Pike stayed with the Hewitt children, and I took the long drive south to Long Beach, following the Hollywood Freeway to the Harbor Freeway, then dropping straight south for almost an hour before picking up the San Diego Freeway east to the 710 and turning south again to parallel the Los Angeles River all the way to the ocean. Downtown Long Beach is a core of redeveloped modern high rises surrounded by an older landscape of two-story stucco bars and craftsman homes and traffic dividers dotted with palm trees that lend a small-town waterfront feel. It would've been a fine place to bring Teri and Charles and Winona for ice-cream cones and a walk in the sun around Belmont Pier to watch the boats coming and going to Catalina Island, only sun walking and boat watching often lose their appeal when you're thinking that your father might've been tortured to death by a steam iron. Maybe another time.

I followed Ocean Boulevard east along the water, then turned north along Redondo Avenue, watching the landscape evolve from small-town waterfront to middle-class residential to lower-class urban, the signs gradually changing from English to Spanish and finally to Asian as the faces changed with them. The Pacific Rim Weekly Journal sat two blocks off Redondo in a small three-story commercial building between a tiny Vietnamese restaurant and a coin-operated laundry filled with tiny Asian women who were probably Vietnamese or Cambodian.

I cruised the building twice, then parked one block south and walked up past the Journal to the restaurant. I glimpsed two people in the Journal office, but neither was Clark Hewitt.

It was still before eleven, and the restaurant was empty except for an ancient Vietnamese woman wrapping forks and spoons in white cloth napkins. Preparing for the lunch-hour rush. I smiled at her. 'Do you have a take-out menu?'

She gave me a green take-out menu. 'You early.'

'Too early to order?'

She shook her head. 'Oh no. We serve.'

I ordered squid fried rice with honey, and told her that I would wait out front on the sidewalk. She said that would be fine.

I stood around out front with the little menu and tried to look as if I had nothing on my mind except food, and snuck glances in the Journal office next door. An Asian woman in her early sixties sat at a wooden desk, talking on the phone. Behind her, the walls were lined with corkboard and about a million little bits of paper and photographs and what looked like posters for community events had been pinned to the board. A couple of ratty chairs were at the front of the office, and another desk sat opposite the woman's, this one occupied by a young Asian guy who looked to be in his twenties. He wore a Cal Tech sweatshirt and tiger stripe field utilities and Top-Siders without socks. He was leaning back, the Top-Siders up on the desk, reading a paperback. A half wall split the space into a front and a back, only you couldn't see the back from here in the front. Maybe Clark was in the back. Maybe I could whip out my gun, charge through the front into the back, and shout, 'Gotcha!' Be impressive as hell if he was really there.

The young guy saw me looking. I smiled and took a copy of the Journal from a wire rack bolted to the front of the building, just another bored guy killing time while he waited for his food. It was a tabloid-sized Vietnamese-language newspaper filled with articles I couldn't read and pictures of Vietnamese people that I took to be from the local community. The printing was cheesy and smudged, and I wondered if maybe Clark had been hired to give them a more professional look. 'Do you read Vietnamese?'

The young guy was standing in the door. Inside, the woman was still on the phone, but now watching me.

I shook my head and put down the paper. 'No. I'm just waiting for some food next door. I was curious.'

He grinned. 'They're free. Help yourself, if you want. They make a great birdcage liner.' Mr. Friendly.

I strolled back past the restaurant and up a short alley, looking for the rear entrance. One of the wonderful things about being so close to the water is that the temperatures are so mild that you rarely have to use air-conditioning. It was in the low seventies, so the Journal's rear door was open for the air. I peeked inside. Furtive.

No Clark.

I listened at the door, then stepped in. An Apple laser printer was humming on a little desk beside another door that led to a bathroom. Industrial metal shelves were stacked with reams of paper and office supplies and a well-used Mr. Coffee, but nothing screamed counterfeiter and I didn't see any of the things that Clark had marked in his catalogs.

I slipped out, went around to the front again, and this time I walked into the Journal office. The young guy was back with his book and the older woman looked up from her word processor. The young guy smiled, but the older woman didn't. I said, 'My name is Elvis Cole, and I'm looking for Clark Hewitt.' I put one of my cards on the young guy's desk. 'His life is in danger and I'm trying to help him. I'm also trying to help his children.' Sometimes honesty is the best policy.

The young guy's smile vanished, and the woman said something in Vietnamese. The young guy answered, also in Vietnamese.

I said, 'Sorry?'

The young guy stared at me for a couple of seconds before he shook his head. 'I don't know what you're talking about.' You could tell that he did. You could tell that he knew exactly what I was talking about, and that he did not like it that I had asked, or that I knew.

I glanced at the woman, and she turned away. Fast.

I said, 'I'm driving a 1966 Corvette convertible parked down the block. It's yellow. I'll be sitting in it.'

I went to the restaurant, paid for my food, then walked back to my car, put the top up to cut the sun, and sat. The squid fried rice was excellent, but I didn't have much of an appetite for it.

Twenty minutes later the guy in the Cal Tech sweatshirt came out to the street, looked at me, then went back inside. Sixteen minutes after that, a black 5oo-series Mercedes sedan circled the block twice, two Asian men in their mid-sixties inside. I copied their license number. Maybe eight minutes after that, a bright red Ferrari Spyder appeared from the opposite direction and eased to a stop a car length away from me. Whoever these guys were, they had money. The Ferrari was driven by a very young Asian guy, but an older man was in the shotgun seat, and, like the people in the Mercedes, both of them were nicely dressed in Italian business suits. I copied the Ferrari's plate number, too. The two men in the Ferrari stared at me for a couple of minutes, talking to each other, and then the young guy rolled down his window and eased next to me to talk. I said, 'Clark Hewitt.'

The young guy shook his head. 'Got no idea who that is.' Flawless English without a trace of an accent. Local.

'I think you do.'

The young guy looked nervous, but the older guy seemed calm. The younger guy said, 'My mother works at the paper, and you're scaring her. I'm going to ask you to leave.' I guess the paper was a family business, but it probably didn't pay for his Ferrari.

'Do you own the paper?'

'I think you should leave.'

I settled back in my seat. 'Can't leave until I see Clark Hewitt.'

The older man said something, and the younger guy shook his head. 'We never heard of the guy.'

'Fine.' I crossed my arms and made like I was going to take a nap.

The older man mumbled something else, and the younger guy said, 'Are you the police?'

' Clark knows who I am. I gave your mother a card.'

The older man leaned past the younger guy. 'If you don't leave, we'll have to call the police.'

'Go ahead. We can talk about Clark and his association with your newspaper.'