Psych:Mind-Altering Murder (17 page)

That was what he was telling himself, anyway. That he was positive.

The trouble was, he wasn't. Not about this. Not about anything.

This was not the way it was supposed to be. Shawn was always positive. His subconscious would toss out an idea and the rest of his mind would grab it and chew it into shreds like a dog with a plush toy. He didn't always know why he knew something, but he never had any doubt that he did.

But that was not the way it had been working lately. The ideas his subconscious threw to him were barely more than half-formed notions, and his brain could hardly get in a nibble before its teeth started to hurt and he had to stop.

This had started when Gus left Psych to take the executive position with Benson Pharmaceuticals. But that couldn't be the reason. Shawn didn't need Gus. He never had. He liked having his old friend with him on cases, of course. He liked the camaraderie, the company. And there was nothing better than having a buddy around when you were stuck on an all-night stakeout, if only to stay in the car when you ran out to look for a bathroom.

But in terms of solving the cases, Shawn had never needed Gus. Shawn was the one with the eye and the mind and the skill. Gus was along for the ride. It was true that he had come in handy from time to time, but his greatest use was as Shawn's sounding board. Shawn hardly needed a full-fledged partner for that. And, in fact, shortly after Gus left Shawn had replaced him with an actual board. He peeled off a piece of plywood that had been covering one of the office's rear windows since it had been broken in a game of extreme handball, drew a rough approximation of Gus' face on it, and propped it up on a shelf. Then he started to run his theories by the board.

Unfortunately that didn't work nearly as well as he'd hoped, and after an hour Plywood Gus was back covering the broken pane. Apparently Shawn needed his sounding board to ask obvious questions before he could come up with his brilliant answers. If only he'd thought to record the real Gus over his last few days in the office. Since his questions were always the same variations on "What the hell are you talking about?" Shawn could simply have pushed play after every inquiry.

Since he hadn't taken that precaution Shawn decided to move away from inanimate objects and try to replace Gus with a real human being.

He'd thought briefly about bringing a professional detective into the agency. But Shawn had a unique way of working that tended to annoy people with actual law enforcement experience, and while that was one of his favorite parts of the job, he didn't feel like bringing that kind of conflict into the agency. Besides, private detectives generally wanted to be paid in money for their labors, and for the position he was looking to fill Shawn was planning on a salary measured in Yoo-hoo and Skittles.

There was only one man who could fit all of Shawn's needs. Hank Stenberg. Hank didn't know a lot about law enforcement, but Shawn was pretty sure that he'd seen enough TV cop shows to know when Shawn was deviating from standard fictional police operating procedure and would object loudly. And his voice was even higher than Gus', so there would be an extra layer of outrage in the complaint.

But Hank turned out to be no more useful than Plywood Gus had been. Sure, he asked plenty of questions in that high, piercing voice, but they were mostly along the lines of "Where's the Butterfinger you promised me?" and "Why haven't you fixed that window?" Not exactly the kind of intellectual challenge that would inspire Shawn to the deductive leaps he needed to make.

He might have tried to work things out with Hank, until Shawn's father, Henry, came to ask him for help. It seemed that one of his neighbors was growing frantic because her son hadn't come home from middle school that day and it was nearly dark. Henry was planning to search the area between the school and the boy's home, and wanted to draft Shawn to join the posse.

At least he had before he saw the object of his search sitting behind Shawn's desk, watching old Hong Kong kung fu movies on the agency computer. Without a word Henry scooped Hank up in one arm and marched him to his truck, and Shawn was once more without a partner.

Which was, he decided, the way it should be. Shawn wasn't the type who needed people. He was a lone wolf. A rebel, a rogue, a one-man army who didn't play by anyone's rules. He was every tagline from every action movie made in the 1980s, except the one about how in space no one could hear him scream, because he wasn't planning any interplanetary excursions, and "Part man, part machine, all cop," because that would require attending the police academy.

But try as he might, he couldn't make himself feel like a one-man army. His eyes worked the same way they always had and the neurons of his mind still flowed along the same old pathways, but whatever had made Shawn into the great natural detective he had been only weeks before seemed to have disappeared. He could still spot tiny details and his mind could still weave them together into patterns, but he had lost the crucial piece of himself that told him which pattern was the right one. He had lost his confidence, and with that had gone his ability.

That was what he told himself, anyway. Because that was better than the other thought that was constantly nibbling away at the back of his mind--that he had it backward. That he had only lost his self-confidence because he knew his ability was gone for good.

The Poe book that had led them here was a perfect example. It was true that the clue in the Dewey decimal number was the kind of thing that Gus would usually have been helpful with, because he was the kind of person who cared about boring things like library classification systems. But Shawn should have spotted the discrepancy. It wasn't that hard. He must have stared at the spine a thousand times and it never even crossed his mind to check its classification number.

If it hadn't been for Jules, they might still be back in the game, trying to figure it out. And Shawn was beginning to think that would not have been a completely positive thing. Although it contradicted everything he'd ever believed, he was coming to the conclusion that you could, indeed, spend too much time with a computer game. It wasn't just that he was dreaming about Darksyde City--his dreams had always been surrealistic landscapes incorporating whichever pop culture tropes he'd been ingesting that day. It was the way his instincts were beginning to change. When he'd gone out for lunch yesterday some clown in a battered Mustang had cut into the drive-through line in front of him and Shawn had had to stop his right foot from slamming down on the accelerator to take out the jerk in a massive fireball. He accepted the possibility that this was simply a measure of the frustration he'd been feeling about being unable to crack the Tanner case, but he thought he'd better cut down on his
Criminal Genius
sessions before he found himself attempting to blow up the Paseo Nuevo Shopping Center in an attempt to solve it.

Once Jules had given him the reference to blacksmithing it was an easy Google search to find out just how many metalworkers there were in the Santa Barbara area. The next part of the investigation took a little longer, but there was no inspiration involved, just a few long hours slogging through incorporation records and other public files to find the link between Macklin Tanner's company and Winter Brothers Ironworks.

When he'd made the discovery, he waited for the old feelings of triumph to flow through him. He sat in front of his computer for a full five minutes, expecting to find himself leaping out of his chair and high-fiving the light fixture.

But that sense of satisfaction never came, and neither did the old, familiar certainty. What he'd found seemed to be a plausible connection and a probable lead, but he didn't
know
it the way he always had before.

At least he still remembered what it was supposed to sound like, so when he called O'Hara he was able to use the proper mixture of elation and self-worship. He hadn't thought she'd heard anything off in his voice, and she did agree to meet him up here this afternoon.

But now that they were all standing outside the barn that once housed Winter Brothers, Shawn was feeling doubt creeping through him. What if he had been wrong? What if Macklin Tanner had never been here?

"Great lead you found, Spencer," Lassiter said as he came up to Shawn. "Doubt you found your missing person, but at least we'll all get skin cancer from standing around in the sun like this."

O'Hara stepped up to Shawn, a look of concern on her face. "It doesn't look like anyone has been here in years," she said.

It didn't. Shawn knew it. He'd gotten this one wrong. The right thing to do would be to turn around and go home, lie on the couch, and watch all five
Planet of the Apes
movies back-to-back. Not that he deserved that kind of reward. It would be much more fitting to make himself sit through the Tim Burton remake five times over, although if he wanted to punish himself that severely he might as well just hang himself in Mandy Jansen's basement.

But just because Shawn felt defeated, he didn't need to show it. He gave Jules his best cocky grin. "Looks can be deceiving," Shawn said. "I mean, Lassie here looks like Mr. Bean. But that doesn't mean he's a bumbling, incompetent boob with a turkey on his head."

"Gee, thanks," Lassiter said.

"Unless I'm wrong about this barn, of course," Shawn continued, "in which case looks really aren't deceiving and no one has been here in years. Then the whole turkey-on-the-head thing is up for grabs."

"That's good, Shawn," Lassiter said. "If you're wrong and you dragged us out here for absolutely no reason, then I'm the idiot."

"Hey, you listened to me," Shawn said.

"Not anymore," Lassiter said, drawing the gun from the holster under his polyester-blend jacket.

"Don't you think you're overreacting a bit?" Shawn said.

"I'm doing my job, which is to check out a tip, no matter how little credibility its source might have," Lassiter said. Gun held pointing down at the ground, he started toward the barn. "O'Hara, you take the back."

"What about me?" Shawn said. "If you've got the front and she's got the back?"

"Personally I think you should go ahead and walk into the barn," Lassiter said. "That way if there are gunshots you're almost certain to get caught in the cross fire. But as a law enforcement officer, I'm telling you to stay here until I give the all clear."

"The what?" Shawn said.

"All clear," Lassiter said.

"That's what I was waiting for." Shawn sprinted past the detective and made it to the barn door before Lassiter could grab him.

"Shawn, stop!" O'Hara whispered urgently.

But Shawn couldn't stop. Right or wrong, this was his call and he wouldn't let Lassiter take that away from him. The way he was feeling, he might never have another one.

Shawn pushed against the barn's sliding door, but it wouldn't budge. Glancing back he saw that Lassiter was closing in on him. In a second he'd grab Shawn and pull him aside and then whatever was in the barn would be all his. Shawn gave the door another shove and this time it slid open. He stepped through.

After the bright sun outside, the barn seemed to be pitchblack aside from the shafts of light that poured through the holes in the roof. Shawn stood in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust. "Hello," he called. "Kidnappers? Victims? Insane computer-game designers? Anyone?"

There was no answer other than some faint scrabbling of rodents in the walls. And as Shawn's eyes got used to the darkness, he could see why.

There was no one here. The floor was rotting bare boards, except for a stone square in the center where an ancient forge sat. Blacksmith tools, bent and blackened by use and age, were scattered around it.

"You've really cracked this case wide-open, Spencer," Lassiter said in his ear.

Shawn felt that same sinking feeling that had assailed him outside the barn. But he was even more determined now not to let it show. "I'm glad you see it, too," he said.

"See what." It wasn't a question, more like an expression of all the contempt Lassiter had ever felt for Shawn squeezed into two syllables.

"The clues," Shawn said. "The evidence. You know, the kind of things that crime solvers use to crack their cases."

"The only thing that's going to be cracked is your skull if you try to keep me here one minute longer," Lassiter said, heading back to the door.

Shawn looked around the interior of the barn again, desperately hoping to find some tiny sign that Macklin Tanner had been there. But unless the game designer had been in the habit of excreting tiny black pellets, he didn't see anything.

That was it, then. His one lead and it was a false one. He might as well give up the detective business altogether. Not right away, of course. He could coast on his past glories for a few more cases before people started to notice he'd lost his gift, the way
Friends
had still attracted vast audiences for three years after the last time it had actually been funny. But once the police beat him to the solution on a couple of cases, word would begin to get out that Psych was a fraud and he'd be out of business. Maybe if he jacked up his rates before then he could build himself a financial cushion that would last until he chose his next career.

He was so lost in his thoughts that it took him a couple of seconds to register the shouts that were coming from the back of the barn. "Carlton! Shawn!"

Shawn ran across the barn's floor and when he reached the back wall he gave it a hard kick. Two of the planks flew off and landed on the dirt, and Shawn stepped through the hole just as Lassie was coming around the corner.

"What is it, Detective?" Lassiter said.

O'Hara didn't say anything. She just pointed to a high stack of old lumber.

"That's very good," Lassiter said, slamming his pistol back in its holster. "You've found the woodpile. If we start to get chilly, it's nice to know we'll be able to build a fire. Of course we'll probably burn down half of Santa Barbara when the first spark drifts out, but still, a good thought."

Shawn didn't listen to Lassie. He was staring at the woodpile, trying to understand what Jules was pointing at. He shifted slightly on his feet and he saw something--a glint of red sparkling in the sun.