Mind-Altering Murder p-5 Page 3

  “To tell us how to investigate a crime scene?” Lassiter finished for him. “To determine the order in which we collect our information? Maybe you could save us all a lot of time and just let us know who killed the victim.”

  The rookie’s throat muscles throbbed as if he were fighting to keep his lunch from coming up. He’d seriously overstepped and he knew it. O’Hara might have joined Lassiter in torturing the kid, until she noticed the dark, wet patch on his uniform shirt just above his badge, and a small beige smudge next to it. Then she understood.

  “Tears don’t stain unless you let them, Officer Randall,” she said, reading his nameplate. “But foundation is a bitch to get out of blues. That’s the mother?”

  The officer’s face went from white to red like litmus paper dunked in lemon juice. “She asked me,” the officer started. “That is, she’s upset. Understandably upset, since it was her daughter and-”

  “Unless she was understandably upset because she killed her daughter,” Lassiter snapped.

  “I didn’t think-”

  “We’re well aware of that, Officer Randall,” Lassiter said.

  O’Hara could see a real danger that the rookie’s tears would soon be joining those of the grieving mother on his shirt. “It’s all right, Officer,” O’Hara said. “Comforting grieving survivors is part of the job. Just make sure to keep in mind what the most important part of the job is. Now, where’s the body?”

  O’Hara could sense Lassiter’s irritation without glancing over at him. He wasn’t done hazing the rookie yet. But something about this scene was troubling her, and she couldn’t figure out what it was. There was nothing new to her about tragedy striking in the best neighborhoods, at the most fortunate people, on the most beautiful of days. Still, ever since they got the call she’d had a rumbling in the back of her mind that this was going to be bad, and she needed to find out just how much.

  “Follow this path down the stairs,” the officer said quickly, before she could change her mind. “At the end of the house turn right onto the deck. There’s a sliding door to the laundry room. She’s inside.”

  “Thank you, Officer,” Lassiter said with exaggerated politeness. “You may go back to comforting the bereaved. But do us one favor. If she should happen to say something-anything-jot it down with a little note about the time, would you?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Lassiter turned and headed toward the stairs. O’Hara considered saying something reassuring to the kid, but really, what was the point? He had screwed up, and he deserved everything her partner had said to him, along with several of the things he’d wanted to but didn’t.

  O’Hara followed Lassiter down a steep, narrow flight of concrete steps that plunged down the hill alongside the white stucco wall. Halfway to the garden there was a door set into the side of the house. Out of habit Lassiter jiggled the knob and found it locked, then continued down.

  At the bottom of the hill the path led onto a small, flat parcel of garden surrounded by a high hedge of cypresses. The space had clearly been landscaped by pros some time ago, but since then it had been allowed to go wild. A patch of roses was overrun by weeds, while the gate to the caged vegetable garden had been left open and deer had eaten everything inside down to the roots. Something had gone wrong in this household even before today’s tragedy, and O’Hara made a mental note to check whether it was financial or medical or something else that might concern their investigation.

  “This way,” Lassiter said, gesturing to the wooden deck that came off the path. She followed him to a sliding glass door that had been left open and stepped through.

  She hadn’t thought much about what she was walking into. A basement converted into a laundry room or a hobby den, most likely. If she’d asked above she might have learned that the house’s lowest level had been converted into a apartment for the owner’s daughter.

  But whatever she might have learned would have done her no good once she stepped through the door. She might as well have plunged down the rabbit hole or passed through the mirror.

  What Juliet O’Hara saw was herself, flying. There was the long blond hair, the blue-and-gold cheerleader’s sweater and short pleated skirt revealing the toned tan legs floating effortlessly above the tiled floor.

  She blinked hard and forced away the sensation of flight. Blinked hard and forced herself back to the now.

  It was remarkable how strongly the young woman resembled O’Hara. It wasn’t just the hair and the cheerleader’s uniform; her face was the same Kewpie-doll oval and her eyes that piercing blue. She was a few years younger than the detective, but it was hard to tell by how many because of the way her eyes were bulging from their sockets and her mouth was twisted into an agonized grimace.

  The cheerleader was flying, but gravity’s gentle hand could not bring her down. There was a rope around her neck, tied to a pipe that ran across the ceiling, and it held her a foot above the ground.

  Chapter Five

  Gus glanced at his watch, then looked down at the orange chicken congealing on the plate in front of him. When the kid in the paper hat with a panda on it had dropped it on his table forty-seven minutes ago, Gus had picked up the plastic fork and made an attempt to eat a little of it. Even after two tines snapped off somewhere between the outer layer of citrus-flavored goo and the inner shell of deep-fried chicken skin, he still thought he might nibble at a couple of the smaller pieces. But before he could yank a chunk of chicken out of the rapidly hardening sauce, his stomach growled a warning and sent a tendril of bile into the back of his throat. If he tried to swallow anything from this plate, he’d have reason to regret it.

  It wasn’t the quality of the food that was turning Gus’ stomach. He’d eaten at several Chop Them Sticks outlets since they started popping up a few years back, and the Orange You Glad You Ordered the Chicken was always exactly the same-hardened nuggets of dubious poultry in a sauce that tasted like double-strength orange Jell-O. That was fine with Gus, who had long believed that an entree that doubled as dessert saved both time and money.

  Gus looked back at his watch just in time to see the larger hand slide over the four. In ten minutes it would be twelve thirty, and in ten more his flight would start boarding. He’d timed the walk from the strip of fast-food restaurants to the terminal and he knew it wouldn’t take him more than five minutes. Security wouldn’t add more than another five. The Burbank airport’s main midweek function was as a commuter portal, and since even the most laid-back techie tried to get to work no later than noon, the lines were rarely long this time of day.

  Better yet, Gus was leaving from the smaller of the two terminals. He’d decided to fly into San Francisco, even though it would cost half as much to land in Oakland. It wasn’t simply the convenience of being able to hop on a BART train at SFO that would take him to his ultimate destination-for the difference in ticket price Gus could have hired a limo in Oakland and still had money left over for a substantially better lunch than the one in front of him.

  It was, in fact, the ridiculously higher ticket price that convinced Gus to fly from Burbank to San Francisco. He didn’t think he’d left any clues about his trip, even making his plane reservations from what might have been Santa Barbara’s last pay phone. If he’d been careless, though, he didn’t want to make it easy for Shawn to track him down. That meant doing the opposite of what his friend would know he’d normally do. Which was, of course, to take the easiest flight or the cheapest, those two rarely occurring together.

  If he’d cared about cost, he would have flown out of LAX, where competition between airlines served to keep prices low. If convenience had been the key, there were frequent, if ludicrously costly, flights from Santa Barbara International to the Bay Area. Driving eighty miles down the always jammed 101 to Burbank only to spend as much as he would on a ticket from Santa Barbara was the dumbest thing he could have done.

  He thought he’d made it out of Santa Barbara without being noticed. Shawn had scheduled himself for anothe
r immersion in Criminal Genius and was without a doubt completely occupied in burning down a police station or looting an orphanage when Gus slid behind the wheel of the Echo and headed out of town. But if Shawn had begun to suspect that Gus was trying to slip away unnoticed, he might try to track down his flight. With a limited amount of time before his plane took off, Shawn would have to prioritize his search, and terminal two at Burbank would barely kiss the bottom of the list.

  Gus’ stomach released a fresh flare of acid and he thought he could feel a piece of the lining burn away. This was all so absurd. He was sneaking around as if he were cheating on his spouse, and it was tearing his insides apart. What he should have done was just tell Shawn he was heading up to San Francisco for the afternoon, and on the off chance that there were any follow-up questions, simply told him the truth.

  Except if he did that, he’d have to take the consequences. If he lied, if he snuck around, then he could put off that moment for just a little bit longer.

  It didn’t matter if his stomach felt like a face hugger had planted an egg in him and it was about to burst out. Once Shawn learned the truth, their entire lives as they knew them would be over. To postpone that, he’d take a little pain.

  Gus looked at his watch again. The minute hand had moved ahead a couple of clicks. It was time to start moving. He checked all the tables in the restaurant, in case Shawn had slipped behind one while he was staring at his food, but he was the only customer. Shawn was clever enough to go undercover behind the counter, but unless he was also clever enough to have become Chinese over the past couple of hours, Gus was safe from all three members of the Chop Them Sticks team.

  Gus slid out along his bench, then grabbed his tray and deposited his uneaten lunch in the trash. Normally he would have felt guilty about throwing away so much perfectly good food when there were hungry people all over the world, but he had more pressing things to feel guilty about right now, so this would have to wait. Besides, judging by the number of similarly full trays in the bin, this might not have counted as “perfectly good.”

  The air outside the restaurant was hot and dry; it stank of jet fuel and deep-fry oil. The sun blasted down through a cloudless sky and the heat waves radiating up from the asphalt made it feel like there hadn’t been a breeze in days. Gus longed to be back in Santa Barbara, hanging out at the pier with Shawn, feeling the soft salt spray on his face. Instead he quickened his step and crossed the street to where a narrow concrete sidewalk snaked along the lanes of the airport entrance.

  As he’d expected, the airport was practically deserted. Gus made a left at the Southwest counter and walked quickly through the narrow corridor that connected the two terminals. Fishing his driver’s license out of his pocket, he stepped up to the United counter.

  The ticket agent glanced at Gus’ license, then typed his name into the system. “Looks like we’re up for a quick trip today, Mr. Guster,” he said. “We have you booked on the nine o’clock return flight tonight.”

  “That’s right,” Gus said.

  “Must be business, then,” the agent said, printing out Gus’ boarding pass. “If you were going to San Francisco for pleasure, there’s no way you’d be coming back in only six hours.”

  “Business,” Gus agreed, feeling a sudden urge to confess everything to the complete stranger who was beaming across the counter at him. To explain everything he’d been feeling over the past couple of months and why what he was doing wasn’t really a betrayal. Instead he scooped up his driver’s license and boarding pass and walked toward the gate.

  Chapter Six

  Shawn glanced at his watch, then looked down at the popcorn shrimp and clam strips the waiter had just deposited on his table. The smell of perfectly fried seafood filled his senses and made his stomach growl. That was something he hadn’t expected. He’d taken a seat in the Yankee Pier only because it gave him a clear view of gate one, and he’d ordered only because there were other people waiting for his table. He’d chosen the first thing he saw on the menu and didn’t expect to eat any of it, having polished off a fast-food burger and fries at the Santa Barbara airport before catching his flight to SFO. But now that the food was here, there was no way he was going to leave a speck of it behind. He’d never known you could actually get good food in an airport. If it was going to happen anywhere, he figured, it would happen in San Francisco.

  If this turned out to be today’s only surprise, that would have been okay with Shawn. United flight 6396 was already approaching the runway. Five minutes after its wheels touched down the gate doors would open and the Burbank passengers would spill out. He’d sit here and watch them all as they deplaned, and if none of them looked the slightest bit familiar he’d be nothing but happy. He’d already bought a ticket for his return flight just in case, and it would start boarding in half an hour.

  But he didn’t expect to be on that plane. Not if Gus had been on this one. Because there was only one reason Gus would have taken the most expensive, least convenient flight he could have found, and that was to hide his trip from his best friend. That was why Shawn hadn’t bothered checking out any of the cheaper or easier flights. If Gus had taken one of them, Shawn would have known not to worry. Sure, it would have been strange that Gus had flown to San Francisco without telling him, but there could have been an innocent explanation for that. The most likely, in fact, was that Gus had told him at one of those moments when Shawn hadn’t been paying attention. Or that Gus had told him and he’d completely forgotten all about it, like he did most things that had no immediate impact on his own life. But for Gus to take this flight was a screaming admission that he was deliberately trying to hide the trip.

  Even that wouldn’t have seemed so disturbing if it had been the only strange behavior Gus had demonstrated in the last few weeks. But Gus had been acting so oddly that Shawn frequently found himself checking the back of Gus’ neck to see if the Martian invaders had been tinkering with his brain.

  It all started around the time they were hired to find Macklin Tanner. To Shawn this was the greatest case they’d ever landed. It was, in fact, the very case he’d had in mind when he first decided to become a private detective. In order to solve the crime he and Gus would have to live in a completely virtual world that no one had ever seen before. They were going to be paid to play and win the coolest computer game ever invented.

  And yet when Brenda Varda came to them for help, Gus hadn’t wanted to take the case. Instead he kept muttering about how the police had already looked into it and the guy had probably taken off on his own.

  That had sparked their first real argument since they had given up trying to agree on whether or not it was right for George Lucas to digitally “upgrade” the original Star Wars movies. Shawn’s point had been simple and, to his mind, obvious-if Tanner had gone for an unannounced vacation, then the case was guaranteed to have a happy ending. If, on the other hand, something had happened to him, then Shawn and Gus were the only ones who could help him. Either way they were going to get paid a lot of money for an experience most people could only dream about.

  Gus finally agreed to help on the case, but Shawn could tell his heart wasn’t in it. And once they were actually inside Darksyde City, the game’s fictional locale, Gus managed to be no fun at all. The first two days, he hardly killed anyone, even when a good bit of mayhem might have moved him up a level. It was like he couldn’t wait to get out of the virtual world.

  Even when he was back on real ground, Gus seemed distracted, moody, and distant. Shawn tried to ask him if something was wrong, but Gus insisted everything was fine. Then he went back to being a grump.

  This was not the Gus Shawn had known for so many years. Yes, he’d always had a tendency toward the judgmental and there was frequently an undercurrent of unnecessary seriousness running through him, but Shawn had never seen him in such a mood for longer than a day or so. Something was wrong.

  Then it got worse. For the first time in as long as Shawn had known him, Gus started to
become unreliable. He’d come into the office an hour late, claiming that his alarm hadn’t gone off or that he’d been stuck in traffic. And once he got there he’d disappear for hours at a time. When he came back he’d give only the vaguest of excuses, claiming that there was some kind of problem at the pharmaceuticals company where he still maintained a second job as a sales rep.

  This behavior presented Shawn with two immediate problems. The first was obvious-a small firm like Psych couldn’t afford to have two partners who were both unreliable, and this had been Shawn’s role since the firm’s founding. It was a position he prized, and he didn’t plan to give it up just because Gus was in a bad mood.

  But the second problem was much more serious. Shawn recognized all the excuses Gus was giving him because Shawn had used them himself, over and over again. So he knew these were not only lies, but lazy lies. They were the lies of someone who doesn’t care if anyone believes them. They were the lies of a man who’d moved on.

  Shawn had spent a lot of time trying to figure out why Gus might not want to be part of Psych anymore, but he couldn’t come up with a single reason. They did what they wanted when they wanted, took only the cases that sounded like fun, and managed to avoid almost all sense of adult responsibility. Who could ever find fault with that? Who could ever want anything else?

  In general, Shawn didn’t like taking on two cases at once. Not since the time he’d gotten mixed up and had accused a suspect in one case of committing the murder in the second. But this was different. One of these cases, as they said on the movie posters, was personal.

  So while Shawn continued to search for Macklin Tanner, he was simultaneously going undercover to spy on Gus. Fortunately his cover was strikingly similar to his own persona-in fact, he was going undercover as himself-so he could move back and forth between his two roles without needing to adjust fake mustaches or even change clothes. But while the outside world might see him as a psychic detective hunting for a missing tech genius, secretly he was engaged in spying on his partner.