J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (5 page)

“No…no her luggage is all right there.” She waved a pearl-braceletted hand at the shelf. Tremors in the hand again. That was more than worry.

“All right. Thank you, Mrs. Thales. I’ll be in touch.” I scooted around her and down the stairs. Shortly after I got into my car, the garage door opened to accept a green Mercedes sedan.

Mr. Thales, presumably, arriving home in time for his outing with his wife. How long until she told him?

I, on the other hand, needed some dinner.

7:00 PM, Saturday

Blackhawk Plaza is one of those shopping centers that desperately tries to convince you that it’s a cultural experience. In early evening it overflows with folks who are there either for the last tour of the auto museum, a posh dinner out, or who have a desperate need to make their consumerism look sophisticated.

Me? I was abusing my client’s trust by paying twice as much as what my “gourmet” pizza was worth. I needed some brain fuel, and the fountains made for a pleasant mid-evening background in the perpetual magic hour of the Bay Area’s midsummer.

This morning, I’d had a hysterical client to placate and a very strange girl to find. Now I had what was looking more and more like a smart nineteen-year-old underachiever taking her parents for a ride while she rode all the available roller coasters in the chemical playground.

It wasn’t an uncommon story in this area. When I worked detective in Oakland, the guys at the Emeryville crime lab we contracted with always had some story of the latest drug or booze scandal from over the hills. One of them insisted that the higher your income got, the more of it your wife and kids wasted in smoke, toke, coke, speed, and China White.

By those standards, Danville and Blackhawk were some of the most loaded places on the planet. It certainly would explain the placid, disinterested expressions on the middle-age faces.

But I wasn’t just here for the pizza. High class neighborhoods are the best places to pore over evidence, because the culture sustains itself on polite disinterest.

If you’re doing something out of the ordinary—for example, examining a teenage girl’s heroin injection kit—you’re less likely to be noticed. Anyone who bothers to look at you will be embarrassed to admit they know what you’re doing. The rest are more likely to presume, out of habit, that you’re a diabetic with a rock candy habit.

At my wire table in the rotunda, with the hundred-yard-long water feature stretching past (I know, I’m sorry, I can hear the English language whimpering from its corner from the pretension, but there just isn’t another word that describes it), I had a good view of both people and mallards from one end of the complex to another.

Sometimes, a little people-watching is just what the bartender ordered. In my case, getting grounded in the local subculture helped, ever so slightly, to separate what was unusual about Nya from what was “normal”—assuming a very flexible definition of the word allowing for local conditions.

With a little food in me I was less inclined to be paranoid than I had been at the Thales house. Between the drugs, the sex, and the fact that her room looked like she never intended to leave, I was tempted to write the whole thing off as a woman who skipped town on a lark and didn’t think to write home. Would be an easy thousand bucks plus expenses to call Mrs. Thales and tell
her
that yes, Nya was probably fine, and no, she shouldn’t worry, and yes, she should call the cops if the girl didn’t turn up for school on Monday.

It wouldn’t be the first time a teenager flew the coop on sheer impulse, and both the heroin and the pot habits were like to send her into a state where she lost track of time anyway.

But what about Dora’s insistence that she was shy around new people? The trophy collection under her bed seemed to put that one down before it got out of the starting gate. Hard to be shy around strangers when you’re actively hunting them for conquests.

And yet…what was it that Rawles had said?

She gets nervous around new people. At least more than one at a time
.

Maybe sex was how she got over being nervous? Wouldn’t be the first time.

And a girl who did that, and was playing with heroin…I couldn’t ignore the prospect that she’d come down with AIDS and run away, or decided to commit suicide. That kind of thrill seeking was almost always self-medication. Depression? Bi-polar? The girl was hiding from something.

Maybe.

This whole damned case was a pile of maybes.

I took a sip of my Gordon Birsch and looked up to the top of the waterfall. Surprise surprise, Rawles was up there, talking to a security guard. The conversation ended in a handshake, and as Rawles walked away he adjusted his pants. The kid was smooth.

He jogged down the walkway, heading to the west parking lot. When he was directly across the rotunda pond, he noticed me. “Hey, what’s up dog!” He waved and jogged around to join me at the table, tossing a warm-up jacket across my phone.

“Evening.”

“What you doing up here, man? You tailing me or something?” He looked at me as if to suggest he could have me killed if he didn’t think I was too cute for words.

“Dinner. Long day.”

“I hear ya, man.” He grabbed a chair from a neighboring half-occupied table, spun it around, and sat backwards on it, leaning cross-armed over the back rest. “Hot fucking day.”

“Yeah.” I took another nibble on my pizza. “You might want to work on that technique,” I nodded to the spot where he’d done the deal with the guard, “I spotted it from here. What was it, about two ounces?”

He blinked, then glared at me. “Hey, now, that’s…”

“Not a problem. I used to be a cop, thought you could use the tip.”

“Oh.” It took a moment for it to dawn on him that I wasn’t going to bust him. “Uh. Thanks, I guess.”

I shifted in my chair so I could get to the two ounce Ziploc in my pocket, on the off chance that it would come in useful.

“Found Nya yet?”

“Hmph.” I took another bite, then talked around my food, “I wish. Hard as hell to find anyone out here on the weekends.”

“That’s because nobody’s home. Weekend like this, they’re all out on the Delta and shit.”

“Ah, my bad.”

“Find anything? Like, should I be worried?”

“Nah, I think she just skipped out for the weekend to party somewhere. I’d send the old lady a bill, but she’s convinced that something awful happened. You know how she is.”

“What’d I tell you man? Fucking Dora wouldn’t know danger if it shot her.”

“Exactly. So now I just gotta figure out where Nya is so I can tell her that she’s okay.”

“That ain’t gonna be easy.”

“You sure you haven’t seen her?”

“Me?” He blinked again. I couldn’t tell whether he was high, or putting extra effort into playing the dunce, or he was trying to cover up from knowing something. “Nah, man, I ain’t seen her since, what, maybe Wednesday.”

“Dora said Nya was at your place last night.”

“Ha! Nya says that whenever she’s going out anywhere. Keeps Dora off her case.”

“So she wasn’t with you last night.”

“No.”

“Where were you last night?”

“Home. With Steph. Why do you care?”

“Stephanie Jennings?”

“Yeah, my fucking girlfriend.”

“Oh, right.” I took another sip. “What about this weekend—no parties you expect Nya at?”

“Nah. She goes where she wants, you know?”

“You said she got nervous around new people.”

“She’s got lots of friends. Might be out with Gravity somewhere. Sometimes they take off, you know? Go to Disneyland, go to Tahoe. Dude’s got a convertible. I gave you his card, right?”

“Yeah, haven’t had a chance to call him yet.”

“Sucks to be you.”

“Yeah. Hey, look, I gotta know something. What’s Dora’s deal? Why is she so freaked?”

“Hell if I know, man. Dora doesn’t wash her dirty laundry in public, you know?” He looked away, like he was hoping I wouldn’t press the point.

“I got that impression. She’s got some, though, doesn’t she?”

“Dude, I can’t go telling stories. My cli…fuck.”

“Client, eh?”

“Look, you can’t talk about your clients, right? Same with me. I got a business to run.”

“Business good?”

He smirked.

“Tell you what, I got some connections. You could level up.”

“Hmph. You said you were a cop.”

“How do you think a cop gets a retirement account? Look,” I leaned forward, and while he was looking at my face I slipped the baggie under his jacket, “I need to know what Dora’s deal is. I can pay you for it.”

“Ha. You? Right.”

“I shit you not. Check under your jacket, but don’t lift it up.”

He lifted up the corner of his jacket and peered under it, then slammed it down again. “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” he hissed.

“Your choice. You can walk out of here with it. That’s about two K street, maybe more if you don’t mind cutting it with some shake. Just tell me about Dora.”

“Holy shit, man.”

I nodded. “Holy shit.”

He looked around to check to see nobody was watching, then said, “Okay. Look, she’s legal, okay. Got her scrip, no bullshit.”

“What’s the scrip for?”

“Anxiety.”

“Ha! That figures. So what’s her deal?”

“Well…” he grabbed a slice of my pizza and used the chewing to make sure his story lined up with itself, “She’s a shrink, so she can’t, you know, look at anyone without thinking there’s something wrong with them.”

He took another bite, looking at the table, hoping I wouldn’t ask any more questions.

“What kind of shrink?”

He seemed to decide that it was safe to tell me. “Oh, you know. Just a shrink. She used to run this halfway house for molested kids. Now she thinks everyone she meets is a child molester.”

Well, that explained the overprotection. “That it?”

“Yeah…uh…yeah, that’s it.”

“How long’s she been buying from you?”

“I don’t know, a few years. Are we done yet, man?”

“Eh, probably.” I grabbed the bottle and took another sip, and mumbled “Gonna hate to see her go down for the speed,” around the mouth.

“What?” He stopped halfway through standing. He was…scared? No, not just. Worried. Like he cared about her.

“She was wired last time I saw her…”

“Don’t, man, she’s not hurting anybody.”

“Professional ethics…”

“Fuck that,” he squeaked, “She’s your client, man, you can’t…”

“Why do you care? Is she buying the stuff from you?”

“Hell no,” he shook his head—too much, “I don’t touch that stuff.”

“So how long have you been fucking her?”

Rawles went white—well, whiter than he already was, at any rate. His mouth stumbled around like a drunken Clydesdale for a full minute before he collapsed back down into his chair. “Dude, you can’t…”

“She’s a therapist, right?” He didn’t respond. “Your therapist?”

“Oh, fuck, dude, really…”

I let him sweat for another minute, took a few more nibbles on my pizza. “Okay, look. You’ve been a help today, and I owe you. So take the shit and go home. I won’t tell anyone about Dora.”

He deflated. Color came back to his cheeks. “Okay, yeah, that’s great. Thanks.”

“And Jason?”

“Yeah?”

I tossed my card on top of his jacket. “Call me if you hear anything about Nya?”

“Yeah, okay.” He scooped up the jacket, and the pot underneath, and beat it.

An hour later, I’d switched to coffee. The environment was a nice change from the old Vic back in Oakland—a string quartet tittered a little ways up the water, and the couches in the annex under the dome were more comfortable than my office chair. Nya’s phone—the one I’d found in her room—was dead. I’d have to pick up charger up for that tomorrow somewhere. I had my bluetooth keyboard with me, and I used it to organize my notes on the phone. It worked well until the phone rang and my headset didn’t.

Spoiled rotten by technology, it didn’t occur to me until the third ring to pick the handset up.

“Lantham.”

“You want answers, Mr. Lantham.” gravelly, disguised, “Do you think you can handle them?”

The caller ID was blocked. “Who is this?”

“My identity is not for sale. I…” the voice broke down into a ragged hack.

“Earl.”

“Clarke. Couldn’t resist. Got your info on the girls.”

“Shoot.”

“Three natural births, one C-section. The girl Stephanie was born in Cambridge—the one in England—but her parents moved here when she was five. The others are all local families. No adoptions, not related in any way I can see.”

“Thanks.” Boom went that beautiful theory. Not that it mattered to the case anymore. Still, good to have the loose end tied up.

“The report’s in your inbox…now.” My phone beeped. “Along with the bill.”

“Go ahead and charge the regular account.”

“You mind if I record that?”

“You just did.”

“Yes, but I need your consent.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks. Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Will do.” I hung up.

After another ten minutes I’d hit the bottom of my coffee and the end of my notes. I rolled the membrane keyboard up and stuffed it into my inside jacket pocket.

As I got to the car, it occurred to me that I ought to stake out one of the girls’ houses for the night, but a check of the Facebook taps once I got behind the wheel put that notion to bed pretty quick.

Gina had an invite out to the other three girls for a visit to somewhere or something called “BAGG” on Sunday night. She’d drive. Google tried to convince me that BAGG was the Bay Area Geotechnical Group, but Google tends to be full of shit.

The other two were in, and they all asked each other if anyone knew where Nya had run off to. A few theories were floated, all of them involving “G,” and none of them very plausible. The consensus developed that she’d probably be at “BAGG” tomorrow anyway, and they’d meet up with her there.

No point in staking any of them out, then. The conversation, all carried out over private message, made it abundantly clear that none of them had the faintest idea of where Nya might be.