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And Then She Was Gone
by J. Daniel Sawyer
AWP Mystery
A division of ArtisticWhispers Productions
Copyright © 2010 J. Daniel Sawyer
All Rights Reserved
Book Design by ArtisticWhispers Productions
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
This book constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason ( excepting the uses permitted to the reader by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
Also by J. Daniel Sawyer
The Clarke Lantham Mysteries
And Then She Was Gone
A Ghostly Christmas Present
Silent Victor (forthcoming)
The Antithesis Progression
Predestination*
Free Will*
Avarice (forthcoming)
The Motive Series
The Auto Motive (forthcoming)
Short Stories
Lilith
Buried Alive In The Blues
Angels Unawares
The Man In The Rain
Cold Duty
Sculpting God*
Down From Ten*
Firearms 101: A Guide for Writers (coming in July 2011)
Anthologies featuring work by J. Daniel Sawyer
The Podthology: the Pod Complex
The Steampunk Bible ed. By Jeff and Ann Vandermeer (forthcoming)
Apocaypse Sex: Love at the End of the World
*(available in full-cast audiobook format)
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself, abus’d or disabus’d;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.
-Alexander Pope
Dedication
For those of you wanting for someone to blame, look no farther than the mad quartet of Humphrey, Lauren, Raymond and Howard.
This book is dedicated to their singular achievement,
And also to Kitty, who loves the snark more than Lewis Caroll ever did.
And Then She Was Gone
A Clarke Lantham Mystery
by J. Daniel Sawyer
9:30 AM, Saturday
After the mess at the New Year’s party, I promised myself I’d never get involved in another murder case. I swore an oath before God, and then to be safe I took that same oath before every god I’d ever heard of, just in case I wasn’t current on his proper name. I wanted him to strike me dead if I ever got the idiotic notion to stick my nose into another room where it might get cut off by a knife-wielding maniac.
I’m too old to mistake that kind of inanity for fun.
With that in mind, you’d think I’d content myself with working divorce cases and employee applications—or retire from my post-disgraced-public-servant life to a respectable position teaching college students the finer points of ethics or selling oranges at a roadside fruit stand.
Not that you can tell that someone’s gonna turn up dead when disaster walks through your door dressed up like money. Still, you don’t listen to the hairs on the back of your neck, and you’re asking for trouble.
I guess that whatever gifts I bought in brains and intuition I paid for out of my common sense, and the few times I’ve tried to grow some common sense since then have all seemed to end with me tied to a chair with a car battery attached to my testicles, or worse, watching a chick flick in a vain attempt to get in touch with my feminine side.
Yeah, that therapist was a moron too, but she sure got rich off my attempts to rub the sickness out of my melon.
Well, I didn’t have that much good sense. Or maybe I’m just such a creature of habit that breaking the habit means breaking the creature. I really can’t help it. Things that are out of place bug me in the same way tuberculosis bothers the lungs. The universe is the primary offender, which means I’m likely never to run out of work.
So when she walked in through the door, looking like a tragic twist on a Paris Hilton sex tape, I knew I was in for it again.
I wish I could say it was raining, or that the last rays of sunlight filtered in through the smoggy haze outside the windows lighting her up like a golden ghost. Truth is, she came in at nine in the morning on a day I’d rather have been scratching my toes on the underside of my duvet.
Of all the mean characters I’ve known in my life, insomnia is the cruelest bitch of them all.
I was in the middle of my fourth cup of coffee when she knocked. Normally my intern—who was getting ready to quit over being treated like a receptionist—would have told the client to take a number and given me thirty seconds to make sure my fly wasn’t down. That day, said intern had a dental appointment and wasn’t due in until eleven.
My fly was up, though. Lucky me.
“Come in.” I took a final quick swig of my coffee and set the mug down on the desk.
She walked in. The flat morning light didn’t do her any favors, but then she didn’t really need many. She wasn’t the tall stately blonde that can capture the heart of any stereotypical masturbation fantasy, but she held her shape well even so. Five foot nine if she was an inch, Greek coloring and hair, or maybe Italian and sun-toasted. Gaudy catholic crucifix fighting with her wild bat-looking collar for who got the window seat. Despite the puffiness around her eyes and the slight wheeze in her breath, she carried herself with grace in her sweat pants and half-buttoned business shirt.
She looked like she’d made up her mind to come in halfway through getting dressed for work—that plus the trembling hands meant whatever she wanted was urgent. Urgent meant money.
I stood and motioned to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. “Have a seat, please.”
She did. A nice one too, which I learned when she bent over from the waist to set her purse on the floor before lowering it into the chair. I enjoyed the view, but I didn’t count it toward anything. She didn’t look like she was putting moves on, more like she couldn’t remember which way was up.
I started out as a cop being a sucker for a pretty face, and then when I washed out because of a pretty face attached to the chief’s wife I went the other way, automatically scoring beauty as a bad point.
In the years since, I gradually learned to admit that beauty is like halitosis – it strikes people without any regard for their character.
She sat there for two solid minutes, fumbling mutely with a Kleenex that she white-knuckled in her left hand. She couldn’t let go of it enough to blow her nose with it, but she couldn’t breathe without it either.
I tried to politely ignore it, but there’s only so much whistling and bulging a body can ignore until he has to do something.
I figured that offering a fresh tissue would be more genteel than putting in my ear plugs, so I opened the bottom right drawer and pulled out the box, sliding it across the desk to her. When it entered her field of view her eyebrows bumped up, like she’d forgotten there was someone else in the room.
Still clutching the used tissue with her trembling left fist, she took a fresh one with her right and blew her nose, dried her eyes, and tried to find some semblance of composure.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lantham. I didn’t even call for an appointment…”
“Clarke. It’s okay.”
Normally interrupting a client isn’t a good idea, but she had the look of someone who would use up her dime rattling on with apology after apology, and I’m not a therapist.
Until she plunked cash on the barrel-head, I wasn’t even her snoop. At the moment, about all I could lay claim to where she was concerned was ‘tissue dispenser.’ Even this early in the morning, I normally insist on a social rank at least equivalent to ‘waiter.’
“Please, what brings you here?” Sensitivity is an ill-fitting suit, but I can slip into it in a pinch.
“I,” she took a deep breath to get her fretting under control, then rushed forward like she was in a speed-reading contest, “My husband told me not to worry. He said I should give it a few days. I mean, the police wouldn’t do anything anyway but I couldn’t just keep waiting and waiting and waiting when I know it’s not right. I mean…” she looked at me helplessly, like she’d already bled her internal thesaurus dry.
“Why won’t the police help?” Sometimes, a little prompting is worth a pint of bourbon.
“Oh. Well, she’s nineteen. She’s got a reputation for…well, you know. But she’s a good girl, likes living at home. She’s really clever, but she doesn’t read much and isn’t really good with math…”
“Your daughter?”
She nodded.
“How long has she been missing?”
“She didn’t come home last night. She always comes home. Never stayed out her whole life…well…you know, not without calling and telling us.”
“At nineteen? Why not?”
“She…well, she’s got some kind of…well it’s not quite autism, really. Not unemotional, but she has to have..well, not routine. Regularity, maybe, or she gets scared. She’s gotta be able to depend on things. I never had to tell her to be home in high school, she just always came home at the right time. She’s been that way since she was born.”
“But not unemotional?” I took a pen from a well on the desk and made some quick notes as she talked.
“Oh, no. Anything but. She’s, well, unusually passionate. Really intuitive. If you’re in the room with her, she’ll catch your eyes, and you won’t see anything else until she’s done with you. She’s been that way since she was a baby. She looks at you, and she knows who you are deep down, you know?”
“I see. She have a therapist?”
“Yes.” She fumbled around in her purse, found a wallet, and handed me a card with an address in San Ramon. I set it down without reading it, for now, and picked up my pencil again. “Where was your daughter last seen?”
“She was at a friend’s house.”
“Name?”
“Excuse me?”
“The friend’s name.”
“Oh. Jason. Jason Rawles.”
“And your daughter’s name?”
“Nya Thales.”
11:00 AM, Saturday
My first stop on my hopscotch jaunt to hell was a lovely cookie-cutter home in Danville, one of those places that also-ran second generation Bobos bought because they couldn’t afford to live behind the fences and armed guards in Blackhawk proper. Hard wind blew over the Oakland hills and swept up to blast me with little bits of cow dung from the neighboring field—bet you didn’t know that having a house that backs up to pasture is the ultimate in posh.
Jason Rawles answered the door after I leaned on the bell a couple times.
“Yeah?” It was clear from the way he stood shirtless in the midday light, scratching his butt and looking at me through half-lids, that he thought he was far too sexy for the house that fortune had confined him to.
“I’m looking for Jason Rawles.”
“Really?” He appeared to pull the business end of his scratching fist out of his butt crack and shove it into his mouth. It was only after his hand started smoking that I realized he’d been palming a joint.
He looked me up and down through the smoke like he was surprised they hadn’t just gone ahead and buried me when I hit thirty. “Who the hell are you?”
“Clarke Lantham. I’m helping Mrs. Thales find her daughter.”
“Nya? Yeah, sure, whatever.” He waved me in, then seemed to forget I was there. I followed him into the kitchen where he ducked into the fridge and grabbed himself a can of the alcoholic seltzer water that kids his age think qualifies as “beer.” He didn’t offer me one, a favor which made me like him more than I really wanted to.
He batted the fridge door closed, planted his back against it, and sucked the sludge out of the can. Once he’d finished chugging it he slammed it against his head and tossed the aluminum hockey puck at a box on the counter. It missed and went skittering across the green granite and then down onto the charcoal slate floor tiles.
The kid flicked a Zippo open and took another pull on the joint, then wheezed “So what’s the big mystery?” at me.
“‘Scuse me?”
“If Dora hired you,” the scorn of a moron has that special ring to it that always makes my heart sing, “Shit. Dora wouldn’t have gotten you to go around looking if she didn’t think there was a serial killer on the loose.”
“She thinks stuff like that a lot?”
“Shit yeah,” the kid leaned forward and tapped the ash off the end of his joint into a neglected coffee mug, “there was this one day we all went up to Chico to go rafting, Nya dropped her phone in. When we got home—and we were on time to the minute—Dora was shitting bricks like she was born on a building site. Crazy bitch. Could hear her screaming at Nya halfway down the block.”
“I see.” I hadn’t banked on home troubles factoring into this, but it did lay a motive for running away. Assuming Nya was competent to run away. Mrs. Thales seemed to think she wasn’t, but what overprotective mother does? “When was this?”
“Eh. Last summer sometime.”
“Who all was there?”
He shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. “What, man, you wanna see pictures or something?”
“Sure.”
He shrugged, jerked his head at the staircase in the foyer, then shuffled off after it, rolling his eyes like he couldn’t imagine a dumber series of questions. That was fine. So long as he thought I was dense, he’d keep dancing—it made him feel superior, and Rawles was the sort who needed to feel superior.
It turned out that, despite the arrogance and the too-many-gym-hours physique, Rawles was the kind of kid who thought that the sun rose and set.
Literally.
In his room I caught a glimpse of his report card on his bedside table, and the failing grade in Astronomy headlined the show. The supporting cast didn’t look much better.
He plopped his ass in front of this year’s latest-and-greatest fruity computer hardware—the smoke followed him around like something out of a cartoon—and jiggled his hand in the direction of an ottoman. I pulled it up and planted my carcass on it as he started shuffling through pictures.
“Don’t know what you want to see,” he shuffled past the obligatory shots of the delta landscape out the window, cataloging gas stations, teenagers goofing off in the back seat of th
e Suburban, and flashing the oncoming traffic. “We just drove up and went rafting.”
“Who are the others?” When I asked, he stopped scrolling through the pics and pulled up a group shot.
“Oh. Well, this guy here’s Gravity.”
“Parents worked at NASA?”
“Wha? Nah. Think his real name is…Chuck? Graduated Cal High a few years back, goes to Diablo Valley. Kind of a prick, but we let him pack along anyway.”
“Prick?”
His brow wrinkled quickly with contempt, then he took another hit on his joint and leaned back in his swivel seat. “Yeah, a cock.” He twisted his neck around to me and blew the smoke in my face. “You know what a cock is, right?”
“That would be the thing your girlfriend puts the batteries in after you go home, eh, kid?”
The skin around his nose crawled up to his eyebrows like a cow just farted in his face. The joint snaked its way up to his mouth again, and he tried to hit it. His lungs had different ideas, and he hacked himself into a laughing fit.
“Aww, fuck, man. You got me.”
I tipped my head, let him think he was winning. “So, prick?”
“Oh, you know.” Rawles lowered his voice to a fratboy-chump timbre, “‘I’m Gravity, the irresistible force.’ Just a prick. I mean, look at him.”
He jerked his head back to the face on the screen.
Mr. Gravity wore the dreads of a rich white kid who spent too much time trying to get laid at anti-globalization rallies. He was also completely baked, each hand full of one tit from a girl on each arm, enjoying the blessings of being the age between expectations and responsibility.
Nya I recognized from the school portrait Mrs. Thales showed me—medium tall, broad shoulders, reddish darkish hair, exotic face that looked like it had been Photoshop-smoothed, a few acne scars here and there. In the high school senior photo she’d worn a traditional formal dress, but in this photo she was considerably more…relaxed. She came up to maybe Gravity’s shoulder, which put him comfortably north of six feet with hands big enough to palm something the size of a casaba.