J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (12 page)

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 camouf
lage 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 Gravity went to Diablo Valley College.

DVC’s not Stanford—not even close.

But he had no name—just the moniker. I’d been to
o
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…

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.