J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 Read online

  Not exactly the well-behaved pack of church kids that Mrs. Thales might prefer to imagine when she thought about her daughter’s friends. Then again, idolizing a needy child was one of the expected vices of motherhood.

  “Yeah, looks like a prick. Who’s that?” I pointed to the stout-looking girl in Mr. Gravity’s left hand.

  “Gina.”

  “Nice girl?”

  “Yeah, sure I guess.”

  “And that’s Nya there?” I pointed to the more familiar girl with the great shape and squinty grin in Gravity’s right hand.

  “Yeah.”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, if I’m going to find her I need to know everything I can about her.”

  “Oh. Well, umm…she doesn’t really have any hobbies. Gets nervous around new people, at least more than one at a time. Let me tell you, though, since she was eleven…”

  Rawles rattled off a story that left me vaguely queasy at that point, but it erased any doubts about how qualified he was to pull an A in anatomy or biology if he could be bothered to stop toking long enough to read the homework. He’d evidently known her since Elementary school, and when she bloomed he was in the right position to catch her as she fell on her back.

  She was one of four girls at the school that got around like that, something Rawles seemed to laugh about only because he was embarrassed at how slavishly he followed them around. Or did he lead them around?

  Full of hot air and bullshit though he was, I had a hard time discounting all of it when his room was plastered with posters and cluttered with keepsakes. Paris? Costa Rica? Yeah, they’d been there. On Rawles’s dime, usually.

  “But Nya. Man, she looks at you and there’s just this…thing about her. And she always knows what people are thinking, even strangers, like she can smell it. I mean, they’re all kinda like that, but she’s better at it than the rest of ‘em. It’s fuckin’ creepy. She settled down a little when Gravity came around.” The young Mr. Rawles said the name like somebody had added dingle-berries instead of strawberries to his breakfast cereal.

  Somebody wasn’t happy with the pecking order.

  “If he’s such a prick, why keep him around?”

  Rawles snorted. “You try telling Nya to stay away from someone and ask that again. Bitch has an iron fist. You gonna be all day? I gotta go get the dog from the barber.”

  Like I said—Danville.

  I got copies of the pictures from the dunce and scanned the bookshelf while I waited, out of habit more than anything. I got the addresses of the other girls and asked for Mr. Gravity’s info. I had to sit through a three minute bitch session and a formal protest, but after Rawles used a tennis racket in a graphic demonstration of how much Gravity sucked, he finally tossed me the guy’s card.

  No address—not unusual for a freelancer.

  I managed to get out the door three steps ahead of a fawning description of how Gravity could make a black hole that wouldn’t collapse for a half-hour. If Rawles payed half as much attention in physics as he did in the group tent on camping trips, he’d be pulling A’s instead of a-holes.

  I’d intentionally parked halfway down the block. Old habit—if I had to tail him, I didn’t want him recognizing my car. But halfway back, replaying the encounter in my head, something twigged.

  I don’t like things that don’t fit, and there was an awful lot about Jason Rawles that didn’t fit. I figured the money must come from dealing the pot he kept smoking, but the books on his shelf itched like bad athlete’s foot.

  In the first place, he had them—physical books, not just the e-reader. In the second place, he was pulling nearly straight Fs. In the third place, the books were on topics I knew dick about—ethology, genetics, the kind of stuff you read about in the Greenpeace brochures with big scary fonts.

  If Rawles was actually reading those books, then his report card didn’t tell the whole story about him, not by a damn sight.

  The July heat turned the inside of my car into a cozy little pressure cooker, but I ducked in and cracked the windows just the same. Phone out, I scrolled through the addresses he’d given me—the other three girls whose names all felt strangely generic, and the man they all seemed to orbit. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but my alternative was to track down some of Nya’s teachers on a Saturday and try to get more of a picture of her.

  Or I could talk to her father. Mrs. Thales had described him as remarkably unconcerned. He might know something his wife didn’t.

  Rawles didn’t give me the chance to make up my mind. Over my steering wheel, I saw him walk out to the curb in front of his house fifty yards away. He took the last hit off his roach and scanned warily up the block, as if checking to make sure he wasn’t being watched.

  I was buried a few cars back in the impromptu curbside lot—something about July heat waves makes for spontaneous barbecue parties amongst the Bobos—and if I kept still he’d never see me through the glare on my windshield. I just about managed it too, as long as you don’t count the sweat that jumped out of my pores like the computerized fountain at the Bellagio.

  Satisfied that nobody was paying him the slightest bit of attention, he flicked the stub out into the street and retreated up the driveway, emerging ninety seconds later in his MR2 and zipping out to the main drag.

  What can I say? Kid didn’t want to be followed, and I didn’t have any better ideas at that point.

  After hooking and winding through the myriad micro-cities around Diablo, I finally understood Danville in the same way an endoscope understands a proctology patient.

  The streets and neighborhoods crammed into little gullies had been designed by the time-honored expedient of getting a four-year-old to barf spaghetti-ohs onto a Landsat map, then tracing the resulting acid burns in sharpie. Eventually somebody with a fancy degree in something-or-other pointed a construction foreman at the marks and said “Send the bulldozers here.”

  Yeah, “civil engineering” and “city planning” are two examples of the special breed of English that goes down well in the suburbs: they have a lot of syllables, sound really important, and have no apparent semantic relationship to the phenomenon they purport to describe.

  As for Rawles, he spent the next three hours making the rounds at local tennis clubs and golf courses, still dressed like a refugee from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog and walking like every step was a dare.

  He was efficient—knew his business, always out and in with the drops in less than five minutes, good at checking his tail, at least now that he was on the job. Typical newbie, only turning his brains on when the shift starts—rookie cops do the same thing, it’s why they tend to do more killing and dying than the rest of us.

  The small breaks when he was inside gave me time to go over the pictures and make notes.

  What started off as the standard teenage road-trip photos with silly faces, blank shots of the scenery, and Cheetos stuffed up the nostrils of sleeping compatriots quickly escalated to the point where, I had to hand it to them, they managed to triple up on felonies without even trying.

  There were the open containers in the car—they were mixing Budweiser and Southern Comfort, which should have been a felony all by itself, but there are some points on which the law and I don’t agree—and the pot in the car. With the booze and the underage kids, that made two plus a misdemeanor, if I wasn’t miscounting.

  But it was what they did to the camera that put the capper on it—let’s just say that it was a good thing they had a waterproof model after some of the places they wound up sticking it.

  It took a few minutes to wrap my head around the fact that Rawles had been understating the amount of debauchery in his little enclave, but only another couple of seconds to realize that, with two of the girls still under eighteen at the time, he’d handed me enough evidence to do him over for kiddie porn.

  Lucky—though honestly I was surprised he hadn’t put them up on Facebook and just given me the li
nk. Kids like to live in public and in pubic, and Rawles had the perfect storm of both.

  My stomach went a little green around the edges as I flipped through, but I kept going, because there was something else in the pics that I didn’t know how to cope with.

  The girls all had the wrong faces, somehow.

  Normally, even when you’re talking sisters, racial or family resemblance is never stronger than the differences between individuals on faces, say, or hands. It was a subtle thing, but these four girls all seemed the same as each other, somehow.

  They didn’t look like twins, exactly, but they had the same kind of generic-ness that, say, Down’s children have. Like somebody put an extra layer of plastic over them that marked them out as part of the same product line at the electronics store.

  Damn creepy.

  Following the brat wasn’t getting me anything but pieces of his client list, and I already had plenty of dirt on him if I needed it. Securing the pictures somewhere else besides my phone might be a good idea too—I didn’t fancy having to explain to my lawyer why he was suddenly defending me from a Megan’s Law problem.

  Time for another plan.

  3:00 PM, Saturday

  “Well, aren’t we in bright and early today.” Rachael, my intern, leaned against my office suite’s open door with her arms folded over her chest and a smirk on her face. When I hit the top of the stairs, she was ready for me.

  “Didn’t you get the note?” I ducked past her. She followed me in and headed for her desk. Left the door open—she has a thing about being able to see trouble coming. Probably why she was waiting out there for me.

  “When I got here there was a grand work of fiction sitting on my desk. It told of a case, and investigations, and something involving money.” She sipped something out of her sports bottle and settled back to the mess of papers she had arrayed like solitaire decks across the work surface. “I figured you’d given up and started writing novels for a dependable income.”

  “Nice.” I shrugged out of my windbreaker and hung it on the hook since I didn’t expect any more clients through the front door today. “Anything going on here that I need to know about?”

  “Mmm. My report is due in two weeks. I need you to sign the time sheets…”

  My eyes swept the room and spotted new range souvenirs on her desk “Ho ho hold on,” I held up my hand, then pointed at the freshly used silhouette targets, “What the hell is this?”

  “Practice.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t hang them on the wall again, it freaks out the customers.”

  “Spoil sport. These are forty yards on a snub,” she picked the top one up by the corner—nice grouping in the head.

  “Very nice. You can shoot. Now stop bringing them in.” I barged through the connecting door to the main office.

  “Or you’ll what?”

  “Forget to do your time sheets” I shouted back through the door.

  “You haven’t remembered them yet.”

  “Yeah, well,” I dropped my phone on my desk and scooped up a sheet of printer paper with the words “Time sheets or die!” and a web address scrawled across it in Rachael’s block print. I stuck my head back into the main office and held up the sign, “I got the memo. Monday?”

  She eyed me like she wasn’t sure whether I could manage to stay alive that long. “I don’t know. I guess I can trust you.”

  “You know where to find me.”

  “If you don’t sign it I’ll out you to the landlord for sleeping in the office.”

  “I better get on it, then.” As good as my word—and hopefully a little better than my English—I retreated into my office, found the sheet buried under Wednesday’s mail pile, and gave it a once-over. Twenty hours a week for the whole summer—extra credit for that all night stakeout a couple weeks back trying to find out who was sneaking inventory out of the back of the 7-11 on MacArthur. “Looks good,” I shouted, and signed it.

  I returned through the door and tossed it on her desk to find five-feet-four of leather-jacketed, goth-wannabe, blue-haired college kid once again leaning against something with folded arms like she was waiting for me to remember our anniversary. “Thanks.” The dry delivery, just to clue me in if I hadn’t noticed.

  “Anything else?”

  “Hmm…” She picked up the note I’d left for her earlier and perused it like an English professor, “your fiction could use a little work. There was an entire subplot about me getting hired on after the term ends that you completely neglected.”

  “You should post that review up on Goodreads. Should make for a riveting conversation starter.”

  “Let’s see, what else…” she turned back to the desk and shuffled through a pile of mail. “Just some bills. Department of Consumer Affairs sent a thirty-day nag note about the renewal on your license.”

  She thrust a stack of opened envelopes at me. I took them and thumbed through. “Any calls?”

  “What do I look like, your answering machine? Everything forwards to your cell phone anyway.”

  I shrugged, conceding the point. “Got some time to help me collate some notes from today?”

  “Sure.” She flomped down in her chair again.

  “Log in, I’ll drop everything to the server.”

  For the next two hours, I listened to the recording of my conversation with the kid—then read it over when Rachael typed up the transcript—until I was satisfied there was nothing in there I missed. After an afternoon chasing Rawles all over creation, my inherent sense of nihilism wasn’t going begging.

  Rachael wasn’t impressed either. “Is this guy for real?”

  “Depends on what you count as reality.”

  “I guess. Jesus. You gonna spike him for the photos or the drugs?”

  “Rule one: you got a potential witness that you might need to lean on later, hold it in reserve.”

  “Aren’t you required to report?”

  “It’s a gray area.”

  “That’s like saying Emperor Hirohito was only kinda Japanese.”

  “Class on World War Two this semester, eh?”

  “Shut up and mind your own business.”

  I chuckled. “Can you pull Rawles registration and driving record for me?”

  “Sure.”

  She wanted to learn this business from one end to the other, so she could use the extra database time. Every snoop needs to know the ins and outs of that god-awful interface—it’s a livelihood thing.

  Me, I needed space to think.

  Near as I could figure, the kid was a dead end. Pot and bluster and not a lot else—all shorts, no scrotum.

  The other girls might be a different story—nine times out of ten, a girl runs away from home, she runs to a friend’s house. Sometimes, the friend hides her, or the friend’s parents don’t notice they have a boarder for a while.

  Playing the odds, my money was on one of the other girls having Nya. First step: Facebook.

  Nya hadn’t updated hers since a few hours before Mrs. Thales said she disappeared.

  The other girls were easy to find—their public feeds weren’t filtered at all, and they used their real names.

  Gina, Bridget, and Stephanie had all been updating every few hours. Rawles’s electronic graffiti was all over their posts, with Stephanie getting most of his replies, but nothing on their feeds implied that Nya might be with any of them. A glance through Stephanie and Bridget’s private lists with a script hack didn’t give me anything either.

  Gina, though, was a different story. A post to her private list last night read:

  “At movies. No Nya. Not answering phone. Anyone seen her?”

  And a second one this morning:

  “Can’t find Nya. Is she ok? Pls call ASAP.”

  So Mrs. Thales wasn’t the only one worried. This girl really was missing.

  There was something else, though. Something that didn’t fit. The same thing struck me earlier in the car—something in their faces.

  They could have
been sisters. It wasn’t that they all looked the same, exactly. But they all had a kind of family resemblance.

  Long sloping forehead, small, slightly scrunched noses like there was always a bad smell in the air. Eyes that would make an anime cartoonist cream himself. And their mouths were…well, they were too big. The corners stretched toward their jaws just a little farther than normal, like they were part cat. Even when they were smiling, there was something vaguely frowny about them.

  “Clarke,” Rachael shouted through the open door, “got Rawles’s DMV records.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Not really. Two speeding tickets.”

  “Roll it into the file.”

  “You got it.”

  “Could you pull his school records and the records for the other three girls?”

  “Sure, I guess.” Just barely tolerating my eccentricities.

  I could have told her to forget it—I didn’t really need them. But it was good training, and it would buy me another hour or so.

  I took ten minutes to dump the data from my phone and secure the less legal pics from Rawles on an encrypted drive which I then hid under floorboards. I set a data-scrubbing program loose in my phone’s flash memory—rewriting every empty sector with random noise eight different times, with different random numbers. Even the NSA can’t crack it, and I really don’t want to be caught holding dirty pictures of minors if I can avoid it.

  Something about the way Rawles talked told me that the bond between these four girls was key to understanding Nya’s world. Particularly when he blathered about coming up through school with them, he’d talked about them like they were a unit—he’d swap from talking about one to talking about another without bothering to clarify his pronouns.

  If I could understand that bond, maybe I could figure out where she ran off to—or get one of the other girls to lead me to her.

  They all lived in the same town—maybe they’d all been adopted? Cousins? Or sisters from some careless teenaged mother?

  I had no way to find out quickly. My birth records database isn’t broad or deep enough to find sealed adoption records—what I could find didn’t seem to suggest a connection between them.