Lassiter couldn’t bring himself to waste the energy to make his tongue form the word “no.” He let his eyebrows do the work instead.
“Then I won’t tell you that,” Shawn said. “I won’t even mention that an entire neighborhood perished so that we could get this information. Let’s just say it’s an anonymous tip and leave it at that.”
“Happy to,” Lassiter said. “Detective O’Hara, you can come back with me now or get a ride in a stolen car from this felon. At this point it’s all the same to me.”
He snagged his car keys out of his partner’s hand and headed back to the sedan.
“There are at least a dozen blacksmiths in the Santa Barbara area,” O’Hara said. “Not to mention all the various other businesses that work with wrought iron.”
“I’m glad you clarified that,” Lassiter said. “Now, let me see if I have this straight: There’s absolutely no reason to think that any blacksmith shop has anything to do with Tanner’s disappearance, aside from some idiotic fantasy of young Kreskin here. But even if I were to accept his word on the subject and go chasing off on this fool’s errand, this is just one of potentially hundreds of locations where I might want to look. Does that about cover it?”
“You left one detail out, Carlton,” O’Hara said. “Of all those hundreds of potential locations, there’s only one that belongs to a subsidiary of VirtuActive Software, and that’s Winter Brothers Ironworks, which is right up ahead.”
“So the company’s hedging their bets in case kids finally wise up, get sick of computer games, and go back to wholesome outdoor entertainment like horseback riding,” Lassiter said.
“The ownership is hidden in a series of nested holding companies,” O’Hara said. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to keep anyone from finding out about this place.”
“But you got the last laugh on them,” Shawn said. “They put all that time and energy into hiding the fact that they owned this place, and what did they get? A police detective who couldn’t be bothered to walk five hundred yards to find them, let alone dig through layers of corporate shells. Bet they’d feel pretty silly if they knew. Which of course they never will, since you’re too lazy to walk the five hundred yards to let them know.”
Lassiter thought he detected something strange in Shawn’s voice, a note verging on hysteria. Of course it was possible he was just choking on the dust that filled the air, but it sounded like Shawn was, for the first time since they’d met, losing that patina of hip detachment he undoubtedly thought of as his cool or his mojo. That was the first interesting thing that had happened since Lassiter let O’Hara talk him into this field trip, and he was about to follow it up with a piercing jab to Shawn’s protective shell, when O’Hara stepped between them again.
“The blacksmith’s shop is just around the next curve,” O’Hara said. “We’re going to knock on the door and ask a couple of questions. Then we can all head back.”
Lassiter stopped with his hand on the door handle. “And if there’s no sign of Tanner?”
He waited for either O’Hara or Spencer to say something. For a long moment, there was silence.
“Then I’ll never ask for SBPD help on this case again,” Shawn said finally.
“And?” Lassiter drew the syllable out longer than he ever had before, hoping that his partner might pick up on the subtle signal.
Apparently she did, further proof of what a good detective she could be when she wasn’t obsessed with trivia. “I will sign off on Mandy Jansen’s death as a suicide,” O’Hara said.
Lassiter pulled open the sedan door, then peeled his fingers from the handle where his flesh had begun to sizzle on the blazing metal.
“Let’s go, then,” Lassiter said. “Looks like this trip is going to turn out to be worth my time after all.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The Hittites of Anatolia developed a process for smelting iron ore fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. Shortly after the invention, a couple of the more enterprising members of that long-forgotten nation took their skills with metal and set up a blacksmith business in the hills outside Santa Barbara.
At least that seemed to be the case if you judged by the exterior of the decaying barn that stood in the middle of a weed-choked lot at the end of the road. The yellow paint had faded to the same dusty brown as the dying vegetation all around it and was peeling off the siding. The onceshining tin roof was encased in dust, and birds flew out through holes in the metal. Where once the word “blacksmith” had been painted in gigantic black letters, now there was only the faint outline of barely recognizable shapes.
As Shawn led the two detectives down toward the barn, he studied the ground for signs that anyone had been there recently. It was impossible to tell. The dirt road had been sunbaked until it was harder than concrete. The grass and weeds had been dead so long that the trampled stalks could have been crushed ten minutes ago or last year.
And yet Shawn was positive that Macklin Tanner had been in this barn. Or that his kidnappers had used it as their hideout. Or that it was at least in some tangential way related to the kidnapping.
That was what he was telling himself, anyway. That he was positive.
The trouble was, he wasn’t. Not about this. Not about anything.
This was not the way it was supposed to be. Shawn was always positive. His subconscious would toss out an idea and the rest of his mind would grab it and chew it into shreds like a dog with a plush toy. He didn’t always know why he knew something, but he never had any doubt that he did.
But that was not the way it had been working lately. The ideas his subconscious threw to him were barely more than half-formed notions, and his brain could hardly get in a nibble before its teeth started to hurt and he had to stop.
This had started when Gus left Psych to take the executive position with Benson Pharmaceuticals. But that couldn’t be the reason. Shawn didn’t need Gus. He never had. He liked having his old friend with him on cases, of course. He liked the camaraderie, the company. And there was nothing better than having a buddy around when you were stuck on an all-night stakeout, if only to stay in the car when you ran out to look for a bathroom.
But in terms of solving the cases, Shawn had never needed Gus. Shawn was the one with the eye and the mind and the skill. Gus was along for the ride. It was true that he had come in handy from time to time, but his greatest use was as Shawn’s sounding board. Shawn hardly needed a full-fledged partner for that. And, in fact, shortly after Gus left Shawn had replaced him with an actual board. He peeled off a piece of plywood that had been covering one of the office’s rear windows since it had been broken in a game of extreme handball, drew a rough approximation of Gus’ face on it, and propped it up on a shelf. Then he started to run his theories by the board.
Unfortunately that didn’t work nearly as well as he’d hoped, and after an hour Plywood Gus was back covering the broken pane. Apparently Shawn needed his sounding board to ask obvious questions before he could come up with his brilliant answers. If only he’d thought to record the real Gus over his last few days in the office. Since his questions were always the same variations on “What the hell are you talking about?” Shawn could simply have pushed play after every inquiry.
Since he hadn’t taken that precaution Shawn decided to move away from inanimate objects and try to replace Gus with a real human being.
He’d thought briefly about bringing a professional detective into the agency. But Shawn had a unique way of working that tended to annoy people with actual law enforcement experience, and while that was one of his favorite parts of the job, he didn’t feel like bringing that kind of conflict into the agency. Besides, private detectives generally wanted to be paid in money for their labors, and for the position he was looking to fill Shawn was planning on a salary measured in Yoo-hoo and Skittles.
There was only one man who could fit all of Shawn’s needs. Hank Stenberg. Hank didn’t know a lot about law enforcement, but Shawn was pretty sure that he’d seen enough TV cop shows to know when Shawn was deviating from standard fictional police operating procedure and would object loudly. And his voice was even higher than Gus’, so there would be an extra layer of outrage in the complaint.
But Hank turned out to be no more useful than Plywood Gus had been. Sure, he asked plenty of questions in that high, piercing voice, but they were mostly along the lines of “Where’s the Butterfinger you promised me?” and “Why haven’t you fixed that window?” Not exactly the kind of intellectual challenge that would inspire Shawn to the
