The Never Game

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Oh God, no. The dudes I buy from? They’re not players. Just, like, students or board heads. You know, surfers. Not bangers from East Palo or Oakland.”

  This seemed credible.

  Shaw asked, “You have any idea who might’ve taken her? Her dad didn’t think she had any stalkers.”

  “No . . .” The young man’s voice faded. His head was down, slowly shaking now. Shaw saw a glistening in his eyes. “It’s all my fault. Fuck.”

  “Your fault?”

  “Yeah, man. See, Wednesdays we always did things together. They were like our weekend, ’cause I had to work Saturday and Sunday. I’d go out and new-school—you know, trick surf at Half Moon or Maverick. Then I’d pick her up and we’d hang with friends or do dinner, a movie. If I hadn’t . . . If I hadn’t fucked up so bad, that’s what we would’ve done last Wednesday. And this never would’ve happened. All the weed. I got mean, I was a son of a bitch. I didn’t want to; it just happened. She’d had enough. She didn’t want to be with a loser.” He wiped his face angrily. “But I’m clean. Thirty-four days. And I’m switching majors. Engineering. Computers.”

  So Kyle Butler was the knight coming to San Miguel Park with a BB gun to confront the dragon and rescue the damsel. He’d win her back.

  Shaw looked toward the shoulder of Tamyen Road. Still no cops. He called the Task Force. Wiley was out. Standish was out.

  “Find me a bag,” Shaw said to Butler.

  “Bag?”

  “Paper, plastic, anything. Look on the shoulder. I’ll look here.”

  Butler climbed the hill to Tamyen Road and Shaw walked the trails, hoping for a trash can. He found none. Then he heard: “Got one!” Butler trotted down the hill. “By the side of the road.” He held up the white bag. “From Walgreens. Is that okay?”

  Colter Shaw was a man who smiled rarely. This drew a faint grin. “Perfect.”

  Sticking to the grass once more, he walked to the bloodstained rock and picked it up with the bag.

  “What’re you going to do with it?”

  “Find a private lab to do a DNA test—I’m sure it’s Sophie’s blood.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “No, it’s just from a scrape. Nothing serious.”

  “Why’re you doing that? Because the cops aren’t?”

  “That’s right.”

  Butler’s eyes flashed wide. “Yo, man, let’s look for her together! If the cops aren’t doing shit.”

  “It’s a good idea. But I need your help first.”

  “Yeah, man. Anything.”

  “Her father’s on his way home from work.”

  “His weekend job’s over in the East Bay.” Butler’s face showed pity. “Two hours each way. Got another job during the week. And he still couldn’t afford to keep their house, you know?”

  “When he gets back, I need you to find out something.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sorry, Kyle. Might be kind of tough. I need to find out if she’s been dating anybody. Go through her room, talk to friends.”

  “You think that’s who it is?”

  “I don’t know. We have to look at every possibility.”

  Butler gave a wan smile. “Sure. I’ll do it. It’s just a stupid dream I had anyway, us getting back together. It’s not going to happen.” The young man turned and started up the hill. Then he stopped and returned. He shook Shaw’s hand. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to go all Narcos on you. You know?”

  “Not a worry.”

  He watched Butler hike back toward the far entrance.

  On his mission.

  His futile mission.

  From his interview with her father and examination of her room, Shaw didn’t believe that Sophie was seeing anyone, not seriously, much less anyone who might have kidnapped her. But it was important for the poor kid to be elsewhere when Shaw discovered what he was now sure he’d find: Sophie Mulliner’s body.

  15.

  Shaw was driving along winding Tamyen Road, having left San Miguel Park behind.

  A serial kidnapper stashing his victims in a dungeon for any length of time wasn’t an impossible likelihood. It did seem rare enough, though, that he focused on a more realistic fate: that Sophie’d been the victim of a sexual sociopath. In Shaw’s experience, the majority of rapists might be serial actors, but almost always with multiple victims. The rapist’s inclination was to kill and move on.

  This meant Sophie’s corpse lay somewhere nearby. X was clearly not stupid—the tracker on her bike, the obscuring clothing, the selection of a good attack zone. He wouldn’t drive any distance with a body in his trunk. There might be an accident or traffic violation or a checkpoint. He’d do what he wanted, near San Miguel Park, and flee. In this southwest portion of San Francisco Bay were acres and acres of wet, sandy earth soft enough to dig a quick, shallow grave. But the area was open, with good visibility for hundreds and hundreds of yards; X would want his privacy.

  Shaw came to a large, abandoned self-storage operation of about a hundred compartments. The facility was in the middle of an expanse of weeds and sandy ground. He parked and noted that the gap in the chain-link gate was easily wide enough for two people to slip through. He did so himself and began walking up and down the aisles. It was an easy place to search because the paneled overhead doors to the units had been removed and lay in a rust-festering pile behind one of the buildings, like the wings of huge roaches. Maybe this was done for safety’s sake, the way refrigerator doors are removed upon discarding so a child can’t get trapped inside. Whatever the reason, this practice made it simple to see that Sophie’s body wasn’t here.

  Soon the Malibu was cruising again.

  He saw a feral dog tugging something from the ground about thirty feet away. Something red and white.

  Blood and bone?

  Shaw braked fast and climbed out of the Chevy. The dog wasn’t a big creature, maybe forty or fifty pounds and rib-skinny. Shaw approached slowly, keeping a steady pace.

  Never, ever startle an animal . . .

  The creature moved toward him with its black eyes narrowed. One fang was missing, which gave it an ominous look. Shaw avoided eye contact and continued forward without hesitating.

  Until he was able to see what the dog was tugging up.

  A Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket.

  He left the scrawny thing to its illusory dinner and returned to the car.

  Tamyen Road made a long loop past more marshes and fields, and with San Francisco Bay to his left he continued south.

  The cracked and bleached asphalt led him to a row of trees and brush, behind which was a large industrial facility, seemingly closed for decades.

  An eight-foot-high chain-link fence encircled the weed-choked facility. There were three gates, about thirty yards apart. Shaw pulled up to what seemed to be the main one. He counted five—no, six—dilapidated structures, marred with peeling beige paint and rust, sprouting pipes and tubing and wires. Some walls bore uninspired graffiti. The outlying buildings were one-story. In the center was an ominous, towering box, with a footprint of about a hundred by two hundred feet; it was five stories high and above it soared a metal smokestack, twenty feet in diameter at the base, tapering slightly as it rose.

  The grounds abutted the Bay and the skeleton of a wide pier jutted fifty yards into the gently rocking water. Maybe maritime equipment had been fabricated here.

  Shaw edged the car off the driveway. There was nowhere to hide the vehicle completely, so he parked on the far side of a stand of foliage. Difficult to see from the road. Why risk a run-in with local cops for violating the old yet unambiguous NO TRESPASSING signs? Shaw was mindful too of the individual twenty minutes ago possibly surveilling him from the ridge above San Miguel Park. Person X, he might as well assume. He placed his computer bag and the bloody rock in the trunk. He scanned the road, the fores
t on the other side of it, the grounds here. He saw no one. He believed that a car had driven through the main gate at some point in the recent past. The grounds were tall grass and bent in a way that suggested a vehicle’s transit.

  Shaw walked to the gate, which was secured by a piece of chain and a lock. He wasn’t looking forward to scaling the fence. It was topped with the upward-pointed snipped-off ends of the links, not as dangerous as razor wire but sharp enough to draw blood.

  He wondered if there was any give to the two panels of this gate, as there had been at the self-storage operation. Shaw tugged. The two sides parted only a few inches. He took hold of the large padlock to get a better grip. He pulled hard and it opened.

  The lock was one of those models without keys; instead they have numbered dials on the bottom. The shank had been pushed in. Whoever had done it had not spun the dials to relock the mechanism. Two things intrigued Shaw. First, the lock was new. Second, the code was not the default—usually 0-0-0-0 or 1-2-3-4—but, he could see by looking at the dials, 7-4-9-9. Which meant someone had been using it to secure the gate and had neglected to lock it the most recent time he had been here.

  Why? Maybe the laziness of a security guard?

  Or because the visitor had entered recently, knowing he’d be leaving soon.

  Which meant that perhaps he was still here.

  Call Wiley?

  Not yet.

  He’d have to give the detective something concrete.

  He opened the gate, stepped inside and replaced the lock as it had been. He then walked quickly over the weed-filled driveway for twenty yards to the first building—a small guardhouse. He glanced in. Empty. He scanned two other nearby buildings, Warehouse 3 and Warehouse 4.

  Keeping low, Shaw moved to the closest of these, eyes scanning the vista, noting the vantage points from which a shooter could aim. While he had no particular gut feeling that he was in fact in any crosshairs, the lock that should have been locked and wasn’t flipped a switch of caution within him.

  Bears’ll come at you pushing brush. You’ll hear. Mountain lions will growl. You’ll hear. Wolf packs’re silver. You’ll see. You know where snakes’ll be. But a man who wants to shoot you? You’ll never hear, you’ll never see, you’ll never know what rock he’s hiding under.

  Shaw looked into each of the warehouses, pungent with mold and completely empty. He then moved along the wide driveway between these buildings and the big manufacturing facility. Here he could see faded words painted on the brick, ten feet high, forty long, the final letters weathered to nothing.

  AGW INDUSTRIES, INC.—FROM OUR HANDS TO Y

  Shaw stepped across the driveway and into the shadows of the big building.

  You’re the best tracker in the family . . .

  Not his father’s words, his mother’s.

  He was looking for a trail. In the wild, cutting for sign is noting paw prints and claw marks, disturbed ground, broken branches, tufts of animal coat in brambles. Now, in suburbia, Colter Shaw was looking for tire treads or footprints. He saw only grass that might have been bent by a car a month ago—or thirty minutes.

  Shaw continued to the main building—the loading dock in the back, where the vehicle might have stopped. He quietly climbed the stairs, four feet up, and walked to a door. He tried to open it. The knob turned yet the door held fast.

  Someone had driven sharp, black Sheetrock screws into the jamb. He checked the door at the opposite end of the dock. The same. At the back of the dock was a window of mesh-impregnated glass and that too was sealed. The screws appeared new, just like the lock.

  This gave Shaw a likely scenario: X had raped and killed Sophie and left the body inside, screwed the doors and windows shut to keep trespassers from finding her.

  Now, time to call the police.

  He was reaching for his phone when he was startled by a male voice: “Mr. Shaw!”

  He climbed off the loading dock and walked along the back of the building.

  Kyle Butler was approaching. “Mr. Shaw. There you are!”

  What the hell was he doing here?

  Shaw was thinking of the open gate, the likelihood that the kidnapper was still here. He held his finger to his lips and then gestured for the boy to crouch.

  Kyle paused, confused. He said, “There’s somebody else here. I saw his car in a parking lot back over there.”

  He was pointing to the line of trees on the other side of which was one of the outlier structures.

  “Kyle! Get down!”

  “Do you think Sophie’s—” Before he finished his sentence, a pistol shot resounded. Butler’s head jerked back and a mist of red popped into the air. He dropped straight to the ground, a bundle of dark clothing and limp flesh.

  Two shots followed—make-sure bullets—striking Butler’s leg and chest, tugging at his clothing.

  Think. Fast. The shooter would’ve heard Butler calling him and would know basically where Shaw was. And to make the headshot, he would have been close.

  But the shooter—most likely X—would also be cautious. He would have seen Shaw at San Miguel Park and suspected he wasn’t the law but he couldn’t be sure. And would be assuming Shaw was armed.

  Shaw glanced at Kyle Butler.

  Dead, glazed eyes and shattered temple. Much blood.

  And then, for the moment, Shaw forced himself to forget about him entirely.

  He backed away, crouching, heading for the drive where he’d spotted the bent grass. As he did, he punched in 911 and reported an “active shooter” at the old AGW plant off Tamyen Road.

  He whispered to the dispatcher, “Do you know where that is?”

  “Yessir, we’ll have units responding. Stay on the line, please, and give me your—”

  He disconnected.

  All Shaw had to do now was find cover and avoid getting shot. He guessed that X would figure that he, whether civilian or cop, would have called for help. The kidnapper would flee.

  Except, apparently, X hadn’t done that at all.

  Above Shaw came a crash of shattering glass and around him shards fell to the ground as he crouched and covered his head with his arm.

  X wasn’t finished yet. He’d gotten into the factory and climbed to an upper floor where he’d have a clearer shot at Shaw. He was now about to stick his head and arm out the window he’d just smashed and pepper Shaw with rounds.

  There was no cover here, not for fifty feet.

  Shaw turned and began sprinting toward the closest warehouse, waiting for the pop, then the slam of the slug in his back.

  That didn’t happen.

  Instead, he heard from inside a woman’s fierce scream. He stopped and looked back.

  It was Sophie Mulliner who stood at the shattered window, her face turned toward the bloody body of Kyle Butler.

  Then she looked at Shaw. A look of pure rage filled her face. “What’ve you done? What’ve you done?”

  She vanished inside.

  16.

  Colter Shaw stood on a mesh catwalk inside the dim, cavernous manufacturing space. He crouched, listening.

  Sounds, echoing from everywhere. Footsteps? Dripping water? The ancient structure settling? And then the roar of jet engines overhead. The factory was along the final approach path to San Francisco Airport. The gassy howl made it momentarily impossible to hear anything else.

  Like someone coming up behind you.

  Shaw had found one door that had not been secured with Sheetrock screws. He’d opened it and quickly stepped inside, closing it after him. He climbed to the third-floor catwalk so he could get an overview of the space below.

  He saw no sign of Sophie or of X. Was the kidnapper still here? He would’ve guessed Shaw called for help. But he also might risk remaining for some minutes to find and murder Shaw, who might have some incriminating information, like his license
tag number. Sophie Mulliner, of course, would die too.

  He climbed down metal staircases to the ground floor, the labyrinth he’d surveyed from above, a network of offices, workstations, concrete slabs and machinery, presumably still here because technology had made the equipment obsolete, not even worth parts.

  AGW Industries—Ground Floor

  1 - K.B.

  2 - Loading Dock

  3 - Room with Five Objects

  4 - Open Door

  5 - Furnace Room/Smokestack

  All surreal, in the gloom. Shaw was dizzy too; this, he guessed, was from air infused with the astringent fumes of diesel oil, grease and vast colonies of mold.

  He spotted the window Sophie had broken—beside another catwalk on the fourth level—but there were no hiding spots there. She’d have gone to cover somewhere on the main floor. Shaw started through that level now, weaving around slabs and bins and machinery and workstations. He passed rows of rooms—ROTOR DESIGN II, ENGINEERING SUPERVISION, WAR DEPARTMENT LIAISON. Shaw paused beside each, listening—for breathing, for gritty scrapes underfoot, for that altered echo when a human takes up space in a room.

  No, they were empty.

  But one office was different from the others. Its door was closed and sealed with the same Sheetrock screws that held fast the outer doors. Shaw stopped. On the wall nearby was a crude painting—an approximation of the eerie stenciled face on the flyer in the Quick Byte Café. Which answered the question of who had tacked it up.

  He turned back to the office with the sealed door. A crude hole, about two by two feet, had been cut and punched through the wall, from the inside out; bits of the plasterboard and dust lay on the floor outside. Shaw crouched and noted footprints in the white powder, small—Sophie’s? She hadn’t been wearing shoes or socks or been barefoot. It looked like she’d wrapped her feet in rags.

  Listening again, his ear near the jagged hole, which was big enough—just—for a person to fit through.