Psyc 03_The Call of the Mild

by William Rabkin

  The woman came back up to the counter with a helpless shrug. “I’m afraid we’ve got no pet owners named Svaco,” she said. “Is there another name she might have used?”

  “Who’s Fluffy?” Henry said, gesturing towards the standee.

  The woman looked confused for a moment, then realized what he was talking about. “The Fluffy Foundation,” she said. “We love them. If your pet is sick and you can’t afford the treatment, they’ll pay for it.”

  “That must cost a fortune,” Henry said. “Where does the money come from?”

  “No one knows,” the woman said. “An anonymous donor. The only thing we know for sure is that whoever it was used to have a cat named Fluffy, and he died because his owner couldn’t afford treatment. So when she came into a lot of money, she donated huge amounts of it to start this foundation.”

  “How huge?” Officer Rasmussen said.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “I do,” Henry said. “Enough to kill for.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The mood in Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss’ palatial conference room was somber. Even the view of the sunlight-speckled ocean seemed dimmer than it had when Shawn and Gus first took their seats.

  That was only appropriate to the occasion. The firm’s senior partner had announced Archie Kane’s death as soon as the other five lawyers assembled around the mahogany table, and then spent the next half hour eulogizing his protégé.

  But beneath whatever sorrow the people in this room might have been feeling ran another emotion. Gus could feel the tension in the air, almost smell the suspicion. And he had no question what the cause of it was.

  It was him.

  More precisely, it was him and Shawn. They had been sitting on either side of Rushton at the head of the table when the other lawyers filed in for the meeting. But Rushton hadn’t introduced them, hadn’t even spared a single word or even a glance to acknowledge their existence. It was a testament to his power over his junior partners that not one of them asked anything about the two outsiders. Most of them wouldn’t even look at the detectives except in furtive glances, when they seemed to think no one would notice.

  This left Gus free during Rushton’s eulogy to study those faces that were so studiously not looking at him. Three men, two women, all in their midthirties to early forties, all polished, buffed, waxed, and tanned to perfection. Gus didn’t know if there was such a thing as a human equivalent to the full detailing to which he treated the Echo every six months, but if there was, these people had it done to themselves on a weekly basis.

  At first Gus was so blinded by the lawyers’ uniform perfection he could barely tell them apart. But as Rushton continued to speak, he began to spot differences between them. The first one who stood out was the closer of the two women. She had jet-black hair cut in bangs that fell low on her brow, and piercing blue eyes, a combination Gus suspected had not been crafted by nature. As he looked around the room, his eyes kept being drawn back to her. He tried to tell himself that it was because she had a uniquely forceful personality that overwhelmed the room even as she sat silently absorbing Rushton’s words, but the fact was that she was a dead ringer for Tanya Roberts in Beastmaster, except that she wasn’t climbing out of a sylvan pool naked. In Tanya’s honor, Gus mentally nicknamed her Kiri.

  Feeling he was being unfair, Gus made himself focus on the other woman in the room. At least he did until his eyeballs began to hurt. It wasn’t that the short blond wasn’t beautiful. He assumed she was, anyway, since everyone else in the room could have been sculpted by Michelangelo. But her hat, her dress, her shoes, her purse, even her watchband were all such a bright green they seemed to radiate light with the intensity of your average lighthouse beacon. The result was that she seemed to be surrounded by a shimmering emerald haze not unlike a fairy’s aura in a Disney cartoon. He decided to call her Tinkerbell.

  That made the man next to her Captain Hook. Not that he was missing a hand or had a habit of glancing nervously around the room for a ticking crocodile. But he had a wolfish, grasping look even as he attempted to convey the appropriate sorrow for his fallen comrade. Gus could practically see him laying out all the ways in which this new turn of events could be used to his advantage and how it could hurt him.

  It was the man sitting next to the Captain whom Gus found most intriguing. He didn’t quite fit in with the others. Sure, his skin had that perfect poreless sheen, and each of the hairs on his head was so precisely cut and shaped that Gus suspected his barber trimmed only one before switching razors, and his suit fit better than Gus’ own skin and moved with his body so easily it seemed to have been woven out of mercury.

  But unlike the other lawyers, this one actually seemed to have the occasional emotion, and some of these even played out on his face. There wasn’t a lot of sentiment present, and in another context Gus might never have noticed anything at all. But in a group of peers who betrayed somewhat less of whatever they were feeling than a group of department store dummies, the slight twitches and frowns this lawyer displayed and then banished almost as soon as they first appeared might as well have been semaphore signals. There was only one word for a man whose every emotional response is so much bigger, louder, and more extravagant than anyone else’s, so Gus decided to call him Shatner.

  He’d turned to appraise the next lawyer in line when he noticed that the man had turned to stare directly at him.

  They were all staring at him. Kiri and Tink and Captain Hook and Shatner and the guy who did not know he was waiting for a clever nickname. What did they want? Was he supposed to say something?

  Gus realized he’d stopped listening to Rushton’s speech several minutes ago. Now he tried to call up back whatever might have penetrated his ears but bounced off his brain. It was no use. He had no idea what he was supposed to do or say.

  Gus could feel himself starting to panic. Under the table his knees were beginning to tremble. In another couple of seconds, he’d begin to do something he was sure no one else at this table had ever done: sweat.

  Fortunately one of the lawyers who had been staring at him—a man whose white-blond hair, golden skin, and muscled physique would have led Gus to nickname him Doc Savage if he’d gotten the chance—turned to Rushton, a look of disapproval momentarily exposing his brilliant white teeth.

  “We have a binding contract with InterTec and are obligated to continue paying them through the end of the year,” Savage said. “If you want to terminate that relationship and bring in our own in-house investigators, we should at least wait until that commitment has been fulfilled so we’re not paying twice for the same service.”

  Gus understood now why everyone had been staring at him. Rushton had finally gotten around to the second item of business on today’s agenda, the one he had laid out for Shawn and Gus in his office. Shawn had wanted to be able to come and go at the firm at will, and he suggested that Rushton give him and Gus some kind of official cover that would entitle them to talk to the attorneys there. They could be auditors, Shawn suggested, or personnel consultants, or famous war correspondents who had taken time away from their vital service to the country risking their lives covering the global fight for freedom to write Rushton’s biography. Or caterers, if that was easier.

  But Rushton had an idea that was far simpler and more audacious than anything even Shawn would have come up with. He would hire Psych to be the firm’s in-house investigative arm. That way Shawn and Gus could be entirely truthful about what they were doing at Rushton, Morelock, while still working undercover.

  “The services are not identical, but complementary,” Rushton said. “InterTec is a fine firm and essential to our growing international business. But Psych has ways of doing things that can only be called unique.”

  “I can think of another word for it.” It was Kiri, who was glaring at Shawn with those eyes as if she really could shoot ice bullets out of them.

  “And what word would that be?” Gus heard the warning in Rushton
’s voice. The dolphins frolicking in the ocean outside the window must have heard it. But either Kiri didn’t hear, or she was so angry she didn’t care.

  Gus knew what the word was going to be. He’d heard it enough from people who refused to believe that his partner actually had the ability to read minds, sense auras, commune with the dead, or whatever new trick Shawn invented when it suited the situation. The word was “fraud,” and Gus couldn’t have resented it any more if it hadn’t been true.

  Gus could see the letter f forming on Kiri’s lips. But before she could finish the epithet, she seemed to wither under Rushton’s cold stare.

  “Fabulous,” she muttered. “And I hope that their first assignment is to uncover the truth about what happened to Archie Kane.”

  Good for Kiri, Gus thought. Just like her namesake, this one was clearly no mere slave girl fit only to have her clothes stolen by ferrets, but a trained warrior. In one sentence she had not only put herself directly behind Rushton, but had also managed to deflect any suspicion away from herself. Gus didn’t know if she would turn out to be the one who’d killed the mime, but if she had, he now knew she would also turn out to be a formidable opponent.

  “Is there anything you won’t lie about, Gwendolyn?” It was Shatner, and he was looking right at Kiri. So now Gus knew her real name. “We all know what you felt about Archie, and we all know that you are as disgusted as any of us at the idea of bringing these two frauds into this firm.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Gus could see the various lawyers weighing the sides here and trying to choose between following Shatner’s lead and saying what everyone was thinking or falling in line behind the boss. Captain Hook in particular seemed to be taking the match out at least a dozen moves and still hadn’t found a convincing end game.

  Shawn didn’t look concerned. He stood up casually and greeted the blank faces with a cheerful smile.

  “First, I want to thank you all for your warm welcome,” Shawn said. “I want to thank Mr. Rushton for hiring us. And I’d particularly like to thank the gentleman who just spoke up. Because there’s nothing like being called a fraud by a man who dines on human flesh.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Gus felt an odd pounding in his feet. After a second he realized it was his heart, which had plummeted all the way down there at Shawn’s words and was looking for a way to break out of his body through his toes. When Rushton hired them he hadn’t made any explicit threats about what would happen if they besmirched his firm, but Gus had little doubt that his retribution would be swift and horrible.

  There was a stunned silence at the table. Then Shatner jumped up angrily.

  “You are all witnesses to this outrageous accusation,” he roared. “I demand a full retraction and an immediate apology.”

  “Wait a minute,” Shawn said. He touched his index fingers to his temples and fluttered his eyelids; then his eyes snapped open. “Sorry, sometimes the visions come to me as metaphors, and apparently whoever is in charge of sending out vibrations today is a frustrated writer—and a bad one, too, if we can judge by the originality of his imagery. When I saw you as a man-eating killer, that was only meant to be a representation of your ferocity in the courtroom. You are widely known as a shark, aren’t you?”

  Gus could feel his heart abandon its efforts to bore a hole in his big toe and begin to travel back up towards his ankle. But even if Shawn had momentarily saved the day, or at least kept it from turning into a complete disaster, Shatner didn’t seem mollified.

  “Is this the level of insight we can expect from our new so-called psychic?” he demanded.

  “ ‘The Psych agency has a nearly unbroken string of successful cases.’ ” It was Tinkerbell, who was trying to look like she wasn’t reading this information from the screen of her iPhone. “ ‘They’ve solved multiple murders that have baffled the police, recovered items owners thought were gone for good, and made believers out of even the most dubious skeptics.’ ”

  Gus forced himself to suppress a grin. He had just learned two valuable pieces of information. One was that Shawn had been absolutely right to pay ten-year-old Hank Stenberg to write and submit the Wikipedia page he’d just heard read back to him. More important, he now knew that Tinkerbell was no feisty rebel like her namesake. She was a calculating corporate suck-up who would say anything as long as she was sure it was what the boss wanted to hear. Gus had met plenty of this type in his other career as a pharmaceutical sales rep, and he’d had plenty of practice getting them to do what he needed. This job just had just gotten a little easier.

  “Is that from the same trusted reference work that claims Jade Greenway is ‘one of America’s greatest lawyers’ and that her annoying affectation of dressing all in green is not a pathetic plea for attention but actually ‘a powerful tool in her ongoing battle for justice’?” Captain Hook sneered. “Because I read in the same entry that she admitted she dressed in green only because she couldn’t remember her own name otherwise.”

  “That was cyber-vandalism,” said Tinkerbell, who was apparently also called Jade Greenway. “I made them change that the instant it went up.”

  “You know she’s right,” Gwendolyn said. “The way she Googles herself, there’s no way there’s anything about her online for more than five seconds before she sees it.”

  This was another valuable lesson. The lawyers were bickering like schoolchildren, and Rushton wasn’t doing anything to stop them. Gus was pretty sure the old man was waiting to see how Shawn and he would handle them. But it also told him a lot about Rushton’s management style. It seemed to be to drop a bunch of snakes into a pit and let them fight it out among themselves.

  Gus glanced at Shawn to see if he’d realized Rushton was waiting for him to prove himself. It was hard to tell, because Shawn was bent over double, his hands pressed against his forehead. It was possible he was about to utter one of his psychic pronouncements, but given the bickering around the table, it was just as possible he’d developed a terrible headache.

  Then Shawn straightened up and stared at Shatner. Stared and saw. Saw the ragged line of white flesh near his hairline. Saw the sharp edge of the leather watchband of his Patek Philippe. Saw the puckered spot on his silk tie and the dull spots on his nails where the clear polish had chipped off.

  “The wrong ocean,” Shawn moaned. “It’s the wrong ocean.”

  The lawyers snapped out of their argument and wheeled to face Shawn, who was clutching his head as if in pain.

  “What is he doing?” Shatner snapped.

  “I believe the metaphor has returned,” Gus said.

  “I see a shark,” Shawn said. “He’s a happy shark, although it’s kind of hard to tell, since they always look like they’re smiling. Anyway, he’s king of his neighborhood, snacking on all the other fishes. Then one day he’s scooped up in a net. When he wakes up, he’s still the same shark he always was. Got the same instincts and appetites. But he’s been dumped in a different ocean. All the nooks and crannies he used to hide in to wait for his prey are gone. And the waters are filled with other sharks who are just as tough as he is, but they know the place so much better. Now every mouthful is a fight for him. Every time he spots a target, one of the other sharks swoops in and steals it from him. He’s getting hungry—starving, actually. And every day that goes by without a meal makes him weaker. If he doesn’t find a big school of fish soon, he’ll be so feeble he won’t even be able to swim fast anymore. And you know what happens then? The other sharks stop preying on the local fish and turn on him.”

  Gus noticed that Shatner had gone pale under his tan. He sank slowly down into his seat.

  “But why am I still talking about seafood?” Shawn said cheerily. “I think someone had an objection?”

  “No objection,” Shatner said, staring down at the table.

  “In that case, I believe our business is concluded,” Rushton said. “Let’s take an hour to finish up last-minute details. The chopper departs precisely at noon.�
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  Rushton waited until the other lawyers had left the conference room before clapping Shawn on the back. “I won’t ask how you knew Morton Mathis was a recent transfer from the Detroit District Attorney’s Office, but I will congratulate you on silencing him,” Rushton said. “It gives me great confidence that I made the right decision in hiring you.”

  “Yes, you did,” Shawn said.

  Something was troubling Gus. “But I don’t see what we’re going to be able to accomplish here if everyone else is leaving.”

  “That’s all taken care of,” Rushton said. “There’s room on the chopper for the two of you as well. This week is our corporate retreat, a time I set aside every year so that the lawyers can bond together into a family.”

  “I can see how well that’s working,” Shawn said. “They’re just like every family I’ve ever known.”

  “It’s a perfect time for you to get to know them, ferret out their secrets, and report it all back to me,” Rushton said. “I want to know who killed Archie Kane.” He touched a lever on his armrest and his wheelchair glided back from the table.

  “We didn’t really pack for a retreat,” Shawn said. “Unless by ‘retreat’ you mean staying at home eating Funyuns.”

  “I do not,” Rushton said. “But you don’t need to worry about packing. Everything you could possibly want will be provided for you.”

  “I don’t know,” Shawn said. “I can want some pretty strange things.”

  “Of that I have no doubt.” Rushton reached into the leather satchel that hung from his chair and pulled out a large manila envelope, which he placed carefully on the table. “Background information on the lawyers, and a little brochure about the retreat. And if you need to make any arrangements for your sudden absence, just dial nine on that phone. I’m afraid I block all electronic signals in my conference room, so you can’t use your cells—it’s the only way I can keep anyone’s attention during meetings.”