Mind-Altering Murder Read online

  Lassiter thought that over. "And if this turns out to be as big a waste of time as I think?" he said finally. "What do we do if Macklin Tanner hasn't been kidnapped?"

  "We'll have to deal with that issue if it comes about," O'Hara said. "Maybe if we just keep negative thoughts in our heads, everything will work out for the worst and we'll be okay."

  Lassiter muttered something under his breath, but he gave her a shallow nod. "What is this brilliant tip we're chasing?"

  "We're going to see a man about a horse," Shawn said. "No, wait. That's not right. We're going to see a man about a horseshoe. Or are we going to see a horseshoe about a man?"

  "I'm so glad we took the afternoon off to have this experience," Lassiter said. "How I've missed this sparkling repartee."

  "There's reason to believe that there's a connection between Macklin's disappearance and a blacksmith's shop in the Santa Barbara area," O'Hara said.

  "What reason?" Lassiter said.

  "If I told you we learned it from an exploding librarian, would that convince you?" Shawn said.

  Lassiter couldn't bring himself to waste the energy to make his tongue form the word "no." He let his eyebrows do the work instead.

  "Then I won't tell you that," Shawn said. "I won't even mention that an entire neighborhood perished so that we could get this information. Let's just say it's an anonymous tip and leave it at that."

  "Happy to," Lassiter said. "Detective O'Hara, you can come back with me now or get a ride in a stolen car from this felon. At this point it's all the same to me."

  He snagged his car keys out of his partner's hand and headed back to the sedan.

  "There are at least a dozen blacksmiths in the Santa Barbara area," O'Hara said. "Not to mention all the various other businesses that work with wrought iron."

  "I'm glad you clarified that," Lassiter said. "Now, let me see if I have this straight: There's absolutely no reason to think that any blacksmith shop has anything to do with Tanner's disappearance, aside from some idiotic fantasy of young Kreskin here. But even if I were to accept his word on the subject and go chasing off on this fool's errand, this is just one of potentially hundreds of locations where I might want to look. Does that about cover it?"

  "You left one detail out, Carlton," O'Hara said. "Of all those hundreds of potential locations, there's only one that belongs to a subsidiary of VirtuActive Software, and that's Winter Brothers Ironworks, which is right up ahead."

  "So the company's hedging their bets in case kids finally wise up, get sick of computer games, and go back to wholesome outdoor entertainment like horseback riding," Lassiter said.

  "The ownership is hidden in a series of nested holding companies," O'Hara said. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to keep anyone from finding out about this place."

  "But you got the last laugh on them," Shawn said. "They put all that time and energy into hiding the fact that they owned this place, and what did they get? A police detective who couldn't be bothered to walk five hundred yards to find them, let alone dig through layers of corporate shells. Bet they'd feel pretty silly if they knew. Which of course they never will, since you're too lazy to walk the five hundred yards to let them know."

  Lassiter thought he detected something strange in Shawn's voice, a note verging on hysteria. Of course it was possible he was just choking on the dust that filled the air, but it sounded like Shawn was, for the first time since they'd met, losing that patina of hip detachment he undoubtedly thought of as his cool or his mojo. That was the first interesting thing that had happened since Lassiter let O'Hara talk him into this field trip, and he was about to follow it up with a piercing jab to Shawn's protective shell, when O'Hara stepped between them again.

  "The blacksmith's shop is just around the next curve," O'Hara said. "We're going to knock on the door and ask a couple of questions. Then we can all head back."

  Lassiter stopped with his hand on the door handle. "And if there's no sign of Tanner?"

  He waited for either O'Hara or Spencer to say something. For a long moment, there was silence.

  "Then I'll never ask for SBPD help on this case again," Shawn said finally.

  "And?" Lassiter drew the syllable out longer than he ever had before, hoping that his partner might pick up on the subtle signal.

  Apparently she did, further proof of what a good detective she could be when she wasn't obsessed with trivia. "I will sign off on Mandy Jansen's death as a suicide," O'Hara said.

  Lassiter pulled open the sedan door, then peeled his fingers from the handle where his flesh had begun to sizzle on the blazing metal.

  "Let's go, then," Lassiter said. "Looks like this trip is going to turn out to be worth my time after all."

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Hittites of Anatolia developed a process for smelting iron ore fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. Shortly after the invention, a couple of the more enterprising members of that long-forgotten nation took their skills with metal and set up a blacksmith business in the hills outside Santa Barbara.

  At least that seemed to be the case if you judged by the exterior of the decaying barn that stood in the middle of a weed-choked lot at the end of the road. The yellow paint had faded to the same dusty brown as the dying vegetation all around it and was peeling off the siding. The onceshining tin roof was encased in dust, and birds flew out through holes in the metal. Where once the word "blacksmith" had been painted in gigantic black letters, now there was only the faint outline of barely recognizable shapes.

  As Shawn led the two detectives down toward the barn, he studied the ground for signs that anyone had been there recently. It was impossible to tell. The dirt road had been sunbaked until it was harder than concrete. The grass and weeds had been dead so long that the trampled stalks could have been crushed ten minutes ago or last year.

  And yet Shawn was positive that Macklin Tanner had been in this barn. Or that his kidnappers had used it as their hideout. Or that it was at least in some tangential way related to the kidnapping.

  That was what he was telling himself, anyway. That he was positive.

  The trouble was, he wasn't. Not about this. Not about anything.

  This was not the way it was supposed to be. Shawn was always positive. His subconscious would toss out an idea and the rest of his mind would grab it and chew it into shreds like a dog with a plush toy. He didn't always know why he knew something, but he never had any doubt that he did.

  But that was not the way it had been working lately. The ideas his subconscious threw to him were barely more than half-formed notions, and his brain could hardly get in a nibble before its teeth started to hurt and he had to stop.

  This had started when Gus left Psych to take the executive position with Benson Pharmaceuticals. But that couldn't be the reason. Shawn didn't need Gus. He never had. He liked having his old friend with him on cases, of course. He liked the camaraderie, the company. And there was nothing better than having a buddy around when you were stuck on an all-night stakeout, if only to stay in the car when you ran out to look for a bathroom.

  But in terms of solving the cases, Shawn had never needed Gus. Shawn was the one with the eye and the mind and the skill. Gus was along for the ride. It was true that he had come in handy from time to time, but his greatest use was as Shawn's sounding board. Shawn hardly needed a full-fledged partner for that. And, in fact, shortly after Gus left Shawn had replaced him with an actual board. He peeled off a piece of plywood that had been covering one of the office's rear windows since it had been broken in a game of extreme handball, drew a rough approximation of Gus' face on it, and propped it up on a shelf. Then he started to run his theories by the board.

  Unfortunately that didn't work nearly as well as he'd hoped, and after an hour Plywood Gus was back covering the broken pane. Apparently Shawn needed his sounding board to ask obvious questions before he could come up with his brilliant answers. If only he'd thought to record the real Gu
s over his last few days in the office. Since his questions were always the same variations on "What the hell are you talking about?" Shawn could simply have pushed play after every inquiry.

  Since he hadn't taken that precaution Shawn decided to move away from inanimate objects and try to replace Gus with a real human being.

  He'd thought briefly about bringing a professional detective into the agency. But Shawn had a unique way of working that tended to annoy people with actual law enforcement experience, and while that was one of his favorite parts of the job, he didn't feel like bringing that kind of conflict into the agency. Besides, private detectives generally wanted to be paid in money for their labors, and for the position he was looking to fill Shawn was planning on a salary measured in Yoo-hoo and Skittles.

  There was only one man who could fit all of Shawn's needs. Hank Stenberg. Hank didn't know a lot about law enforcement, but Shawn was pretty sure that he'd seen enough TV cop shows to know when Shawn was deviating from standard fictional police operating procedure and would object loudly. And his voice was even higher than Gus', so there would be an extra layer of outrage in the complaint.

  But Hank turned out to be no more useful than Plywood Gus had been. Sure, he asked plenty of questions in that high, piercing voice, but they were mostly along the lines of "Where's the Butterfinger you promised me?" and "Why haven't you fixed that window?" Not exactly the kind of intellectual challenge that would inspire Shawn to the deductive leaps he needed to make.

  He might have tried to work things out with Hank, until Shawn's father, Henry, came to ask him for help. It seemed that one of his neighbors was growing frantic because her son hadn't come home from middle school that day and it was nearly dark. Henry was planning to search the area between the school and the boy's home, and wanted to draft Shawn to join the posse.

  At least he had before he saw the object of his search sitting behind Shawn's desk, watching old Hong Kong kung fu movies on the agency computer. Without a word Henry scooped Hank up in one arm and marched him to his truck, and Shawn was once more without a partner.

  Which was, he decided, the way it should be. Shawn wasn't the type who needed people. He was a lone wolf. A rebel, a rogue, a one-man army who didn't play by anyone's rules. He was every tagline from every action movie made in the 1980s, except the one about how in space no one could hear him scream, because he wasn't planning any interplanetary excursions, and "Part man, part machine, all cop," because that would require attending the police academy.

  But try as he might, he couldn't make himself feel like a one-man army. His eyes worked the same way they always had and the neurons of his mind still flowed along the same old pathways, but whatever had made Shawn into the great natural detective he had been only weeks before seemed to have disappeared. He could still spot tiny details and his mind could still weave them together into patterns, but he had lost the crucial piece of himself that told him which pattern was the right one. He had lost his confidence, and with that had gone his ability.

  That was what he told himself, anyway. Because that was better than the other thought that was constantly nibbling away at the back of his mind--that he had it backward. That he had only lost his self-confidence because he knew his ability was gone for good.

  The Poe book that had led them here was a perfect example. It was true that the clue in the Dewey decimal number was the kind of thing that Gus would usually have been helpful with, because he was the kind of person who cared about boring things like library classification systems. But Shawn should have spotted the discrepancy. It wasn't that hard. He must have stared at the spine a thousand times and it never even crossed his mind to check its classification number.

  If it hadn't been for Jules, they might still be back in the game, trying to figure it out. And Shawn was beginning to think that would not have been a completely positive thing. Although it contradicted everything he'd ever believed, he was coming to the conclusion that you could, indeed, spend too much time with a computer game. It wasn't just that he was dreaming about Darksyde City--his dreams had always been surrealistic landscapes incorporating whichever pop culture tropes he'd been ingesting that day. It was the way his instincts were beginning to change. When he'd gone out for lunch yesterday some clown in a battered Mustang had cut into the drive-through line in front of him and Shawn had had to stop his right foot from slamming down on the accelerator to take out the jerk in a massive fireball. He accepted the possibility that this was simply a measure of the frustration he'd been feeling about being unable to crack the Tanner case, but he thought he'd better cut down on his Criminal Genius sessions before he found himself attempting to blow up the Paseo Nuevo Shopping Center in an attempt to solve it.

  Once Jules had given him the reference to blacksmithing it was an easy Google search to find out just how many metalworkers there were in the Santa Barbara area. The next part of the investigation took a little longer, but there was no inspiration involved, just a few long hours slogging through incorporation records and other public files to find the link between Macklin Tanner's company and Winter Brothers Ironworks.

  When he'd made the discovery, he waited for the old feelings of triumph to flow through him. He sat in front of his computer for a full five minutes, expecting to find himself leaping out of his chair and high-fiving the light fixture.

  But that sense of satisfaction never came, and neither did the old, familiar certainty. What he'd found seemed to be a plausible connection and a probable lead, but he didn't know it the way he always had before.

  At least he still remembered what it was supposed to sound like, so when he called O'Hara he was able to use the proper mixture of elation and self-worship. He hadn't thought she'd heard anything off in his voice, and she did agree to meet him up here this afternoon.

  But now that they were all standing outside the barn that once housed Winter Brothers, Shawn was feeling doubt creeping through him. What if he had been wrong? What if Macklin Tanner had never been here?

  "Great lead you found, Spencer," Lassiter said as he came up to Shawn. "Doubt you found your missing person, but at least we'll all get skin cancer from standing around in the sun like this."

  O'Hara stepped up to Shawn, a look of concern on her face. "It doesn't look like anyone has been here in years," she said.

  It didn't. Shawn knew it. He'd gotten this one wrong. The right thing to do would be to turn around and go home, lie on the couch, and watch all five Planet of the Apes movies back-to-back. Not that he deserved that kind of reward. It would be much more fitting to make himself sit through the Tim Burton remake five times over, although if he wanted to punish himself that severely he might as well just hang himself in Mandy Jansen's basement.

  But just because Shawn felt defeated, he didn't need to show it. He gave Jules his best cocky grin. "Looks can be deceiving," Shawn said. "I mean, Lassie here looks like Mr. Bean. But that doesn't mean he's a bumbling, incompetent boob with a turkey on his head."

  "Gee, thanks," Lassiter said.

  "Unless I'm wrong about this barn, of course," Shawn continued, "in which case looks really aren't deceiving and no one has been here in years. Then the whole turkey-on-the-head thing is up for grabs."

  "That's good, Shawn," Lassiter said. "If you're wrong and you dragged us out here for absolutely no reason, then I'm the idiot."

  "Hey, you listened to me," Shawn said.

  "Not anymore," Lassiter said, drawing the gun from the holster under his polyester-blend jacket.

  "Don't you think you're overreacting a bit?" Shawn said.

  "I'm doing my job, which is to check out a tip, no matter how little credibility its source might have," Lassiter said. Gun held pointing down at the ground, he started toward the barn. "O'Hara, you take the back."

  "What about me?" Shawn said. "If you've got the front and she's got the back?"

  "Personally I think you should go ahead and walk into the barn," Lassiter said. "That way if there are
gunshots you're almost certain to get caught in the cross fire. But as a law enforcement officer, I'm telling you to stay here until I give the all clear."

  "The what?" Shawn said.

  "All clear," Lassiter said.

  "That's what I was waiting for." Shawn sprinted past the detective and made it to the barn door before Lassiter could grab him.

  "Shawn, stop!" O'Hara whispered urgently.

  But Shawn couldn't stop. Right or wrong, this was his call and he wouldn't let Lassiter take that away from him. The way he was feeling, he might never have another one.

  Shawn pushed against the barn's sliding door, but it wouldn't budge. Glancing back he saw that Lassiter was closing in on him. In a second he'd grab Shawn and pull him aside and then whatever was in the barn would be all his. Shawn gave the door another shove and this time it slid open. He stepped through.

  After the bright sun outside, the barn seemed to be pitchblack aside from the shafts of light that poured through the holes in the roof. Shawn stood in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust. "Hello," he called. "Kidnappers? Victims? Insane computer-game designers? Anyone?"

  There was no answer other than some faint scrabbling of rodents in the walls. And as Shawn's eyes got used to the darkness, he could see why.

  There was no one here. The floor was rotting bare boards, except for a stone square in the center where an ancient forge sat. Blacksmith tools, bent and blackened by use and age, were scattered around it.

  "You've really cracked this case wide-open, Spencer," Lassiter said in his ear.

  Shawn felt that same sinking feeling that had assailed him outside the barn. But he was even more determined now not to let it show. "I'm glad you see it, too," he said.

  "See what." It wasn't a question, more like an expression of all the contempt Lassiter had ever felt for Shawn squeezed into two syllables.

  "The clues," Shawn said. "The evidence. You know, the kind of things that crime solvers use to crack their cases."