Psych: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read Read online

  Shepler’s finger tightened on the trigger. Gus rolled along the floor until he could scramble to his feet. He bolted for the door, but the handle wouldn’t turn.

  “Don’t you remember? Shawn asked me to lock you all in.” Shepler leveled the gun at Gus.

  “Don’t you want to explain your master plan?” Gus said, still trying to make the door work. “Or maybe make me watch you execute all my friends before you lock me in the dungeon to suffer for hours with the memory burning in my brain?”

  “Because I care so much about what you think? Are you always this arrogant?”

  Shepler was moving closer. Not so close that Gus had any hope of grabbing the gun, just near enough there was no chance of missing.

  Gus only had one prayer. Shawn. Maybe he was coming out of his trance. Maybe he’d been faking all along. Maybe he could be sneaking up on Shepler as they spoke.

  Gus risked a glance in his direction. He wasn’t. He hadn’t. He couldn’t.

  But one part of him was moving. Shawn’s eyes were shifting back and forth urgently. Gus followed his gaze and let it lead him to the harpist.

  “He doesn’t even want to give a speech. He’s not going to go for a flashback,” Gus said.

  Shawn’s eyes widened slightly and shifted quickly back toward the harpist. Now Gus saw what he was indicating. The harp case stood open behind her.

  Shepler took another step toward Gus. There was no chance he could miss from this distance. “I’ve seen that movie, too. You pretend to talk to someone, I turn around to see who it is, blah blah blah.”

  “Shawn?” It was Tara’s voice. She was blinking slowly, as if trying to focus.

  This time Shepler did turn his head, and Gus took advantage of the moment. He dived to the ground, sliding across the slick marble like a puck on an air-hockey table, crashing into the harp and toppling it with a musical crash. As bullets smashed into the wall behind him, Gus rolled over and pulled himself behind the open case. He crouched down, wishing that Shawn had brought someone who played an even bigger instrument.

  “Do you really think they make harp cases bulletproof?” Shepler said. “It’s not like there’s a big demand for them in war zones.”

  There were three shots, and three holes appeared in the top of the case. “Nope, not bulletproof,” Shepler said. “Let’s see if you are.”

  There was nowhere to run. There was nowhere to hide. There was only one chance, and it was as slight as they come.

  “Tara!”

  “Gus,” Shepler said wearily, “when a drugged-out zombie is your only hope, you might as well pack it in.”

  “Tara, Mr. Shepler put pickles on Shawn’s burger!”

  Gus pulled his head down to his knees and waited for the impact of the bullet into his body. And waited.

  There was no gunshot, just a muffled crack, and then a thump. And after a moment, Tara’s pleading voice.

  “Gus, I think Mr. Shepler fell down the stairs.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Santa Barbara chilled under a blanket of fog. Across the city, smoke was pouring out of fireplace chimneys, furnaces were roaring for the first time in months, and the homeless who had moved here for the weather were bundled in multiple copies of the Times.

  Somehow, however, the impound office was as hot as ever. It seemed to be made out of a miraculous new kind of tin that would let heat in but never allow it out.

  Of course that could be partly due to the fact that it was crammed full of people. The day after the Eagle’s View affair, when the hallucinogen’s twelve-hour effectiveness had worn off and all its victims had been released from the hospital, Bert Coules demanded that Shawn be arrested for his outrageous accusation. Chief Vick wouldn’t accede to that, since there was no law against maligning public officials. But she did strongly urge Shawn to either prove what he’d said or take it back before Coules found some statute to hold him on.

  Gus thought this showed a good deal of ingratitude. After all they had solved the murder of Dallas Steele and had helped bring his killer to justice. Or, if not exactly justice, death. Either way Shepler wouldn’t get what he’d been planning on, which was complete control of the Steele estate once it passed to the Dallas Steele Foundation, of which he had been the executive director.

  Tara had been captured, and was undergoing observation at an upscale spalike psychiatric hospital where she’d probably spend the rest of her life, thanks to Veronica Mason Steele’s generosity. If she ever stood trial, she might easily be sentenced to multiple centuries in prison. But it would be hard for even the toughest prosecutor to find her sane enough to stand trial when she honestly seemed to believe that the dead podiatrist in the trunk of her stolen car had ended up there by falling down a flight of stairs.

  Even so, the police refused to take Shawn’s word that the city’s district attorney was also a murderer. So Shawn had arranged a demonstration, and because of—or maybe despite—the results of his last gathering, this one was well-attended. Chief Vick had brought Detective Lassiter, Detective O’Hara, and several uniformed officers, while Coules had come on his own. Henry Spencer was there with a large scrapbook in one arm and Mindy in the other. And of course, Alicia the harpist had set up her instrument in the corner. Arno Galen was nowhere to be seen since, as Shawn cheerfully admitted, he’d only had him brought to Eagle’s View to annoy him.

  “Before we start,” Shawn said cheerfully, “who wants a beverage?”

  The others glared at him. Even Gus struggled to find the humor.

  “Get on with it, Spencer,” Coules growled.

  “Okay, but I’m warning you, we’re going to need flashbacks. Are you ready, Alicia?”

  From the corner, she let loose a series of glissandos.

  “That’s enough.” Shawn held up a hand to stop her. “We’re only going back a few weeks. Now I need a volunteer from the audience.” He scanned the crowd packed into the tiny space, then pointed at Lassiter. “You, sir, step up behind the counter, please.”

  Lassiter didn’t move. Chief Vick leaned over and whispered in his ear. He scowled, but he shuffled over to take the place of the attendant.

  “First I want you to assure the audience that we’ve never met and that I haven’t given you any direction on what to do,” Shawn said.

  “We have met more times than I care to count,” Lassiter said. “And, in fact, you’ve not only told me what you wanted—you typed out a script. There’s only one ‘s’ in ‘genius,’ by the way.”

  “Sorry. The key sticks,” Gus said.

  “Can we just get on with this farce?” Coules said. “I have criminals to prosecute.”

  Shawn turned to his audience and bowed. “Allow me to set the scene. We’re in a tin shack that passes for an impound office. It’s well over a hundred degrees inside. And two intrepid young sleuths come in on a desperate rescue mission. Alicia!”

  The harpist let loose with a brief glissando. Shawn and Gus stepped up to the counter. Lassiter glared at them.

  Shawn rapped on the counter. “My good man, we are here to collect a car. Prithee, hasten and fetch it!”

  “Prithee?” Henry said. Mindy, who had wrapped most of her limbs around him, beamed at his interruption.“Are we flashing all the way back to the sixteenth century?”

  “First, all good drama includes the word ‘prithee,’” Shawn said. “Second, you should be ashamed of yourself. That girl’s a third your age.” He turned back to the counter. “Hasten already.”

  Lassiter glanced at his script. “That will be six thousand dollars.”

  Gus clapped his hands to his cheeks in full Macauley Culkin. “I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Then get lost.”

  Shawn touched his fingertips to his forehead. “Wait. I’m getting an emanation from the beyond. The spirits are speaking to me. They’re telling me you’re not who you claim to be. You are not the legal holder of this position in an impound lot licensed to serve our fair city. You are in fact a convict who h
as recently escaped from a chain gang.”

  Lassiter checked his script, then dropped it on the counter. “I am not going to say this.”

  “You have to,” Shawn said. “Gus stayed up all night working on that script.”

  “You’d think it was easy, but it turns out good dialogue has to advance both the story and the character, while providing a break from straight exposition,” Gus said.

  “Just say it,” Detective O’Hara said. “We’re never going to get out of here until you do.”

  Lassiter muttered something under his breath, but he picked up the pages and read from them. “Oh, you are indeed a wise and powerful psychic. How it pains me to know that my own master plan depends on depriving the rest of the world of your geniusssss.”

  He took a shotgun out from under the counter and aimed it at them. Shawn motioned to Alicia, and she glissandoed them back to the present.

  “End scene!” Shawn said. “I’d like a special round of applause for our volunteer from the audience.”

  No one clapped. Chief Vick said, “Mr. Spencer, what was the point of that? We already know what happened when you came to get Mr. Guster’s car.”

  “Do we?” Shawn said. “Do we really?”

  “Yes,” Gus said. “We already told them.”

  “Oh,” Shawn said. “Sorry we wasted your time, then. Come on, Gus.” He pushed through the crowd of astonished and angry faces to the door.

  “I’m waiting for my apology, Spencer,” Coules shouted at him.

  Shawn stopped and turned back. “You know, I don’t think we did tell you what this refugee from a chain gang was doing here.”

  “I don’t believe we did,” Gus said.

  “Remember, he was serving time in Arizona,” Shawn said. “After he escaped he came directly to Santa Barbara and murdered the real impound lot attendant so he could take over his position. It’s a safe bet that a second-generation criminal with a history of armed robbery wouldn’t be that excited to land a minimum-wage job. He was here for a specific reason.”

  “Yes, Mr. Spencer, the police were also able to reach that astonishing conclusion.” Chief Vick was finding it hard to hide her frustration in the heat of the shack. “We simply couldn’t figure out what that reason was.”

  “That’s because you weren’t looking in the right place,” Shawn said. “Alicia!”

  Lassiter raised the shotgun. “I swear, Spencer, if you start another flashback, I will beat you to death with this. And I guarantee you there won’t be a single witness who’ll say they saw me do it.”

  “No more flashbacks,” Shawn said. “Just a little traveling music.” He signaled to Alicia, and she launched into a jaunty tune. Shawn took a moment to appreciate the music, then walked around the counter and out the back door to the impound lot. The others followed.

  Shawn waved at the acres of cars in front of them. “John Marichal came all the way across the country to die here.”

  “If you consider the next state over to be all the way across the country,” Coules said. “He escaped from a chain gang in Arizona.”

  “Only because he was caught holding up a liquor store to finance the rest of his journey,” Shawn said. “He originally came from Florida. Miami. Isn’t that where you’re from, Bert?”

  “Me and Detective O’Hara and eighteen million other people.”

  “Good point. And among those eighteen million people were Herman and Betty Walinski.”

  “Didn’t he used to run the tackle shop down on the pier?” Lassiter said.

  “Before that, he ran a small fleet of tow trucks,” Shawn said. “Which he then contracted to the city, and used that connection to open the impound yard, later expanding it into one of the few combined impound-and-wrecking yards on the West Coast. When he’d made his fortune here, he used some of it to open his tackle store, where he spent a happy retirement.”

  “Thanks for the lesson in local history,” Coules said. “Is there a point?”

  “Dad?” Henry stepped up and handed Shawn the scrapbook. Shawn flipped it open to the picture of Herman as a young police officer. “It turns out that before Herman moved to Santa Barbara, he was an officer on the Miami PD. He went undercover with some bad cops and managed to bust them for participating in the biggest race track heist in Florida history, the Calder Race Course robbery of nineteen seventy-two.”

  Shawn flipped the pages over and showed them headlines about the robbery from Miami newspapers. “But after that heroic act, Herman turned his back on law enforcement. He quit the force, took a long vacation in Europe, and then settled here, where he never told anyone he used to be a cop. Wonder why.”

  “Because cops don’t like cops who inform on their fellow officers, even if they deserve it,” Detective O’Hara said. “That robbery happened before I was born, but there were still people upset about it in the department when I was there.”

  “That’s what my dad assumed,” Shawn said. “It’s probably what any cop would assume. But Gus and I aren’t cops.”

  “And we can all thank the city of Santa Barbara for that,” Coules said.

  “The money from the race track robbery was never recovered,” Gus said, trying to get things back on track.

  “Three million dollars,” Shawn said. “You can bet that the people who planned the heist never stopped looking for it. But all the crooks were caught, and no one had a dollar. Imagine what it would be like to spend twenty-some years in jail with nothing to do besides trying to figure out who’d taken your money. And when you finally did, to know there was nothing you could do about it until your sentence was up.”

  Shawn stopped to take a breath, and Gus stepped into the breach. “Then, when you got out, you were too old and too feeble to go after the SOB who stole your money. But if it couldn’t help you, at least you could pass the information to your son, who’d followed you into the armed-robbery business.”

  Lassiter stared at them suspiciously. “You’re saying that John Marichal’s father was part of the Calder heist?”

  “It’ll be pretty easy to check out,” O’Hara said. “I can call one of my buddies out there.”

  “So let’s go with it for now,” Shawn said.

  “And he was looking for the money here?” Henry said. “You’re not going to try to tell us that Herman was one of the thieves. He was a friend of mine.”

  “And yet in all those years of friendship, he never mentioned his past in law enforcement,” Shawn said. “Because the fewer people who knew about it, the fewer people would think to connect him to the money. But John Marichal’s father did, and he sent his son to get it. Unfortunately, by the time the lad got off the chain gang, Herman had died of cancer, so John was going to have to search for the loot himself.”

  “Here?” Chief Vick said.

  “Where better to hide three million cash than in acres of abandoned automobiles? Marichal killed the original attendant and took his place so he could take his time and search every car in the yard. He would have started with Florida plates and tried to move on from there.”

  “This is ludicrous,” Coules said. “Why would the money still be there after all this time?”

  Shawn turned to his father. “I think you can figure out why.”

  Henry thought back on the Herman Walinski he knew. He was kind and gentle and happier with his life than anyone he’d ever known. All Heman had wanted to do was sit behind the counter in his tackle store and design lures. “Because Herman didn’t need it. Maybe he never did. Maybe he just stole it to keep it out of the hands of the thieves. Either way, he made his own fortune in the towing business, and never had to touch the loot.”

  “And so here it sat for almost forty years, until Old Man Marichal got out of jail,” Shawn said. “He told his son what he had figured out, and young John headed west. He must have told someone else, too.”

  “Someone he was scared of,” Gus said. “Why else would he talk?”

  “And what would frighten this old man more than the
threat of spending his last few years back in jail?” Shawn said. “I wonder who’d have the power to do that.”

  “Say,” Gus said. “Didn’t Bert Coules used to work in the Miami DA’s office?”

  “I believe he did,” Shawn said.

  All heads swiveled to stare at Coules. He took a step backward. “You can’t believe this fraud.”

  “I’ve often started off with that attitude, Mr. Coules,” the chief said. “But by the time he’s done, I almost always find myself convinced.”

  “I am not going to put up with this.” Bert Coules started back toward the street, but Lassiter and O’Hara stepped in his way.

  “Just for a little while longer,” O’Hara said.