J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (16 page)

In ‘95 Newsweek called him the Susan Lucci of the Nobel prize, which pissed off the New York Times, where their resident expert pointed out the following week that the Nobel Committee doesn’t publicly disclose its nominees so no one could verify the claim.

Some kind of lawsuit put him out of practice—perhaps the malpractice company wouldn’t cover him anymore? Details were a bit thin on the net. He filed for bankruptcy but pulled out. New York Times had him hitting the jackpot selling off his patents in ‘01, but didn’t have any details.

Not a lot of info on his personal life. I took a look through the title report to see if anything there could help.

The house was jointly owned by Sternwood and his wife, administered in some kind of living trust since ‘96. Searching for his wife didn’t turn up anything.

What’s left. Local papers?

Didn’t turn up anything of interest, other than an obituary for a daughter in late ‘95—eight years old, leukemia.

An hour of digging, the headache rising and falling like successive waves of mass hysteria, and all I got was Sternwood competing with Gravity for the center spot in this weird little solar system.

Closing in on one o’clock. They were going to find Stephanie’s body soon. When they did, I was on a clock just long enough to drive back from Redding.

I didn’t have enough brains left to spread on toast. To get anything more on the doctor—or any of the other players—I was gonna need help.

Hiking back up to the car let the migraine back in, at least for a few minutes. Blood flow and headaches aren’t a good combination. I had to stop twice to catch my breath.

The second time, a woman walked past me pushing a stroller. She glanced quickly in my direction twice—once to make sure I wasn’t going to grab the Chinese toddler trailing her, and the second time to let me know just how pathetic I was not to be able to climb a simple hill on a day that wasn’t even over ninety five degrees yet.

When I stood back up and saw her again, something in my brain stretched loose, like a droplet of syrup on a cold day.

She was a white woman, maybe twenty eight, followed by a Chinese toddler and pushing a black baby in a stroller—deep black, like a Nigerian, not mixed-race. Adopting refugee orphans? Like…

Like what Rawles said this morning.

Like their mom died and they were adopted out.
Ever since that first meeting with Rawles I’d had that thought sliding around in my head like a marble on a ship deck in high seas. Rawles just put words to it.

Except they weren’t adopted. I’d checked. All of them born to different parents, with real birth certificates. But that couldn’t—
couldn’t—
be the whole story.

It was those faces. Fuck birth defects—like Kristine said, birth defects make you look grotesque. These girls were anything but. You just didn’t see faces like that. All with the same secret langu
a
ge—a language Rawles said Gravity spoke. Four of them.

Well, three of them now.

And I had the sinking feeling that Stephanie was only the beginning. Most domestic murders are about sex, money, or power, but this wasn’t a domestic murder. Phil dropped that kid at my office to take me out of circulation.

Killing someone out of jealousy or anger was one thing. Killing a lover to cover your tracks implies there’s tracks worth covering. Maybe it was just about the sex—nobody wants to be branded a sex offender—but my money said no. A corpse on my cot framed me for murder, and as far as Phil knew I was already off the case. There was something else going on…

Damned if I knew what it was.

2:45 PM, Monday

Earl Whitaker is the kind of guy PIs want to bear children for. Lives up on a little spur road by Mount Hamilton. He can afford it—he’s got fingers in pies the NSA doesn’t know exist yet.

Danville might be Danville, but Silicon Valley is Mecca. This guy found Mohammed’s mountain and set up shop there so he could monopolize Allah’s attention. House like a Sultan’s palace on land measured in the kilodollars per square foot, spitting distance from the observatory.

Best data miner in the business. He helped me out once on this case already. Now he was gonna save my bacon, or I was gonna wind up frying on the business end of another hi-powered Taser.

Calling ahead got me through his front gate without the customary body cavity search by his goons. Time was we were on opposite sides of a black-hat-enabled robbery at Ask—the FBI really liked Earl for the caper’s villain. I didn’t. I won. Got a couple special agents pissed off at me, but Earl loves me.

I’d say he was a gentleman about it, but Earl wouldn’t know a gentleman if he wound up paired with one at a French tickler party. If you didn’t speak geek, the man didn’t know where your buttons were.

He liked it that way. Said it was a “Social firewall to keep the assholes in their pen.”

I dropped him the case data and headshots of the kids while I went over the job.

Yeah, I had ten thousand for his time.

No, I wouldn’t take more than a few hours.

That was good, according to him—if he couldn’t find something in that amount of time on a specific question, it probably wasn’t there for the finding. Pretty confident for a man dressed like Elton John had grown up in The Matrix.

I told him I had a group of four-minus-one girls who looked like they’d walked off an alien space ship, who acted like they’d grown up in another world, and the men who exploited them. Or who they exploited. Or both.

I gave him Sternwood’s explanation and why I didn’t buy word one anymore. And told him about Gravity, whoever the hell he was. Satan’s stepchild, maybe.

And Phil. By his wife’s account a loving if distant father, but I trusted her about as far as I could crap out a Chrysler. By Rawles’s lights, a perfectly normal guy until he met Gravity—then he started screwing his daughter and her friends.

And Rawles, hanging on to a lost throne. The perpetual dependable boyfriend. The rich-kid screw-up drug dealer with more money than sense.

“Hah!” Earl said from the other side of his teak-edged glass-top desk, “Poor little Clarkie Kent gets his ass in a sling when the girls aren’t sugar and spice. Where
do
all the little cults come from?”

“Hell, if this was a religious cult, it would make sense. Ditto, maybe, for a street gang or a prostitution ring. You can spot those. Nah this…this is something else.”

“Mother Mary too contrary for them? Hmm…” He scanned the notes as he spoke, “Feels like some kind of psyop.”

“How do you mean?”

“Misdirection city from the opening bell. Think on it, buddy. Nya’s nineteen and Gina’s eighteen? Those two could double-team Tweedle Dee and toke off the caterpillar’s hookah and no DA in the world would give two shits.

“Your client freaked out that her little angel with the trophy collection stayed out all night? Freaked enough to hire a private dick at a grand a day? Take a picture, Clarke, because this is what it looks like when I catch someone yanking your prick.”

“Bah. Nervous mothers are part of the business…”

“Nervous mommies of darling twelve-year-olds, maybe—might want proof that precious poopsie’s on drugs so they can tattle to the shrink. Might want to find out if their husband’s molesting the kids. Notice the cadence? We’re talking
kids.
”

“And these girls aren’t?”

“Girls? The one you’re chasing’s been flashing her high-beams at anything with balls for seven years. No, not girls. Women. Two of them legal, two of them nearly.

“Soccer moms with church friends to impress threaten the insurance when grown hellspawn stay out till the asscrack of dawn. They hide the car keys. Maybe, if they’re pissed like the Pope, maybe they’ll threaten to charge rent. Maybe. We
are
talking Danville.

“Straight up, Clarkie, it’s social engineering. They’re fucking with nextgen software to keep it getting outta the lab—gives ‘em something to do. Keep ‘em needy, then pretend they don’t know about the sneaking around and the drugs and the bad condom habits, ‘cept they do. But you wanna know the one thing they don’t do?”

“They don’t hire a shamus to turn creation upside down.” I said.

“Damn straight.” Earl pulled the four headshots up on the screen. “Your noodle’s fucked up because you still see fifteen-year-old street kids when you look at these four. And this one,” He opened Rawles’ pic, “You think is their…pimp? Sultan of the harem and just now losing the popularity contest? That scrawny kid?”

“He’s got ‘em hooked on drugs.”

“In that neighborhood? The toddlers get nose candy with their pixie sticks.”

“He’s got money.”

“Show me one of ‘em that’s hurting for cabbage.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. He had me there. Rawles didn’t have any power over those girls I could see. He was more like their hanger-on than vice versa.

I kept at the lip-munching until he announced he was done catching up.

“So, what can I do you for, Clarkie boy?”

I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair. “Rawles said they met Gravity in Paris, and he ‘spoke the girls language.’ Said Phil could do the same trick. He’s not the shiniest car on the lot, but every time I think of those four gir…women I have the same reaction. You say they’re not related. I say they came out of the same litter, and that litter isn’t quite…I don’t know, normal?

“I want to know what’s tying these four,” I pointed at Nya, Gina, Stephanie, and Bridget each in turn, “together. What’s their deal? And while we’re at it, what the hell do any of them have to do with Sternwood?”

“Call it a mission, Jim.” He looked through the notes and the concordance he’d generated, took another glance at the photos, and said, “You look like hell. Go crash out in the living room. This’ll take a while.”

I needed the sleep. If I knew then how much, I might have taken a couple hours more.

My hair was blowing around the goose-egg I got last night. Light touches on a fresh wound will wake you up reaching for your gun really quick.

My gun.
Oh, hell
.

I hadn’t reported my gun stolen. If they used it to shoot another one of the girls…
shit.

Who
had
jumped me from behind anyway?

I sat on the couch rubbing my head for a few minutes, but I couldn’t remember anything from last night but the Taser and the blackness.

But I’d been looking at the two men driving away with the two girls—I knew it couldn’t have been either of them. Rawles was spoken for—couldn’t have been him, either.

Mrs. Thales? If it was her, then this was a setup from the beginning and I’d been chasing my tail to amuse parties unknown. It was about someone trying to get me—and there were a lot easier ways to frame me or get me killed.

Only other thing that made sense was if it was Nya or Gina—but that would imply they were in on it.

Which assumed there was an “it” to be in on.

Hold on to your brain, Lantham. It’s still not functioning right. Not a good time to be solving a case.

The French windows on either end of the large oval living room were opened to the outside, making a path for a strong wind to stumble through the house like it hadn’t made up its mind about which way to blow.

It wasn’t the only thing about the afternoon that blew, but at least it was looking better than the morning.

I’d tossed my phone onto the glass’n’brass coffee table before I dropped off. Turned to silent—the last thing I wanted was the sound of electronic bells stabbing me through the temples.

Five missed calls. Three texts. No voicemail—no surprise, there was no voicemail set up on the phone.

First text. Not the one I wanted to wake up to. It read: “You bastard.”

Rachael. She’d found the body. When?

Time stamp on the message was two PM. Two hours ago.

Hell.

Second message: “Jergens, Homicide wants 2 ask questions about corpse. Said you were in Redding since last night. Fuck you.”

Damn. One call to Oakland PD. I wasn’t looking forward to.

Third message: “Little birdie flew away home. Thought you’d want to know. -Kim”

A lesser man might have been annoyed to have a dent in his head and all his luck running against him. Not me. No sir. Never gonna happen. I know better than to piss and whine about life not being fair.

“Goddammit!” My feet aren’t quite as mature. Too much time walking a beat. One of them kicked the couch halfway across the marble floor.

“Don’t kill my house, Clarke!” Earl, from the other room. Must’ve had a camera watching me.

I waved surrender, walked to the front door, and dialed Oakland PD

“Detective Jurgens, please.”

“The Detective isn’t available at the moment.”

“Tell him Clarke Lantham called. I’m out of town but am heading back as soon as I’m done, so I’ll be in first thing tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Mister Lantham, is there a number where he can reach you?”

“Not really. Sorry. Please give him the message.” I hung up.

Tomorrow was gonna be a barrel full of kittens.

And I still forgot to report the gun stolen. Shit.

I’d call in to Stockton PD once I had my head screwed on straight enough to lie well, tell them it was stolen out there. Nice and far away from the girl in my office.

At least the noggin wasn’t hurting except when something brushed against it—now I just needed something to wake me up.

Back through the obscenely round living room, through the double doors, to the office. Earl was still at his desk in the large-enough-to-house-four-families-of-migrant-workers office, flipping back and forth between pictures, graphs, and charts on two thirty-five inch screens.

Yeah, Earl didn’t have to worry much about retirement.

I sat down across the return from him. He didn’t acknowledge me until the chair squeaked.

“Good time with the sleep fairy?”

I nodded.

“Have some coffee.” He nodded at a carafe on a sideboard—yeah, his office had a sideboard. “Your noodle gonna stay in your skull?”