Psyc 03_The Call of the Mild (10 page)

Gus thought this over, then let out a sigh. “I’m going to regret this, but go ahead.”

Shawn beamed. “Okay, first question: Why was the locket in La Canada?”

Gus waited. Shawn drummed his fingers on the desk. Tapped his feet on the chair leg. Cleared his throat. “You need to answer,” he said.

“Why?” Gus said. “If this is an exercise in the proper framing of the puzzle, why do you need me to answer? Just keep on with the questions.”

Shawn stared down at the desk. “I need you to say something stupid.”

“Uh-uh,” Gus said.

“It doesn’t mean I think you’re stupid,” Shawn said quickly.

“But if you don’t give me the wrong answer, I don’t think I can come up with the right one.”

“What if I give you the right answer?”

“Okay,” Shawn said. “What if?”

“Are you saying I never come up with the right answer?” Gus demanded.

“That’s not to say that it couldn’t happen,” Shawn said.

“That would be like saying Jay Leno will never tell a funny joke.”

Gus glared at him. “What if I give you the right answer at this very moment?”

“Then I will give you all the credit for solving the case,” Shawn said. “I will put your name on the door. I will tell people you’re my partner and not my assistant even when you’re not in the room.”

Gus decided to let this pass. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start with the locket. Describe what you saw.”

Shawn closed his eyes and thought back. The locket was a simple gold-plated heart on a chain. It was clearly old, as the plating had rubbed off in one spot, but so cheap it would never be considered an antique. Inside it were facing pictures of two homely people, hand-cropped badly enough so that some of the green plastic backing showed behind them.

“Green plastic,” Shawn said. “That’s it.”

“That’s what?”

“That’s not how this works,” Shawn said. “You were going to give me the right answer.”

“I was,” Gus said. “But now you’ve figured it out. And there’s no way you can keep yourself from telling me about it.”

“Watch me,” Shawn said.

For a moment, the two of them sat in silence. Then Gus got up and gave Shawn’s desk chair a shove, sending him rolling away from the desk. He stood over the computer and typed into a search engine.

“Let’s see,” Gus said as a Web site popped up in response. “Fun facts about La Canada Flintridge. One: While the ‘Canada’ part refers to the Spanish word for gorge or ravine, ‘Flintridge’ refers to nothing at all, since there is no flinty ridge here. Two: It’s the USA’s eighty-fifth most expensive city to live in. Three: Kevin Costner’s ex-wife owns a restaurant here which is locally famous for its breakfasts.”

“That’s it,” Shawn said. “Clearly this is all part of the global conspiracy to get Cindy Costner’s pancake recipe.”

Gus ignored him and kept reading. “Four: There’s a decades-long feud between La Canada and neighbor Pasadena over which city should be listed in news stories as the location of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Five—”

“Don’t stop now,” Shawn said. “I want to know more about the pancakes.”

“JPL is in La Canada,” Gus said, quickly typing in the search engine again. “It’s less than five miles from Descanso Gardens.”

“Amazing,” Shawn said. “If only we had thought to ask why this all happened in La Canada.”

But Gus wasn’t going to take the bait now. Because he had the answer. “And that backing in the locket wasn’t plastic,” he said. “It was silicon.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
here was a lot Gus didn’t like about being a detective. The danger, for one. Although being threatened with imminent doom might sound exciting, after the first couple of times it began to get really old. And then there were the hours. Gus never had a problem with working hard, but he did like to know exactly when he could expect to knock off for the day, and that was rarely the case in an investigation.

For all the inconveniences, though, there were some things about the job that he loved enough to put up with anything. Best of all was the moment when a baffling mystery revealed itself into a crystalline, perfect solution.

This, unfortunately, was not one of those times.

Both Shawn and Gus were fairly certain that they had solved at least one part of the crime. The necklace was being used to smuggle a computer chip full of information out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And it was a safe bet that whatever that information was it had some sort of national security implications, since it seemed improbable that Ellen Svaco would have been killed simply so someone could find out what the weather was like on Mars.

Beyond that, however, they were stumped.

Clearly, Ellen Svaco had been some kind of courier. She was supposed to have picked up the chip and then delivered it somewhere else. But there was no way to tell whom she was working for, or why they might have chosen an elementary school teacher for the job. Had she even known what she would be transporting? The fact that she had hired Psych to retrieve it from the lost and found suggested she’d known that someone else was after it, but nothing more than that.

And then there was the mime. He had been desperate to get the necklace—desperate enough to risk a daring daylight robbery. But who was he? They briefly considered the idea that he was the JPL employee who had smuggled the chip out of the lab in the first place and then had developed second thoughts. But while that seemed to simplify things at first, it quickly led to far greater complications. Because if he had put the chip in the locket, then he was probably also the one who’d left it at the lost and found. Which meant he would have known where it was—and the mime hadn’t. If he had, there would have been no need to disguise himself and wait for Shawn and Gus to retrieve the necklace before taking it away from them. He could simply have asked for it at the booth.

And then there was the “Rushmore” he’d insisted he was protecting. A Google search of the word turned up multiple references to the mountain, the movie, and a Manhattan condo tower, but none of them seemed to have anything to do with purloined jewelry, public gardens, or the art of mime.

No matter how many times they turned their few facts over, they kept coming back to Ellen Svaco at the center of the mystery. Which was entirely unacceptable, because Ellen Svaco was the one part of the puzzle they weren’t allowed to investigate.

If this had been a normal case, Shawn and Gus would have dived into Ellen Svaco’s private life. They would have searched her house and car. They would have gone to her funeral to see who else showed up to mourn—and which of the mourners didn’t seem particularly sorry to see her go. They might even have attempted to go undercover as substitute teachers at her school.

But each of those routes led almost inevitably to a single roadblock: Henry Spencer. Shawn had learned the fundamentals of detective work at his father’s knee—or sometimes across his father’s knee, if Shawn had been the subject of Henry’s investigation—and the instincts that would be driving Shawn would also be driving his father. Shawn had promised Henry he’d stay out of Ellen’s murder, and unless he could figure out a retroactive weasel, he was stuck with the pledge.

The remaining pathways were much less appealing. The only obvious one was to knock on JPL’s front door and ask if they happened to be missing a microchip or two, and if they might happen to know what was on it. But it seemed unlikely that the guard at the front gate would be willing or able to share that information with a couple of guys who happened to walk up to him. In a normal situation they’d try to come up with a way to get into the lab posing as scientists or journalists or any other kind of “ists,” but JPL had made national news a few years back for forcing its longtime employees to sign waivers allowing government inspectors to dig into every aspect of their lives from birth onwards. It seemed unlikely that a pair of private detectives could slip into the facility by claiming they’d left their ID badges at home.

That left the mime as the sole loose end they might be able to pick up. But this presented a few problems as well. Like the fact that he was a mime. His face had been completely covered by makeup, his hair by a beret, and his hands by white gloves. Even if they had any idea where to start looking, they’d never be able to identify him unless he hadn’t bothered to de-mime himself in the intervening hours.

Shawn and Gus spent the evening trying to find a way into the case, stopping once only long enough to send out for pizza and then again to tear the office apart collecting change when the deliveryman arrived and they realized they didn’t have enough cash to cover the check.

By midnight they were both halfway to sleep and no closer to a solution. An hour later Gus was looking for his car keys and declaring he was going home as soon as they’d made a little more progress. Fifteen minutes after that he was snoring on the office couch.

Not that he was slacking, Gus told himself as his eyes fluttered closed. The thorniest problems are never solved in the conscious mind; the solutions have to bubble up from the subconscious. And what better way to access his subconscious than to let it have free rein for a couple of minutes? If he napped for just a couple of minutes he would certainly wake up with the answer on the tip of this tongue.

He’d used that argument with himself in the past, and it had never worked. He’d wake up a few hours later barely able to remember which member of En Vogue he was about to marry in his dream, let alone a solution to any problem that was plaguing him when he drifted off.

But this time turned out to be different. Because this time when he woke up, the solution was right there. Only it wasn’t on the tip of his tongue. It was on Shawn’s.

“I’ve found the mime,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he sun had crested the hills east of Santa Barbara, the fog had retreated to the horizon, and the ocean was sparkling in the morning light. The waves off Hendry’s Beach should have been filled with surfers finishing up their predawn runs.

But the few surfers who were here were out of the water, pressed up against a line of crime scene tape thirty feet back from the berm. Beyond the tape a small battalion of uniformed officers and red-jacketed lifeguards patrolled the sand, keeping the crowd of onlookers away from the wet-suited divers who were emerging from the surf. The only onlooker allowed inside the police perimeter was an ancient man in an electric wheelchair, who sat at the waterline staring sadly out to sea.

Shawn and Gus made their way through the crowd to the tape.

“You still haven’t explained what we’re doing here,” Gus said.

“Because sometimes words aren’t enough,” Shawn said. “A strong visual can convey all the meaning of pages worth of verbiage in so much less time.”

“Does that include all the time since you woke me up to tell me you’d found the mime?” Gus said. “Because it’s been more than two hours, and you can fit a lot of words into one hundred and twenty-seven minutes.”

“Don’t forget, a chunk of that time was spent eating breakfast,” Shawn said. “You wouldn’t want me to talk with my mouth full. That would be rude.”

“In between bites, I’m sure you could have squeezed in an answer to a simple question or two,” Gus said. “Like ‘what do you mean you found the mime?’ ”

“You’ve got a point,” Shawn said. “That would have taken only six words: ‘I mean I found the mime.’ Or I could have answered your follow-up question, ‘Where is the mime?’ That would have been only three words.”

“And if you had taken a break between bites of your breakfast burrito, which three words would you have used?”

“In regard to the mime’s current location?” Shawn jerked his thumb towards the divers emerging from the surf. “In the water.”

He lifted the crime scene tape and ducked under it. Just as Gus joined him on the other side, a uniformed officer stepped in front of them.

“Hey!” the officer said. “Didn’t you see the tape?”

“Of course I saw it,” Shawn said. “That’s why I ducked under it. If I hadn’t noticed it, I’d probably still be stuck in place, trying to figure out why I couldn’t move forward.”

The officer put a beefy hand on Shawn’s shoulder. “Did you happen to notice the words written across the tape?” he said.

“He didn’t bother,” Gus said. “Because a strong visual can convey so much more than any number of words.”

“And a patrol car can convey your ass straight to jail if you don’t step behind the tape,” the officer said.

Gus glanced down the beach and saw that two other officers had noticed the disturbance and were on their way to assist. He and Shawn had met a lot of cops in the years since they’d been working as private eyes, but the ones patrolling this scene didn’t seem to be among them. Not surprising, since the officer blocking their way had a deep tan and premature wrinkles strongly suggesting he had been working beach patrol for many years, and try as they might to get beachfront crimes, Psych’s cases rarely brought Shawn and Gus down to the ocean.

“Maybe we should do what the officer suggests,” Gus said.

“That would be the prudent course of action,” Shawn said.

“You’ve got that right,” the officer agreed.

“Unfortunately, we’re not prudes,” Shawn said. “We’re private detectives, and we’ve been asked to meet our client on this very beach at this very time.”

“Are you, now?” the officer asked, although the question mark seemed to Gus to be more of a rhetorical device than an indication of true curiosity.

“We are now,” Shawn said. “We also were then. And we still will be ten minutes from now, which is more than I can say for you and your present job as a police officer if you prevent me from speaking to my client, who happens to be one of the richest and most powerful men in Santa Barbara.”