J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01

by And Then She Was Gone

  The cop walked into the room. He squatted down and felt the floor. His eyes narrowed—either the smell and the dribbles had him suspicious, or he was trying to figure out what else he could charge me with. A quick shine under the futon couch with his flashlight did nothing to improve his expression.

  I was going down for this one, at least for a few hours. Whoever this kid Rawles had found for a playmate was fast. But what the hell was the game?

  A night in the clink while they tried to sort this out—if I was lucky and the prosecutor wasn’t up for re-election this year—and every minute, Nya was either farther away or more dead.

  The cop turned to me. I could see his name tag now in the half-light from the substandard CF that had been screwed behind the ceiling’s fixture. Officer Randolph. “Some girl you’ve got here.”

  “She was just here.” I didn’t put a lot into it. Trying to convince a cop to believe a PI’s story was about as useful as teaching a cat to play chess, at least when that cop hadn’t worked much with that PI before. I know. I used to be one—the cop, not the cat. Private snoops can be trusted to work angles and shade the truth right up to the limit of their professional obligations.

  Kind of like I was about to do.

  “Right. Lantham, step over to the bench.” He pointed past me to a little garden bench a few yards away. I backed over to it, but didn’t sit down. He said a couple low words to the EMTs, they nodded and started milling around like confused pigeons. Randolph yanked Rawles aside and interrogated him for a minute, then came over to me.

  “The kid says you got porn pics of his girlfriend on your phone. Mind if I take a look?”

  “Yeah, I mind.”

  “He says she’s seventeen, that makes it kiddie porn. You can save yourself a lot of trouble right here.”

  “Not without a warrant.”

  “All right, if that’s how you want to play it.” He clapped a hand onto my shoulder and started to pull me out toward the car.

  “Look, Officer, I came out here on a job. My client had some business with the owner of the house. Before I could get to the door I heard the kid yelling, and then the woman screamed and the kid ran out of here like he was scared of getting caught.” I rattled off a mostly-truthful account of the rest of it. He glanced sideways at Rawles, cooling his heels against the shed wall. “It was self defense.”

  “He says you hit him with your gun.”

  “It was in the holster. You came up behind me. Did I have time to put it back? Is there a bruise where I supposedly hit him?”

  “Hmph. So what’s the kid’s problem with you?”

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on him for my client. He’s probably worried I’m gonna rat him out for his herb business.” That got him. Randolph’s eyes peaked quick before he could cover it up. “Probably got some product on him right now.”

  “And the pictures?”

  “He’s pulling it out of his ass. Probably watched ‘America’s Most Wanted’ during dinner.”

  “Mind if I take a look at the phone?”

  “Not without a warrant.”

  Now, here’s the problem with street cops: they’re used to getting their way with intimidation when the law isn’t on their side—they’re trained in extracting evidence without letting suspects know what they’re up to. With a detective it wouldn’t have been a problem—they know the score and deal with PIs all the time.

  Randolph grabbed the handpiece for his walkie and hit the button. “Dispatch, this is Randolph, number 875. I’m gonna need a second patrol car in here to haul in suspects.”

  “Ten-Four, 875, units are on their way,” said the dispatcher.

  Last thing I needed just then was time in lockup. I nodded at the cop. “I’m sorry, but the last…”

  “Shut up. Kid says his name is Rawles. That right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rawles! Get over here.”

  The kid sauntered over. He was sure he’d nailed me.

  Randolph looked him up and down. “Do you have anything in your pockets you want to tell me about?

  “No.”

  “Turn around and spread your legs.” Rawles did as he was told, after giving the cop a look that would have gotten him thrown to the ground in a less genteel jurisdiction. This cop was patient, but he wasn’t screwing around.

  Randolph patted down Jason’s pockets and came out with a dime bag. He held it up to his flashlight. Its contents weren’t green. “Well, looks like we have a winner. Let’s add possession of methamphetamines to the list of charges. Now, you,” he nodded at me, “Out in front. You,” he poke Rawles in the back, “Follow him.”

  I was already sitting in the rear seat of Randolph’s car working on a new set of wrist scars by the time backup arrived a couple minutes later. Randolph handed Rawles off to the other car and then got back into his own.

  He waited until we were moving before he started into me, right on schedule. “Doesn’t have to go down this way, you know.”

  “Yeah, it does. I show you files on my phone without a warrant and you can bring me up on breach of confidence. I’ll lose my license.”

  “So help me out here. Who is this kid? What’s his deal?”

  “Wish I knew. You want to bring him up for dealing, though, I’ve got notes and photos from yesterday. I’ll be happy to have him out of my way.” It wasn’t really true, but if Rawles was in lockup I could get him when I needed him. Until then, I had the house. And now two girls to find, instead of one.

  Randolph didn’t say anything for about a half mile.

  I wasn’t lying when I told him I couldn’t give him the phone. He wouldn’t have found anything after the deep-cleaning I gave the phone’s filesystem. I could retrieve the pictures from the crypto drive later if I needed them, but no search in the world would turn them—or the drive-up.

  Would have been great, except the phone contained my notes. Unless I’m reporting a crime—which I wasn’t—I can’t show those to anyone without a court order. Breach of confidentiality is a misdemeanor, and I wasn’t in the market for a new apartment just now.

  “You really think there’s a girl in trouble?” Officer Randolph pulled the car over.

  “Yes.”

  “Hell.” He shook his head and flipped the car around. After another block he said “You know, a snoop license doesn’t give you the right to sneak into other people’s houses.”

  “Yeah, I read the manual. And I didn’t sneak into the house.” We both pretended, for the sake of argument, that I hadn’t actually been in the guest house. I might have just glimpsed her through the door.

  “You need probable cause for that.”

  “Well, actually probable cause is a law enforce…” I stopped. He bought it, but not enough. He was giving me a leash. “Yeah, you can’t go in without a warrant.”

  “Yeah. I can’t.”

  “All units in the area,” said the radio, “we have a seven car TA on 680 South. CHP requesting help for the next thirty minutes.”

  Randolph grabbed his mouthpiece. “Dispatch, 875, I’m on the way.” He pulled the car to a stop.

  “What, here?”

  “You don’t want to walk,” he got out of the car, “I can always take you back to the station.”

  “Forget it, I’ll take my chances.” Eleven at night. Perfect time to taking my life in my hands walking though dark parts unknown, with danger behind every corner—in an area where shoplifting can get the police chief’s panties in a bunch. Heroic.

  Still, braving the mean streets of Danville seemed slightly less irritating than sitting handcuffed to a bench for six hours while someone roused a judge to force my phone’s password out of me.

  I turned sideways on the hard plastic bench and stuck my cuffs out. Randolph opened the door and took his bracelets back, then backed me out of the cruiser.

  “Don’t let me catch you brawling again.”

  “No problem, Officer.” I rubbed the raw bands on my wrists where the cuffs had dug in.r />
  “Good.” He drew my .357 from his pocket and handed it to me. I reflexively opened the cylinder to check the load.

  “Have a nice walk.” Randolph ducked back into the cruiser and peeled out, all lights flashing.

  It took me about ten minutes to get back to the Civic—still sitting right in front of the Ackerman Drive house. Nobody had touched it. Whoever’d been in there either wasn’t in there anymore, or they were laying low.

  I poked around the perimeter for about five minutes, but didn’t dare go in. Not tonight. The lights were all out, and the place looked deserted, but I like my skin. If anyone was in there they’d be expecting it, and another call to the cops would be enough to get me a bunk for the night in the land of smelly roommates.

  And it was looking like they’d all bugged out. The van was gone, and I couldn’t find any other cars around the place.

  I’d be no good to anyone if I went in anyway. It was late. My stomach was busy trying to eat itself—it had been about six hours since that sherbet at Stanford. Low blood sugar means slow reactions—no good for an extralegal B&E.

  There was the Porsche’s tag to look up, and I had enough to go on that I could stand a few hours of desk work and a couple hours sleep. After I got some food.

  I was gonna have to ditch the Civic for the rest of the job. Gravity made me in it this afternoon, Rawles knew it now after nearly putting his fist through the hood, and if anyone was left in the house, I had to assume they’d look up the license number.

  If they were kidnapping and shooting up girls, they might be willing to kill to cover their tracks. Might even have stuck a GPS track on the car. The more difficult it would be for them to spot me, the better.

  And I had one other thing to do before I could get back to the office.

  Dora.

  10:45 PM, Sunday

  I had a buddy that ran the Enterprise office in Walnut Creek. Two phone calls and half an hour later I had a gray Malibu. Dora’s home address was right on the way back to the office, long as I drove the long way.

  The lights were still on inside, I could see people moving around in the greatroom. As I approached, I could hear Dora yelling at someone—her husband, presumably. Sounded like she thought he’d been cheating on her.

  Hell of a place, Danville.

  She yanked the door open before my third knock. Her face went from shocked to hopeful to dread in the space of two seconds. I saved her the trouble of starting the conversation.

  “I found Nya.”

  She leaned to the side to peer around me. “Where…”

  “I saw her an hour ago down near El Cerro. She’s in trouble. Bad. I need you to call in that missing persons report—tell them you’ve had a threat.”

  “They’ll want to see the note…”

  “Tell them it was an anonymous phone call.”

  “Oh.” She chewed her bottom lip. I noticed she was blocking the doorway with her body—either she didn’t want me to see in, or she didn’t want her husband to see me.

  “I’ll call you in a few minutes so there’s a phone record. You call the cops right after that. Tell them you’ve hired me, they’ll know what to do.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “If we move fast, maybe.”

  “Dora?” A whiny, irritable voice came from inside the house. “Who is it?”

  “Someone who got the wrong address,” she shouted back into the house. “Look, you better go. If he sees you…I’m sorry, no. These streets wind around a bit—you want to go up that way, you’ll find it.”

  The door opened the rest of the way to reveal a man wearing a button-up shirt undone at the collar. He had deep-set, tortured-looking eyes and an angular face.

  The tweed man from the Ackerman house.

  “Anything wrong, sweetheart?” He had the same insecure edge in his voice that he had in the shed.

  “No. This gentleman just got turned around,” she said.

  “Thanks much for the help.” I nodded politely and scampered back down the front walk, then four houses up the street, to the Malibu.

  11:30 PM, Sunday

  So why the hell did Dora try to hide that Nya was in trouble? For that matter, what was Nya’s father doing at the Ackerman house? Might help to figure out who the hell lived there, and what they were doing with the girls there. The men in the shed had said that there were “two more,” but that was before I’d found Nya, so they couldn’t mean there were two girls left alive. The numbers could have been a coincidence.

  Coincidence is a hemorrhoid on the ass of reality, and the coincidences were piling up way too fast for my taste. It made me itch in ways I don’t like to talk about at parties.

  I called Mrs. Thales from a prepaid cell on the way home, then tossed it out the window in Crow Canyon. I didn’t tell her about her husband—until I knew what was up, I couldn’t be sure that telling her wouldn’t put her life in danger.

  Information. Too much that didn’t fit anywhere. Ninety percent of the job is desk work, and this one had been legwork most of the way through. I had a pile of half-threads that didn’t add up to anything.

  San Pablo was every inch the grindhouse I expected on a Sunday night.

  Clubbers in the parking lot—my usual spot was occupied. Probably a good thing—extra camouflage if anyone came around looking for me, chasing the car down. Chances were thin, but my hackles were now standing up high enough to tickle the moon.

  The minute or so parking gave me some extra time before I got in front of the computer got me sorting the first questions.

  If I ever run out of questions, my career is over.

  First question, and probably the most important:

  What’s for dinner?

  Thank God for the kitchenette secreted behind a rice-paper partition in the front office. I started my inquiries with a microwave-granted dose of brain fuel in the form of a frozen artichoke basil pizza.

  Investigation runs on questions. The next question just as obvious: Who lived in the Ackerman house?

  Not as easy to find out as I hoped. I don’t have access to title search databases—I need them seldom enough that the subscriptions aren’t worth the price. None of the services I did have access to yielded any useful information on that house.

  Subcontractors are the life-blood of this business. One email to the title company next door would get me a search return tomorrow afternoon.

  Not soon enough, but it was what I could manage.

  I didn’t have anything solid to go on, but there was a ghost of a pattern here that I didn’t like one bit. Something about the whole thing was starting to feel like sex trafficking.

  Was Rawles selling his girlfriends out to kidnappers for money or product, with the owner of the house as the crux of the operation?

  If it was a kidnapping operation.

  Could be Rawles really was house sitting for a friend, and using the place for orgies with his favorite four girls.

  Which didn’t explain why Nya’s father had been there. Or who the other man was. Or why they wanted to get rid of “Mister Shiny Pants,” which had to be Rawles.

  Well, Rawles was out of circulation for the moment. But why get rid of him in the first place? The kid had held his cool all weekend, for the most part. Running interference for Thales, keeping me busy. Very smooth.

  And besides, all that presumed a kidnapping, something that didn’t seem to have happened.

  I was missing a piece. A huge piece. I could feel the puzzle assembling itself like planets in orbit around a star, held there by—what else?—Gravity.

  And Gravity was…who? I still didn’t have a good notion. What had Rawles said?

  Nya settled down when he came around.

  Something about him made enough of a difference for Rawles to mention it to a stranger. So what did I know about him?

  He was, evidently, an activist. He’d also been at the lecture dressed like a student—perhaps he was an activist who was also a student? Rawles said G
ravity went to Diablo Valley College.

  DVC’s not Stanford—not even close.

  But he had no name—just the moniker. I’d been too rushed to get his tags, so I couldn’t look up his car. His phone dead-ended at a porn company in the city.

  Perhaps he was a professional agitator—very careful to use cover so that he’d stay off the Feds’ radar? That was a little out of my league, but I knew that people like that existed. Back when I was a cop, we had periodic trouble with them in Oakland, trying to start race riots for reasons conforming to obscure political agendas I didn’t give a shit about. I’d recognized a couple at the rally at the Clark Center—maybe he was a new one in town?

  My head wasn’t cooperating. Long day, too much running around, and waiting too long to eat had my head throbbing to the rhythm of the club-bound traffic outside. Not good thinking music.

  Okay, so, if Gravity was somehow the solution to this nasty little collection of dead ends, it would have to do with…what?

  Was he Rawles’s supplier? Did he own the house on Ackerman? What did he have to do with Stanford? What did he and Phil have going on? Was he Nya’s…

  That’s it. It all had to do with his relationships—his relationships somehow tied the whole picture together. Like the girl in the Da Vinci painting—without her, everything’s chaos. With her, the whole painting evokes timeless beauty. Or bestsellers for Dan Brown. Or something. Art history class was fifteen years ago, and I spent most of it trying to get a date with that liberal arts major with the gorgeous eyes.

  Ok, Lantham, time to reset. Start back at what Rawles said again:

  Nya settled down when he came around.

  What did that mean? Judging by her trophy collection, she didn’t seem less sexually prolific. So let’s say it meant something else.

  That would be…what? I didn’t have anything to go on. If I could see them in action together, or if I had a video, maybe then I could…

  Wait. Maybe I did.

  Opening the hidden floor safe, I found the memory cards I’d pinched from Nya’s house laying on top of her dead phone—the one I hadn’t gotten a charger for because I’d been chasing wild geese all over creation today, dammit. I pulled out all three of the flash devices. I’d only watched through one—were the other two also diaries? Or maybe…