Mind-Altering Murder Page 14

  "The only thing that's going to be cracked is your skull if you try to keep me here one minute longer," Lassiter said, heading back to the door.

  Shawn looked around the interior of the barn again, desperately hoping to find some tiny sign that Macklin Tanner had been there. But unless the game designer had been in the habit of excreting tiny black pellets, he didn't see anything.

  That was it, then. His one lead and it was a false one. He might as well give up the detective business altogether. Not right away, of course. He could coast on his past glories for a few more cases before people started to notice he'd lost his gift, the way Friends had still attracted vast audiences for three years after the last time it had actually been funny. But once the police beat him to the solution on a couple of cases, word would begin to get out that Psych was a fraud and he'd be out of business. Maybe if he jacked up his rates before then he could build himself a financial cushion that would last until he chose his next career.

  He was so lost in his thoughts that it took him a couple of seconds to register the shouts that were coming from the back of the barn. "Carlton! Shawn!"

  Shawn ran across the barn's floor and when he reached the back wall he gave it a hard kick. Two of the planks flew off and landed on the dirt, and Shawn stepped through the hole just as Lassie was coming around the corner.

  "What is it, Detective?" Lassiter said.

  O'Hara didn't say anything. She just pointed to a high stack of old lumber.

  "That's very good," Lassiter said, slamming his pistol back in its holster. "You've found the woodpile. If we start to get chilly, it's nice to know we'll be able to build a fire. Of course we'll probably burn down half of Santa Barbara when the first spark drifts out, but still, a good thought."

  Shawn didn't listen to Lassie. He was staring at the woodpile, trying to understand what Jules was pointing at. He shifted slightly on his feet and he saw something--a glint of red sparkling in the sun.

  Then he knew what it was. He pushed past Lassiter and ran to the woodpile, tearing logs off and hurling them aside. Dodging the flying wood, O'Hara came up and worked beside him until they opened a large hole in the stack.

  Gleaming red metal sparkled up at them. Stacks of it, cut into shards and scraps, hacked into chunks.

  "What's that?" Lassiter said as he peered down at the heap of metal.

  "Right now, scrap metal," Shawn said. "But before someone took a set of blacksmith's tools to it, I'd say it was a cherry red 1964 Impala."

  Chapter Twenty-four

  He was back, baby.

  All that doubt, all that fear--all pointless. Shawn had followed his own instincts where they led him and he'd found the first evidence that Macklin Tanner had been kidnapped. The police quickly confirmed that the metal scraps had been the car Tanner disappeared with, and now there was a full investigation into his abduction.

  Of course this hardly meant Shawn's role in the case was over. He'd discovered where Tanner had disappeared to, but who took him and why and where he might be now were still completely unknown.

  Or almost completely, anyway. Thanks to Shawn's sleuthing methods, the police were fairly certain that at least one of the kidnappers worked for VirtuActive. After all, it was a clue planted in the game that had led to the barn and the discovery of the dismembered automobile. The cops were running background checks on every member of the programming team and had already started questioning everyone who'd ever worked for the company.

  Shawn was content to let them take over this part of the case. That was the kind of thing the SBPD was good at--the hard, boring grunt work. His job was the brilliant flashes of insight that broke cases wide-open.

  This time, though, he couldn't take all the credit for himself. It was true he had figured out that the librarian in the game was the key to figuring out Tanner's location, and that he had persisted in trying ways to worm it out of her no matter how many fictional people had to die along the way.

  But once he'd gotten the book he hadn't known how to interpret the clue. He had no doubt that if he'd had a little more time it would have come to him. After all, the Dismal Dewdrop system number, or whatever it was called, was a pretty obvious sign, and once he had exhausted all the less likely possibilities he would have had to investigate the obvious ones. Still, he'd had help on this part and it had shortened the investigation substantially.

  That help hadn't come free, of course, and that was why he was standing next to Juliet O'Hara in the basement apartment of a fabulous Spanish house in one of the nicest parts of town. She'd agreed to help him with the Macklin Tanner case if he'd take a look at her cheerleader suicide, and now he was paying off his debt.

  He was trying to, anyway. Even with his mojo back he was having trouble trying to understand what it was about the case that was troubling her. And she was having just as much trouble explaining it.

  "So, in terms of evidence you've got what exactly?" Shawn said as he looked around the immaculately clean room. There was a bed in one corner and a small kitchenette directly opposite it. Just in front of the window overlooking the garden sat two armchairs and a small coffee table. The floor was covered in a cheerful blue carpet. If it hadn't been for the exposed water pipes running along the ceiling there would have been nothing to say that this was a basement conversion.

  "Nothing that indicates anything other than suicide," O'Hara said morosely.

  "That's a good start," Shawn said.

  "It is?" O'Hara looked at him with a little glimmer of hope.

  "Sure," Shawn said. "You know you're dealing with a master criminal if he didn't leave any evidence behind."

  "Or I'm not dealing with a criminal at all," O'Hara said. "That's the standard interpretation of complete lack of evidence."

  "The standard interpretation!" Shawn scoffed. "The standard interpretation of the sun setting into the ocean every night was that it was moving around the earth. The standard interpretation of a yellow light is that you're supposed to prepare to stop. There's always a standard interpretation and it's always wrong. Except for why people actually watch Two and a Half Men. No one's been able to explain that. But the rule stands."

  O'Hara let out a heavy sigh. "It would be nice to think that's true," she said. "But the standard interpretation is almost always the right one, because it's a product of many minds working from the same set of facts and coming up with identical answers. And in this case we're not going to be able to change any of those minds if all we have to go on is the complete lack of evidence."

  "Well, in that case, the solution is simple," Shawn said. "We have to find some evidence."

  If he'd actually unplugged a valve in her neck and let out all the air filling her body, O'Hara couldn't have looked more deflated. "That's kind of why I asked you to meet me here."

  "And you were right to do it," Shawn said. "Evidence of murder, coming up."

  Shawn looked around the room and he saw ... nothing. No wayward pill, dropped out of the handful that had been ground up and poured into Mandy's evening cocoa. No carpet fibers torn up as Mandy's high-heeled feet were dragged across the floor so that her unconscious body could be strung up from the beam. No button that would at first seem to be from Mandy's blouse but on closer examination would reveal itself to be made out of a unique type of plastic that was only used by one designer of men's shirts, which were sold to only one store in California and which would turn out to have had only one customer in the last ten years.

  Shawn felt a new stab of panic. Before, when he'd thought he was losing his mojo, he knew it was mostly about confidence. But this was completely different and entirely worse. Before the confidence could come into action he needed the eye. It was great to be able to take tiny details that no one had noticed and then spin them into a web of meaning, and then invent some psychic vision to explain what he'd figured out. But that ability wouldn't do him much good if he'd lost the ability to spot those details in the first place.

  He to
ok a deep breath. He was getting way ahead of himself. It was quite possible that the only reason he wasn't seeing any details out of place was that there were none. Everyone else who'd looked at this case had concluded that Mandy Jansen had killed herself. Maybe that was what happened, in which case there would have been no reason for anyone to drop pills or buttons or carpet fibers.

  But Jules was sure Mandy had been murdered, sure in a way that transcended evidence and came straight from her instincts as a detective. Shawn had known her long enough to know that she was good at what she did, and if she was feeling this strongly she was probably right.

  Which meant that Mandy had been murdered. And unless the killer was the most brilliant criminal in history he had left evidence behind. Evidence that Shawn wasn't able to see.

  Shawn looked again, harder this time, straining the muscles in his eyes as if he thought they'd pop out of their sockets and roll across the carpet, looking for clues. But he still saw nothing.

  "What is it?" O'Hara said. "What do you see?"

  For one brief moment Shawn contemplated telling her the truth. Or at least his own version of the truth, something about how the spirits had been chased away by the aura of sadness lingering in the apartment. That might actually work, he realized. He could say that the spirits wouldn't return until the place got a lot more cheerful, so they should tune the flat panel to the Full House marathon on TV Land, and then come back in a day when they'd been drawn in by the warm family humor.

  But everyone had been blowing O'Hara off on this investigation. She'd been told by her fellow cops, by Mandy's friends, and probably by complete strangers that this was an obvious suicide and she should just close the case and move on. If he gave her some nonsense about spirits not wanting to cooperate, she'd assume that he was doing the same thing. He didn't want to let her down that way, especially after the help she'd given him with Macklin Tanner.

  He was going to have to admit the truth. This was all Gus' fault. Shawn had never had any problems like this when he was still around. Even though Shawn couldn't remember anything he'd ever actually done, apparently his presence worked on Shawn's subconscious like a security blanket.

  But Shawn wasn't five years old anymore. He didn't need a security blanket. He didn't need any kind of blanket. Well, there was that nice wool one he liked to snuggle in when the weather turned cold, but he was willing to throw that on the dustbin of history if it would help bring his mojo back for good.

  "There's nothing, right?" O'Hara said softly. "You're not getting any emanations or seeing any spirit trails or doing whatever it is you do instead of what I do."

  She was giving him a chance to get out of this easy, he realized. Maybe she was looking for a way to extricate herself from the case, too. All he had to do was say there was nothing here and it would be over. She'd close the file on Mandy Jansen and everyone could get along with their lives, with the obvious exception of Mandy herself.

  But if he did that here, what would happen on his next case? It was exceptionally rare that a client hired a detective only to tell him that it was okay if he wasn't able to solve the case. He had to fight his way through this.

  And if there was one thing he'd learned from watching TV, it was that he could do it. Had there ever been a single private detective who didn't get blinded at some point in his career? And whether it was Spenser or Dan Tana or Mannix or Magnum or even Monk, none of them ever gave up. Instead when the acid was thrown in their face or the gunshot creased their brows or they had been exposed to superbright light intended to kill the brain-parasite-Jell-O thing stuck to their backs, they wrapped a bandage around their eyes and set out to solve the crime they'd been investigating.

  So maybe Shawn was blind now. He'd find a way to carry on. If Robert Urich could do it, so could he.

  "Maybe this was a bad idea," O'Hara said. "Mandy's death was probably a suicide, just like everyone thinks, and I'm wasting your time dragging you here."

  "I owe you," Shawn said. "If it hadn't been for you, I'd still be in Darksyde City."

  "You don't owe me anything," O'Hara said. "You owe Gus."

  Shawn pulled his eyes away from their search of the floor and gave her a sharp stare. "Because he's done so much to help solve this case?" he said.

  "Not this one," O'Hara said. "Macklin Tanner."

  "Believe me, he was even less use on that case than here," Shawn said. "Every time I brought him into Darksyde City he spent the whole time whining about how he didn't want to kill anymore. It was like having the Dalai Lama as a sidekick, except that Gus can't shoot laser beams out of his eyes."

  "He was the one who came up with the explanation of the Dewey decimal classification," O'Hara said. "When neither of us could figure out what the book clue was, I flew up to San Francisco to talk to him about it. He told me about the blacksmiths."

  "Mighty helpful of him," Shawn said. "Although I guess it felt pretty good to do some real work instead of pushing papers across a desk."

  "He seemed pretty excited about what he was doing at Benson," O'Hara said. "Said he felt he was really going to be able to help a lot of people there."

  "Oh," Shawn said. "Well, it was nice of him to put off saving the world for a few minutes. I hope you gave him a big thanks."

  "I wanted at least to take him to lunch, but he didn't have time," O'Hara said. "He said he was absolutely swamped and couldn't leave his desk."

  "I guess that's what it's like when you're the bottom guy on the old totem pole," Shawn said.

  "He's not," O'Hara said. "He's been promoted twice since he got there."

  "Twice?" Shawn said. That couldn't be right. Gus was a great guy and all, but he wasn't promotion material. He was a sidekick, not a star.

  "He started off as a junior vice president, then moved up to senior VP within a couple of weeks," she said. "Now he's an executive vice president, whatever that is. Part of it is all the coincidences, sure, but they must really like him to move him up so quickly."

  Shawn felt a little tickle from his subconscious. He took a quick glance around the room to see if he had spotted a piece of evidence without being aware of it. But the little apartment was just as clue-free as it had been before. The dark part of his brain must have been responding to what she had said.

  "Coincidences?" Shawn said as casually as he could.

  "A bunch of them," O'Hara said. "It's really kind of weird. If you read it in a book you'd have trouble believing it."

  "And if it wasn't in a book, but in real life?" Shawn said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.

  "Well, it actually all starts in this room," O'Hara said.

  "You asked Gus for help on this case, too?"

  "Yes, but not in the way you think," O'Hara said. "It turned out that Mandy Jansen used to work in sales for Benson Pharmaceuticals. She resigned a few weeks before she died. Lassiter and I drove up to San Francisco to talk to her employers, and it was Gus who took the meeting. That's how I found out he'd left Psych, by the way."

  If there was reproach in that sentence, Shawn chose to ignore it. He was too interested in the rest of her story.

  "So Gus knew Mandy?"

  "They missed each other by a few weeks," O'Hara said. "In fact, if Mandy hadn't died, Gus might never have been offered his job. The company had wanted her for the position."

  There was another jab from Shawn's subconscious. Something was definitely weird here.

  "Okay, that's one coincidence," Shawn said. "Or is it just happenstance at this point?"

  "Either way," O'Hara said.

  "I'm still not sure why you ended up talking to Gus about Mandy Jansen," Shawn said. "If he was hired after she quit and they'd never actually met, what did he have to tell you about her?"

  "Not much," O'Hara said. "Although he did give us her complete personnel file. We were sent to him because Mandy reported to the senior vice president of marketing, and that was the job Gus had just been promoted into."

&n
bsp; "What happened to the former senior vice president of marketing?" Shawn said. "They erased his memory when they gave him a different job?"

  "We were told that if we wanted to pick his brain, we'd have to scrape it off the tree first," she said. "He'd gone skiing the weekend before we got there and died in a freak accident."

  Shawn's subconscious was screaming at him, and now there was no doubt what it was trying to say. "That's not the last coincidence, is it?"

  "Once Gus got the promotion to senior VP, he was reporting to a guy named Jim Macoby, who was second in command of marketing for the entire world," she said.

  "Don't tell me," Shawn said. "His plane crashed."

  "You think that's funny, but you're closer than you know. There was a problem with the electrical system in the office where they work. He went to get a cup of coffee from the machine and was electrocuted."

  Shawn felt a chill run through his body. "Is that the last of them?" he said carefully. "The last of your coincidences?"

  "As far as I know," O'Hara said. "Isn't that enough?"

  "It's more than enough," Shawn said. "More than enough to tell me none of these deaths was coincidence."

  "Then what?" O'Hara said.

  "They were murders."

  Chapter Twenty-five

  "We are doing well, but we can do even better by doing good."

  That sounded right. Gus had been practicing his closing line for half an hour now, and he thought he had finally perfected the intonation. As long as he made sure to add that note of surprise to the last phrase, as if he had just stumbled across the formulation in the middle of speaking it, all taint of self-righteousness disappeared.

  Gus was ready. He'd been preparing for this staff meeting for a week, although in a way his entire tenure at Benson Pharmaceuticals had been a warm-up for what he was about to do. "We are doing well, but we can do even better by doing good," he said again, this time with a perfect little fillip of surprise when he hit that last phrase.

  Gus glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes until the meeting started. Just enough time to practice his presentation one last time. He straightened his tie, shrugged his shoulders like a fighter entering the ring, and stood to address his imaginary audience. And he froze.