Sanctuary by Ted Dekker Page A

to determine if I could trust him. Whether he would be willing to help. If he still had the mustache from his days in the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department, as pictured.
    He didn’t have a Facebook profile, which was fine, because neither did I. He hadn’t made any news for a few years. Good enough—I hadn’t either, at least not for three years, and then only as an unidentified subject in a rather nasty slaying.
    What he did have was a two-year history working as an attorney, and five years in the sheriff’s department before that. Best as I could fit the rather disconnected pieces together, Keith had joined the sheriff’s department right out of law school, served for five years, entered private practice, and then dropped off the scene altogether a year or two ago.
    The Los Angeles Times had at least a dozen stories that included the name Keith Hammond in their archives, five of them about the bust and the high-profile trial of a meth cook and distributor, one Bruce Randell.
    Bruce: the viper doing time in Basal who hated priests and was now going to kill Danny. Over my dead body. Likely both.
    Keith spoke of his reason for leaving the sheriff’s department in an article about Martinez Boutros, the only client from his two years of law practice that I was able to identify. Boutros was a twenty-six-year-old Mexican immigrant who’d been charged with murder in a drug case. He was wrongfully accused, Hammond claimed, and then he was acquitted. And the Times came looking to find out why Keith had switched sides from drug buster to busting out druggies.
    In a short statement Keith claimed he’d left the sheriff’s department to find true justice. When pressed about how the department lacked true justice, he sidestepped the question.
    Conclusion: Keith left because of corruption in the system. Maybe not, but honestly, that’s what I hoped for. Then he took up practicing the law to defend the innocent. And then…well, then he’d quit on the system altogether.
    That’s what I pieced together. That and the fact that he’d gone through a bitter divorce eight years earlier, about the time he quit the sheriff. He’d been twenty-seven years old at the time and was now thirty-five, same age as Danny.
    I had my attorney, albeit one who no longer practiced law. I had my defender of the weak, righter of wrongs, and, most important, I had someone with a common enemy: Bruce Randell.
    But that was only in my mind. In reality, I didn’t have him at all. He lived in the condo across the street, and for all I knew he’d moved there to get away from people like me.
    The sun was long gone, and I was about to give up in frustration when a black Ford Ranger approached the condo, turned up the driveway, and pulled into the garage on the first floor. I could hardly mistake the face of the man through the windshield. The man who would help me save Danny had come home.
    How he could help, I didn’t know. But that wasn’t all I didn’t know. Short of storming Basal with an Uzi—and believe me, I’d thought about it—I didn’t know how to get to Danny. I didn’t know who I could trust, who I could get to listen, who I could hire. I needed someone to help me think. To be with me, because alone I was lost.
    The instant the garage door closed, I opened my car door, stepped out into the gray dusk, and headed across the street. I climbed the three steps to the condo’s landing, pushed the doorbell, and stepped back. Hoping to make a good impression, I’d washed my hair twice, blown it half-dry and combed it out so that it laid naturally. The Miss Me jeans I wore were boot cut, better than the skinny jeans I used to wear. My top was a brown BKE with dolman sleeves. I knew these things because I bought all of my clothes from either the Buckle at the Irvine Spectrum Center or from the online store, and I stick to what makes me comfortable without looking shabby. Jane had introduced me to the Buckle two years earlier, and I