidential stretch was waiting by the fire hydrant outside her building.
    I wedged my car into a parking spot half a block down and walked up the sidewalk. The limo driver was reading a magazine behind the wheel with the windows raised and the engine running. Two men were smoking in a Mercury Marquis parked across