Killer in the Hills Read Online Free Page B

and soon he is forklifting massive helpings of huevos rancheros into his mouth. He has a side of hash browns and another side of country biscuits and gravy with plump breakfast sausages. I have my usual eggs Benedict. Our collective cholesterol count is approaching numbers equaling the national debt when he takes his last bite of gravy-soaked biscuit and washes it down with coffee and dabs his mouth carefully.
    “This is official FBI business now,” he says. “Talked to the deputy director this morning. The internet sex thing means we’re into it and we can leverage the LAPD to cooperate. The Director called LAPD Chief an hour ago and arranged a meeting for us at LAPD Cyber Crimes in an hour. Apparently a very big deal.”
    “Gonna deputize me?” I say.
    “I’m gonna send you packing if you even slightly screw up,” Melvin says. He means it and he knows I know it.
    Melvin has a lot of leeway as a Special Agent. He has turned down several offers to become deputy director, choosing instead to remain in the field. He has also refused the numerous citations he had been awarded in his eighteen-year career. He is the best agent on the ground, and in return for his quiet, indispensable performance he has gotten to do pretty much whatever he wanted. Melvin has never screwed up. He has stayed out of the limelight of the press—despite the infamous cases he has brought to resolution, often with his S&W 500. He earned the nickname “Cowboy” after gunning down a record number of fugitives: two serial killers, a cop-killer, a kidnapper, and a Mexican druglord whose name was on the Ten Most Wanted list for almost as long as Whitey Bulger’s. In my research I have interviewed around a hundred uniformed cops, detectives, FBI agents, prosecutors, and, once, an Inspector with Scotland Yard. I have shot with them at ranges, sparred with them in gyms, gone on ride-alongs, and there is no one better than Melvin. I once saw him put a bullet through the forehead of a paper target figure from forty yards. One shot, with a pistol, from a cold draw. I used to fight Golden Gloves and mixed martial arts, and won a regional second-place, in my youth. Most of the cops I’ve sparred with were in my class—light heavyweight—and I have held my own, usually. I sparred with Melvin once. I won’t do it again. Melvin has the qualities of any great hunter—endless patience, constant awareness of everything around him, and a calm, quiet demeanor that can switch to deadly action in a heartbeat. The only man he’s ever hunted but didn’t catch was me. This is a source of irritation for Melvin, but also of grudging respect. He has called upon me a couple of times to consult on profiling particularly slippery suspects.
    “Bureau’s full of smart guys,” he once told me. “Great investigators, dedicated lawmen. But they’re Boy Scouts. Sometimes they’re not the most imaginative people in the world. But you got that dark, crazy thing going on in that head of yours. You know how to think like a bad guy. And that’s useful. As long as you don’t go rogue on me.”
    “I only went rogue once,” I had said. “And I saved someone’s life.”
    Melvin had grown quiet when I said that. Years ago, when I was charged with a murder I didn’t commit, I had run. I found the killer and shot him, just before he shot Melvin. The life I saved was Melvin’s, and we had never spoken of it until that conversation, and we have never spoken of it since.
    We finish breakfast, which Melvin insists on paying for. We are on the government dime now, and that means everything must be meticulously recorded. A file has been opened, a case number assigned, and everything we do from this point will be scrutinized and entered as evidence in the event of a trial, or a post-mortem review.
    We leave the Best Western and get back in the Town Car and back onto the Hollywood freeway, heading for LAPD headquarters.
    As we lurch through the morning rush hour into downtown,