“Come on, Jules. We’ve only got seconds left,” Shawn said.
“I’m trying!”
“Try harder!” Shawn shouted over the roar of the water.
“Will you be quiet and let me think?” she said, but her words were lost as the concrete in the dam began to crack apart.
“What?” Shawn said.
“Quiet!” she yelled.
The water was rushing under their feet now. In another few seconds the dam would give way completely and they’d be swept away in the flood, drowned or pulverized or eaten by sharks. In other words, Shawn thought, another disaster.
He looked down, expecting to see Fawn Liebowitz grinning up at him as she always did right before he died. But Fawn wasn’t smiling. She was twitching and shaking and blue smoke was coming out of her ears.
“You did it, Jules,” Shawn shouted triumphantly. “Do it again!”
“Do what?” O’Hara said.
“I kept thinking of her as a college student and a woman,” Shawn said. “I didn’t realize that what’s really important is what she’s studying. She’s a librarian.”
Now O’Hara understood. She kneeled down by Fawn and yelled in her smoking ear. “Quiet!”
At the command, the student stopped shaking. The smoke stopped coming from her ears. She reached into her backpack again.
“Get back!” Shawn shouted, feeling disappointment flooding through him even more strongly than the water was coming out of the dam.
“Not this time!” O’Hara said. “You be ready in case she tries something.”
The water was up to their knees now and it was getting hard to stand against it. Shawn braced himself as the librarian slowly pulled her hand out of the backpack.
“I see something!” O’Hara said.
It was long and straight. Shawn was so prepared to see a weapon it took him a few seconds to realize that what was coming out of the backpack was actually a book.
“Grab it, Jules!”
O’Hara reached out and got one hand on the book and then the other. She gave it a yank and it came free.
“I’ve got it!”
There was no answer. O’Hara looked up, but Shawn was gone. So was the dam. The last thing she saw was the gigantic wall of water crashing down on her.
Chapter Twenty
“I wish I could help you, Jules. I really do,” Gus said. “I just don’t have the time to get back to Santa Barbara.”
“And I didn’t have the time to fly up here,” O’Hara said. “Or the money. And it’s not like the department is paying for this trip.”
As they walked through the wide hallways of the Benson Pharmaceuticals headquarters, O’Hara found she practically had to run to keep up with Gus. Of all the strange things that had been going on lately, this had to be the strangest. The Gus she knew was always the guy who was lagging behind shouting, “Hey, guys, wait up!” He wasn’t the leader. But he strode through these offices as if he owned the place.
“I’ve given you every bit of information we have about Mandy Jansen, Jules,” Gus said. “There just isn’t any more.”
O’Hara felt a tremor of guilt flit through her at the mention of the name. Since she’d gone to see Shawn two days ago she hadn’t done a thing about that case. But the book in the game had pushed everything else out of her mind.
“You’ve been more than helpful on that case,” she said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Then what?”
“It’s Shawn.”
“What about him?” Gus said, his step slowing slightly.
“He needs your help on the Macklin Tanner thing,” she said.
Gus stiffened and increased his pace. “If Shawn needs my help he knows where to find me.”
“I’m not sure he does,” O’Hara said.
“He’s a detective,” Gus said. “He tracked me to San Francisco when I was trying to keep my destination hidden from him. It’ll be much easier now that he has my business card with my phone number on it.”
“He doesn’t want to bother you,” O’Hara said. “He knows you’re in an exciting new phase of your life, and the last thing he wants is for you to think he’s trying to drag you back to Psych.”
“So he sent you to do it instead.”
Gus stopped outside a door. The nameplate read BURTON GUSTER, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT.
“Last time I was here, hadn’t you just been promoted to senior vice president?” she said.
“It’s one of the things that make this such an exciting company to work for,” Gus said. “Lots of room for advancement. But it also means there’s a huge amount of work for those who are ready to take it on. And I’m already backed up.”
“All I need is a couple of minutes,” O’Hara said.
Gus sighed and pushed open the door and led her into an office the size of the house she grew up in. Floor- to-ceiling windows looked out over the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge to Treasure Island and the East Bay. She couldn’t help but stare at the view-not only because it was so beautiful, but because she couldn’t quite bring herself to reconcile it with its owner. People like Gus didn’t get offices like this. And yet here he was.
Gus led her to a sitting area in one corner of the office, two armchairs and a couch all arranged for maximum appreciation of the view. He sat in one of the chairs and motioned for her to do the same.
“Tell me about Shawn,” he said.
“There’s not much else to tell,” she said. “He’s completely obsessed with this computer game.”
“That’s not much of a surprise,” Gus said. “It’s pretty addictive if you like that kind of thing-and Shawn likes that kind of thing.”
“That’s what I thought at first, too,” she said. “Just Shawn being Shawn. But it’s more than that. He’s got to find Macklin Tanner or he’ll tear himself apart. And he’s convinced that the only clue is the one he’ll find in the game.”
“That’s nothing new,” Gus said.
“But this is,” she said. “We found the clue.”
“We?”
The look on his face told her he was reading much more into this pronoun than it could possibly carry. “I helped him out one time. It was the least I could do after all the cases you guys worked on for us.”
“So you found the clue,” he said. “That’s great. Why do you need my help?”
“Because we can’t understand what it means,” she said.
“You’re two great detectives,” Gus said. “If you can’t figure it out, why do you think I can?”
“Because it’s a book,” O’Hara said. “You like books. You understand books. I’ve always been something of a reader, but I never had the passion. And Shawn-well, you know.”
He did. “I’ll do what I can. But I’m not going to be able to get to Santa Barbara anytime soon, and I can’t imagine there’s a way to get into the game from here.”
“You don’t need to,” O’Hara said. “I’ve drawn it for you.”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her purse and unfolded it on his desk. She had drawn the book’s front cover and spine.
“What about the back cover?” Gus said, studying the pictures.
“Nothing,” she said. “Black leather.”
