J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (3 page)

Time for another plan.

3:00 PM, Saturday

“
Well, aren’t we in bright and early today.” Rachael, my intern, leaned against my office suite’s open door with her arms folded over her chest and a smirk on her face. When I hit the top of the stairs, she was ready for me.

“
Didn’t you get the note?” I ducked past her. She followed me in and headed for her desk. Left the door open—she has a thing about being able to see trouble coming. Probably why she was waiting out there for me.

“
When I got here there was a grand work of fiction sitting on my desk. It told of a case, and investigations, and something involving money.” She sipped something out of her sports bottle and settled back to the mess of papers she had arrayed like solitaire decks across the work surface. “I figured you’d given up and started writing novels for a dependable income.”

“
Nice.” I shrugged out of my windbreaker and hung it on the hook since I didn’t expect any more clients through the front door today. “Anything going on here that I need to know about?”

“
Mmm. My report is due in two weeks. I need you to sign the time sheets…”

My eyes swept the room and spotted new range souvenirs on her desk “Ho ho hold on,” I held up my hand, then pointed at the freshly used silhouette targets, “What the hell is this?”

“Practice.”

“Yeah, well, don’t hang them on the wall again, it freaks out the customers.”

“Spoil sport. These are forty yards on a snub,” she picked the top one up by the corner—nice grouping in the head.

“Very nice. You can shoot. Now stop bringing them in.” I barged through the connecting door to the main office.

“Or you’ll what?”

“Forget to do your time sheets” I shouted back through the door.

“You haven’t remembered them yet.”

“
Yeah, well,” I dropped my phone on my desk and scooped up a sheet of printer paper with the words “Time sheets or die!” and a web address scrawled across it in Rachael’s block print. I stuck my head back into the main office and held up the sign, “I got the memo. Monday?”

She eyed me like she wasn’t sure whether I could manage to stay alive that long. “I don’t know. I guess I can trust you.”

“
You know where to find me.”

“
If you don’t sign it I’ll out you to the landlord for sleeping in the office.”

“
I better get on it, then.” As good as my word—and hopefully a little better than my English—I retreated into my office, found the sheet buried under Wednesday’s mail pile, and gave it a once-over. Twenty hours a week for the whole summer—extra credit for that all night stakeout a couple weeks back trying to find out who was sneaking inventory out of the back of the 7-11 on MacArthur. “Looks good,” I shouted, and signed it.

I returned through the door and tossed it on her desk to find five-feet-four of leather-jacketed, goth-wannabe, blue-haired college kid once again leaning against something with folded arms like she was waiting for me to remember our anniversary. “Thanks.” The dry delivery, just to clue me in if I hadn’t noticed.

“Anything else?”

“Hmm…” She picked up the note I’d left for her earlier and perused it like an English professor, “your fiction could use a little work. There was an entire subplot about me getting hired on after the term ends that you completely neglected.”

“You should post that review up on Goodreads. Should make for a riveting conversation starter.”

“Let’s see, what else…” she turned back to the desk and shuffled through a pile of mail. “Just some bills. Department of Consumer Affairs sent a thirty-day nag note about the renewal on your license.”

She thrust a stack of opened envelopes at me. I took them and thumbed through. “Any calls?”

“What do I look like, your answering machine? Everything forwards to your cell phone anyway.”

I shrugged, conceding the point. “Got some time to help me collate some notes from today?”

“Sure.” She flomped down in her chair again.

“Log in, I’ll drop everything to the server.”

For the next two hours, I listened to the recording of my conversation with the kid—then read it over when Rachael typed up the transcript—until I was satisfied there was nothing in there I missed. After an afternoon chasing Rawles all over creation, my inherent sense of nihilism wasn’t going begging.

Rachael wasn’t impressed either. “Is this guy for real?”

“Depends on what you count as reality.”

“I guess. Jesus. You gonna spike him for the photos or the drugs?”

“Rule one: you got a potential witness
that
you might need to lean on later, hold it in reserve.”

“Aren’t you required to report?”

“It’s a gray area.”

“That’s like saying Emp
ero
r Hirohito was only kinda Japanese.”

“Class on World War Two this semester, eh?”

“Shut up and mind your own business.”

I chuckled. “Can you pull Rawles registration and driving record for me?”

“Sure.”

She wanted to learn this business from one end to the other, so she could use the extra database time. Every snoop needs to know the ins and outs of that god-awful interface—it’s a livelihood thing.

Me, I needed space to think.

Near as I could figure, the kid was a dead end. Pot and bluster and not a lot else—all shorts, no scrotum.

The other girls might be a different story—nine times out of ten, a girl runs away from home, she runs to a friend’s house. Sometimes, the friend hides her, or the friend’s parents don’t notice they have a boarder for a while.

Playing the odds, my money was on one of the other girls having Nya. First step: Facebook.

Nya hadn’t updated hers since a few hours before Mrs. Thales said she disappeared.

The other girls were easy to find—their public feeds weren’t filtered at all, and they used their real names.

Gina, Bridget, and Stephanie had all been updating every few hours. Rawles’s electronic graffiti was all over their posts, with Stephanie getting most of his replies, but nothing on their feeds implied that Nya might be with any of them. A glance through Stephanie and Bridget’s private lists with a script hack didn’t give me anything either.

Gina, though, was a different story. A post to her private list last night read:

“At movies. No Nya. Not answering phone. Anyone seen her?”

And a second one this morning:

“Can’t find Nya. Is she ok? Pls call ASAP.”

So Mrs. Thales wasn’t the only one worried. This girl really was missing.

There was something else, though. Something that didn’t fit. The same thing struck me earlier in the car—something in their faces.

They could have been sisters. It wasn’t that they all looked the same, exactly. But they all had a kind of family resemblance.

Long sloping forehead, small, slightly scrunched noses like there was always a bad smell in the air. Eyes that would make an anime cartoonist cream himself. And their mouths were…well, they were too big. The corners stretched toward their jaws just a little farther than normal, like they were part cat. Even when they were smiling, there was something vaguely frowny about them.

“Clarke,” Rachael shouted through the open door, “got Rawles’s DMV records.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Not really. Two speeding tickets.”

“Roll it into the file.”

“You got it.”

“Could you pull his school records and the records for the other three girls?”

“Sure, I guess.” Just barely tolerating my eccentricities.

I could have told her to forget it—I didn’t really need them. But it was good training, and it would buy me another hour or so.

I took ten minutes to dump the data from my phone and secure the less legal pics from Rawles on an encrypted drive which I then hid under floorboards. I set a data-scrubbing program loose in my phone’s flash memory—rewriting every empty sector with random noise eight different times, with different random numbers. Even the NSA can’t crack it, and I really don’t want to be caught holding dirty pictures of minors if I can avoid it.

Something about the way Rawles talked told me that the bond between these four girls was key to understanding Nya’s world. Particularly when he blathered about coming up through school with them, he’d talked about them like they were a unit—he’d swap from talking about one to talking about another without bothering to clarify his pronouns.

If I could understand that bond, maybe I could figure out where she ran off to—or get one of the other girls to lead me to her.

They all lived in the same town—maybe they’d all been adopted? Cousins? Or sisters from some careless teenaged mother?

I had no way to find out quickly. My birth records database isn’t broad or deep enough to find sealed adoption records—what I could find didn’t seem to suggest a connection between them.

One of them—Stephanie Jennings—had been born in England to a mother and father Jennings. Nya had been born at Travis Air Force Base to Dora and Phillip Thales. Neither family were Mormons, so genealogy would be a pain in the ass to dig up, but on the surface there was no obvious legal or blood relationship.

I dropped a note to Earl Whitaker—best data miner I’ve ever worked with—asking whether the girls were adopted, or related at all. Would like to have bought more, but I couldn’t justify the expense of a deep background check.

By rights I should have had Rachael call him, but I wasn’t ready to let that particular trade secret slip just yet. Maybe if she earned her keep. Maybe.

Even if she earned it, I didn’t know if I’d keep her on. It was nice having the extra hand, but I really didn’t want to be lugging a twenty year old kid around all over creation. Hell, she was basically the same age as Nya.

I tabled the question of Rachael’s post-internship employment. Again. I’d get back to it.

Someday.

Maybe.

So, if the four girls weren’t related, that left…what? Some kind of weird version of Down’s Sy
n
drome?

Police work is a game. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.
It’s got more rules than a D&D set designed by Rain Man, but in the end, it’s a game with a password. I never did stop playing it after I went private, and the password is still the same: “I know a guy.”

Well, I know a guy, kinda
—maybe more accurate to say I once saved someone’s ass—who does pediatrics over at Oakland Children’s
. She owes me a few favors, and she’s one of those obsessive-compulsives that eats dinner at the same place every Saturday evening, without fail.

If I left now, I could just catch her.

I told Rachael not to wait for me.

Oakland and Berkeley share a border that looks like it was drawn up in a bad divorce between a rage-a-holic husband and a schizophrenic wife—no, I don’t know which is which, but does it really matter?

The border zig-zags through about four neighborhoods to the extent where, all along Alcatraz, you can step from one city to another and back again by walking in a line straight enough to please even the most belligerent beat cop. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a toilet where you can sit with one cheek in each town and cause another border skirmish with your deposit.

Cafe Colluci is a hole-in-the-wall Ethiopian place that’ll be the first thing up for grabs if the two cities ever actually get into an armed territory dispute. Fenced off from Telegraph behind grass screens, they serve little stewed piles of paradise on spongy sour pancakes.

I found Kristine Warner at one of the split-log tables on the makeshift front patio, munching on collard greens and messer-wot and reading the latest Robin Cook. Back to the sidewalk, like she knew I was coming.

I jingled my keys in a shave-and-a-haircut rhythm. She knocked out “two bits” on the wood.

“You must be desperate.” She didn’t turn around. Didn’t even look up from her book.

“You can’t imagine.”

She looked half to the side and smirked. “You’d be surprised.” She tapped her finger at the seat opposite her own.

I sat down.

“How’ve you been?” She still wasn’t looking at me. Longstanding standoffs breed the most complicated ritual greeting dances.

“Been okay.” I got two full nostrils-full of berebere, garlic, and hot enjirah. Would make a fine dinner, and Kristine wanted me to take some.

“You still living in your office?” She pushed the basket of springy sour bread toward me.

“Sometimes.” I didn’t eat any. My life is too complicated already.

“Anyone on your calendar?”

“Getting kind of personal, aren’t you?”

“I know you’ve got a gun wedged in your butt and freckles on your penis. How much more personal does it get?”

“Hmph. I was having a bad day that day.”

“Just keep telling yourself that and you might be able to sleep at night.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“So,” She deigned to peer at me over the edge of the paperback, “Let me guess, another stolen diamond accidentally swallowed by the thief’s toddler?”

“Nah, this one’s better.” I handed her my phone, with Nya’s pic front and center. “Have you ever seen something like this before?”

She marked her book, licked the lentil slime off the fingers on her right hand, and took the phone. “Oh, that’s a good one.”

“Come again?”

“If you wanted another date you could just ask. Spending all this time in Photoshop is kinda high-school, don’t you think?”

“Ha! My mouse’s relationship with photos ends at the browser window.”

“If I live to a hundred you’ll never know how grateful I am for that. So what’s this?” She shook the phone.

“Got a runaway case—that’s her—and there’s four teenage girls, all about the same age, that have the same kind of thing going on.”

“Do you have them with you?”

“Yeah. Swipe right.”

She scrolled through them. “That’s something, all right. Nice family.”

“Not related—not even close. Any idea what it could be?”

“You’re thinking congenital?”