29

Davie and Vaughn left the yacht club but instead of walking to the car, Vaughn turned toward the beach. She welcomed the detour because they faced a tedious drive back to L.A. in a car without air conditioning, and they’d already been sitting inside for way too long.

Davie put on her sunglasses to shelter her eyes from the glare. “What do you think of the Van Kuris lead?”

Vaughn flipped his hand in a dismissive gesture. “We’re supposed to believe Zeke gives this Kuris guy the stink eye and he kills three people as payback? Nobody saw them arguing. They didn’t even speak to each other that we know of.” Vaughn tapped his finger on Davie’s glasses. “Maybe the sun was in Zeke’s eyes and he was just squinting.”

Walking had made Davie warm, so she stripped off her jacket and slung it across her arm. “Kuris was the director of security. You can’t get a job like that without a background in law enforcement or the military. If he was in the military, he might have crossed paths with Zeke.”

“The guy is from Canada. I know they’re one of our allies, but it still seems farfetched.”

“I know it does, but the day after his encounter with Zeke, Kuris requested an emergency leave to visit a sick relative in Ottawa. A few days after that, Juno Karst was killed in Nevada, Zeke in Los Angeles, and Harlan Cormack in San Bernardino County. Then a sniper tried to kill Dag Lunds.”

“At the moment, there’s no link between Kuris and the victims,” he said. “Lunds wasn’t in Hong Kong, and Cormack didn’t even work for the company anymore. Zeke retired from the military three years ago. If that’s what motivated the killings, somebody waited a long time for revenge. It makes more sense to focus on the two TidePool assignments the four of them worked together. You think RHD has the budget to send us to Istanbul? I love their rugs.”

“I wouldn’t bother renewing your passport just yet.”

They turned right when they hit the sand, strolling along the sidewalk past upscale beach houses set on narrow lots. Newport’s tony real estate stood in stark contrast to the quirky shops along the boardwalk of Pacific Division’s Venice Beach. For all its warts, she preferred Venice.

“Maybe we’re overanalyzing this,” Vaughn said. “What if they picked a fight in a bar with a bunch of skinheads and the murders were payback.”

“If it was something that recent, Lunds would have told us about it.”

“Maybe he’s not who we think he is. His ex-wife said he had PTSD. Something could have happened that made him snap. Maybe he killed Zeke and the others.”

Davie grabbed her partner’s arm and pulled him to a stop. “What are you saying? Somebody tried to kill him, too.”

Vaughn turned toward her, his face a stone mask. “But they missed, didn’t they? What’s the likelihood of a guy with a sniper rifle not hitting his target? Lunds could have had an accomplice up on that ridge, somebody who also helped him pull off the other murders.”

Davie flashed back to the image of Lunds sanding his father’s canoe and calmly relating his war experiences. His affect had been flat as he talked about all that violence. She supposed he could have known the sniper was on that hillside. But the more plausible explanation was that he sensed trouble because of his Ranger training or his days as a LRRP in Vietnam. The deer bolted because he sensed the shooter and Lunds pushed Davie into the river to save both of them. If it had been a setup, he could have let her drown, but he didn’t. He saved her life.

“You don’t actually believe Lunds killed his friends, do you?”

“Probably not. I’m just reminding you not to lose your edge until we know all the facts.” Vaughn checked his watch. “Let’s go back to the car. The freeway is going to be jammed if we wait any longer.”

Davie had spent the last ten years on the job judging people’s characters. She’d gotten it wrong on occasion, but she couldn’t imagine Dag Lunds killing three of his closest friends. Even so, Vaughn’s theory was plausible and a good detective never closed her mind to possibilities.

“You drive,” she said. “I’ll call Lunds and ask him to meet us at Pacific. Ninety minutes should give us enough time to get back to L.A. and for Guardian to email the photo of Van Kuris. We’ll show it to Lunds, see if he remembers the guy. Then we’ll ask for his alibi for the time of all three murders.”