The Postcard Killers - James Patterson [64]
“Copenhagen,” Dessie said, closing her phone.
Chapter 95
Saturday, June 19
Los Angeles, USA
THE LANDING GEAR HIT the ground with a thud at LAX, Los Angeles International Airport.
Jacob was back on American soil for the first time in six months.
This wasn’t how he had imagined his return, if he had actually come back at all. But he’d had to come back. This was where the Rudolphs had lived and created their scheme.
The air outside the terminal building was thick with exhaust fumes. He stood for a moment looking at his surroundings from the parking lot outside the rental-car office. It was such a familiar scene: the sea of private cars spreading out around him, the advertising billboards, the voices, the sound of traffic in the streets.
The U.S. was just as he remembered it, just a bit more… unsubtle.
He rented a Chrysler with GPS. He didn’t know his way around L.A. and had no desire to learn right now, not on this trip.
Programming Citrus Avenue into the wretched machine turned out to be tougher than finding the address on a map, so he gave up and drove north along Sepulveda Boulevard in heavy city traffic. God, the traffic. It was even worse than in New York.
He would never come to grips with Los Angeles, he was thinking to himself.
A sort of romantic shimmer lay over the whole city. Here was Hollywood and the dream factory and a glamorous life in the sun. For some people, anyway.
Personally, he could see only the crass advertisements, the elevated freeways, and the endless blocks of ugly single-story villas.
California wasn’t exactly his bag of potato chips.
He ignored the freeways and followed Sepulveda for miles, until he reached Santa Monica Boulevard.
He swung off right and drove on until he nearly fell asleep at a streetlight. He’d been warned that jet lag from Scandinavia was no joke. It sure wasn’t. The time difference was nine hours. Here it was only seven in the evening, but after six months in Europe, his body thought it was four in the morning.
Exactly one day before, he had been lying in a narrow bunk in an old prison cell, feeling more alive than he had since Kimmy died.
He hadn’t showered since he left her, and he could still make out the smell of fruit from her body on his…
He pushed the confusing thought aside and parked the car near a loading bay on Beverly Drive.
Two quick coffees and a parking ticket later, he was more or less ready to go on.
Number 1338 Citrus Avenue was a fairly rundown two-story rental with a flat roof and a walkway, just a few blocks from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.
Lyndon Crebbs opened the door before Jacob had time to even ring the bell.
Chapter 96
“YOU OLD BASTARD!” THE FBI agent said with feeling, hugging him. “Come in, for god’s sake!”
Jacob stepped into a sparsely furnished room with a deep-pile beige carpet that had seen better decades.
His mentor had aged. His hair was white and his suntanned face was covered in a network of wrinkles. But his eyes were the same, dark brown and crackling with intelligence. And suspicion.
“God, Lyndon, you look like an old man.”
The FBI agent laughed hard and closed the door behind him.
“Prostate trouble, Jacob. The cancer’s eating me up, slowly but surely.”
Jacob let his duffel bag fall to the floor and sank down on a chair at Lyndon’s round dining-room table. “So — what have you heard? Anything?”
“I got a message from Jill in New York,” Lyndon said, taking out two Budweisers. “They’re wondering when you’re going to stop running round Europe chasing murderers. They say they’ve got enough of those in the Thirty-second and could do with your help. Today, if not sooner.”
Jacob laughed so loud and long that the noise almost shocked him.
“Well,” he said, “I’m certainly not planning to settle in this dump of a city.”
Lyndon smiled.
“You know what they say: L.A. isn’t a cat that jumps into your lap and licks your face. But with a little time and patience, it just might.”
And Jacob replied the same way he had for the past twenty years whenever pets were