J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (2 page)

“Clarke Lantham. I’m helping Mrs. Thales find her daughter.”

“Nya? Yeah, sure, whatever.” He waved me in, then seemed to forget I was there. I followed him into the kitchen where he ducked into the fridge and grabbed himself a can of the alcoholic seltzer water that kids his age think qualifies as “beer.” He didn’t offer me one, a favor which made me like him more than I really wanted to.

He batted the fridge door closed, planted his back against it, and sucked the sludge out of the can. Once he’d finished chugging it he slammed it against his head and tossed the aluminum hockey puck at a box on the counter. It missed and went skittering across the green granite and then down onto the charcoal slate floor tiles.

The kid flicked a Zippo open and took another pull on the joint, then wheezed “So what’s the big mystery?” at me.

“‘Scuse me?”

“If
Dora
hired you,” the scorn of a moron has that special ring to it that always makes my heart sing, “Shit. Dora wouldn’t have gotten you to go around looking if she didn’t think there was a serial killer on the loose.”

“She thinks stuff like that a lot?”

“Shit yeah,” the kid leaned forward and tapped the ash off the end of his joint into a neglected coffee mug, “there was this one day we all went up to Chico to go rafting, Nya dropped her phone in. When we got home—and we were on time to the minute—Dora was shitting bricks like she was born on a building site. Crazy bitch. Could hear her screaming at Nya halfway down the block.”

“I see.” I hadn’t banked on home troubles factoring into this, but it did lay a motive for running away. Assuming Nya was competent to run away. Mrs. Thales seemed to think she wasn’t, but what overprotective mother does? “When was this?”

“Eh. Last summer sometime.”

“Who all was there?”

He shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. “What, man, you wanna see pictures or something?”

“Sure.”

He shrugged, jerked his head at the staircase in the foyer, then shuffled off after it, rolling his eyes like he couldn’t imagine a dumber series of questions. That was fine. So long as he thought I was dense, he’d keep dancing—it made him feel superior, and Rawles was the sort who needed to feel superior.

It turned out that, despite the arrogance and the too-many-gym-hours physique, Rawles was the kind of kid who thought that the sun rose and set.

Literally.

In his room I caught a glimpse of his report card on his bedside table, and the failing grade in Astronomy headlined the show. The supporting cast didn’t look much better.

He plopped his ass in front of this year’s latest-and-greatest fruity computer hardware—the smoke followed him around like something out of a cartoon—and jiggled his hand in the direction of an ottoman. I pulled it up and planted my carcass on it as he started shuffling through pictures.

“Don’t know what you want to see,” he shuffled past the obligatory shots of the delta landscape out the window, cataloging gas stations, teenagers goofing off in the back seat of the Suburban, and flashing the oncoming traffic. “We just drove up and went rafting.”

“Who are the others?” When I asked, he stopped scrolling through the pics and pulled up a group shot.

“Oh. Well, this guy here’s Gravity.”

“Parents worked at NASA?”

“Wha? Nah. Think his real name is…Chuck? Graduated Cal High a few years back, goes to Diablo Valley. Kind of a prick, but we let him pack along anyway.”

“Prick?”

His brow wrinkled quickly with contempt, then he took another hit on his joint and leaned back in his swivel seat. “Yeah, a cock.” He twisted his neck around to me and blew the smoke in my face. “You know what a cock is, right?”

“That would be the thing your girlfriend puts the batteries in after you go home, eh, kid?”

The skin around his nose crawled up to his eyebrows like a cow just farted in his face. The joint snaked its way up to his mouth again, and he tried to hit it. His lungs had different ideas, and he hacked himself into a laughing fit.

“Aww, fuck, man. You got me.”

I tipped my head, let him think he was winning. “So, prick?”

“Oh, you know.” Rawles lowered his voice to a fratboy-chump timbre, “‘I’m Gravity, the irresistible force.’ Just a prick. I mean, look at him.”

He jerked his head back to the face on the screen.

Mr. Gravity wore the dreads of a rich white kid who spent too much time trying to get laid at anti-globalization rallies.
He was also completely baked, each hand full of one tit from a girl on each arm, enjoying the blessings of being the age between expectations and responsibility.

Nya
I recognized from the school portrait Mrs. Thales showed me—medium tall, broad shoulders, reddish darkish hair, exotic face that looked like it had been Photoshop-smoothed, a few acne scars here and there. In the high school senior photo she’d worn a traditional formal dress, but in this photo she was considerably more…relaxed. She came up to maybe Gravity’s shoulder, which put him comfortably north of six feet with hands big enough to palm something the size of a casaba.

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 link. 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.