The Call of the Mild p-3

by William Rabkin

  “Yes, Ellen Svaco, your donor,” Rasmussen said.

  “I don’t know who that is,” the dweeb said. “The foundation’s principal donor is Arnold Svaco. That’s the only Svaco I know.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “You always do this,” Gus said. “You say you solved the case, and then when I ask for details, it turns out you’re not even close to a solution. You’ve just come up with some obscure detail that half the time has nothing to do with anything.”

  “Because the other half of the time it has everything to do with everything,” Shawn says. “And those are the ones that people remember. You can get away with a dozen wrong guesses in a row as long as you hit the last one out of the park.”

  “We’re not in a park, we’re in a law firm,” Gus said. “And we’re about to be away on some corporate retreat.”

  “Which is why it doesn’t matter if I’ve actually solved the murder or not,” Shawn said. “Because there’s no way I’m staging a reveal before we get to ride on the company helicopter.”

  “You’re going to let a killer go free so you can go joyriding in the sky?”

  “So we can go joyriding in the sky,” Shawn said. “Personally, I can’t think of a better reason to let a killer go free. Except maybe if he has such a rare blood type that he is the only tissue match for an innocent little girl who will die without an organ transplant, but he won’t agree to the operation unless he gets a full pardon.”

  “Sure, but once you set him free, how will you guarantee he’ll go through with the transplant?” Gus said. “And what if she needs a second transplant later? And what if he does give the girl the organ, but then he kills again? Do you think that little girl would want to know her life was purchased with the blood of innocents? And what if the transplant surgeon is secretly in love with the killer’s wife, but she is loyal to her husband, so the doctor is planning to have something go wrong in the operation, killing the convict and making the wife available?”

  “What are you talking about?” Shawn said.

  “The same thing you are,” Gus said. “ General Hospital circa 1991.”

  “They really did run out of steam, didn’t they?” Shawn said. “I mean, after you’ve seen Robin Scorpio befriending space aliens, how are you supposed to take it seriously when she says she’s HIV-positive? Not that I ever watched soap operas, of course.”

  “Right, me neither,” Gus said.

  “Anyway, the real point is that the killer won’t be getting away at all, because we’ll be going with him,” Shawn said. “And we know who he is.”

  “We do?”

  “Didn’t I just get done telling you we did?” Shawn said.

  “You told me you did,” Gus said. “But you didn’t say who it was. And I’m not getting into any aircraft until you do.”

  Shawn let out a deep sigh. “You’re taking a lot of the fun out of this,” he said, but Gus’ sharp gaze didn’t waver. “Fine, it’s Shark Boy.”

  “William Shatner?” Gus said, then remembered he hadn’t had a chance to share his nicknames with Shawn. “I mean, Morton Mathis? How do you know?”

  “The first part was easy,” Shawn said. “He’s wearing a watch that looks like it costs more than your car.” Shawn glanced down at the Timex on his wrist. “Of course, so am I. But his looks like it costs more than a good car-until you notice that the leather strap is actually plastic. It’s a cheap knockoff. His tan is sprayed on. There was a dried water spot on his silk tie where he tried to wash off a stain instead of spending a few dollars on dry cleaning, and his manicure is weeks old. He’s not used to getting them, or he’d never have let it get chipped like that.”

  “That’s how you knew he was a recent transplant,” Gus said. “But what makes you think he’s the killer?”

  “It was the way he reacted when he thought I was reading his mind,” Shawn said. “He panicked. But there was nothing I was saying that everyone in the room didn’t already know. They’d all been here when he arrived at the firm; it wasn’t a secret he was from out of town. And the fact that he hasn’t won a big case since he got here is the kind of statistic that every lawyer in a firm like this knows. He was afraid I was going to reveal something they didn’t know. Which means he’s got a secret.”

  “Maybe he watches Supernanny, ” Gus said.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Shawn said. “He’s got bad taste in reality television. Or he’s a killer with recent blood on his poorly manicured hands. Either way, we’re going to be right by his side until we know for sure.”

  At first this sounded reassuring-at least until Gus thought it through. “We’re going to be right by his side in a tiny cabin hundreds of feet in the air.”

  Shawn ignored the obvious implications. “And then we’re going to be with him at some fabulous resort,” Shawn said. “And we’ll have to stick with him wherever he goes. To the pool, to the spa, to the five-star restaurant. We’ll make the sacrifice.”

  “What makes you think we’re going to some fabulous resort?” Gus said.

  “It’s a corporate retreat,” Shawn said. “Remember the one you went on?”

  Several years ago Gus’ pharmaceuticals company had hosted a retreat for its entire sales force at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara. Gus had spent three of the most glorious days of his life sipping fruity concoctions by the pool while flotillas of waiters came by to offer gleaming silver trays piled high with the best finger food he’d ever tasted. It wasn’t until the end of the weekend that he realized he’d been supposed to sit through a series of seminars and training sessions, and that his failure to do so meant he’d never be invited back for another retreat.

  “That was completely different,” Gus said.

  “Sure, a pharmaceuticals company has to spend some of its money actually making products, so they can’t blow it all on their retreat,” Shawn said. “What kind of expenses does a law firm have besides legal pads? Because if you buy them by the ten-pack, you’d be surprised how cheap they are. Which means they can put on one hell of a weekend.”

  Gus was sure there was something wrong in Shawn’s reasoning. It all sounded so perfect, so appealing that there had to be a catch. But as he worked it over in his mind, there was nothing that stuck out. Maybe they had finally found something too good to be true that wasn’t.

  “Let’s go catch a killer,” Gus said.

  “Right after we catch some shrimp.”

  Shawn tossed the manila envelope back on the table. Files scattered its length.

  “Don’t you think we might need those?” Gus said.

  “For what?” Shawn said. “We already know who our killer is. What else could possibly be in that envelope that we’d need?”

  “Maybe there’s a second killer,” Gus said.

  Shawn glared at him as if he’d just handed him a surgeon general’s warning that cocktail sauce causes cancer. Then he let out an exaggerated sigh, marched back to the table, and scooped all the files together, shoving them back in the manila envelope.

  “Happy now?” he said. “You can read these when I’m checking out the previews on Spectravision.”

  Gus was happy. As they left the conference room, he was filled with a feeling of great contentment. This case had started out as a chore, turned into a nightmare, and now was looking like it was going to be the best job they’d ever tackled. To go on a luxury retreat and reveal a killer while they were there; people shelled out small fortunes for murder mystery weekends like that. Only this one was real-and they’d be getting paid. Gus couldn’t imagine anything better.

  He might have, though, if he’d noticed the other paper that had fallen out of the envelope when Shawn tossed it on the table. Unfortunately, the glossy brochure had slid along the polished surface and fallen to the floor, where neither of them saw it.

  So Gus never saw the photos of the barren mountaintop, or the tiny raft swamped by enormous waves, or the string of climbers hanging from a line pitoned into a sheer cliff face. He never read t
he slogan “A bond that will never break.” And he never saw the name of the company that had put the brochure together:

  High Mountain Wilderness Retreats.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Gus had always wanted to ride in a helicopter. If he had ever put together a list of things he wanted to do before he died, the chopper flight would probably come in no lower than number seven, right below “Win the Tour de France” and just above “Make up a list of things to do before you die.”

  But no helicopter ride he had ever imagined came close to this one. Because all the helicopters he’d ever imagined were drawn from some kind of objective reality. And Gus’ reality never included the kind of fantasies that only the truly rich indulge in.

  From the outside it looked like any large chopper. But once the passenger door slid open, Gus and Shawn were staring into the most opulent living room they had ever seen. The walls and deep armchairs were covered in a fabric woven by the only company in the world so exclusive that it became famous for keeping Oprah out. A giant flat-screen dominated the front of the passenger compartment; a Sub-Zero Wine Captain filled with every conceivable beverage nestled below it, alongside a cabinet of stemware Gus suspected was Baccarat.

  What was most remarkable about the helicopter didn’t become apparent until the doors had closed and they started to lift off the ground. Gus was expecting the ride to be so deafeningly loud that conversation would be impossible except for a few shouted exchanges. But the chopper’s cabin was no louder than that of his Echo.

  Not that the silence made conversation any more appealing to the passengers. As soon as the lawyers belted themselves into their armchairs, each pulled out an iPhone or a BlackBerry and started typing as if they were afraid their thumbs were going to be amputated as soon as they landed. If they were excited to be going on this retreat, they certainly didn’t show it. None of them had even changed out of office attire, or in the case of Jade Greenway, her enveloping green aura. You’d think at least one guy would have slipped into his Tommy Bahamas to be ready to relax on arrival. But they might as well have been flying off to take the world’s longest series of depositions.

  Gus was content to ride in luxurious quiet all the way to wherever they were going. He could use this time to study the files Rushton had given them. At first he was concerned that the lawyers would notice he was reading up on them and demand to know why. But ten minutes into the flight not one of them had even glanced up from their devices long enough to acknowledge that he was in the cabin. Gus flipped open the tray table from his armrest and started to page through the file.

  It was every bit as exciting as he would have expected a law firm personnel file to be: a collection of CVs, each with a picture stapled to it. Gus was hoping that Rushton might have included a little note here and there to give them some inside information, but there was nothing.

  The first CV belonged to Kiri, whose real name was Gwendolyn Shrike. Gus was not surprised to discover that she was the firm’s chief litigator. He was right when he assumed she was a warrior, even if her primary weapon was not the long-sword but the longer brief. She had an almost unbroken record of wins, and she’d thrice won the California Bar Association’s Litigator of the Year award, along with two nominations for something called The Piranha, apparently handed out by the less formal Trial Lawyers League.

  But it was her nonprofessional affiliations that Gus found fascinating-and a little terrifying. Gwendolyn wasn’t only a warrior in the courtroom. She’d fenced on the California state team and had made it all the way to the nationals. She had medals in archery, both with the crossbow and the long. And she held black belts in three different martial arts. Gus hoped fervently that Shawn was right about Mathis being the killer; he had no desire to go up against this woman.

  Suppressing a shudder at the thought, Gus flipped a page and saw Doc Savage’s bright smile beaming up at him. To Gus’ surprise, he read that Savage actually was the guy’s family name, although his first name was not Doc but Kirk. His resume was brief and to the point: Yale Law, followed by ten years at a New York firm, then another ten at Rushton, Morelock, as its lead tax attorney. He’d donated a lot of time to various environmental concerns and had chaired a benefit to clean up the bay.

  Captain Hook was born Reginald Balowsky and he specialized in labor law, although from what Gus could glean from the resume, he was never actually on the side of labor. He’d won awards from manufacturers groups and various chambers of commerce, all of which hailed him as a “champion of business.” He didn’t seem to have any outside affiliations or interests-or at least none that would fit comfortably on a lawyer’s CV.

  Turning the page, Gus was surprised to discover that Tinkerbell, born Jade Greenway, was also a litigator. He had seen the killer instinct in Gwendolyn; he could have seen it from the helicopter if she’d stayed on the ground. But Jade seemed so much softer and less secure than her colleague. Her outside interests confirmed this suspicion. She did a lot of work with pet rescue organizations, she volunteered at a local food bank, and she’d founded something called the Society for the Preservation of English Folk Songs. If Gus had had to guess, he would have said she was a researcher, and that if she ever did set foot in a courtroom it was to handle pro bono cases arbitrating conflicts between puppies and unicorns. From her CV, though, it looked like she had taken on several multinational corporations, and won. At least that explained why Gwendolyn seemed to despise her so intensely; these two would be competing for dominance in the same field, and Gus was pretty certain that Rushton did nothing to discourage that sort of rivalry.

  Finally Gus turned to the page that interested him the most: Morton Mathis, the man Shawn had identified as the killer of both Ellen Svaco and Archie Kane. His CV confirmed what Gus already knew about the man: He was a recent transfer from Detroit, where he’d been a rising star in the District Attorney’s Office. There was no indication of what had made him decide to leave the public sector or to move out to California, and his outside interests didn’t provide a clue-he had been involved in a capital campaign for the Detroit Opera and had chaired a fund-raiser to produce a performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle. But that wasn’t nearly as interesting as his legal specialty at the firm. He focused almost entirely on issues of technology-not surprising, considering his undergraduate degree in computer engineering.

  Shawn was right. He had to be. Morton Mathis was the only lawyer in the firm who had substantial involvement in the high-tech field. He’d have an understanding of the kind of work they were doing at JPL, and he’d know who was in the market to buy it once it was stolen. There was only one problem with the theory that Gus could see: Mathis had joined the firm six months ago. Before that he’d never worked or lived in the state. How had he made the contacts at JPL and set up his smuggling scheme so quickly?

  Those were questions that could best be answered over poolside mai tais, Gus reasoned. Now that they were certain who their target was, they could take their time reeling him in, delivering him to Rushton just when the helicopter came to take them home.

  Gus stashed the files away in the pocket on the side of his seat and looked out the window as the helicopter soared above Santa Barbara and then over the mountains to the east of the city. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen his hometown from the air-he’d flown out of the local airport more than once-but this view was nothing like the brief glimpses you could get out of the window of a jet. They were flying level and low, and he could see everything spread out below him as if they were floating in a hot-air balloon.

  Gus wanted to pull Shawn aside and whisper what he’d discovered about Mathis. But the cabin was small, and there really was no “aside” in it. And Shawn was busy doing his own research, anyway. What Gus had learned from files, Shawn seemed determined to learn firsthand: in this case, that Gwendolyn was not someone they wanted to tangle with.

  “Have you been on one of these retreats before?” Shawn asked her.

  Her icy blue eyes barely f
licked up at him from her iPhone. “Yes.”

  Shawn waited for her to fill in the details, but the only filling she did was in an e-mail. “What was it like?”

  This time she didn’t look up at all. “I survived.”

  “I can see how that might be a challenge,” Shawn said. “I once ate so many shrimp I had to be rushed to the emergency room.”

  If she appreciated his humor, she didn’t show it. But she did teach Gus a little more about the luxurious appointments in the cabin. Until she swiveled her chair so that its back faced Shawn, Gus had no idea the chairs weren’t fixed facing forward. He found the unlocking button below the armrest and turned his seat to get a better look out the window.

  Hundreds of feet below, the ground rushed by in a blur of brown. They seemed to be flying over the Central Valley. Gus tried to calculate where they might be going. If they’d been flying with the ocean on their right, he knew they’d be heading south to L.A. or San Diego or even Baja. With the ocean on their left, he’d have guessed San Francisco or the Napa Valley. Maybe even the northern coast. Plenty of resorts in either direction. But they were clearly heading east, and the only luxury destination Gus could think of in that direction was Las Vegas. That route would take them over desert, though, and while the ground below them was dry, it was clearly farmland.

  Gus was trying to re-create the map of California in his mind when he heard a voice behind him.

  “I know why you’re here,” the voice said.

  Gus swiveled his chair to see the man he had named Doc Savage leaning down into Shawn’s face.

  “I’m glad someone does,” Shawn said. “Because I thought I was supposed to be collecting all the World Rings, but now I discover that whoever gathers them all has to be sacrificed to harvest their power, and even as a hedgehog, I can tell that’s a bad deal.”

  Gus glanced up at the flat panel in the front of the cabin and confirmed that Shawn had turned on a Wii console and fired up a video game.