The Call of the Mild p-3 Read online

  Heidi pressed the red button on her phone for the fifteenth time. Where the hell was security? They should have had this nut out of here ages ago.

  Finally a side door banged open and Fritz the security guard came through. “What seems to be the trouble here?”

  Well, duh, Heidi thought. It’s the crazy lifeguard with the foot fetish. She was about to point out the obvious when she noticed that Fritz’s hands were up in the air and his face had gone white.

  Heidi turned to see that the lifeguard had pulled out a gun and was aiming it directly at Fritz.

  “I want to see Mr. Rushton,” he said. “Now.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  The others hadn’t been gone long. Gus reached over and touched Shawn’s sleeping bag. It was still warm. And the fire was blazing in the ring, a pot nestled among the embers heating water for instant coffee and freeze-dried eggs.

  Gus looked back at the sun. It had climbed in the sky and it pounded him with its heat. But it still didn’t seem to give off any light. The only illumination in the campground came from the flickering fire. Shadows jumped, danced, laughed at the edges of the camp.

  “Shawn?” Gus whispered. Beyond the reach of the firelight something rustled in the underbrush. Gus tried to peer into the darkness, but he couldn’t see anything. “Shawn?” he whispered again, but there was no answer.

  Where had Shawn gone? Where had they all gone? And why had they left him here alone? He bent down to check one of the sleeping bags and his hand came back sticky and feathered. There was a gash in the bag, and as Gus stood up, the feathers flew out of the tear and swirled around his face. He shook his hand to get the feathers off, but they wouldn’t fall. He slapped at them, and his hand came back red with blood.

  The gash in the sleeping bag was bleeding.

  This wasn’t possible. Even as his rational mind was being consumed with terror, Gus knew that a nylon shell filled with duck feathers couldn’t bleed. And that meant this couldn’t be real. He had to be dreaming. He had to be dreaming that dream. All he had to do was wake up.

  Gus squeezed his fist until his fingernails were digging into his palm. Then he looked down at the sleeping bag. It was still oozing blood. He looked up at the sun.

  The sun was oozing blood, too.

  There was another rustling in the bushes behind him. Gus turned to see who was coming after him. What was coming after him. A branch tore off a tree and fell to the ground and a hand reached through the opening in the tree trunk. Except it wasn’t a hand, it was more like a-

  Gus woke up. His eyes flashed open. The sun was coming up over the mountains, and it was actually shining light down on the campsite.

  Shawn was sitting by the fire mixing something in a metal Sierra Cup with a plastic spoon.

  “I keep stirring and stirring,” Shawn said when he noticed Gus was awake. “But this still doesn’t look like eggs Benedict.” He tilted the steel cup so Gus could see the yellow-and-white soup floating inside.

  Shawn was here, but the lawyers were all gone. As he crawled out of his sleeping bag, Gus searched the camp for any trace of them. “Where is everybody?”

  “Bathroom break,” Shawn said. “They worked out some system where the three of them go into the woods together so no one actually has to look at anyone else. Or something.” He took a sip of his eggs and grimaced. “If I ever come up with a brilliant moneymaking scheme that revolves around eggs Benedict you can drink with a straw, talk me out of it.”

  Gus wanted to grab Shawn by the shoulders until his head fell off, grew spider legs, and ran away. How could he be thinking about anything so trivial right now?

  There was a rustling from the bushes. Before Gus had time to formulate the image of the creature in his head, the three lawyers stepped out into the camp. Savage and Balowsky stayed a step behind as Gwendolyn walked up to Shawn and reached for his pack.

  “We’ve taken a vote,” she said. “We’ve decided to share control of the map.”

  Shawn nudged the pack out of her reach with his foot. “I voted that if Quaker Oats was going to release a new flavor of Life cereal they should go for chocolate instead of maple-and-brown-sugar,” he said. “They seemed to think that my vote didn’t count, especially since they never had an election.”

  If Shawn had hoped to distract Gwendolyn into a discussion of the Quaker Oats company’s unfair decision-making process, he was disappointed. “We don’t trust you and your little sidekick.”

  Gus should let that go, he knew. There were monsters in the woods. They couldn’t start fighting among themselves. But he found himself taking a step forward, his hands clenching into fists. In the last few days he’d been held hostage first by a mime, then by a group of actors. He’d been stranded in the mountains and forced to hike a bazillion miles to save his life. He spent half his energy fighting to stay alive and the other half struggling against blind, irrational panic. Through it all he’d remained pleasant and polite. And what was his reward? To be insulted by a lawyer-a lawyer! Worse-a lawyer with a thirty-four percent chance of being a mass killer. He wasn’t going to take it anymore. “I am no man’s sidekick,” he said.

  “I didn’t say you were a man’s sidekick,” Gwendolyn said. “I said you were his.”

  “That’s it,” Gus said. “The last straw.”

  Somehow Shawn didn’t seem to share his anger, even though the barb had been aimed primarily at him. “I guess that makes you the camel’s back,” Shawn said. “That could come in handy on the rest of the hike. Which is what we should really be saving our energy for.”

  “I’m ready to hike as soon as I can see the map,” Gwendolyn said.

  “You want that map?” Gus said. “You can come through me to get it.”

  “Because that would be a long and exciting fight,” Shawn said casually. “After all, she’s only the Master of Sinanju looking for an excuse to scoop your brains out through your nose with her pinky finger. And you never came in lower than second when we played Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots.”

  “We’ve got to have this out now,” Gus said.

  “That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “I mean, it’s not like they came up to us and deliberately tried to get us mad so that we’d start a fight, giving them an opportunity to kick our asses and take the map from our cold, dead hands. And when I say it’s not like that, I mean it’s exactly like that.”

  The blood pounding in Gus’ ears was almost enough to drown out Shawn’s logic. Almost, but not quite. He dropped his hands and felt the blood surging back into his fingers as they unclenched. “So by not fighting, we win,” Gus said. “It’s like a Zen thing.”

  “Wax on, wax off,” Shawn agreed.

  “That is the lamest excuse for wussing out on a fight I’ve ever heard,” Balowsky said.

  “Almost as lame as letting the girl do your fighting for you while you hide behind her?” Shawn said.

  “Even lamer,” Gwendolyn said. “They know who their strongest warrior is.”

  “I know I do,” Shawn agreed. “If there’s one of the three of you who’s tough enough to toss Jade off a cliff, I’d vote for you.”

  “And yet the other two want to give her the only map out of here,” Gus said

  “Nice try,” Savage said. “But we can work that out between ourselves once we’ve got the map. Now hand it over.”

  Shawn picked up his pack and slipped it over his shoulders. “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll be the ones going in the right direction. You get moving, and we’ll call out the turns.”

  He headed out of the camp between two tall trees. Gus shouldered his pack and followed. There was a moment’s whispered discussion among the lawyers, and then Gwendolyn led the others quickly through another stand of trees and around so that they were positioned in front of Shawn and Gus.

  “You’re going to give us the map,” Gwendolyn said.

  “You couldn’t trick us into a fight; you’re not going to outsmart us,” Shawn said. “There’s no way we’re goin
g to give it to you.”

  “Except that there are only two of you,” Savage said. “And there are three of us.”

  Savage took one menacing step forward. But as his foot hit the ground, something snaked through the litter of dried pine needles and seized him around the ankle. Before anyone could move, the snare tightened on his foot and flung the lawyer upside down high among the top branches of the trees. Gus heard a meaty thump as Savage’s head collided with the trunk. Gus peered up. Way above them, he could see the tiny, broken figure of the lawyer dangling limply from the rope.

  “I guess that makes us even again,” Shawn said. “Shall we start walking?”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  After leaving the investigation, Henry had thought he’d go back to rock and roll camp. He’d driven most of the way to Ojai beating out his drum solo on the steering wheel. But he couldn’t focus on jamming right now; his mind was completely preoccupied with a double homicide, and he knew that even though he wasn’t officially involved, he couldn’t just let it alone. So he made a U-turn as soon as he passed the end of the divided section of Highway 33 and headed home.

  He’d spent the next day working the phone and the computer trying to find any information on the case. He’d even popped into police headquarters, but Lassiter and O’Hara were out in the field, and no one knew when they’d be back. Of course he could have called their cells and offered his services, but he knew what they’d have said: He was retired.

  The long and fruitless day landed him exactly one piece of information-the janitorial contracting service Arnold Svaco had worked for had a contract to clean, among many much less interesting places, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Arnold had been working there almost exclusively for years. Maybe that meant something, although Henry had no idea what. He left the information on Lassiter’s voice mail, just in case.

  The next day was the last session of camp, and when he woke up Henry decided he’d go back for the big jam session finale. The case was still pushing the beat out of his mind, but after wasting all of yesterday, he decided he could leave the police work to the working police.

  He was getting into the car for the drive to Ojai when his cell rang. He answered. And heard the last two words he ever expected to hear since his retirement:

  Hostage situation.

  Henry blew through a half dozen red lights on his way to Edgecliff Road, but by the time he got to Rushton, Morelock’s mansion offices, the parking lot was already filled with police cruisers. He jumped out of his car as Lassiter rushed up to him.

  “How bad is it?” Henry said.

  “How bad can it get?” Lassiter said. He started towards the mansion, assuming that Henry would keep up with him. They blew past the front door and continued along the exterior of the building.

  “What does he think he’s doing?” Henry said.

  “ ‘Bringing justice to an unjust world,’ ” Lassiter said. “Or something even dumber. You can ask him yourself. He’s been demanding to speak to you.”

  There was a window open at the far end of the building. Lassiter stopped short, but gestured for Henry to walk up to it.

  Henry peered into the open window. The room was enormous, the size of Henry’s whole house, and furnished in nautical antiques. Across a huge desk Henry could see an elderly man in a wheelchair. He’d never met Oliver Rushton, but he’d seen enough pictures in the paper to recognize him. Standing over the lawyer was Officer Chris Rasmussen. He was pointing a gun at Rushton’s head.

  Henry had to think fast. He should have formulated a plan of action on the drive down, but the situation was so insane he couldn’t bring himself to believe it until he saw it for himself. Now he had to improvise.

  “Officer Rasmussen,” he said with as much authority as he could muster. “Report.”

  “I came to interview Mr. Rushton,” Rasmussen said, snapping to attention. “He was unwilling to speak to me, so I was required to use force.”

  “That’s very good thinking, Officer,” Henry said. “Excellent initiative. Then what?”

  “He still won’t talk!” Rasmussen wailed, sounding close to tears. “I’ve been asking and asking, but he won’t tell me anything! And I keep trying to remember what you told us about interrogation techniques, but I forget!”

  “It’s okay, Officer,” Henry said. “I don’t think we covered that in class.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better!”

  Henry could see Rasmussen’s hand shaking; he was clearly about to snap. Rushton, on the other hand, looked completely in control.

  “I’ve tried to explain to the officer that I haven’t heard of the woman he’s inquiring about,” the lawyer said. “I’m willing to look at a picture, if you have one.”

  “She called you!” Rasmussen shouted.

  “She called my offices,” Rushton said. “As I’ve explained, many people work here, and she could have been calling for any of them. Or she could have misdialed. I have offered to let you go over my phone logs for the day in question, to see if her call shows up. What else can I do?”

  “You can tell the truth!”

  “I am telling the truth,” Rushton said. “The sad fact is that one of the lawyers in the firm might well be involved in these crimes. That person may have killed one of my own employees. As soon as the lawyers return from their retreat, I promise to urge them to cooperate fully with your investigation.”

  “You’re stalling!” Rasmussen’s finger was tightening on the trigger. Henry had to do something fast.

  “Officer Rasmussen, you will stand down now,” he commanded.

  “I can’t!” Now there were tears in Rasmussen’s eyes. “This is all my fault, Detective Spencer. Ellen Svaco was involved in some kind of crime ring in my own town, and I missed it. And I missed the redial thing, too. You tried to teach me, but I was too stupid to understand any of it, and now I’ve messed everything up. I’ve got to make it right!”

  “This isn’t the way, Officer,” Henry said. “You can’t fix one crime with another crime.”

  “That’s what you said when I was in school, but how do I know this isn’t something that’s much more complicated in grown-up life? Nothing is like it’s supposed to be!”

  Rasmussen was about to explode. Henry had to do something fast. He wanted to dive through the window and knock the gun out of his hand. He wanted to tell the officer what a fool he was making of himself. If it had been Shawn in that room, he would have.

  But of course his own son would never have been in such a ludicrous position. For all that Shawn pretended not to listen to Henry’s advice, the fact was he always absorbed the important parts. He had allowed Henry to mold him into a man. Chris Rasmussen had never had anyone to do that for him.

  “Officer,” Henry started, then softened his tone. “Chris. We had forty-five minutes together twenty years ago. Forty-five minutes with a crowd of other children. And you took that brief meeting and built your entire life around it. Do you have any idea how proud that makes me?”

  Henry could see sunlight glinting off the tears in Rasmussen’s face. “Proud?”

  “I’m only sorry I wasn’t able to be there for you all along,” Henry said. “I wish I had. I always wanted a second son. I hope you’ll allow me to consider you that now.”

  Rasmussen’s hand trembled furiously. And then the gun dropped to the floor.

  “Clear!” Henry shouted, and the office was full of police officers in body armor. Henry’s last sight of Rasmussen was just a scrap of flesh buried under a mountain of black uniforms.

  Henry was about to rejoin Lassiter when Rushton called his name. He turned back to see that the lawyer had moved towards the window.

  “I hope you meant what you said about cooperating,” Henry said to him.

  “My devotion to the cause of justice is as strong as yours, even if we express it in different ways,” Rushton said. “I suspected that something was wrong in my firm, but until today I didn’t realize just how b
ad it was. And that concerns you as well.”

  “Me?”

  “I heard you mention you have a son,” Rushton said. “He’s a detective, isn’t he?”

  “Technically,” Henry said, feeling a cold shiver of fear run down his spine.

  “Then there’s something you need to know.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  This time there was no chance that Gus was going to lose sight of the rest of the hiking party. Shawn hadn’t even needed to bring up his notion of roping them all together; no one moved out of anyone else’s view. Gwendolyn and Balowsky walked together, staring at each other. At one point, Gwendolyn, her eyes fixed firmly on Balowsky’s face, hit a rock with her foot and tripped. She fell to the ground, rolled, and popped back up-never looking away from the other lawyer.

  Even though there were two people on watch all night long, one of them had managed to slip away in the night and set the trap that took out Savage. If the killer could strike this quickly and this invisibly, what hope did the rest of them have?

  From their place at the end of the pack, Gus and Shawn examined Gwendolyn and Balowsky. They both seemed completely consumed in studying each other for treachery.

  “One of them is a pretty good actor,” Shawn said. “I wonder if Helstrom needs a new member in his troupe.”

  “If only I had shared my watch with someone besides Savage, since he clearly wan’t the killer,” Gus said. “I would have known if whoever was staying up with me had sneaked off to set a snare. That would have narrowed the suspect pool down to one.”

  “How much could you actually see when you were on watch?” Shawn said.

  “I could see you sleeping,” Gus said. “I could see you sleeping peacefully all night long.”

  “You mean you could see whatever was in the direct firelight,” Shawn said.

  “That, too,” Gus said. “But mostly I could see you sleeping.”

  “Yes, the clever and subtle dig has been heard and now acknowledged,” Shawn said. “But my greater point was that it was really dark in the camp. If Savage had slipped away on your watch, are you sure you wouldn’t have seen him?”