And suddenly I was going forward again.
No more risks, Lantham. He could still be back there.
I set course for home, back over the mountain, moving as fast as I could. If I got nabbed by a cop, it would at least keep me off the radar for a while.
Now, how the hell had he spotted me? How did he know I was a threat?
Where had he been going before he tied to shake me?
Most importantly, who was Mr. Gravity?
And why had he been at the Symposium, dressed as a student?
5:30 PM, Sunday
“Thank you for calling the office of Serena Tam, MFT. Office hours are ten AM to six PM, Monday through Friday. Your call is important to me, and if you leave a message I will return your call as soon as I’m able. Thank you.”
Beep.
“Doctor Tam, my name is Clarke Lantham. There is an emergency regarding your patient Nya Thales. If you can call me back as soon as possible, I’ll explain. You can reach me any time, day or night, at 5-1-0 3-2-6-3-8-2-7.”
I hung up the phone. Between that message and Mrs. Thales’s promise that she’d also call Nya’s therapist—secured from her as I waded through traffic on the San Mateo Bridge—I’d hopefully get a return call.
With that promise secured, I cranked some Zeppelin and took a break while I drove back to the office.
Now it was time to get back to work. I typed up the notes, dropped the conversation to the server with a note to Rachael to transcribe them when she came in tomorrow.
More important, though, I had an evening free. Nothing to do for the next few hours. Besides, running around all creation talking to everyone wasn’t getting me anywhere.
What I really needed was time to think. Get to know the missing girl, not the screwy fruitcakes that populated her crazy corner of the world. If I was going to find her, I needed to understand her. A heroin kit and some pot, a box of trophies and a description of her disability only took me so far.
Rawles and Dora both said she was special. I needed to know why.
I still had those flash cards and the thumb drive from her room. The vids on them might even be something other than porn. Maybe a video diary? Memories? At this stage, anything personal other than pictures might help.
Propped up on the couch with the laptop balanced on my knees and a well-earned bourbon, it was time for the evening’s entertainment.
I queued up everything on the first card in date order, oldest to youngest.
Most of ‘em were small, not more than five minutes each. When the first one started, with her sitting in her room like a refugee from YouTube, I was glad I’d grabbed the bourbon.
But Nya wasn’t your run-of-the-mill video blogger. I wasn’t halfway through the first glass before I almost forgot I was holding it.
She talked about her archery. About her friends. About the club they all got fake IDs to get into—some place called Bondage-a-Go-Go. She even talked about the heroin—called it a “rush.”
“I don’t know. I don’t really like it. J says it’s top-flight shit, but you know…Makes me stupid. G says that after a while it’ll grow on me, but I think he’s crazy. I mean, yeah, sure, it makes me all hummy down…” A cat jumped onto her lap. She tittered. “But I’d rather pet my pussy, like this!” She held the cat face first into the camera lens and patted its head.
The rest of it was like that. Disconnected whimsy, organized thoughts that flittered all over the place.
There was something unreal about her. Have you ever watched a pack of puppies at play? Or two cats chasing each other around a house until even they can’t tell who was chasing who anymore? And their movement is almost perfect, like the dances in a Broadway play, but better?
Her mind was like that.
This wasn’t a depressed girl.
I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen a better definition of the word “alive” than watching those videos. Yes, she was a risk junkie. Yes, she was chomping at the bit, chafing under her mother’s control. Yes, she seemed like a textbook example of the disorder Doctor Sternwood had described.
But she was alive.
And against my better judgment, I think I fell in love with her, just a little, watching her flittering every which way.
I was going to find her. I had to.
The phone jarred me around. I’d drifted off to sleep watching the videos.
“Clarke Lantham, how can I help you.”
“This is Serena Tam. You called me earlier about Nya Thales, you said it was an emergency.” I could hear a couple rambunctious kids in the background, chasing each other and shrieking at just the right frequency to make my ear bleed.
“It is. Do you have an hour free? I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Mr. Lantham—“
“Clarke, please.”
“Mr. Lantham,” well, familiarity wasn’t going to help with this one, “I can’t discuss clients business with anyone. Not to be rude, but who the hell are you?”
“I’m a private investigator—Nya’s gone missing, and Mrs. Thales has retained me to help find her.”
“Oh no. Nya? Do you have any idea…hey!” she covered the mouthpiece and shouted at her kids, “If you two don’t shut up and get your shoes on, we’re not going to the movie. I mean it, go now. Daddy will be here in a couple minutes and if you’re not ready, we’re not going.” She uncovered the mouth piece, “Sorry about that. You know how it is.”
“Yeah,” I had nieces and nephews, thankfully long since grown out of that stage, “Look, could I get maybe a half hour of your time? Anything you can give me would help at this stage…”
“I told you I can’t discuss it. But I hope you find her. She’s a good one.” The kids got noisy in the background again. “Sorry, I have to go.”
She hung up.
Caller ID caught her number. A reverse look-up gave me her address—Dublin. Hacienda was the closest cinema. It might not be the one she was going to, but it was worth a shot.
7:00 PM, Sunday
Things which would have taken hours in the days of Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade take a few minutes today. Ms. Tam had her photo on her website—now I had it on my phone.
I leaned up against the wall next to a poster for this summer’s gore-fest and pretended to be arguing with somebody halfway across the country. Every time a new family with at least four people appeared in the ticket line, I checked it against the phone.
After an hour and a half I switched to watching the crowds coming out. The Tams lived in Dublin, my office was in Oakland. Even at top speed, they could have beaten me here by thirty minutes. Thanks to the wonders of the CalTrans budget crunch, it took me forty, which meant they were probably already inside watching the latest abomination from Disney.
Based on the timing and the show schedule, they’d probably not get out till between eight thirty and nine. I took the time to catch up on the other girls’ Facebook feeds. If Nya came back home, they’d probably hear about it before Mrs. Thales did.
Still nothing—and still not a lot of alarm. One message from Gina to the private list about hitting Shakespeare in the Park in Pleasanton tonight, if anyone else was interested. No replies yet.
There’s two reasons I charge between five hundred and twelve hundred a day. First, you never know when the next case is going to walk through the door, and I don’t take insurance jobs unless I’m really hard up. The paperwork sucks.
Second, when it comes down to it, it’s boring work. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking—after a day like today, I should be gagging for some boredom. Let me tell you something about stakeouts: No matter how bad, or crazy, or unhinged your day has been, there’s no amount of overexcitement that the first ten minutes waiting for someone to show up and do something interesting won’t cure. The rest of it, the hardest part is to keep your attention sharp, or something’s liable to happen right in front of you without you ever noticing.
But if you’re good, and you wait long enough, you do tend to find what you
’re looking for.
Serena Tam, two elementary school boys, and a fortyish man who looked like he’d just been forced to sit through a Donald Trump charity pitch. They headed across the open space to the TexMex franchise.
Easy pickin’s.
I followed them in, slipped the hostess a twenty and asked to be seated close enough to keep one ear on the conversation. A woman as irritated as this one had been on the phone would want a break at the earliest convenient excuse, no matter how easy going she was.
And as soon as the waiter had brought the chips and taken their food orders, she took it. She stood and excused herself, headed back toward the side of the building they’d entered from. Right toward the bathrooms.
I waited until she was out of sight, then got up and followed. I took my complimentary water and my menu with me.
That side of the restaurant was only sparsely populated. I took the nearest available booth to the bathrooms, sat down, and pretended to read the menu.
Five minutes later, on the nose, she emerged. A professional who couldn’t leave work habits at the office—taking a short break exactly by the clock. Probably knew exactly how long she could get away with being gone and had an alarm set.
As she walked past me I said, “Nya’s not going to find herself, you know.”
She stopped cold. She turned around and looked at me like she wasn’t quite sure whether she should scream for the cops or not.
“What did you say?”
“Nya Thales. She’s not going to find herself.”
She set her lips in a thin line. “You’re Clarke Lantham.”
“Thanks. I sometimes forget. And you’re Serena Tam.”
“No, I’m someone who can’t help you.” She started to turn around.
“Be a shame if she turned up dead when you knew something that could help.”
She looked over her shoulder and glared at me.
“Sit down. I won’t keep you a minute.”
“You already have.”
“Ms. Tam…”
“Doctor.”
“Doctor Tam, I get paid to not give up. I’m very good at my job.”
She stepped closer to the table. “You have any credentials?“
“Here.” I handed her my license card. “Dora Thales left a message on your machine telling you to talk to me.”
“Hmph. If you knew anything about Dora you would have just called on your own.”
“Professional jealousy?”
“Get to the point.”
“I need to know anything you think might help me find her.”
“Dora?”
“Nya.”
“Mr. Lantham, Nya’s a grown woman. She has an active social life, she goes where she wants. Her mother has no legal hold on her, and if she’s sunk as low as hiring you…” She trailed off, probably realizing she was skating too close to the edge of an ethics breach.
“None of her friends have seen her. In two days. My investigation shows me a girl who’s social to the point of being nuts about it, who is never out of contact with her nearest and dearest, who has every corner of life filled all the way up. She might have impulse control problems, but unless I’ve got my read totally wrong, she’d never just run off and not tell anyone.”
Ms. Tam’s jaw went from clenched to slack—her eyes relaxed. She was worried now. I nodded at the bench across the table from me, and she sat.
“I take it from your reaction that she wouldn’t do that?”
She closed her eyes, probably deciding exactly what she could say without risking her license. “My impression is that Nya isn’t interested in solo adventures.”
“That’s what I gathered.” I gave her a quick rundown on who I’d talked to, “None of them have heard from her. None of them have seen her. Not since Friday.”
She considered her words carefully. “As a mother, you have to trust a lot of people, and you hope you can do a good job. But there’s really nothing you can do when your kid has really bad judgment.”
“You’re saying she was in a bad relationship.”
“Who? I’m talking about being a mother. Here,” she turned to the right and waved subtly at the window, “a thousand people probably go by that window every hour, right?”
“Probably. Probably more.”
“A lot of people with stuff on their minds. We’re all like that, you know? All looking out the window at the rest of the world.”
“Trapped in our own worlds?”
“Exactly. Where we come from defines who we are in ways we never really appreciate. Just like now, when you’re watching people out the window, you’re not focused on what’s going on in the restaurant.”
“Says you.”
“Okay, but that’s your job.”
“Touché. So that’s why you do what you do.”
“Among other reasons.”
“And Nya?”
“If she couldn’t trust me not to talk to someone employed by her mother, I’d deserve to lose my license.”
“But you’re worried about her.”
“I’m worried about what’s in this restaurant.”
“The food here can’t be that bad.”
“Ha!”
“So why are you eating dinner here?”
“My husband likes it. And it was either that or listen to my kids giggle about eating at ‘Ruddfuckers’ all night.”
“A trying life you lead.”
She leaned toward me until her eyes filled my entire field of vision. “I, at least, know what I’m doing.”
She stood up and walked away. I watched her go—if she wasn’t so clearly talking nonsense on purpose I’d have thought she was as batty as everyone else in this insane piece of theater.
Theater.
Gina was supposed to be at Shakespeare at Bernal right now. It was only ten minutes down the road—time I talked to another one of her friends directly.
9:30 PM, Sunday
Parking was less of a problem than I was expecting. The smallish vacant lot they’d converted for parking was only three quarters full. Gina’s last post had her sounding uncertain whether she was coming, but DMV had Gina driving a twenty-year-old white Corolla with vanity plates. Spotting it wasn’t difficult.
I got there in time to catch the last act from the bottleneck by the main exit of the little portable audience pavilion.
The last bit of Hamlet is a nice reliable blood bath, and the play’s FX guy took a page out of Monty Python to turn it into a blood shower.
When the play broke, I stood back and waited for Gina to come out. Three hundred faces filed past in the sodium light, but Gina’s shouldn’t have been difficult to pick out of the crowd, not with that signature look she and the other girls had.
But these weren’t the droids I was looking for. Not one of them.
I hot-footed it back to the parking lot, figuring I’d just missed her.
Her car was still there. Untouched. But she wasn’t anywhere in sight. Perhaps she’d snuck off with her date to play in the field?
A half hour of watching the car didn’t make it any more occupied, and there’s only so long you can stake out an empty public lot without the rent-a-cops wondering if you’re skulking.
Time was you could get away with anything if you stood in the corner and smoked, now it’s just another way to draw attention. Least I don’t have to smell like cigarettes in order to do my job—smelling good was a luxury I wouldn’t have had thirty years ago.
What the world gives you with one hand it rips out of your grasping fingers with another.
When the rent-a-cop made his rounds the third time he gave me the hairy eyeball. It was time to move. I hopped out of my car and walked past the Corolla, bumped into the side view mirror and dropped my phone.
When I bent over I grabbed a second phone from my pocket—a prepaid cell with a GPS tracker and a rare-earth magnet on the back. I stuck it up inside the wheel-well and stood back up. I made a show of composing a terribly important t
ext message as I walked back to the shanty arena that served as a theater.
There were still a few folks milling around, picking up the trash, loading out the valuables. Across the street behind the stage, folks had co-opted a piece of a two-square-mile vacant field and turned it into a bazaar complete with booths and tents, with pathways twisting and turning between them for no good reason, like the event organizers had gotten lost when it turned out they couldn’t actually see everything at once.
The warm late summer night had brought the whole town out and then some. A busker was juggling firebrands to liven up the post-thespian festivities. Some kid with pants that might have been covered with the reflective beads they use on roadsigns was walking along a path so far on the other side of the park that it looked like a pair of legs had decided to go out for a stroll without informing their torso or feet. Little kids and what looked like church groups dotted the field haphazardly like they’d been planted there years ago. No Gina though. No girls even the right age.
After a full circuit, I gave up the search. The place was too active to provide reliable cover for a pair of cavorting teenagers. Still, I flashed Gina’s picture around at some likely-looking groups, just in case.
The whole exercise netted me three bumps on the shins from groups of children running around like herds of wild buffalo playing tag, and not much else.
When I got back to the lot, my car was the only one left. The Corrola had gone.
I jumped into the Civic and headed out onto Bernal. At the convenience store a couple blocks west I pulled over and brought the tracker site up on my phone.
The Corolla was heading right back up to Danville.
680 North was nice and clear, and the Toyota only had three miles head start on me. I got it in my sights by Alcosta, passed it at Crow Canyon, then allowed myself to get trapped behind an idiot in the slow lane, tailgating too close to be able to pull around safely.
It passed me in the next lane, but Gina wasn’t driving it.
Jason Rawles was.
The Corolla peeled off the freeway at El Cerro, heading back up into the hills around Diablo. Gina’s reg had her living further south, so wherever Rawles was taking her car, he wasn’t returning it to her house.
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