Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant by Lee Goldberg

over the material he'd gathered on Mark Sloan and his son.
    He'd analyzed their credit card statements, their phone bills, their DMV records, and managed to get a look at Steve Sloan's service record. Privacy no longer existed for anyone—except men like Wyatt, whose survival depended on it. Wyatt paid a high price for the sophisticated software and database passwords he'd acquired, but it was worth every penny to have unfettered access to bits and bytes of people's lives.
    As soon as he landed at LAX in the late afternoon, he rented a car and drove to a storage unit he kept in Canoga Park, a bleak corner of the San Fernando Valley filled with auto body shops, apartments overstuffed with illegal aliens, and warehouses where porno films were shot.
    The storage units were covered with gang graffiti and were protected by a live-in manager, who liked to tool around the property in his golf cart and had put rattrap boxes in every corner and alcove.
    Wyatt walked up to his little closet. A cheap $10 padlock was all that protected his tens of thousands of dollars' worth of sophisticated electronics and unsophisticated weapons. Anyone who put expensive locks on their storage units might as well put a placard outside that said: GOOD STUFF INSIDE. COME AND GET IT!
    He left the weapons, took the electronic goodies, and drove through Las Virgenes Canyon, down the Santa Monica Mountains, and into Malibu, the exclusive beach community for the very rich. Having just left Kauai, Wyatt was struck by the contrasts between the two iconic visions of sandy paradise.
    They both had long beaches, palm trees, and almost endless sunshine. What Hawaii didn't have was a Berlin Wall of obscene houses, tall fences, and a traffic-clogged freeway cutting people off from the beach. And even if anybody got to the beach, what little sand that wasn't eroded away was covered with raw sewage, used syringes, and TV production crews hauling in fake palm trees, fake dunes, and swimsuit models to sell the world on a paradise that didn't exist.
    But other than that, Hawaii and Malibu were virtually the same.
    Mark Sloan lived on an exclusive stretch of Malibu across from the colorfully dated Trancas Market, where people with multimillion-dollar homes shopped for groceries in flip-flops, cutoffs, and sweatshirts and pretended they were beach bums.
    Wyatt discovered in his research that Mark bought the house cheap in an auction held by the DEA, who'd taken the prime property from some drug dealer. Mark lived on the top floor and his son lived on the first floor. They shared a front door, but there was separate access to the bottom floor from the beach. That was the door Wyatt used to break in after he disabled the alarm.
    Wyatt spent the next two hours methodically and efficiently infesting the house with electronic bugs. He opened up their computers and installed chips that would allow him to capture each keystroke and, when they were on-line, see whatever they saw in real time. The image would be transmitted to his computer and, if he wasn't there, would be captured on his hard drive for later viewing. He used another piece of electronic wizardry to clone their cell phones so he could eavesdrop on their calls at will or, when he wasn't around, have them recorded by his computer for playback.
    All the devices he planted were energy parasites powered by their hosts. No need to worry about batteries. In all, he left close to $50,000 in electronics behind in Mark Sloan's house. He thanked Danny Royal for so kindly offsetting that unexpected expense out of petty cash.
    When Wyatt finished with the house, he moved into the garage, bugged Mark's Saab convertible, and planted a satellite tracking device under the hood. Wyatt would rely on the Defense Department's array of satellites to pinpoint Mark Sloan's location at any time and relay it to his wireless handset.
    Your tax dollars at work, Wyatt thought.
    He wouldn't have to risk tailing Mark Sloan; he'd just listen to