The Last Good Guy Page 4

  I looked down the list of categories left blank, pleased that not every bit and byte of information about young Daley Rideout was available to anyone willing to pay for it.

  Oddly enough—very oddly—the same was true of Penelope: Her IvarDuggans biography was spotty.

  Born October 14, 1990, in Mobile, Alabama, to Carl and June. Fourteen years later, the Rideouts moved to Denver, where the three Rideouts became four. After that, Penelope and her family lived in the aforementioned succession of homes—Denver through Eugene, four moves in four years—until the deaths of the mother and father. Annoyingly, IvarDuggans.com had the same long blanks for Penelope between Eugene, Prescott, Phoenix, and Oceanside—three moves in five years.

  Penelope Rideout’s education and employment histories closely paralleled her moves—and lack of them—around the country.

  Elementary and two years of junior high school in her native Mobile. Mentions in both The Mobile Daily and The Alabaman of young Penelope’s success at hunter-jumper youth competitions.

  Then the southern girl skipped eighth grade and went west to Denver for her first year of high school. IvarDuggans provided no extracurricular news for that year.

  She did her second year of high school in Salt Lake, her third year in Boise, one semester of her senior year in Reno, and her final semester in Eugene. Her graduation picture from Eugene High School showed a contained and pretty girl, with the same calm, adjudicating eyes that I had seen for the first time less than twelve hours ago in my Fallbrook office.

  Penelope had graduated from the University of Oregon with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. In her graduation photo she looked composed.

  Then part-time employment as a technical researcher/writer in Eugene, through 2011.

  The year she married Richard Hauser.

  Although IvarDuggans.com had no record of that union. Neither did TLO or Tracers Info. Very unusual. Information peddlers as sophisticated as these don’t often miss things the size of marriages.

  So I called him, Hauser, at the number that Mrs. Rideout had given me. Got one Suzanne Delgado, who had never heard of Richard Hauser and hung up. Checked Facebook and got eleven men with the same name, two of them approximately the right age but neither even slightly resembling the Marine colonel in the picture.

  Went to the bar for another iced coffee. The band was doing a sound check. Nice and loud. I asked the boy-faced, dreadlocked barista about them and he told me they were a San Diego–based psychedelic garage band called Tin Lenses. I asked him if SNR was still in charge of security here, and he said yes, they stopped in every night.

  Back at my stool, I tried to dig up the strangely overlooked Richard Hauser and found two such men who had been U.S. Marines in the last four decades, but neither was still active. Not colonels, not pilots.

  I called an old Marine friend now stationed at Miramar, Master Sergeant Tyson Songrath. We spent a few minutes catching up, and when I asked about Richard Hauser, Ty had never heard of him. He certainly would have, if Hauser was actual: Songrath worked in aircraft maintenance and knew every pilot who’d come through Miramar in the last five years.

  As soon as I hung up, the band kicked into its first song. Good timing. Fast chords crashed through the room. The singer’s voice cut through them, high and clear.

  Still online with my shameless snooping confederates, I quickly tracked down the basics on Carl and June Rideout (née Donegan). Carl had been a pleasant-faced, bespectacled man, an aerospace publications director, and she was a nurse, who looked very much like her daughters. He was a Mobile native, while June hailed from the Alabama hill country. Both from big families. He was a deacon in a non-denominational church; June taught Sunday school there. Carl had been ten years older than June, who had had their first child when she was twenty-one and their second at thirty-five. I wondered why they’d waited so long between children. Trouble conceiving? Trouble taking to term? A purposeful pause? They were middle-class people, old-school southern Democrats with a hint of prosperity via the Mobile Oaks Country Club.

  A collision reconstruction report completed in March 2009 concluded that the single-car crash had happened on a stormy night, on northbound I-5, heading into Eugene. Carl had lost control of the minivan, crashed through a guardrail, and rolled the vehicle down a slope and into a creek running high with rainwater. No excessive speed. No alcohol or drugs involved. However, the right front tire of the van had blown out, and in all likelihood, the front-wheel drive, high winds, and rain-drenched highway had conspired to hydroplane the slightly top-heavy vehicle off the road and down the embankment. Carl was dead when the Oregon State Police arrived; June died that night in a hospital.

  A family portrait taken just months before their deaths showed two wholesome, still-young parents and their two daughters, a teenager and a four-year old. They all looked loved. Mom and girls were conspicuously radiant.

  However, I did have some questions for my employer—older sister Penelope—who was claiming to have married a man who didn’t seem to have a history. None at all. And I had other questions for her little sister, Daley, who had just yesterday been seen willingly getting into a car with probable murderers and had not been home since. I looked at that family portrait again. A tingle came from the scar on my forehead—an old boxing injury that acts up from time to time. Sometimes a tingle, sometimes a chill, sometimes an itch or a burn. An expressive scar with a mind of its own. Always trying to tell me something. I wondered what.

  An Internet search told me that SNR Security was a privately held, San Diego–based company now two years old, specializing in “Armed and Unarmed Personal, Workplace, and Job Site Protection.” SNR Security was a member of the Better Business Bureau and the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and endorsed by the Southern California Christian Business Association. I found two workplace racial discrimination suits, both dropped. No other complaints, controversies, or litigations involving the company.

  I watched the young dancers, enjoyed the music. I might have been in a place like this twenty-something years ago. Partying like it was 1999. Even back then I liked to dance. A large but not completely graceless young man. I was twenty years old that year. Two years through a San Diego State University degree in history. I surfed and fished and had a steady girlfriend. Why history? Because when I read the papers and watched the news I couldn’t make any sense of the world at all. Figured I needed some background. Soon as I had gotten a little, I joined the Marines and stepped from the pages of history into history itself. Fallujah. Where so much went wrong.

  Alone there in Alchemy 101, I let the hours set their own pace. We widowers learn to do that. I scanned the newspaper on my smartphone. Nations rising and nations falling. Find the nuke. Our great American divide. The scandal du jour. All the heat and so little light.

  Dinner was good, soup and a sandwich. I watched the customers on their way into the club. At 9:04 p.m. a silver Expedition SUV pulled into the handicap-only space out front, not ten feet from where I sat. The emblem on the door said SNR Security, and showed an eagle holding two lightning bolts. The driver got out, locked up, and knocked on the glass of the ticket-seller’s booth, smiling at her on his way past. When he came inside I saw a sturdy guy, thirty or so, dressed in slacks and duty boots and a dark blue uniform blouse with a badge on it. A Sam Browne belt with Mace and a flashlight attached, no sidearm. He moved through the crowd to the coffee bar and started talking to the barista.

  He accepted his drink in a to-go cup but didn’t pay for it. He sipped it and slowly worked his way between the dancers and the standing audience, all the way along the full-wall video screen, which was now showing a hugely magnified, real-time Tin Lenses. The guard slipped backstage through a black curtain.

  The orange-haloed girl in the singlet and shorts was giving the song her all. Boots planted, arms out, swaying in rhythm. The bass player watched her closely, his fingers tied to
her movements as firmly as a puppeteers’. Through the amplified music, her voice rang clear and true.

  Come on, shoot us a star

  Play some electric guitar

  So we can find where you are

  In the Blue Rodeo

  Ten minutes later, the security man came back through the black curtain, sipping his coffee, making his way toward the exit. I bellied up to the bar and bought a double espresso in a to-go cup, timing my return trip for a brush with the guard. He bumped past me, raising his cup to Dreadlocks as his badge glimmered in the brightly flashing strobe lights: Adam Revell.

  I spotted him a few steps, then hooked around and followed him out. Gave him my back as I walked to my truck, digging the fob out of my pocket. Casual PI Ford, in no hurry and happily careless in the world. I saw Adam Revell behind me, reflected in my window, standing on the running board of the Expedition and waving goodbye to the ticket-seller in the glass booth.

  6

  ////////////////////////

  I STAYED two cars behind, padding my cover with the beach town traffic. Took Interstate 5 through Carlsbad and Leucadia into Encinitas, then Encinitas Boulevard toward Rancho Santa Fe. Hills and open land. I’d done work here in this prosperous corner of San Diego’s North County, multimillion-dollar estates with acreage, privacy, and plenty of room for horses and helipads.

  Revell turned up Via Encanto, lightly traveled at this hour and leaving me exposed. I followed and fell back as he turned onto Matilija. Drove past it and U-turned, taking my time. Gave Revell his space.

  Which gave R. Ford a chance to study the “Cathedral by the Sea” sign on the corner:

  Home of the Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry

  Where Christ Is King

  When the SUV’s taillights had vanished around a bend I started up the hill. Steep and wide. Up ahead I saw Revell sweep right, no signal, Matilija deserted. Again I loitered at the stop sign. Gave my mark some distance. Slowly followed him onto King’s Road.

  It was a private road, with thick new asphalt that randomly glittered in my headlights. From a steep, slow curve I saw the Pacific a few miles to my left, glittering much as the asphalt was, and the lights of the San Diego coast. I poked along, enjoying the view.

  Rounding the next curve, I saw the Cathedral by the Sea, rising from a hilltop and bathed in light. It was modest in size, an asymmetrical construct of white marble and wooden beams bound together by stainless-steel cable. A copper roof flowed down nearly to the ground at one end, yet formed an upswept wave rising into the sky at the other. I wondered if the architect was now institutionalized. Concrete stairs and ramps led up to a tall, arched doorway. Inset windows of stained glass flickered with color. Above it all towered a large stainless-steel cross, lit by hidden floodlights to give it a supposed glow of its own. The Cathedral by the Sea was bold and somehow forbidding. I wasn’t sure if it was expecting a worshiper or an invader.

  The SUV rolled across a big parking lot, which was empty but well lit. I saw what might be an administration building, and a campus built around a stand of big Canary Island date palms, and a meandering grassy mall with fountains at each end, both still illuminated and tossing water in the night. Revell steered around the outbuildings and disappeared behind the cathedral.

  I retreated to Via Encanto, backed my truck into a break in the thick chaparral, rolled the windows half down, and shut off the engine. I wondered how long it would take Revell to make his appointed rounds. Would he walk the grounds or just reconnoiter by SUV? It was hard to picture much trouble up on this swank but secluded hilltop church at ten o’clock on a warm Southern California night.

  I found the Cathedral by the Sea website. Glancing from the phone to the road and back, I read:

  Dear Faithful,

  Please join us in worship of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and in praise and thanks to Him for the forgiveness of our many sins. Our mission is to bring you to Our Lord. Come to experience fellowship in Him! Bring your children to our Sunday school, and encourage your teens to participate in our many activities. Next Sunday is surfing at Swami’s—following our ten o’clock service, of course. Bring sunscreen, boards and joyful hearts! Sign up in the office, Moms and Dads welcome!

  Pastor Reggie Atlas

  Atlas’s picture showed an earnest-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, with soulful eyes, shaggy blond hair, and a big, welcoming smile.

  I did a Google search and scanned through the articles, blogs, and posts. The Cathedral by the Sea was just over a year old. Nice reviews from scores of North San Diego visitors when it opened early last summer. Hearty best wishes from the cities of Encinitas, Solana Beach, Del Mar, Vista, Rancho Santa Fe, and Oceanside. Optimistic notices on the religion pages of the local papers, and a good-sized piece in the Union-Tribune, written by a reporter I had once helped on a touchy story. Pictures of the pastor at home with his wife and children. Reggie Atlas had an easy smile and cheerful eyes and obviously liked cameras. He was forty-eight years old at the time of the story, a Georgia-born evangelist who had started small and ministered throughout the South by vehicle for ten years before establishing his first church. It went from modest to successful to very successful. Then the Lord had called him west.

  I half read and half watched. Saw headlights on the cathedral parking lot asphalt, then the silver SNR Security vehicle, with Adam Revell barely visible behind the heavily smoked window.

  I was surprised when he didn’t backtrack down to the coast but headed east on Del Dios and onto I-15.

  South to Santee, where he stopped for gas. I adjusted to the idea of a long night. I watched him from a competing station across the intersection, topping off my own main tank, an oversized thirty gallon. While the pump pumped, I got into the big toolbox bolted to the bed of my truck and claimed my night-vision binoculars, my holstered .45, and a small cooler stocked with jerky, candy, and drinks. Kept an eye on Revell. Set my provisions on the passenger seat.

  Then off to I-8 East, which winds through the rough mountains and scorching desert and Imperial County farmland, tight to the Mexican border, then up almost to Tucson, where it joins I-10 for its long run to the Atlantic.

  I varied my lanes and distance from the SUV, used the I-8 traffic for cover. Plenty of cars and tractor-trailers for that, even as we dropped down from the cool of the mountains to the September heat of the Imperial Valley and the dashboard clock hit midnight. Eighty-one in Ocotillo.

  Onward to Coyote Wells, Plaster City, and Dixieland. Seeley and El Centro. Just past Buena Vista, the SUV got off at Rattlesnake Road and I had to slow way down as I came to the ramp and followed him off. He California-stopped at Rattlesnake, swinging left, which would take him through Buena Vista. I went right and continued on, his dust rising in my mirrors. I saw him make a right onto what looked like a dirt road, unlit, then disappear.

  I made a slow U-turn and crept back along Rattlesnake, through tiny sleepy Buena Vista—part of it in California and the other part in Mexico, with a twenty-foot-high steel wall to prove it. The gas station was closed. The convenience store open. A restaurant and a bar and signs for the post office and library. Houses scattered back in the dark, low hills.

  The dirt road was wide and well graded. I cut my lights and used the nearly full moon, clear as a bulb in the north. Revell’s dusty taillights shimmered far ahead. Headlights sprayed left and right in his turns. The shadows of creosote and ocotillo, leaning away from the moonbeams. Narrow dirt roads, one marked by a pile of rocks and another by a tire half buried in the sand. No signs, no mailboxes.

  A trickle of nerves. Because there is no backup for PIs. No one to help you but you. No partners or departments, no cavalry to bugle in. You have your wit and skills, a phone that may or may not be in range, binoculars, a gun if you’re licensed to carry one. Maybe a little cooler of food and drinks for those long hours on watch. Maybe even some luck. I believe in luck
.

  The road narrowed and got rougher. From the top of a slight rise I could see that the SUV had stopped, and the driver’s door stood open. I glassed the low-beamed silhouette of a man dragging open a rickety barbed-wire-and-scrap-wood gate. A moment later he drove past it, then came back and escorted the wobbly gate back to its rustic post. Dropped a loop of chain over it. A breeze swirled around the SUV and it was gone.

  The next gate was nothing like the first. Far ahead, bathed in the floods from a tall metal stanchion, the gliding wall of steel poles looked ten feet high. When it closed I saw the security guard accelerating away. And the metallic glimmer of two chain-link fences running in opposite directions as far as my night-vision glasses could follow.

  The sign on the gate showed a fruit-heavy palm tree against a pale background. Beneath the fronds, heavy dark letters declared:

  PARADISE DATE FARM

  NO TRESPASSING

  I sat tight. Watched the taillights rise and fall and grow smaller. It was twelve fifty-five. One minute later the gate lights went off. I gave the scene another good long look with my night glasses, saw no way in except through the gate, which I doubted would open to welcome the curious PI Ford.

  Which meant you jumped the fence. I glassed it with an eye for electrical or razor wire. No and no. Ten feet was ten feet, but I could do it. There was a chance of my truck getting broken into by the time I got back. More practically, I tried to guess how far I would have to walk. All I had to go on was a low ridgeline that looked to be less than half a mile away. Over which the SUV had passed less than a minute ago. And from behind which shone soft light.