Forty Thieves (36 page)

Nicole and Ed went upstairs. There were no signs that anyone had been here. When Nicole looked up the hallway through the night scope, she saw the floor was still marked with tape, and that the blood from Boylan’s wife had not been cleaned up. It was still visible as a dark blotch on the wall-to-wall carpet.

She spoke in a normal voice. “Nobody has been here since the cops left. Let’s go.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Ed lowered his MP5 rifle and covered it with his jacket again. “Maybe I overestimated those
people. This would have been a great place to hide while they cooled down and everybody convinced themselves that they were already back in some crummy country.”

Ed pretended to look around. “I’ll bet this place will sell cheap, because somebody died here.”

“I don’t care if it’s a dollar, I’m not interested.”

He shrugged. “You did your best to avoid killing her. She practically insisted.” He looked at his watch. “Well, we’ve got another stop to make tonight.”

32

“Here’s an address,” said Sid. “Malikov was using the back of this real estate ad as a scratch paper. It’s 2-9-9-5 Quillivray Way, Chatsworth.” He looked at Ronnie. “Where’s Quillivray Way?”

Ronnie opened her laptop and typed in the address. “It’s way out in the northwest of Chatsworth.” She looked at the paper Sid held in his hand. “What does that say, in the corner?”

“I don’t know. It’s either Russian or initials. Looks like an
M,
backward
N,
small
p,
small
a
.”

“Let’s try Google Translate. Russian to English.” She typed
M-N-p-a
into the box on Google Translate, and then watched. “Nothing. Maybe the program doesn’t recognize it unless the
N
is backwards. Let’s try this another way.” She typed on the English side.
“M-I-R-A.”
On the Russian side appeared
M,
backward
N,
small
p,
small
a.

“What does it say?” asked Sid.

She clicked on the audio symbol, and a Russian voice said, “Mira.”

Sid set the paper down. “Maybe that’s where she is. I guess we’d better get out there and take a look.”

As Sid and Ronnie Abel drove into the northwest part of the San Fernando Valley around 1:00 a.m., there were fewer and fewer cars on their route. The long, straight roads made it possible to see a few solitary sets of headlights, and even an occasional flash of colored paint under a distant streetlamp, but they were nearly alone. In this part of the Valley the streets had become dark and quiet.

They drove to Moliere Road, and stopped just before it intersected with the 2400 block of Quillivray Way. They parked their rental car, got out of it, and walked into the covering darkness. They moved up Moliere to Quillivray. There were no streetlamps or sidewalks. After a few hundred feet they passed a wooden sign beside the road. Sid let the glow of his cell phone illuminate it for a second:
QUILLIVRAY AN EQUESTRIAN NEIGHBORHOOD. PLEASE USE CAUTION
.

Ronnie said, “It just means watch what you step on.”

Sid said, “It is pretty rural. It would make a good place to sit tight and wait for the police manhunt to run out of steam.”

“Quit it. Every time you say something like that, I feel like ducking. The last time it was ‘this would be a good place to kill somebody.’”

“This wouldn’t be a bad place for that either.”

“Thanks, Sid.”

They became silent and watchful as they moved on to Quillivray Way. The houses were far apart on large pieces of land, but the houses themselves weren’t either pretty or very large. A few had outbuildings of the sort that might be stables or studios or workshops.

Many of the houses had the same 1920s style, a brick or clapboard one-story ranch house with a long concrete porch along the front shaded by an overhanging roof. The fences were nearly all chain link, perhaps made to keep a dog or a few chickens behind it in the dusty yard. Many of the houses had been expanded at some point with boxlike additions.

As Sid and Ronnie walked along the street toward the 2900 block the houses got newer and bigger, and the edge of the street was no longer sloping earth like the banks of a river. There were stretches of curb, and some sidewalks. But the lots were still large, relics from the era when it had still been a reasonable idea to move out of the crowded city and buy a house with an orchard on it or space for a truck garden.

Sid and Ronnie studied each house as they came to it, looking for signs their years of experience as police officers had taught them that a group had moved into a house and hidden there.

None of the houses had lights on at this hour, and there were no modifications done to make the windows opaque. There were no houses with heavily reinforced doors, no bulky barriers piled against the front of a house to make it bullet resistant. When abnormal numbers of people were living in a house, it often showed in the quantity of garbage that was produced. There was nothing like that here.

A couple of times they ventured into backyards to sight along the row of houses to see if there was anything not visible from the front—hidden vehicles, light leaks in windows, sentries posted to watch the street.

They kept moving, making their way from block to block, trying not to present a silhouette or make noise. This was a quiet neighborhood surrounded by other quiet
neighborhoods, and beyond them, foothills and then a wall of jagged mountains that showed uninterrupted gray except along the crest where three red lights mounted on a radio tower blinked to warn off low-flying planes.

The house at 2995 was a bit away from the others, and there was an extra space around it because the building on the oversized lot to the left of it had been torn down at some point, and the home to the right side still had a swath of old orchard beyond its chain link fence, and then two hundred feet of empty space before the tiny garage at the end of a driveway that consisted of two parallel strips of concrete.

The house at 2995 had several of the qualities that Sid and Ronnie had been watching for. The façade was brick and mortar, but it seemed to be an add-on that didn’t fit the original style. The windows had a matching set of curtains, but six inches behind each one appeared to be an opaque layer like blackout curtains.

There was a big black pickup truck with tall tires parked nose outward in the driveway. It reminded Ronnie of a watchdog—a pit bull, maybe, with a big blunt muzzle. It occurred to her that a truck like that wasn’t a likely sign that the Europeans were here. The big truck would probably look ridiculous to a European, and it wouldn’t help a robber keep a low profile. But she knew it was possible that the house’s occupants had been murdered by the panthers, and this truck belonged to a dead man. And maybe the truck had been kept as an escape vehicle. It gave the place the look of being occupied, but it was also the sort of truck that somebody could use to make an off-road run through the desert to the Mexican border.

Sid and Ronnie paused near the house to exchange silent signals and then split apart to enter the property. Sid went to the right side up the driveway, where the neighbor’s orchard would complicate his silhouette, and Ronnie went to the left near the edge of the lawn where the empty lot began.

They each found a vantage where they were difficult to see, sat down, and waited. For the agreed-upon fifteen minutes, they stayed absolutely still and listened for any sounds, observing everything they could see. At the end of fifteen minutes they moved again, this time close enough to touch the house.

On Ronnie’s side, all of the windows had been blocked by blackout curtains, and when she put her ear to the glass, she heard nothing. She continued beside the house to the back corner, and looked into the two-acre backyard. Parked on the back lawn behind the house were four vehicles. She held her position.

Sid moved to the big black pickup truck in front of the garage and looked inside. The truck’s interior looked pristine from the driver’s side window. Even in moonlight he could see that there was nothing on the seats or the floor. He moved around to the truck bed, but it had a hard-shell cover that was locked, so he kept going until he reached the passenger side. Something looked odd from that side. The seal along the bottom of the window on the right door seemed to have been scraped. He felt it with his finger, and it was rough. Maybe somebody had used a slim-jim to open the lock without a key. He cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face to the window. He could see from this side that the cylindrical ignition lock had been pried out of
the steering column, leaving the wires protruding a couple of inches. The truck had been hot-wired.

He thought for a moment. Trying to communicate with Ronnie now could give away her position. The fact that someone had hot-wired the truck would give the police probable cause for a search, but it didn’t prove anybody was in the house, and telling Ronnie wouldn’t contribute to her safety. Right now she should already be crouching somewhere near the back of the house, as alert to all of the dangers as she could be.

Sid moved on. The windows on his side of the house were all blacked out. The garage was closed and it had no windows, so he moved around it toward the back of the house. In a moment he and Ronnie would meet, and they’d determine then whether they should try to enter the house.

As he took his next step he heard an unexpected sound in the distance. It began to grow gradually—car engines and the hiss of tires on the empty street. He pivoted and backtracked around the garage to the front corner, hid, and watched.

There were three SUVs. All of them came around a corner far down the street moving toward the 2900 block. As soon as they’d cleared the corner, they turned off their headlights, and moved along the center of the street in single file. The cars went slowly to keep their noise low, almost coasting for the last few hundred feet. The only illumination came from their red brake lights when the drivers stopped in front of 2995. Sid could only hope that Ronnie had heard them coming too and taken cover in time to keep from being seen.

Each SUV had only a driver inside. When the drivers opened their doors to get out, Sid could see that they had
all turned off the dome lights so the interiors would remain dark. They got out and walked to the front steps, but only one man climbed to the door. He knocked.

As soon as he did, the door swung open and people began to come out of the house. There was a dim light on somewhere deeper inside the house, and now Sid was able to make out a few of the faces when they turned back to look behind them toward the light or whisper to a companion. First there were a couple of younger men, and then three women, and then three more men. Then there was another woman, then several more men. Each of the people carried a large shoulder bag, a pack, or a small airline carry-on.

There was a long pause, while shadows cast by the light inside seemed to be moving rapidly about. The light went off, and the final dozen men came outside, and the last one closed the door.

Sid stared. There was no question these were the panthers, but they were about to leave. In a minute they’d be in the cars and heading off, and he knew that meant they had reason to think they’d never be caught. If he was going to do anything, it had to be now.

Sid backed away from the front of the house, taking out his phone, and dialed 9-1-1. When the operator answered, he said in a low voice, “My name is Sid Abel, and I’m a former LAPD homicide detective. I’m at 2-9-9-5 Quillivray Way in Chatsworth. The crew of jewel thieves the LAPD is looking for are here, getting into cars and preparing to move out. There are at least thirty. This is urgent. Please get this call to all police agencies in the northwest part of the Valley.”

He cut the call and pocketed the phone, but he sensed that something had already gone wrong. A moment ago there
had been a low sound of whispered and muttered conversation as the panthers moved toward their cars, but it had stopped. The world had gone silent, as though all movement had halted and every person was listening, trying to determine exactly where he was. He took out his pistol and stood still, hoping he was wrong.

There was a harsh whisper, and then footsteps coming from the front of the house. Sid couldn’t run around the house to the back, and lead them straight to Ronnie. He took a couple of steps and hoisted himself over the chain link fence into the next yard.

The first two panthers appeared at the front corner of the garage, where he had been a moment ago. They had heard him rattle the fence as he had gone over it. One of them switched on a flashlight and aimed the beam in Sid’s direction, but Sid had anticipated something of the sort, and lay flat a few yards into the orchard in a depression between two rows of trees. When the beam of light didn’t find him instantly, it began to move. It swept along the fence, searching hungrily for a sight of him. After it had passed him, he remained flat on the ground with his face down.

Suddenly the beam flicked back to his hiding place, stayed there for about three seconds, and then began to move away again. The silence was shattered by a loud burst of automatic weapon fire, and the muzzle flashes illuminated the trees around him. The air in the orchard was full of flying bark chips and splinters as the bullets tore into the trees.

A moment later the silence returned, and Sid sensed the shooter had paused to replace his spent magazine. Sid looked, aimed, and fired his pistol twice at the torso of the
human shape beside the man with the flashlight. Then he moved his aim to the flashlight just as the man switched it off. Sid fired three times, but he was not sure whether any of his bullets had found the man.

Next Sid heard a sound he had been dreading—the familiar pop of a Glock pistol. He knew it must be Ronnie firing from the far end of the house. There were three more rapid shots, then two. Sid got up and ran along the grove of fruit trees toward the sound, but then the air around him exploded again with flying bark and chips as shots came at him from the front corner of the garage. He dropped to the ground and flattened himself while the bullets pounded into the trees above him.