and couldn’t help him get a promotion, so he stuck me with the tab.”
“That is brutal,” Shawn said. “No wonder the tan guy is so concerned about us.”
Shawn turned back to the thorny problem of undoing the changes an evil genie had done in The Arabian Nights. Gus thought about grabbing another Wii control and joining the game, but he couldn’t manage to be quite as worry-free as Shawn. He didn’t understand much of what the lawyer had been hinting about, but it seemed increasingly apparent that the man who’d hired them was some kind of master manipulator. Shawn and Gus had thought they’d gotten exactly what they wanted from Rushton, but now Gus wasn’t sure. What were they getting themselves into?
Gus twirled his chair towards the window as he tried to make sense of it all. But what he saw there only made him more confused. They had left the Central Valley behind them; if he craned his neck, he could see its edge far in the distance. But whatever they were flying over, it wasn’t the approach to Las Vegas. There were no lights in the distance, no freeways filled with suckers speeding towards their inevitable fleecing.
What there was was… nothing.
Nothing, anyway, that belonged anywhere near a five-star luxury resort. There were rolling hills densely covered with pine forest. There were frequent outcroppings of granite. There were rivers and lakes, and Gus thought he saw a waterfall.
What there wasn’t was any sign of human habitation. No houses. No buildings. No roads.
Gus did his best to call up that map of California in his head. If you flew out of Santa Barbara and headed east and then north, which was their trajectory as best as he could figure, you’d pass over farm towns like Lemoore and Hanford, and then you’d hit wilderness. And not wilderness like those parts of Santa Barbara where an old bungalow had been torn down but the plans for the McMansion hadn’t been approved yet. This was real wilderness. Specifically the John Muir wilderness, almost six hundred thousand acres of nothing. And beyond that, more wilderness areas and two national parks, and then a lot of nothing, and then Death Valley, which was also a lot of nothing but was also hot enough to kill you in about ten minutes this time of year.
Gus would be the first to admit he wasn’t a connoisseur of high-end luxury resorts, but he had never heard of one anywhere within hundreds of miles of where he assumed they were now. And even if there was one somewhere below them, it probably wouldn’t have a lot of amenities, since there didn’t seem to be any roads to supply them.
As Gus was trying to picture a place he’d actually want to stay in anywhere on a line between here and Toronto, the pilot’s voice came over a sound system. “If you look out the left side of the cabin, you’ve got a great view of Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous United States.”
Gus was right about their location, but, he thought hopefully, maybe he’d been wrong about the purpose. This was probably just a sightseeing detour, a chance to give the lawyers a bit of spectacular scenery before taking them to the resort that was undoubtedly waiting for them in some civilized part of the world.
“For the person who bribed the employee at High Mountain Wilderness Retreats to get our destination and maps down the mountain, Mr. Rushton has a special message,” the pilot continued. “Mount Whitney was just a decoy destination.”
The chopper took a hard turn to the right. Gus had to grab the armrests of his chair to keep from falling to the floor like the crew of the Enterprise during a photon torpedo attack. When he’d recovered his equilibrium, he saw with horror that the ground was rushing straight up at them.
“This is your new destination,” the pilot said as the helicopter lowered itself onto a rocky outcropping at the peak of another mountain. “Last stop. Everybody out.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Henry and Rasmussen rode in silence all the way to Pasadena. Since the moment they’d left the dweeb’s office, Rasmussen had spoken only twice-once to confirm that Arnold Svaco was indeed Ellen’s cousin, her sole relative, and once to accuse Henry of violating every principle he’d taught Rasmussen to live by. Henry tried to retort that a policeman couldn’t hope to get by with just the information he’d learned in junior high school, but one look at the pout on the officer’s face told him not to bother.
Instead he spent the drive thinking through the case. He had no doubt that Ellen Svaco was the emotional force behind the Fluffy Foundation. The cat box, food, and toys in her house were all for a pet who’d been dead for half a decade; they must have constituted a shrine or a monument to his memory. But it was her cousin Arnold who was footing the bills. Why? And more important, how?
It wasn’t that Arnold was rich. He made even less than Ellen had, under thirty thousand dollars a year working as a janitor for a contractor that cleaned government offices. Yet somehow in the last five years he’d managed to donate ten times his gross salary to Fluffy’s memory.
So who was behind these donations-and why? Since the charity was actually paying out to pet owners, it didn’t seem to be a money-laundering operation, or at least not a particularly efficient one.
And then there was the big question-why was Ellen Svaco killed? It couldn’t have been for the money, because it appeared that she never had possession of it. Nothing about this case was making sense. Least of all Henry’s temporary partner.
Henry pulled the car up outside a decaying bungalow in Northwest Pasadena. Its shingles were cracked, rain gutters sagging, and the lawn in front was a patch of dirt.
Rasmussen looked up from his hands for the first time since they’d left Santa Barbara. “This isn’t the Pasadena Police Station,” he said.
“Can’t fault you on your observational skills,” Henry said. “Arnold Svaco lives here.”
“We need to check in with the locals,” Rasmussen said. “We don’t have jurisdiction.”
“I don’t have jurisdiction anywhere,” Henry said. “I’m not on the Santa Barbara force. I’m just a private citizen stopping by the home of another private citizen to ask a few discreet questions. There’s no law against that, is there?”
Rasmussen stared as if Henry had suggested executing Arnold Svaco, then dragging his body through the neighborhood behind the car. “If police don’t treat each other with respect, then why should anyone else?” he said. “You taught me-”
“I know,” Henry said. “But you were eleven years old at the time.”
“Truth is truth, no matter what age you are,” Rasmussen said.
“There are levels of complication that make sense only as you get older,” Henry said. “It’s like when you were little and your parents told you about where children come from. It was true, but there was a lot they didn’t explain at the time.”
Rasmussen crossed his arms across his chest angrily. “I didn’t have parents,” he said. “I grew up in foster care. I never had any kind of role model at all-until I met Officer Friendly. I thought he was honest.”
In another circumstance Henry might have felt bad about disillusioning this kid. But he wasn’t a little boy anymore; he carried a badge and a gun. He needed to toughen himself up, and fast.
“I’m going to knock on that door,” Henry said. “You can come with me or you can drive away and visit the Pasadena Police Department alone. Up to you.”
Henry left the car and went up the cracked concrete walkway. The white picket gate nearly came off in his hands when he opened it, and the porch stairs sagged alarmingly under his feet. The only architectural element on the house that seemed functional at all was the set of iron bars on all the windows. Henry rapped sharply on the warped door and called out, “Arnold! Hey, it’s me!”
Henry ducked behind the doorframe just in case Arnold Svaco’s answer came in the form of a gunshot. But the only sound was a creak as the door swung open under his touch.
Henry’s senses went on full alert. No one installs iron bars on his windows and then leaves the door open. He waved urgently for Rasmussen to join him, but the officer looked away and pretended not to see.
Heart pounding and hand reaching for a gun that hadn’t been on his hip for years, Henry pushed the door open.
Arnold Svaco’s possessions didn’t have a lot in common with his cousin’s. Where she had almost nothing, Arnold seemed to own everything he’d ever seen in any store. There were flat-screen TVs and an elaborate
