Shawn squeezed into two syllables.
“The clues,” Shawn said. “The evidence. You know, the kind of things that crime solvers use to crack their cases.”
“The only thing that’s going to be cracked is your skull if you try to keep me here one minute longer,” Lassiter said, heading back to the door.
Shawn looked around the interior of the barn again, desperately hoping to find some tiny sign that Macklin Tanner had been there. But unless the game designer had been in the habit of excreting tiny black pellets, he didn’t see anything.
That was it, then. His one lead and it was a false one. He might as well give up the detective business altogether. Not right away, of course. He could coast on his past glories for a few more cases before people started to notice he’d lost his gift, the way Friends had still attracted vast audiences for three years after the last time it had actually been funny. But once the police beat him to the solution on a couple of cases, word would begin to get out that Psych was a fraud and he’d be out of business. Maybe if he jacked up his rates before then he could build himself a financial cushion that would last until he chose his next career.
He was so lost in his thoughts that it took him a couple of seconds to register the shouts that were coming from the back of the barn. “Carlton! Shawn!”
Shawn ran across the barn’s floor and when he reached the back wall he gave it a hard kick. Two of the planks flew off and landed on the dirt, and Shawn stepped through the hole just as Lassie was coming around the corner.
“What is it, Detective?” Lassiter said.
O’Hara didn’t say anything. She just pointed to a high stack of old lumber.
“That’s very good,” Lassiter said, slamming his pistol back in its holster. “You’ve found the woodpile. If we start to get chilly, it’s nice to know we’ll be able to build a fire. Of course we’ll probably burn down half of Santa Barbara when the first spark drifts out, but still, a good thought.”
Shawn didn’t listen to Lassie. He was staring at the woodpile, trying to understand what Jules was pointing at. He shifted slightly on his feet and he saw something-a glint of red sparkling in the sun.
Then he knew what it was. He pushed past Lassiter and ran to the woodpile, tearing logs off and hurling them aside. Dodging the flying wood, O’Hara came up and worked beside him until they opened a large hole in the stack.
Gleaming red metal sparkled up at them. Stacks of it, cut into shards and scraps, hacked into chunks.
“What’s that?” Lassiter said as he peered down at the heap of metal.
“Right now, scrap metal,” Shawn said. “But before someone took a set of blacksmith’s tools to it, I’d say it was a cherry red 1964 Impala.”
Chapter Twenty-four
He was back, baby.
All that doubt, all that fear-all pointless. Shawn had followed his own instincts where they led him and he’d found the first evidence that Macklin Tanner had been kidnapped. The police quickly confirmed that the metal scraps had been the car Tanner disappeared with, and now there was a full investigation into his abduction.
Of course this hardly meant Shawn’s role in the case was over. He’d discovered where Tanner had disappeared to, but who took him and why and where he might be now were still completely unknown.
Or almost completely, anyway. Thanks to Shawn’s sleuthing methods, the police were fairly certain that at least one of the kidnappers worked for VirtuActive. After all, it was a clue planted in the game that had led to the barn and the discovery of the dismembered automobile. The cops were running background checks on every member of the programming team and had already started questioning everyone who’d ever worked for the company.
Shawn was content to let them take over this part of the case. That was the kind of thing the SBPD was good at-the hard, boring grunt work. His job was the brilliant flashes of insight that broke cases wide-open.
This time, though, he couldn’t take all the credit for himself. It was true he had figured out that the librarian in the game was the key to figuring out Tanner’s location, and that he had persisted in trying ways to worm it out of her no matter how many fictional people had to die along the way.
But once he’d gotten the book he hadn’t known how to interpret the clue. He had no doubt that if he’d had a little more time it would have come to him. After all, the Dismal Dewdrop system number, or whatever it was called, was a pretty obvious sign, and once he had exhausted all the less likely possibilities he would have had to investigate the obvious ones. Still, he’d had help on this part and it had shortened the investigation substantially.
That help hadn’t come free, of course, and that was why he was standing next to Juliet O’Hara in the basement apartment of a fabulous Spanish house in one of the nicest parts of town. She’d agreed to help him with the Macklin Tanner case if he’d take a look at her cheerleader suicide, and now he was paying off his debt.
He was trying to, anyway. Even with his mojo back he was having trouble trying to understand what it was about the case that was troubling her. And she was having just as much trouble explaining it.
“So, in terms of evidence you’ve got what exactly?” Shawn said as he looked around the immaculately clean room. There was a bed in one corner and a small kitchenette directly opposite it. Just in front of the window overlooking the garden sat two armchairs and a small coffee table. The floor was covered in a cheerful blue carpet. If it hadn’t been for the exposed water pipes running along the ceiling there would have been nothing to say that this was a basement conversion.
“Nothing that indicates anything other than suicide,” O’Hara said morosely.
“That’s a good start,” Shawn said.
“It is?” O’Hara looked at him with a little glimmer of hope.
“Sure,” Shawn said. “You know you’re dealing with a master criminal if he didn’t leave any evidence behind.”
“Or I’m not dealing with a criminal at all,” O’Hara said. “That’s the standard interpretation of complete lack of evidence.”
“The standard interpretation!” Shawn scoffed. “The standard interpretation of the sun setting into the ocean every night was that it was moving around the earth. The standard interpretation of a yellow light is that you’re supposed to prepare to stop. There’s always a standard interpretation and it’s always wrong. Except for why people actually watch Two and a Half Men. No one’s been able to explain that. But the rule stands.”
O’Hara let out a heavy sigh. “It would be nice to think that’s true,” she said. “But the standard interpretation is almost always the right one, because it’s a product of many minds working from the same set of facts and coming up with identical answers. And in this case we’re not going to be able to change any of those minds if all we have to go on is the complete lack of evidence.”
“Well, in that case, the solution is simple,” Shawn said. “We have to find some evidence.”
If he’d actually unplugged a valve in her neck and let out all the air filling her body, O’Hara couldn’t have looked more deflated. “That’s kind of why I asked you to meet me here.”
“And you were right to do it,” Shawn said. “Evidence of murder, coming up.”
Shawn looked around the room and he saw… nothing. No wayward pill, dropped out of the handful that had been ground up and poured into Mandy’s evening cocoa. No carpet fibers torn up as Mandy’s high-heeled feet were dragged across the floor so that her unconscious body could be strung up from the beam. No button that would at first seem to be from Mandy’s blouse but on closer examination would reveal itself to be made out of a unique type of plastic that was only used by one designer of men’s shirts, which were sold to only one store in California and which would turn out to have had only one customer in the last ten years.
Shawn felt a new stab of panic. Before, when he’d thought he was losing his mojo, he knew it was mostly about confidence. But this was completely different and entirely worse. Before the confidence could come into action he needed the eye. It was great to be able to take tiny details that no one had noticed and then spin them into a web of meaning, and then invent some psychic vision to explain what he’d figured out. But that ability wouldn’t do him much good if he’d lost the ability to spot those details in the first place.
