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

the street in front of Gittamon's car. They were thick men in their late forties with ruddy faces, short hair, and the flat expressions of men who were used to being in the wrong place at the wrong time and weren't much bothered by it. They watched me like cops.
    I went up the stairs and rang her bell. A man I had never met before answered the door.
    “May I help you?”
    It was Richard. I put out my hand.
    “Elvis Cole. I wish we weren't meeting like this.”
    Richard's face darkened. He ignored my hand.
    “I wish we weren't meeting at all.”
    Lucy stepped in front of him, looking uncomfortable and irritated. Richard was good at making her angry.
    She said, “Don't start.”
    “I told you this would happen, didn't I? How many times did I tell you, but you wouldn't listen?”
    “Richard, just stop, please.”
    I said, “Yes, now would be the time to stop.”
    Something sour flickered in Richard's eyes, but then he turned back into her apartment. Richard was Lucy's age, but his hair was silver on the sides and thinning badly. He wore a black knit shirt, khaki slacks that were wrinkled from the plane, and Bruno Magli mocs that cost more than I made in a week. Even wrinkled and sleepless, Richard looked rich. He owned a natural gas company with international holdings.
    Lucy lowered her voice as I followed her inside.
    “They just got here. I called to tell you that he landed, but I guess you were on your way over.”
    Richard had joined a solidly built man in a dark business suit in Lucy's living room. The man had steel-gray hair so short that he was nearly bald, and eyes that looked like the wrong end of gun sights. He put out his hand.
    “Leland Myers. I run security for Richard's company.”
    Richard said, “I brought Lee to help find Ben since you people managed to lose him.”
    As Myers and I shook, Gittamon came out of the hall with Ben's orange iMac. He huffed with the weight as he put it on a little table by her door.
    “We'll have his E-mail by the end of the day. You'd be surprised what children tell their friends.”
    I was annoyed that Gittamon was still chasing the staged abduction theory, but I wanted to be careful with how I described what we found on the slope to Lucy.
    “You're not going to find anything in his E-mail, Sergeant. Starkey and I searched the slope this morning. We found a shoe print where Ben dropped his Game Freak. It was probably left by the man who took Ben, and he was likely someone who served with me in Vietnam.”
    Lucy shook her head.
    “I thought the others were dead.”
    “They are, but now I think that the person who did this has a certain type of combat experience. I gave Starkey a list of names, and I'll try to remember more. She called SID to try for a cast of the print. Any luck, and we might get a pretty good guess of his height and weight.”
    Richard and Myers glanced at each other, then Richard crossed his arms, frowning.
    Richard said, “Lucy told me the man mentioned Vietnam last night, and that all of this had something to do with you. Were we doubting this before now?”
    “People can say anything, Richard. Now I know he's for real.”
    Myers said, “What do you mean, a certain type of combat experience?”
    “You don't learn how to move the way this man moved by hunting deer on the weekends or going through ROTC. This guy spent time in places where he was surrounded by people who would kill him if they found him, so he knows how to move without leaving a trail. Also, we didn't find signs of a struggle, which means Ben never saw him coming.”
    I told them how Ben's footprints ended abruptly and that we had found only the one other print. Myers took notes while I described the scene, with Richard crossing and recrossing his arms with increasing agitation. By the time I finished he was pacing Lucy's small living room in tight circles.
    “This is fucking great, Cole. You're saying some kind of murdering Green Beret commando like Rambo took my son?”
    Gittamon