He took a deep breath. He was getting way ahead of himself. It was quite possible that the only reason he wasn’t seeing any details out of place was that there were none. Everyone else who’d looked at this case had concluded that Mandy Jansen had killed herself. Maybe that was what happened, in which case there would have been no reason for anyone to drop pills or buttons or carpet fibers.
But Jules was sure Mandy had been murdered, sure in a way that transcended evidence and came straight from her instincts as a detective. Shawn had known her long enough to know that she was good at what she did, and if she was feeling this strongly she was probably right.
Which meant that Mandy had been murdered. And unless the killer was the most brilliant criminal in history he had left evidence behind. Evidence that Shawn wasn’t able to see.
Shawn looked again, harder this time, straining the muscles in his eyes as if he thought they’d pop out of their sockets and roll across the carpet, looking for clues. But he still saw nothing.
“What is it?” O’Hara said. “What do you see?”
For one brief moment Shawn contemplated telling her the truth. Or at least his own version of the truth, something about how the spirits had been chased away by the aura of sadness lingering in the apartment. That might actually work, he realized. He could say that the spirits wouldn’t return until the place got a lot more cheerful, so they should tune the flat panel to the Full House marathon on TV Land, and then come back in a day when they’d been drawn in by the warm family humor.
But everyone had been blowing O’Hara off on this investigation. She’d been told by her fellow cops, by Mandy’s friends, and probably by complete strangers that this was an obvious suicide and she should just close the case and move on. If he gave her some nonsense about spirits not wanting to cooperate, she’d assume that he was doing the same thing. He didn’t want to let her down that way, especially after the help she’d given him with Macklin Tanner.
He was going to have to admit the truth. This was all Gus’ fault. Shawn had never had any problems like this when he was still around. Even though Shawn couldn’t remember anything he’d ever actually done, apparently his presence worked on Shawn’s subconscious like a security blanket.
But Shawn wasn’t five years old anymore. He didn’t need a security blanket. He didn’t need any kind of blanket. Well, there was that nice wool one he liked to snuggle in when the weather turned cold, but he was willing to throw that on the dustbin of history if it would help bring his mojo back for good.
“There’s nothing, right?” O’Hara said softly. “You’re not getting any emanations or seeing any spirit trails or doing whatever it is you do instead of what I do.”
She was giving him a chance to get out of this easy, he realized. Maybe she was looking for a way to extricate herself from the case, too. All he had to do was say there was nothing here and it would be over. She’d close the file on Mandy Jansen and everyone could get along with their lives, with the obvious exception of Mandy herself.
But if he did that here, what would happen on his next case? It was exceptionally rare that a client hired a detective only to tell him that it was okay if he wasn’t able to solve the case. He had to fight his way through this.
And if there was one thing he’d learned from watching TV, it was that he could do it. Had there ever been a single private detective who didn’t get blinded at some point in his career? And whether it was Spenser or Dan Tana or Mannix or Magnum or even Monk, none of them ever gave up. Instead when the acid was thrown in their face or the gunshot creased their brows or they had been exposed to superbright light intended to kill the brain- parasite-Jell-O thing stuck to their backs, they wrapped a bandage around their eyes and set out to solve the crime they’d been investigating.
So maybe Shawn was blind now. He’d find a way to carry on. If Robert Urich could do it, so could he.
“Maybe this was a bad idea,” O’Hara said. “Mandy’s death was probably a suicide, just like everyone thinks, and I’m wasting your time dragging you here.”
“I owe you,” Shawn said. “If it hadn’t been for you, I’d still be in Darksyde City.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” O’Hara said. “You owe Gus.”
Shawn pulled his eyes away from their search of the floor and gave her a sharp stare. “Because he’s done so much to help solve this case?” he said.
“Not this one,” O’Hara said. “Macklin Tanner.”
“Believe me, he was even less use on that case than here,” Shawn said. “Every time I brought him into Darksyde City he spent the whole time whining about how he didn’t want to kill anymore. It was like having the Dalai Lama as a sidekick, except that Gus can’t shoot laser beams out of his eyes.”
“He was the one who came up with the explanation of the Dewey decimal classification,” O’Hara said. “When neither of us could figure out what the book clue was, I flew up to San Francisco to talk to him about it. He told me about the blacksmiths.”
“Mighty helpful of him,” Shawn said. “Although I guess it felt pretty good to do some real work instead of pushing papers across a desk.”
“He seemed pretty excited about what he was doing at Benson,” O’Hara said. “Said he felt he was really going to be able to help a lot of people there.”
“Oh,” Shawn said. “Well, it was nice of him to put off saving the world for a few minutes. I hope you gave him a big thanks.”
“I wanted at least to take him to lunch, but he didn’t have time,” O’Hara said. “He said he was absolutely swamped and couldn’t leave his desk.”
“I guess that’s what it’s like when you’re the bottom guy on the old totem pole,” Shawn said.
“He’s not,” O’Hara said. “He’s been promoted twice since he got there.”
“Twice?” Shawn said. That couldn’t be right. Gus was a great guy and all, but he wasn’t promotion material. He was a sidekick, not a star.
“He started off as a junior vice president, then moved up to senior VP within a couple of weeks,” she said. “Now he’s an executive vice president, whatever that is. Part of it is all the coincidences, sure, but they must really like him to move him up so quickly.”
Shawn felt a little tickle from his subconscious. He took a quick glance around the room to see if he had spotted a piece of evidence without being aware of it. But the little apartment was just as clue-free as it had been before. The dark part of his brain must have been responding to what she had said.
“Coincidences?” Shawn said as casually as he could.
“A bunch of them,” O’Hara said. “It’s really kind of weird. If you read it in a book you’d have trouble believing it.”
“And if it wasn’t in a book, but in real life?” Shawn said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.
“Well, it actually all starts in this room,” O’Hara said.
“You asked Gus for help on this case, too?”
“Yes, but not in the way you think,” O’Hara said. “It turned out that Mandy Jansen used to work in sales for Benson Pharmaceuticals. She resigned a few weeks before she died. Lassiter and I drove up to San Francisco to talk to her employers, and it was Gus who took the meeting. That’s how I found out he’d left Psych, by the way.”
If there was reproach in that sentence, Shawn chose to ignore it. He was too interested in the rest of her story.
“So Gus knew Mandy?”
“They missed each other by a few weeks,” O’Hara said. “In fact, if Mandy hadn’t died, Gus might never have been offered his job. The company had wanted her for the position.”
There was another jab from Shawn’s subconscious. Something was definitely weird here.
“Okay, that’s one coincidence,” Shawn said. “Or is it just happenstance at this point?”
“Either way,” O’Hara said.
“I’m still not sure why you ended up talking to Gus about Mandy Jansen,” Shawn said. “If he was hired after she quit and they’d never actually met, what did he have to tell you about her?”
“Not much,” O’Hara said. “Although he did give us her complete personnel file. We were sent to him because Mandy reported to the senior vice president of marketing, and that was the job Gus had just been promoted into.”
“What happened to the former senior vice president of marketing?” Shawn said. “They erased his memory
