“That is troubling,” Vick said. She turned to Shawn and Gus. “I guess there’s no way out of this for you, is there?”
“You say that like you think we should be able to come up with an answer,” Shawn said.
“Only if you’re innocent,” Vick said. “Otherwise I’m going to have to put you under arrest and let Mr. Coules hold you until trial. If only you could find a flaw in his otherwise excellent logic.”
Gus’ mind spun. Chief Vick was trying to throw them a lifeline. But as far as he could see, the rope was still hanging just out of reach.
The realization hit Shawn and Gus at the same time.
“I guess there’s no way out for us,” Shawn said.
“None at all,” Gus agreed.
“You’ve got us,” Shawn said to Coules. “We wanted Steele dead, and Tara acted on that desire, just like she did on all the others.”
“I wonder how she knew so well what you wanted all the time,” Gus said.
“Like she said, she took my psychic orders.”
“But that can’t be,” Gus said. “Coules refuses to endorse the ridiculous notion that you’re actually psychic.”
“Good point,” Shawn said. “Then we must have told her we wanted Steele dead before the press conference started.”
“Of course,” Gus said. “I can’t remember—how did we do that again? Because we were locked in the North Tower all night. She didn’t come up there, did she?”
Chief Vick shook her head. “We’ve been studying the house’s security logs for that night. It turns out that most of the doors and windows are monitored. Thanks to that, we believe that Tara broke in through the underground garage and went straight to the auditorium. As far as we know, the door to the north tower didn’t open between the time Shepler took you up there and the time he brought you down.”
“That would certainly clinch our innocence,” Shawn said, “if only it weren’t for modern technology.”
“That’s right,” Gus said, his spirits rising. “We could have plotted the entire thing out on our cell phones.”
“Except there’s no reception anywhere within five miles of Eagle’s View,” Vick said.
Coules’ glare shifted from Vick to his two prime suspects. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing—”
“We’re not playing. We’re trying to help you,” Shawn said. “Where were we again?”
“You were explaining how you conspired with Tara Larison to kill Dallas Steele,” Vick said.
“Right,” Gus said. “All we need is to pinpoint the moment when we gave her the order to commit the murder, and we’re going down.”
“I’ve been working through the time line, and I can’t see any point where we could have communicated to Tara after we got to Eagle’s View,” Shawn said.
“That’s easy,” Gus said. “Clearly we gave her the order after Shepler picked us up.”
“That could work,” Shawn said. “Does make us look pretty stupid, though.”
“Why is that, gentlemen?” Vick said.
“Well, when Shepler came for us, we thought Dal wanted to see us because we had made him a fortune,” Shawn said.
“And we were going to share in that fortune,” Gus said. “Ten percent of all profits were supposed to go to us.”
“There were no profits,” Coules growled. “That’s one of the reasons you hated him.”
“Yes, definitely,” Shawn said. “After he told us that, we certainly were miffed.”
“If only he’d told us before we went up to see him, this all would have been so much easier to arrange,” Gus said.
“I guess it’s possible that we hated Dal so much that we arranged to kill him before we collected our vast profits, even though his death would probably mean we’d never see a nickel,” Shawn said.
“So we told Tara she should follow us everywhere we went, just in case we popped up to Eagle’s View, so she could murder Dallas Steele in the exact time and place that would put the biggest burden of guilt on us,” Gus said.
“That must have been what we did,” Shawn said. “Except that it’s not only incredibly stupid—it doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“I’m sure it will to a jury,” Gus said.
“As long as the jury is made up completely of idiots,” Shawn said. “Think they can arrange that?”
Coules was breathing heavily, and his hands were shaking. Chief Vick pulled him aside gently.
“I don’t think you’re ready to charge them yet,” she said.
“They’re guilty, and everyone in this room knows it,” Coules said through gritted teeth.
“If you want to charge them, I can’t stop you,” Chief Vick said. “But in two minutes they’ve been able to poke huge holes in your case. Wouldn’t it make more sense to release them now and rearrest them when you’ve got everything lined up?”
“By which time they’ll be in Argentina.”
Shawn managed to put on a look of shock. “This is our home,” he said. “We didn’t move here after spending most of our lives across the country like some people. We grew up here—and we’re not going anywhere.”
“What Shawn is trying to say is, we have deep roots in the community,” Gus said.
Gus could practically see the neurons bouncing around in Coules’ head as he tried to find a way to hold on to his case.
“Fine,” Coules said finally. “Let them go for now.”
Shawn and Gus exchanged a high five, a low five, a medium five, and a couple other fives that didn’t have precise definitions.
“But you’d better enjoy your celebration now,” Coules said, “because I am going to put you away for multiple murders.”
Coules turned and walked out of the interrogation room.
“That man needs to slow down and enjoy life a little more,” Shawn said.
“Don’t be fooled by the red face and shaking hands,” Chief Vick said. “Bert Coules loves his job. There’s nothing that gives him more pleasure than putting a criminal behind bars.”
“Except in this case,” Shawn said, “I think he’d prefer to put us there.”
“There’s one thing you need to understand, Mr. Spencer,” Chief Vick said. “I didn’t believe he had the evidence to charge you today, and I wanted to spare you and Mr. Guster a great deal of unpleasantness and Mr. Coules a great deal of humiliation. But if we find evidence against you, I’ll be working with him.”
She opened the door and ushered them out to the corridor, where two state marshals were leading a manacled woman in an orange prison jumpsuit toward the door. As soon as she saw them, she started screaming.
“Shawn! Help me!”
It took Gus a second to recognize the woman, if only because he’d never seen her in anything that wasn’t tight and red before. Now, stuffed into the baggy jumpsuit, her hair still wet and stringy after the blood had been washed out of it, eye shadow running down her face like tears, she didn’t look like the dangerously hot daughter of Satan. She looked like a little girl. A psychotic, delusional, murderous little girl, true, but even so, Gus felt his first twinge of pity for her.
“Shawn,” Tara cried again,“I only did what you wanted me to!”
All traces of pity vanished from Gus’ heart. Regan MacNeil was only a little girl, too, and she could make her head spin all the way around. There was no reason to think that this one couldn’t have made Marichal’s head do the same thing, let alone plunge a knife into Dallas Steele.
The deputies pulled Tara out of the room. Before the massive oak doors closed behind her, Gus got a glimpse of the short gray bus that would take her to the state prison for women near Chowchilla.
“Poor girl,” Shawn said. “We’ve got to help her.”
“We can testify in her defense, I guess,” Gus said. “Try to explain to a jury how crazy she really is.”
“We could do that,” Shawn said. “Or we can do something really useful.”
“What’s that?” Gus asked with a sinking heart.
“We can figure out who the real killer is.”
Chapter Seventeen
“The real killer,” Gus said. “You’ve said that about six thousand times,” Shawn said.
“I keep hoping if I say it one more time the words will actually make sense.”
Chief Vick had arranged for a squad car to take them back to the Psych office. During the ride, Shawn had refused to let Gus discuss the case on the assumption that the officer behind the wheel would report back every word they’d said. Which Gus hoped fervently wouldn’t turn out to be the case, since Shawn had spent the entire trip talking about how much more alluring Chief Vick had become since they’d removed the Interim from her title.
The mindless conversation did allow Gus to think through what Shawn had said at the station. But by the time the squad car pulled up outside their bungalow, he still couldn’t find a way to see it as anything but wishful thinking. They’d seen Tara standing over Steele’s body, the knife in her hand. How could anyone disprove that?
“Think about it,” Shawn said. “What do we really know about Tara?”
“She’s crazy, for one thing,” Gus said.
“Let’s not use technical terms,” Shawn said. “What else?”
“She’s slavishly devoted to you, and she has a propensity toward violence.”
Shawn started writing a list on a yellow legal pad. “That’s good.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I meant as a list,” Shawn said. “What else do we know about her?”
“She likes to wear red,” Gus said. “She never apologized for nearly running me over and sending me off a cliff. And—Hey!” Gus had a sudden flash of memory, followed by a spasm of muscle pain as his body joined in the remembering. “I don’t know about Dallas Steele, but there’s no way Tara could have killed John Marichal.”
“That’s good,” Shawn said, writing furiously. “Why not?”
“You said it yourself,” Gus said. “When I was in the hospital, she was with you every second of the night.”
“That’s good,” Shawn said. “Except . . .”
“Except what?”
“Is that whole perjury thing still illegal?” Shawn said. “Because that might have some bearing on my testimony.”
“You told me she was with you the whole time.”
“Whole, part—that’s just quibbling,” Shawn said. “Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder exactly when Tara first learned my feelings on the pickle-burger conundrum?”
“Never.”
“Really? Because that turns out to be such a major part of this whole situation, and I’d think that someone as smart as you might have put some thought into it. As my dad says, when you can’t find a clue, follow the time line. And the time line here would—”
“Shawn!”
“While we were waiting at the Community General Hospital waiting room, she might have stepped out for a moment to grab a couple of burgers.”
“She might have or she did?”
Shawn was too busy writing on the pad to hear the question. Gus tore it out of his hands. “Hey, that’s work product,” Shawn said.
Gus glanced at the writing. Shawn’s work product was one sentence repeated all the way down the page. “‘All work and no play makes Gus a dull boy’? That’s not even original.”
“I changed the name,” Shawn said.
Gus tossed the pad back at him. “So what you’re saying is that Tara could have killed Marichal.”
“It’s not what I’m saying,” Shawn said. “More like what the facts are hinting at. Or at least what Coules can make the fact look like.”
Gus sunk down into a leather chair, which settled under him with a whoosh. “Shawn, if she killed those people, how are we ever going to prove that we weren’t all part of a criminal conspiracy?”
“That’s why we have to prove she’s innocent,” Shawn said. “And to do that, we’ve got to—”
“Figure out who the real killer is,” Gus finished the sentence for him. “There’s still that one small problem. What if she’s the real killer?”
“I know she’s not,” Shawn said. “Look, we both know I’m not really psychic, but you have to agree I have a pretty good eye for detail. And those details say so much about who a person is. I’ve studied Tara in depth from the first moment I met her, and I’ve never seen a trace of malice or danger or cruelty in her. She can’t be a murderer.”
Gus had rarely heard Shawn speak this sincerely. And he knew it was true sincerity, since it was actually far less convincing than when he was faking sincerity. “We’ve got work to do,” he said.
“Great,” Shawn said. “What do we know about Tara?”
“You were the one making the list.”
Shawn glanced down at his pad. “Hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “Apparently all work and no play makes Gus a dull boy.”
Gus grabbed the pad back and stalked to the desk, where he planted himself in front of the computer. “Maybe we should do a little research and figure out what Tara was doing before she was slavishly following your psychic orders.”
Gus typed the words “Tara Larison” into a search engine. There were references to a couple of women with the same name, but since the Tara they knew was neither a housewife running an organization for the protection of songbirds in Mississippi or a teenage girl with a MySpace page devoted to resurrecting Vanilla Ice’s career, this proved to be a dead end.
“I seem to recall she used to take care of her aunt Enid in Arcata,” Shawn said. “Let’s see what we can find out about a certain fat divorcée Realtor.”
Shawn leaned in over Gus’ shoulder and typed a string of words into the search engine, then hit ENTER. After a moment, they found themselves staring at a series of photos of large, middle-aged naked women. “Tara’s aunt was a plus-size porn queen?”
“This is Fat Divorcée Realtor Dot Com,” Gus said, muscling Shawn away from the keyboard. “Let’s try actually entering her name.”
Gus typed in the name “Enid Blalock.” The first few hits were real estate listings she’d had in Arcata.The fourth was her obituary in the Arcata Advertiser. Gus clicked the link, and after a millisecond, the article loaded.
Enid Blalock, according to her obituary, was the queen of the Arcata real estate scene. Despite her short time in the profession, she was uniformly admired and even loved by the other agents in her office. She was on track to win the coveted Arcata Arrow Award for most sales in a single year when her life was cut short in a tragic accident. She had fallen down the stairs in an empty house she was trying to sell and broken her neck.
“There’s nothing there,” Shawn said.
“Yet.” Gus clicked the button at the bottom of the screen and loaded the article’s second page.
“Look.” Shawn pointed to the screen. “In lieu of flowers, donations should be made to the Association for Divorcée Rights. I told you she was bitter.”
“That’s very helpful,” Gus said.
“Okay, maybe not,” Shawn said. “What about this?”
Shawn pointed at the last line of the obituary. Apparently, Enid was survived by a sister who lived in New Jersey and a niece, Tara Busby.
“She changed her name,” Gus said. “I wonder why.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Shawn said.
Gus returned to the search engine and typed in “Tara Busby plus Larison”. The handful of results seemed to have nothing to do with the woman they were looking for, with each of the three names drawn from long-separated sections of various texts.
“I guess she didn’t marry someone named Larison,” Gus said.
“That’s good,” Shawn said. “The last thing we need is to have a jealous husband coming after us. Then we’d really be in trouble.”
Gus stared at the search engine. It was like one of those genies in a fairy tale. It would tell you everything you needed to know, but only if you asked exactly the right question. Unfortunately, there was no way to ask the one question he needed to an
swer first: What was the right question to ask?
“You’d think someone as crazy as Tara would have popped up somewhere before,” Shawn said. “You don’t just start out following psychic instructions to beat up burger chefs. You’ve got to work up to that. I can’t believe she waited until she heard my voice to go completely nutso cuckoo.”
Gus sat up straight. That was it—the clue he had been looking for. “She first heard you while she was listening to Artie Pine’s radio show.”
Psych: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read Page 20