Psych:Mind-Altering Murder (16 page)

So he wouldn't call Shawn and help him figure out what a blacksmith had to do with the disappearance of a computer-game mogul. He wouldn't share his theories about the other possible meanings of the clue, and he definitely wouldn't do to Shawn what he had just done to himself. He wouldn't sow doubt and fear when the only thing that could help the situation was confidence.

Gus had made his choice. He used to be a detective; now he was an executive vice president of a rising pharmaceuticals company. He'd loved being part of Psych, but that time was over. There was no going back.

Chapter Twenty-two

I
t was only a few hundred feet from one side of the ridge to the other, but it felt like they'd traveled a thousand miles. The climate they'd left behind was temperate and practically tropical, cooled by the gentle breezes blowing off the ocean. Now they'd stepped into a desert of dead grasses and blasting heat.

Detective Carlton Lassiter had always loved crossing the hills that separated Santa Barbara from the rest of the world. Sure, the city he lived in was widely considered a paradise, and the backcountry was barely livable for rattlesnakes. But there was a truth to the arid heat that was hidden by the green and pleasant climate of the city below: Life was cruel and death was always waiting around the corner for you. The hills told you that. Bums lived out on the streets of Santa Barbara for years--there was one old guy he was sure had been camping outside a shopping mall since Carter was president. But you couldn't survive a summer in the hills without running water and air-conditioning and shelter. In August you'd be lucky to make it through a day.

As much as he enjoyed the physical experience, though, Lassiter had little interest in being here now. He had work to do, cases to close, criminals to catch. He couldn't afford to waste most of a day trying yet again to solve the murder of a woman who hadn't been murdered.

This was his partner's doing. She had insisted they follow some mysterious lead in the Mandy Jansen case and slog up this way. At least she said she'd had a lead; she refused to tell him where it had come from. For all he knew it had been revealed by a gypsy woman reading her palm.

Normally he wouldn't have cared where she'd gotten the tip. Juliet O'Hara was as good a detective as he'd ever met and the best partner he could imagine.

But lately she had begun to change. As far as he could tell it had started when they'd been called to the scene of that hanging cheerleader. For some reason the sight had affected her more deeply than she would acknowledge. Lassiter had offered her the advice that had always helped him through the tough times on the job. But when he'd pulled her aside and said "walk it off, Detective," she had only given him that vacant smile she reserved for civilians who came into the station to report that space aliens were eating Jell-O on their lawn.

Lassiter was still willing to trust her instincts--he was here with her, wasn't he? But he found himself questioning her judgment far more than he ever had before.

And now, as their unmarked sedan bounced down a dirt road leading into a deep canyon, he had to wonder if she'd lost her senses completely. There was no crime to investigate at all, just a poor, unfortunate girl who had taken her own life. And yet O'Hara was insisting they search for some kind of phantom evidence in Southern California's answer to Appalachia.

"Are you sure you've got the right address, Detective?" Lassiter said.

"No, Carlton," O'Hara said, not taking her eyes off the rutted road. "The other fifteen times you asked me that, I lied. But now that you've hit the magic sixteenth, I'm compelled to tell the truth. I've actually got the wrong address, and I'm just going to keep driving through the middle of nowhere because I'm too embarrassed to admit it."

"At least that would be behavior I could understand," Lassiter said. "I can't imagine what else would possibly drag you up here."

The car rounded a tree and suddenly Lassiter could imagine. There was a small blue car sitting under the branches, the one bit of shade for miles around. Shawn Spencer was stretched out on the hood.

"This was your tip?" Lassiter said.

"It wasn't a tip. It was a lead," O'Hara said. "We found it together."

She pulled the sedan up behind the blue Echo and got out. After a long moment Lassiter followed, but only because she'd turned off the ignition and the cabin was already starting to heat up.

"Sorry we're late, Shawn," O'Hara said, as he ambled over to meet them.

"No problem," Shawn said. "It's hard to move fast when you're stapled to a lead weight."

Lassiter glared at Shawn. "What does this loser know about Mandy Jansen?" Lassiter said. "I doubt she would have given him the time of day."

"I don't think he knows anything about her," O'Hara said. "We're here searching for Macklin Tanner."

Now Lassiter turned his glare on her. "The Mandy Jansen case would be bad enough," he said. "At least that's technically an SBPD case, even if it's only still open because you've got some strange fixation with it. But Macklin Tanner isn't a case at all. Our detectives looked at it, determined there was no foul play, and dismissed it. So if you are using the time of two Santa Barbara Police Department detectives to help a private detective out on his own case, that is theft, and despite my great respect and admiration for you, I will have no choice but to report you to the proper authorities."

"And then Santy Claus won't bring her any presents," Shawn said. "I bet you'll feel guilty come December twenty-sixth, Lassie."

"I'm at a dead end with Mandy Jansen's case," O'Hara said. "I asked Shawn to consult, but since the department wasn't prepared to pay I told him I'd give him a hand on his case."

"Unfortunately she didn't mention she'd be bringing some other body part, as well," Shawn said.

"I refuse to have anything to do with this," Lassiter said.

"Too late, Carlton," O'Hara said. "The mileage is already on the vehicle. If you report me, what are you going to say--that I kidnapped you?"

"Don't think I won't report myself, as well," Lassiter said. "You know I will."

"Poor Lassie," Shawn said. "Doesn't have any friends, so he's got to do everything on his own."

"I don't see your little sidekick anywhere, Spencer," Lassiter said. "Oh, that's right. He dumped you to take a real job."

"He didn't dump me," Shawn said, rolling off the car's hood and landing on his feet. "If you ever had a friend you'd know that sometimes you've got to go off in separate directions for a while."

"I'd say three hundred miles and eighteen tax brackets north is about as far as Gus could get away from you," Lassiter said. "So, what, you kept his car as a souvenir?"

"He doesn't need it in San Francisco," Shawn said. "So I offered to look after it when he's out of town."

"Thoughtful of you," Lassiter said. "If I ran the plate, I bet I'd find this piece of junk is owned by Gus' old company. And since Gus doesn't work for them anymore, and in fact has started working for their competitor, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that they requested its return weeks ago. By now it might even have been reported stolen."

"Carlton, stop," O'Hara said.

"It's not stolen," Shawn said. "Gus asked me to turn it in. And I'm going to. But I have to make sure to clean all of our stuff out of the glove compartment first, and I haven't had a chance to do that, what with all the official police business you can't seem to wrap up without help from me."

"The Santa Barbara Police Department is perfectly capable of closing its cases without you, Spencer," Lassiter said.

"Really?" Shawn said. "You should try it someday."

The two men stood toe-to-toe, and if the tension radiating off them got any hotter the dried grass under their feet would soon be bursting into flame. O'Hara took Lassiter's arm and pulled him back a step.

"He's helped us plenty," O'Hara said. "And if Tanner is in trouble, then it doesn't really matter whose case it is, does it?"

Lassiter thought that over. "And if this turns out to be as big a waste of time as I think?" he said finally. "What do we do if Macklin Tanner hasn't been kidnapped?"

"We'll have to deal with that issue if it comes about," O'Hara said. "Maybe if we just keep negative thoughts in our heads, everything will work out for the worst and we'll be okay."

Lassiter muttered something under his breath, but he gave her a shallow nod. "What is this brilliant tip we're chasing?"

"We're going to see a man about a horse," Shawn said. "No, wait. That's not right. We're going to see a man about a horseshoe. Or are we going to see a horseshoe about a man?"

"I'm so glad we took the afternoon off to have this experience," Lassiter said. "How I've missed this sparkling repartee."

"There's reason to believe that there's a connection between Macklin's disappearance and a blacksmith's shop in the Santa Barbara area," O'Hara said.

"What reason?" Lassiter said.

"If I told you we learned it from an exploding librarian, would that convince you?" Shawn said.

Lassiter couldn't bring himself to waste the energy to make his tongue form the word "no." He let his eyebrows do the work instead.

"Then I won't tell you that," Shawn said. "I won't even mention that an entire neighborhood perished so that we could get this information. Let's just say it's an anonymous tip and leave it at that."

"Happy to," Lassiter said. "Detective O'Hara, you can come back with me now or get a ride in a stolen car from this felon. At this point it's all the same to me."

He snagged his car keys out of his partner's hand and headed back to the sedan.

"There are at least a dozen blacksmiths in the Santa Barbara area," O'Hara said. "Not to mention all the various other businesses that work with wrought iron."

"I'm glad you clarified that," Lassiter said. "Now, let me see if I have this straight: There's absolutely no reason to think that any blacksmith shop has anything to do with Tanner's disappearance, aside from some idiotic fantasy of young Kreskin here. But even if I were to accept his word on the subject and go chasing off on this fool's errand, this is just one of potentially hundreds of locations where I might want to look. Does that about cover it?"

"You left one detail out, Carlton," O'Hara said. "Of all those hundreds of potential locations, there's only one that belongs to a subsidiary of VirtuActive Software, and that's Winter Brothers Ironworks, which is right up ahead."

"So the company's hedging their bets in case kids finally wise up, get sick of computer games, and go back to wholesome outdoor entertainment like horseback riding," Lassiter said.

"The ownership is hidden in a series of nested holding companies," O'Hara said. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to keep anyone from finding out about this place."

"But you got the last laugh on them," Shawn said. "They put all that time and energy into hiding the fact that they owned this place, and what did they get? A police detective who couldn't be bothered to walk five hundred yards to find them, let alone dig through layers of corporate shells. Bet they'd feel pretty silly if they knew. Which of course they never will, since you're too lazy to walk the five hundred yards to let them know."

Lassiter thought he detected something strange in Shawn's voice, a note verging on hysteria. Of course it was possible he was just choking on the dust that filled the air, but it sounded like Shawn was, for the first time since they'd met, losing that patina of hip detachment he undoubtedly thought of as his cool or his mojo. That was the first interesting thing that had happened since Lassiter let O'Hara talk him into this field trip, and he was about to follow it up with a piercing jab to Shawn's protective shell, when O'Hara stepped between them again.

"The blacksmith's shop is just around the next curve," O'Hara said. "We're going to knock on the door and ask a couple of questions. Then we can all head back."

Lassiter stopped with his hand on the door handle. "And if there's no sign of Tanner?"

He waited for either O'Hara or Spencer to say something. For a long moment, there was silence.

"Then I'll never ask for SBPD help on this case again," Shawn said finally.

"And?" Lassiter drew the syllable out longer than he ever had before, hoping that his partner might pick up on the subtle signal.

Apparently she did, further proof of what a good detective she could be when she wasn't obsessed with trivia. "I will sign off on Mandy Jansen's death as a suicide," O'Hara said.

Lassiter pulled open the sedan door, then peeled his fingers from the handle where his flesh had begun to sizzle on the blazing metal.

"Let's go, then," Lassiter said. "Looks like this trip is going to turn out to be worth my time after all."

Chapter Twenty-three

T
he Hittites of Anatolia developed a process for smelting iron ore fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. Shortly after the invention, a couple of the more enterprising members of that long-forgotten nation took their skills with metal and set up a blacksmith business in the hills outside Santa Barbara.

At least that seemed to be the case if you judged by the exterior of the decaying barn that stood in the middle of a weed-choked lot at the end of the road. The yellow paint had faded to the same dusty brown as the dying vegetation all around it and was peeling off the siding. The onceshining tin roof was encased in dust, and birds flew out through holes in the metal. Where once the word "blacksmith" had been painted in gigantic black letters, now there was only the faint outline of barely recognizable shapes.

As Shawn led the two detectives down toward the barn, he studied the ground for signs that anyone had been there recently. It was impossible to tell. The dirt road had been sunbaked until it was harder than concrete. The grass and weeds had been dead so long that the trampled stalks could have been crushed ten minutes ago or last year.

And yet Shawn was positive that Macklin Tanner had been in this barn. Or that his kidnappers had used it as their hideout. Or that it was at least in some tangential way related to the kidnapping.