J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01

by And Then She Was Gone

  Of the three, two were microSDs. One was a thumb drive. A different format might mean different content—Nya’s room certainly made her look like someone who would organize her videos that way.

  I plugged the thumb drive into my laptop. More videos, but these weren’t the daily or weekly stream. By the time stamps, these came randomly from the last three years.

  My notes didn’t say when Gravity had first appeared, but I knew he’d been around for at least the last year, so I scanned the files for anything dated during that time period. There were a string of them from last January. I opened one.

  The screen flashed bright white and then faded to show a blank white wall flecked with little bits of black and rainbow sparkles.

  A foot came into frame and pushed into the wall with a crunch.

  Snow.

  The camera swung up to the operator’s horizon. One of the girls—not Nya—stared back. Took me a moment to identify Bridget—not easy to tell them apart under snow-swaddlings—who threw a snowball at the camera.

  The camera operator—Nya, by the voice—fell back into the snow. The video jostled every which way as she jumped back up and started running at Bridget, but she didn’t make it.

  A youngish man on skis slid down between them and asked directions to somewhere. I couldn’t make it all out, the microphone was clogged with snow, and it wasn’t a great mic anyway.

  Going by the body language and what I could hear of his tone, the new guy was trying to pick Bridget up. Nya jogged in a wide arc around the stranger—the camera jumped around and pointed at the ground most of the time.

  As the camera moved closer I could hear a little better. The voices were getting shrill. The stranger seemed confused—Bridget seemed close to panic. The camera shifted around like the operator had forgotten it was there—two other girls ran into frame and huddled around Bridget. Nya stepped out in front of the group—the camera jerked every which way as she waved her hands, trying to get the guy to get lost.

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t picked up a stranger before and gotten a drink thrown in my face—or seen it happen to other people hundreds of times. And this didn’t look any different, what I could see of it through the waving camera’s perspective. Pretty normal behavior for young girls approached by a strange man.

  But something about it had my adrenaline going.

  Nya lurched forward, then stepped back in the same way a boy on a playground might feint at an enemy when he’s spoiling for a fight. When she did, I could see Bridget’s blue ski cap in the edge of frame.

  Everyone was talking now, I couldn’t make out a thing. Nya’s attention—or at least her camera orientation—swung quickly up and to the left.

  A new figure on cross-country skis at the top of the rise. The camera stayed fixed on him as he glided down to the stranger, leaned over, and spoke low into the man’s ear.

  The girls had gone quiet. The new guy embraced the stranger and patted him warmly, then shifted his goggles off his face and up to his forehead.

  Gravity.

  It sounded like everyone was talking through a pillow, so I couldn’t hear anything useful—either the snow in the mic had melted enough that it shorted the mic out, or Nya’s gloves were covering it. I hit mute and just watched the body language.

  The girls stayed still, unsure of what to do. Gravity seemed to make introductions, then Bridget brightened up and stepped forward and kissed the stranger like he was an old lover.

  He’d gone from threat to in-group in all of three minutes. Because of Gravity’s introduction.

  Now, I’ve been in and around San Francisco for half my life. I know this kind of thing happens. Hell, I’ve been there when this kind of thing happens, and there’s always this vibe of instant family. Most of the time it’s just genuinely friendly.

  But, even through the camera, this was something different. Something about the whole situation made my skin crawl. It was like Gravity was a god to these girls. He knew exactly how to play them.

  Come to think of it, the extent of the female solidarity seemed…off somehow. Maybe it was a Danville thing, but these were girls that liked male attention. A lot. But they weren’t jockeying for the new guy’s attention, or gossiping behind one another’s backs. They saw a stranger and all immediately decided he was a threat.

  Rawles words came back to me again: She gets nervous around people she doesn’t know.

  It all felt wrong, in the same way a robot that looks too human feels wrong. Like someone walked across my grave before I ever got there.

  I got up and tossed my pizza box in the kitchenette’s trash can—didn’t want it cluttering up my office—grabbed a Coke and some caffeine pills and popped ‘em. Those would give me about three hours before a hard crash—then I’d sleep hard and wake up feeling like I’d been hit by a truck, but if I could crack the puzzle it’d be worth it.

  Everything in this universe was about Gravity. If I could just figure out who the hell he was and what he was up to, I’d get the gold star.

  I went back to the desk and used it as a stretching bar—gotta keep the body moving to keep the mind nimble—and just about jumped out of my skin when something stabbed me in the hip.

  Or felt like it.

  My phone was buzzing. I hadn’t pulled it out and unloaded it since I got here.

  “Clarke Lantham.” I tried not to sound like I was trying to stuff my heart back into my chest.

  “Mr. Lantham, it’s Dora.”

  “Mrs. Thales?”

  “That’s right. I just wanted to tell you not to worry. Nya called—she went to a friend’s house for the weekend and didn’t tell us. I’m sorry I bothered you. Could you please mail me your bill?”

  “You say Nya called?”

  “Yes, just.”

  Then why didn’t the cops call me after you called them an hour and a half ago? “Did she say where she was ?”

  “She said she was on the way to Capitola with some friends.”

  “How did she sound?”

  “She…she sounded fine.” Something she wasn’t telling me. Nothing sounds as obvious as a forced smile. The tension. The hesitation.

  “Too happy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fine. Like high? Drunk?”

  “Probably.” Resigned. That was more in character for a mother with an adult child she wasn’t willing to let go yet. “You’ll send along your bill tomorrow?”

  “Most certainly, Mrs. Thales. Thank you for your business.” She hung up before I finished the sentence.

  Nya was fine? Maybe, if you had the same view of the language as a bad salesman. Bleeding out in a Danville guest house with track marks on your inner thigh didn’t qualify as “fine” in my book.

  I tossed my phone onto the desk. “Fired” isn’t a word I run into very often, and this time it stank like the ass end of a landfill.

  With three more hours awake whether I liked it or not, I figured I might as well get the notes collated for my files, and the bill done, before the caffeine wore off and I crashed hard.

  The pictures and vid on my phone pretty much got shuffled straight into the “sort later” bin. Notes on my phone call with Dora, my run-in with the cops, my inability to locate Gina all went into the case file.

  It read like a big litany of red herrings and dead ends, which is how most of them read until you stumble on the one thing the client’s looking for.

  Except here, there wasn’t anything the client wanted anymore, so the case file’s only happy ending was the bill, which I’d have Rachael total up in the morning.

  I didn’t buy for a minute that Nya would be home safe tomorrow, or that she was out screwing her friends on some beach in Capitola, but I didn’t have any evidence of a crime—well, not a real crime, certainly nothing I could take to the cops. I didn’t count the vacation pics and the drugs. Kids will be kids, no matter what you do.

  With nothing to report to the boys in blue, and a client that had just called me off the c
ase, I had no more legal right to snoop.

  There was something going on at the house on Ackerman, and it wasn’t a party. But without more to go on my hands were tied.

  My phone beeped. I picked it up—Facebook alert. Gina to Stephanie and Bridget—the two remaining girls in the group.

  “Getting ready to go down to SOMA for BAGG. You in?”

  SOMA—San Francisco’s South of Market Area. A quick Google for BAGG in San Francisco turned up a club in SOMA called Bondage-a-Go-Go, a fetish dance club with a quirky website—the one Nya had mentioned in her diary? Probably. Over 18s only, no photography without prior arrangement with the clubs owners.

  The phone binged again. Bridget saying “We’re in. Pick us up at Steph’s.”

  “Already in the city with G. Meet me there?” came Gina’s reply.

  “On our way.”

  Twelve-thirty. They were in Danville.

  It would take them forty minutes to get into the City. It would take me fifteen.

  12:45 AM, Monday

  Third street, south of 80. The kind of neighborhood where you didn’t used to be able to walk alone at night, it had managed to hang on to the air of an impending mugging as it gentrified.

  The entry took me up to the second story bar in the club, a stadium box affair with comfortable diner-style seating and some couches arrayed in a large L stretching its arms down the north and east walls of the club. The elbow of the L had a woman suspended in a rope harness from the ceiling and a man tied to a cross, being flogged.

  Long bay windows looked down onto a choked dance floor below. With an hour left till the bar closed, people of all shapes and sizes were lined up to get their last drops.

  I shoved my way through to the west end of the club and took up a spot between a couple other voyeurs (of the strictly amateur variety) on the west gantry.

  If the girls didn’t stop on the way here, I should have beaten them by about fifteen minutes.

  The press of flesh below me moved in time with the heavy industrial sounds deafening me even through my ear plugs. The spontaneous choreography was directed by a twentysomething kid in dreds spinning in the DJ’s nest below the bondage arena.

  From my position, I could see all three entrances to the dance floor, so I switched between them every few seconds, watching for three girls wearing faces that looked like they came off the same assembly line.

  But something kept me coming back to the DJ. He was sixty feet away and under red light, so I couldn’t see very well, but something about him was damn familiar.

  By my watch I had maybe ten minutes before the girls got here. I left my place on the gantry, scuttled down the stairs and weaved my way over to the DJ booth.

  The DJ was queuing up a pair of vinyl platters while the current track played out. I leaned over the partition and waved a twenty to get the his attention. “Hey!”

  “Yo!” He pulled the headphones off and leaned over to me.

  “Head Like a Hole?”

  “You got it.” The guy took the twenty from my hand and gave me a wink, then went back to his vinyl.

  I knew that face. I’d been seeing it all weekend. But the voice sounded creepy-familiar too. Shouting over the din I couldn’t be sure if I was right. I had to be sure.

  “Hey!”

  “Another track?”

  “Nah. Putting together an event, need a DJ. You do swing?”

  “Sure. I’ll spin anything. When and where?”

  “Next month, Alameda.”

  “Grab a card.” He pointed to a stack of cards at the other end of the partition. “I might be booked up already. Email me with a date. See what we can do.” There it was, that easy authority. The rich baritone. I suppressed a shudder.

  “Great, thanks!” I slid along the partition and grabbed a card. Mr. Gravity, Disc Jockey and Event Producer. And he had the same voice as the guy in the shed.

  While I was pocketing the card and scanning the crowd a couple girls came up and leaned over the partition next to me.

  “Hey G! You seen Gina?” I risked a peripheral glance. Bridget and Stephanie, the last two girls. The last two of four?

  “Yeah, she forgot her tape so went out to get some more.”

  “We told her we were coming!”

  “Go dance, I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”

  The girls leaned over the partition and kissed him, each in turn, then flounced across the floor to the stage kitty-corner from the DJ’s booth.

  A few seconds later, I got a tap on the shoulder. Gravity. I leaned back. “Yeah?”

  “You’re new here right?” He was leaning closer, so didn’t have to shout as much.

  “Yeah.”

  He stretched a long-fingered hand past my face. “Check it out.”

  The girls mounted the stage and started shucking their street clothes, then applied electrical tape to their nipples to stay legal. As I watched, the two of them began weaving together to the music in a complex dance. It couldn’t have been rehearsed, but they moved around each other, coupling up and splitting apart like a pair of courting swans.

  Those faces. Heavy brows, sloping foreheads, elongated, downturned mouths, scrunched noses. Even from this distance, it was impossible to mistake them for anyone else.

  I stalked around the edges of the floor to get a better view, wound up sitting with a half dozen other over-thirties taking a breather.

  The club flashed and pounded, the pills were out and the people were lost in the noise, like everyone had crawled into a shared game of Pac-Man. At the next song change I got up to make room for a few more people at the table and went to get a Coke in the downstairs lobby.

  What the hell was I doing here? I should be home, or at least at the office, satisfied with a couple days pay and an exciting chase, and who cared if it came to nothing?

  All I had to go on the was a panicky mother of an adult girl who ran off for the weekend with her boyfriend and got into a fight with him.

  The girls here seemed to be safe. Rawles was in jail for the moment—and damn well deserved it for assaulting Nya, even if that wasn’t the charge.

  Gravity was relaxed too. Not a care in the world. Whatever he’d been worked up about in the shed—finding a way to squeeze Rawles out of whatever they were doing, I figured—wasn’t bothering him now.

  I came here to see if the girls would actually show—and if Nya would be with them.

  Two girls showed, but no Nya. Maybe she really was on the way to the beach like her Mom said—but who with, if her nearest and dearest were all here?

  And where the hell was Gina? Gina who sent the invite out on Facebook in the first place?

  Their absences screamed like a toddler with an infected tooth. I might have nothing I could report to the cops, and I might be off the case, but the notion that the girls were safe?

  I didn’t buy it for a second.

  I said you don’t survive long in this line without a good nose—mine was ready to jump off my face for how badly this stank of a set-up. But who was being set up? And why? And who the hell was doing it?

  One-thirty in the morning. My cup was as dry as the case. The girls on the stage had been going at it—not quite that way—for over half an hour, and they weren’t slowing down. Fast beat or slow, it was a frenzy up there—their own little tribal dance.

  I climbed halfway up the east stairs to the landing and leaned back against the railing. My holster dug into my tailbone. It occurred to me that nobody would hear a shot in here over the music.

  Two-thirty. Girls still on the stage. Couldn’t see them very well, just the skin and the thongs flashing between the heads of the onlookers surrounding them.

  The dance floor was thinner now. With the alcohol drying up people were gravitating to the shows—the bondage area upstairs, the go-go cages, and the stage.

  My caffeine pills had started to wear off around two—caught myself micro-napping. Hypnotic beat, hypnotic floor show…

  I wasn’t going to get anything
more here, whatever was going on. Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation was the best one. Teenagers runaway. Teenagers do drugs. Teenagers fight with their boyfriends. Teenagers cut themselves and each other just to see what it feels like. Teenagers have parents who freak out.

  Dora was full of shit, maybe paranoid—Nya was at the Ackerman house, probably getting wasted with whoever else was there. Friends of Rawles who were also partying at the house.

  Gina was here somewhere and I hadn’t seen her yet. Had to be. A few hundred people in a club this size and me napping on the stairs, no surprise I hadn’t spotted her.

  I didn’t care anymore—I technically shouldn’t have even been on the job since I’d been fired.

  Cops and PIs are creatures of habit—most of them annoying even to us. Trained to the bones in methods that are only useful when on a case or a crime scene, they kick in when, for example, you just want to leave the damn night club and go back to the office to sleep.

  The main exit was just to my right, but the habits kicked in. I did the numbskull’s shuffle across the dance floor, looking like just another drunk who’d lost the beat. Taking the long way out, back the way I came in, meant I’d get one last sweep over the club.

  Like I said. Annoying habits. The scenery wasn’t bad either.

  Halfway across I checked my right. The floor was clear between me and the DJ’s box.

  I checked back in front of me, and stopped in my tracks. I looked right again.

  Gravity was gone. A blonde woman was spinning the discs.

  I couldn’t see anyone on the stage through the press of flesh. I ran up the west stairs to the gantry and peered over the heads.

  There were girls up there all right. Three of them.

  But none of them had those trademark faces. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes they’d swapped out and skedaddled.

  “Dammit!” I looked up and peered through the windows. Not in the viewing gallery. Not in the bondage arena. Not on the far staircase. Not at the go-go cages.