A Fatal Frame of Mind Page 11

  The officer slipped the card into his pocket without looking at it. “You’ll be hearing from me,” he said. “And say—if you happen to know any hot girls, we’re not all prudes like the groom.”

  Gus was searching for a way to answer that when some sort of shoving match broke out toward the top of the stairs. The cop gave Shawn a knowing wink, and he and his partner headed up to deal with the disturbance while the three of them ran to the Echo.

  And that had been their last encounter with the police. They hadn’t even seen a highway patrolman on the freeway. Which didn’t keep Gus from worrying for the whole drive.

  At least he was able to worry in peace and quiet. Shawn had closed his eyes and gone to sleep as soon as they hit the 101—less because he’d been up all night, Gus suspected, than because his other option was to spend the entire drive describing the missing painting in excruciating detail. Kitteredge, too, quickly nodded off.

  Which left Gus time to finally ponder the question that would have occurred to him hours earlier if events hadn’t been moving so fast: What the hell were they doing?

  When he and Shawn had set off to find Professor Kitteredge, it was to protect him from being discovered by a member of the force who might think him so dangerous he needed to be shot before being questioned. But Gus had never really considered what they were going to do once they’d found him—the task itself seemed so impossible that contemplating the next step felt like a waste of time. Then, once they had actually accomplished this, things started moving under their own impetus. Step by step, everything they did seemed to make sense at the time, and yet it didn’t actually add up to a logical plan.

  In fact, nothing that had happened since they first showed up at the museum made any logical sense. Unless he meant dream logic. Because while Professor Kitteredge’s story about the search for King Arthur’s magic sword was powerfully convincing when he’d laid it out, once Gus had had the chance to think it over, it began to sound ridiculous. They might as well be searching for Cinderella’s glass slipper.

  Gus knew there was only one right thing to do now. He should wake up Kitteredge and tell him he had no choice but to turn himself in. Then he’d pull into the Pea Soup parking lot and call Chief Vick to arrange the professor’s surrender. That would fulfill his original intention, which was to make sure Kitteredge would be safe until he could prove his innocence.

  But Gus wasn’t sure he could do that from a jail cell. Not that he believed his old professor had anything to do with Filkins’ murder. But as long as Kitteredge was unable or unwilling to provide an alibi, then this mysterious conspiracy was their only hope of finding the real killer. And no matter how absurd it sounded, someone had been able to steal that painting from under the noses of the cops. If not an all-powerful conspiracy, then who could have done it? And if the only clues to the Cabal lay hidden in that painting, and the only available copy of the picture was the one in Shawn’s mind, then separating the professor from Shawn would present an insuperable obstacle to discovering the truth.

  That meant finding a place to hide out until they could break the conspiracy and catch the killer. For the moment that wouldn’t be too hard. No one was looking for Gus and Shawn.

  But they would be soon. As the manhunt broadened, it was unimaginable that one of the police officers they’d met today wouldn’t realize they’d seen Kitteredge. And once they did, they’d remember who was with him. Unless it was that last cop. He wouldn’t need to remember anything—Shawn had given him a card.

  That gave them a few hours to find a hiding place and stock it with all the supplies they’d need until the case was over. Once their faces were on the news, they wouldn’t dare show them in public.

  Which brought him to one last option. Gus didn’t think Professor Kitteredge would agree to turn himself in to the police. But if they stopped for lunch, there was no reason Gus couldn’t excuse himself to use the rest room and call Chief Vick. He could even do it anonymously, just a loyal citizen doing his duty by reporting a sighting of a wanted fugitive. He wouldn’t have to worry about Kitteredge being hurt, because the police would not risk using their guns in such a crowded public place. They’d simply surround the table and lead the professor away.

  Gus hated himself for even allowing these thoughts to pass through his mind, but at the same time he knew that his self-loathing was completely irrational. Even though he was sure Professor Kitteredge was not a murderer, there was no denying he was a wanted felon. He had taken a police detective hostage and threatened to kill him with a knife that had already taken one life. Gus couldn’t pretend that he was protecting a pure innocent; on one level the man was a criminal.

  And it wasn’t like he actually owed Kitteredge the kind of loyalty he gave his clients. After all, Kitteredge had never hired Psych. He hadn’t even come to Gus for help in solving a crime, as Gus had thought when he’d felt compelled to rescue him from the police. No—he’d just sent Gus a form letter begging for a donation. If that obligated him to save the professor’s hide, then he’d also have to rescue the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, the March of Dimes, and every other charity whose pleas clogged his mailbox. And at least the charities sent him personalized return address labels. They were unusable, true, because they had Ziggy on them, but they were a nice gesture. What had Professor Kitteredge ever done for him?

  Gus could feel the steering wheel fighting to turn onto the off-ramp that would lead to the restaurant. It really was the correct thing to do. And he and Shawn could still help Kitteredge once he was safely in custody.

  But he couldn’t do it. He’d seen the fear in the professor’s eyes when he realized he was being framed for Filkins’ murder. He’d seen Kitteredge’s passion when he thought he was about to discover the clues hidden in the painting. He knew that only Kitteredge had the knowledge to get himself out of this terrible situation, and he needed to be free to do it. Gus had to help.

  Gus yanked the wheel back to the left, and the Echo zipped past the exit. He jabbed Shawn gently with his elbow until he woke up.

  Shawn blinked a couple of times, then glanced out the window. “So I guess that’s a no on lunch and betrayal,” he said.

  “You knew what I was thinking?” Gus said.

  “Everyone always knows what you’re thinking,” Shawn said. “You should try to control your facial expressions a little more. Really, you might as well be blinking in Morse code.”

  “You were asleep,” Gus said. “You couldn’t have seen my face.”

  “I could hear your muscles twitching,” Shawn said. “Do you want me to walk you through your entire thought process?”

  Having already sat through it once, Gus had no desire to hear it repeated back to him.

  “I’d rather hear yours,” Gus said.

  “Okay,” Shawn said. “I was wondering who would win if Julie Newmar’s Cat Woman fought the Michelle Pfeiffer version. And that got me thinking about Halle Berry, and whose side she would fight on. Or would the other two team up against her because her movie destroyed the franchise forever. And then—”

  “I mean about what we’re going to do now,” Gus said. “Since you were so avidly following my thoughts in your sleep, you must know how much trouble we’re about to be in.”

  “Yes,” Shawn said. “In fact I almost woke up to tell you to knock it off, since you were giving me bad dreams.”

  “Then do you have an idea where we should go?” Gus said.

  “Well, we’re heading north,” Shawn said. “We could keep going until we cross the Canadian border.”

  “That’s thousands of miles from here,” Gus said. “Plus, Canada is a foreign country. We don’t have our passports.”

  “Canada is a different country?” Shawn said. “That explains a lot.”

  “What it doesn’t explain is what we’re going to do now,” Gus said.

  “Maybe you’ll allow me,” Kitteredge said.

  Gus glanced in the mirror and saw the professor stretching his neck as he
shook off the unpleasant effects of sleeping in the backseat.

  “Please,” Gus said.

  “We’re going to see the one man in the whole world who can help us,” Kitteredge said.

  “If you’re talking about the Wizard, I am not bringing him a broomstick,” Shawn said.

  Gus nudged Shawn with his elbow—harder this time.

  “Who is this man, and where do we find him?” Gus said.

  “To explain who he is could take a lifetime,” Kitteredge said. “But in order to find him, all you have to do is take the next exit.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “When the professor said that all we had to do to find this man was take the next exit, he neglected to mention that after we took the exit we’d have to drive around in circles for hours,” Shawn said.

  That wasn’t precisely true. They had been driving in circles for only forty-five minutes. And it was entirely possible that for most of that time they had actually been going in the right direction. One low rolling hill covered in golden hay and ancient oak trees looked pretty much like every other one.

  But now that they were stopped at a T-intersection where the narrow lane that had taken them up a steep hill ended with a choice of left or right turns unless he wanted to go cross-country up the rest of the slope, Gus had a chance to peer around and see a vast vineyard sprawling out at their left.

  “I don’t think we’ve been here before,” Gus said. “That vineyard doesn’t look familiar.”

  “Because last time we passed it, it was on the right side,” Shawn said. “We’re going back the way we came. Which might be all right, because I’m getting hungry, and pea soup is sounding mighty fine. Pea soup and everything that comes with it.”

  Gus knew that Shawn wasn’t referring to the soup toppings Andersen’s offered for an extra couple of bucks: the bacon bits and croutons and little pitcher of sherry that made a bowl into a meal. They needed to find Kitteredge’s friend quickly, or Shawn would be ready to dump the professor under an oak tree and head back home. Gus turned around in his seat to see if Kitteredge seemed to know where they were going.

  Judging from the smile on his face, he did. “It’s a geographical anomaly that allows this valley to thrive,” he said gazing out at the vineyard below them. “Because it runs east–west—the only east–west running valley in the Pacific coastal region, by the way—it gets the flow of offshore breezes and fog that temper the otherwise harsh climate and allow for the growth of the vines.”

  “That’s fascinating, Professor,” Gus said. “But this might not be the time for a discussion of the local landscape. Except for the part about where on it your friend lives.”

  Kitteredge waved away the objection with a sweep of his hand. “There’s always time to gain a little knowledge,” he said. “Because you never know when you’re going to need it. For instance, in this case, you might think you don’t need to know about the formation of these hills or the techniques the Chamokomee Indians used to hide from the Spanish settlers who were trying to drive them off their land.”

  “I might,” Shawn agreed. “And so might every human being on Earth. Because we would all be busy noticing that the most important feature of these hills is the fact that the sun has gone behind one of them and it’s about to start getting dark. Oh, and another one—that these hills don’t have a single street light anywhere on them. So we’re going to be driving around in the dark looking for a place we couldn’t find in daylight.”

  If Kitteredge noticed the hostility in Shawn’s voice, he didn’t seem to be terribly concerned by it. “That’s what I mean when I say you never know which bit of knowledge is the one you’re going to need,” he said. “In this case it turns out to be both of the ones I just mentioned.”

  In almost any situation, Gus would have happily listened to his old professor lecture on whichever subject struck his fancy. But he could feel Shawn’s hunger-fueled frustration radiating from the passenger’s seat, and it was hard not to share a little bit of it.

  “I’d love to hear all about this,” Gus said. “But maybe we could wait until we reach your friend’s house.”

  “Or until Guns N’ Roses finally gets around to putting out Chinese Democracy,” Shawn said.

  “They already did,” Gus said. “A couple of years ago.”

  “Really?” Shawn said. “You’d think after all that waiting somebody would have noticed.”

  “I’m afraid this can’t wait,” Kitteredge said. “That’s what I was trying to explain. You see, if we were in the Purisma Hills to the north, then we could expect to keep driving up until we reached the maximum elevation of seventeen hundred feet before we started down toward the Los Alamos Valley. If we’d gone south into the Santa Ynez Mountains we might climb as much as twenty-five hundred feet before we began to drop down toward the Pacific Ocean. But you see, we are in the Santa Rita Hills. And among the salient details of the geographical region, along with its ideal climate and soil conditions for viticulture, is the relatively lower elevations of its peaks: no more than nine hundred and fifty feet.”

  Shawn turned to Gus, real pain on his face. “He’s going to be lecturing his executioner on the chemical composition of the lethal injection as the guy pushes the button,” Shawn said. “And he’ll probably still be talking after he’s dead.”

  Gus cast a pleading look over his shoulder. “Please, Professor, we just need to know which way to turn.”

  “That’s my point,” Kitteredge said. “We are currently at an elevation of roughly the maximum for the area, as you can tell from a quick glance around.”

  “All I can tell from a quick glance around is that I can’t see anything, because it’s dark,” Shawn said. “Maybe the professor wants to explain why that happens, too.”

  “Taking all this into consideration,” Kitteredge said, ignoring Shawn as he might a student who had interrupted class without first raising his hand, “you might wonder why it is that there seems to be an enormous slope rising above us.”

  “I might,” Shawn said. “Or I might just put my head under the front tire and beg Gus to hit the gas.”

  But Kitteredge’s words had an impact on Gus. He stared at the looming shadow in front of them. “What about the Indians?” he said, ignoring the strangled cry from the seat next to him.

  “The Chamokomee were a peaceful people, even more so than their close neighbors the Chumash, and they had neither the inclination nor the ability to fight the better armed and trained Spanish,” Kitteredge said. “All they wanted was to live their lives undisturbed. So they became experts at hiding their settlements. They could construct elaborate structures to mask their villages from the outside world.”

  “That would explain why we haven’t seen any Indians tonight,” Shawn said. “That and the fact that it’s too dark to see anything. But unless your friend is one of the Chappaquiddick guys—”

  “Chamokomee,” Gus said.

  Since he didn’t have a tire iron to beat Gus’ head in with, Shawn ignored the correction. “—why do we care about any of this?”

  “I think Gus knows,” Kitteredge said.

  Gus didn’t. At least not quite. But there was something playing around the edges of his mind, and if he could just pull it forward he’d know which way to go.

  “All we need to understand is whether we’re supposed to turn left or right here,” Shawn said. “So maybe the one piece of knowledge we need here is your friend’s address.”

  Gus peered down the road to the left, then the right. And then he knew. He cast a glance back at Kitteredge, who was smiling and nodding his encouragement.

  “Hold on,” Gus said, taking his foot off the brake. “This may get a little bumpy.”

  Before Shawn could object, Gus pushed his foot down on the gas and the car lurched forward across the intersection. Straight across toward the unpaved hillside.

  “What are you doing?” Shawn shouted.

  “Getting us there,” Gus said.

  The
Echo flew across the road, then shuddered and thudded as it left the pavement. Gus could feel the tires clutching for purchase on the loose dirt of the hillside. He could hear the engine screaming as it fought to haul the car’s weight up the steep slope, saw the high weeds covering the windshield like a curtain. For a moment it seemed like the car was going to slide back into the intersection.

  And then the tires grabbed asphalt. Flat asphalt. On both sides of them the hill angled up steeply, but they were on a level road.

  “What happened?” Shawn said.

  “I think it was the old Chamokomee trick,” Gus said.

  “An artificial hill to disguise the entry to my friend’s property,” Kitteredge said.

  Shawn peered out the window to confirm this, but it was too dark to see anything. “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “I did,” Kitteredge said. “Why didn’t you listen?”

  Gus glanced over at Shawn to make sure he wouldn’t have to physically restrain him from leaping onto the backseat and throttling Kitteredge. But before Shawn could unbuckle his seat belt, the air was filled with the sound of an explosion. The windshield flew in their faces in a shower of glass pebbles.

  “Somebody’s shooting at us!” Shawn shouted. “Get out of here!”

  Gus hadn’t actually needed the instruction. He stomped on the brake, threw the gearshift into reverse, and jammed down on the gas.

  But before he got more than a foot, there were two quick shots, and the front tires exploded out from under them. The Echo landed hard on the rims and dug divots in the asphalt.

  Shawn and Gus dived for their door handles. Gus made it out first and yanked open the back door, pulling Kitteredge out of his seat as Shawn rushed around the car to join them.

  “Now what?” Gus said.

  “We run,” Shawn said.

  “Not a bad idea,” a voice from out of the darkness said. “Would have been better if you’d thought of it before.”