Patrol dogs and Military Working Dogs were trained to protect their handlers. If the handler was attacked, and unconscious, or fighting for his or her life, the dog had to know what to do without bein...
POLLARD CALLED IT the blood tingle. She blasted up the Hollywood Freeway, high-fiving the dashboard and pumping her fist, feeling the electric buzz in her fingers and legs that had always come with ma...
Okay, listen. The ATF analyzed the bomb from my car. You know what taggants are? Detection markers. Taggants had been required in plastic explosives since the nineties. The
Mrs. Phelps, sixty-two years old, was overweight, dowdy, and a retired sheriff’s deputy from Riverside, California. She had moved to Culver City with her new husband, a retired Los Angeles police offi...
Most of the homes were immaculate Spanish or Mediterranean villas, reminiscent of an earlier time and rich with genteel elegance. More Ross Macdonald than Raymond Chandler.
Miss Stanik? That your name, Candace Stanik? Her voice was soft, but thin and strained. Pike wasn’t listening to her; he listened past her, searching for other occupants. A crisp medicinal smell of et...
Meryl Lawrence was in her mid-forties, with sandy hair and the trim, sturdy build of a woman who took care of herself. She wet her lips as she stared at the phone, thinking, and finally glanced up. Wh...
Maggie swung her head from side to side, checking the high scents first, then dipped her head to taste the smells close to the ground. The humans behind her might be able to identify five or six disti...
Maggie jumped to a full alert, her eyes locked on the greasy cube. Scott threw it hard, and Maggie sprinted after it. The chunk bounced and skipped through the grass thirty yards away. Scott didn’t kn...
Khat was a shrub native to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, where people chewed the leaves as a stimulant. Poor man’s speed. Stone’s
Jonathan said, We’ll discuss the team’s progress and direction. I want you to be a part of that meeting. I don’t want you to feel left out. I said, You don’t have to handle me, Jonathan. I know that,...
Jonathan Green nodded again, then stared at the far wall for what seemed like several minutes. No one moved, and no one spoke. All of the other attorneys stared at Jonathan as if he might suddenly utt...
Jon wondered if Pike needed money. If Pike needed money, Jon could make money. And Jon loved making money. The woman on the far side of the bed snored. The woman beside him stirred. Her voice was clou...
Jon went back inside, and Googled pictures of Jacob Breslyn. He found a tall young man with a thin face, relaxed smile, and high forehead. Geeky, but growing into himself. An everyday, normal civilian...
Jon found the phone and took it outside. This particular phone, the phone Jon used for business, scrambled its signal into garbage only a phone with a similar chip could unscramble. Deep
Joe Pike watched his friend Elvis Cole leave the Burger King parking lot, then entered the longitude and latitude into his GPS. Pike was not using a civilian GPS. He used a military handheld known as...
Joe Pike thought about that for a long time. Centuries. Then he said, Someone had to bring her back.
If a future judge excluded the watchband, he or she might also exclude all downstream evidence derived from the band. The downstream evidence was called fruits of the poisonous tree, under the princip...
I wasn’t an expert on immigration, but anyone living in Southern California becomes conversant with the issue. Do
I stood with Sherman, watching them go, and wondered at Jonathan Green’s lack of concern. I was thinking that maybe he was crazy, or arrogant, or brimming with the fatal flaw of hubris, but you never...