J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (4 page)

“Can’t think of anything else.”

“I’ve never seen it in any of the kids I’ve worked on. Could be really rare…I don’t know.” She tore off a hunk of injera and nibbled on the corner. “Birth defects are almost always off-putting. Uncanny. Viscerally unpleasant.

“Hardest thing for siblings over about five is to see the person behind the disfigurement. But these…it’s more like it’s on purpose. Like a sculptor did it. They’re really beautiful. I’d say stunning, but they’re strange enough I can’t go that far.” She handed the phone back to me. “They must be really popular.”

“That’s the rumor. You sure it’s not a Down’s thing…”

“No. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Another couple bites. “You know who might, though…” She took a sip of of her tej, “I had a professor at UCSF, think he’s still there. Embryology—if it’s a congenital thing, he’ll know it cold.”

“Name?”

“Sternwood. Richard Sternwood. Last I heard he was still there.”

“Thanks.” I took my phone back from her. “Everything copacetic?”

“Yup.” She checked her wristwatch and waved at the clerk inside the restaurant. “Life’s good.”

“Good.” I resisted the urge to ask her when she was free next week. Instead, I locked the screen and pocketed the phone as I stood up. “Sternwood?”

“Yup.”

“Thanks, I owe you one.” I walked away before she could dispute the bill. She still hadn’t forgiven me for getting her out of that mess last year, still less for the promotion she got because of it. Every time I came to her for a favor, she was easier, like the bill collectors wouldn’t call anymore now that she could pay an installment.

Once I was rolling safely along at three inches an hour through Berkeley traffic, I looked up the Embryology department in the UCSF directory. Richard Sternwood, research professor, Embryology. His office hours were strictly weekdays only, so he probably wasn’t in at the moment.

I called him anyhow, on the theory that it was better to poke a wild academic with a sharp stick than follow directions and get the runaround.

He wasn’t in. His grad student was, though, and he was very helpful after a little sweet talk and the promise of chocolates.

It seemed the professor was attending a bioethics symposium at Stanford all weekend, but would be in during normal office hours on Monday.

Hurry up and wait? At a thousand bucks a day, I wasn’t going to take time off if I could help it. So long as I had to wait to do the next obvious piece of legwork, I might as well shore up my background on the missing girl.

“Mrs. Thales, this is Clarke Lantham.”

“Is everything okay?” Her voice on the other end of the line was steady and controlled, as if she were bracing herself for the worst.

“Everything’s fine. I’ve got a couple hours waiting for some information that might help. I was wondering if I could drop by and take a look at Nya’s room.”

“Umm…I guess so. Why?”

“If she ran away, taking a look at her space might give me some ideas.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

6:00 PM, Saturday

The Thales place was one of those dot-com era tract homes up near Blackhawk, not too far from where Rawles lived. Maybe a quarter acre, set back from the street, the house overbuilt to the point where it was rubbing asses with the houses on either side. Probably had a back yard the size of a mouse’s bikini.

Dora answered the door half-put-together, gearing up for some formal occasion or other.

“Come in, quickly.” She stood aside and I stepped in. She brushed past me to the stairs and led me up them, fiddling with her earrings on the way. “We have to hurry. My husband will be home soon.”

I’ve heard lines like that before. Seeing her not-quite-dressed was becoming a habit—based on what I’d seen of her performance under pressure, it wasn’t a habit I wanted to put much energy into. Beauty and halitosis, right?

Lucky me, she didn’t sound like she meant it
that
way. More like she was afraid the cops were going to bust their way in at any second.

She pointed at an open door with a boy-band-of-the-month plastered on it, then quick-marched on to her room to finish her preparations.

I pushed, it swung back. I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found inside.

Growing up with two sisters, and having spent six of the last fifteen years searching different rooms in one official capacity or another, I had a pretty good idea what to expect. Teenagers rooms are all pretty much alike once you account for gender.

They all have that sense of being caught between two worlds. You might find clothes and underwear strewn haphazardly about with Barbies or teddy bears or juvenile-tinged decor—Care Bears next to Cosmo, or G.I. Joes alongside Hot Rodder magazine.

Nya’s room was a woman’s room, not a girl’s room. Very little about it seemed particularly juvenile. Not a pink heart, not a teddy bear, not a romance book with vampires. It was done in deep, primal colors. Azure blue paint on the walls, white trim for the jambs. The doors—what I could see of them through the posters for industrial bands, Parisian skylines, and tropical islands—were gloss white.

The sheets on her bed were the color of a crime scene, but the brown and dark green of the splotchy bedspread made it earthy instead of horrific.

There was the normal carpet-bound population of dirty clothes and shoes, a half-open school backpack with some badly neglected textbooks spilling out.

She’d managed to do an entire wall in digital photoframes instead of wallpaper, then gone the one step further and routed all the power cords to make geometric tracks between the frames, giving the whole thing the look of ornaments on a Mayan step pyramid. I counted twelve in the first ten seconds, all rotating on a different schedule to provide a continually-refreshing string of memories.

The shelves were crowded within an inch of their lives—not with books, but with shrines. Souvenirs from different places around the world set up almost like pagan altars, populated by day-old flowers.

Bits of dried petals on the shelf in front of one of them attested to Nya’s presence not too long ago—she’d removed a desiccated African Daisy and replaced it with the current, not-quite-dead-yet version.

“Finding everything okay?” Dora’s voice, edgy, approaching from the master bedroom.

“Yeah, fine.” I backed away from the shelf before she made it into the room. Old habits—crime scene protocol. I didn’t want her to have a reason to come into the room and disturb anything on her own.

“Anything I can help with?” She was fiddling with her handbag in the doorway—all decked out now like she was going off to an opera.

“Nah, I’m fine. I’ll be out of your hair in five minutes.”

“Oh! I can tell you anything…”

“It’s not a facts thing, it’s a feel thing.”

“Oh.” She swayed back and forth a couple times, like she was trying to figure out what to do. Jittery. Off-balance. She obviously wasn’t someone used to looking needy—she also wasn’t someone used to giving up control.

Then again, her daughter was missing. I’d be jittery too.

“Mrs. Thales, really. I won’t take long. Go finish getting ready.”

“If you’re sure…”

“I’m sure. I’ll let you know if I have any other questions.”

“Okay.” Her eyes were wet, which she tried to cover up by turning her attention back to her handbag. She took a breath and swayed out of view in her high heels. A moment later I heard her soft creaks on the carpeted stairs.

Nya, I don’t blame you at all.
I wouldn’t have lasted past fifteen pinned under that hysteric’s boot heel. Judging by Rawles’ pics, Nya liked her independence. Maybe enough to run away for it.

It was a nice hypothesis. Worst case, she’d have slipped away somewhere and would show up on the grid when she started pulling a paycheck.

Shame it didn’t stand up to the most cursory glance around the room.

Her laptop was still on the desk, her iPod hooked up to it, having long since shut down due to being fully charged. Wherever she’d gone, whatever she’d done, she hadn’t been planning on leaving when she was last in this room.

I poked my head into the hall to check Dora’s location—I heard her opening and closing cupboard doors as if she was looking for something.

A few crumpled pieces of paper pulled from the wastebasket and strewn across the hall at the top of the stairs gave me a good three-second alarm. She’d probably also want to see what I found.

A crazed mother going after an adult daughter can create all sorts of havoc, and I wasn’t going to let her in on the process while there was any doubt about the score.

There were four drawers in the desk, all them filled to bursting with brick-a-brack from a high school career ill spent. A DSLR with dead batteries and no memory card. A few graded papers that showed her regularly pulling Ds and Cs in remedial lit classes—in a California public school, getting a grade that low took a special kind of effort. A half-dozen half-consumed packets of chewing gum. Pencils that had never been sharpened. Paperclips bent out of shape for no readily apparent reason.

Nothing useful.

The drawer below, though, after a gentle ransack, yielded up a couple memory cards and a thumb drive. I pocketed them for later.

If I credited Rawles, I’d have believed this girl didn’t do anything but screw and toke. When I closed the drawer and stood up, I found myself facing an archery achievement plaque on the wall next to a compound bow. A shelf next to it held two track trophies.

So much for Rawles as a great read of human character.

The whole display, added to the ordered symmetry among the keepsake shrines, bespoke a deeply sentimental athletic girl with a tightly-organized mind. She might be slow with language, and not exactly tidy, but she knew her priorities, and she wasn’t dim.

A harness and some climbing rope under her bed pointed either to a love of extreme sports or of bondage play—maybe both.

Behind the climbing gear was a long low Rubbermaid tub. I just about lost my lunch when I opened it up. The smell of an unwashed locker room, minus the urine, hit me full in both nostrils. The thing was filled to bursting with maybe forty men’s shirts—most of them t-shirts, most of them rolled up with little bands, labeled with a name. A female version of Don Juan’s panty collection?

This girl didn’t just get around, she kept trophies. All of these were relatively fresh—a deeper glance under the bed revealed two more tubs stacked crossways a little further toward the head. Nothing else of interest under there.

Time was wasting.

I stowed the tub and climbing gear, then looked at the bed itself. Sheets fresh—could still smell the lavender dryer pouch. No stale sweat smells. Top sheet and bedspread in disarray, but the bottom sheet was still drum-tight. Only a few days old at most.

A half-empty glass of water and a plate with what looked like Triscuit crumbs on it on the bedside table. I shifted right to the bed again and rifled through the pillows.

Beneath them, staring back at me like a village idiot, was a touch-screen smartphone.

Nya hadn’t run away. She’d either gotten lost, gotten injured, gotten killed, or someone had kidnapped her.

I slipped it in my left hip pocket. I’d have time to check it later for anything that might be useful.

Maybe a minute and a half before Dora came back up the stairs to check on my progress if I was lucky, and I still had the bathroom and the walk-in closet to check.

I ducked into the bathroom—fortunately only a small vanity and cabinet required any deep searching. The shower revealed a little lavender-scented city of styling products. The cabinet was filled mostly with toilet paper and tampons—the tampons were in a basket, nothing hidden underneath them.

The drawer held brushes, barrettes, toothpaste, the usual stuff. I pulled some hair out of one of the brushes and stuffed it into an empty dime bag I carried with me. If she didn’t have a wallet on her when they found the body, I’d want to be able to identify her. An extra thousand bucks for a gene sequence wouldn’t break the Thales bank.

When I returned the brush to the drawer the back of my hand bumped into something strapped to the underside of the counter. I turned my hand around and found a little leather package, no wider than six inches. I pulled it free from its Velcro mount.

Oh yeah, I’d seen one of these before.

I stowed the injection kit in my waistband, far enough back that my jacket would conceal it.

Whenever possible, always wear a jacket. A light one in warm weather won’t get you looked at half as much as the telltale bulge of a back holster under a tight shirt.

I could hear Dora’s high heels clopping on the entryway tile. Twenty seconds until she summitted the stairs, unless she got distracted.

Three heartbeats and one bedroom later, I clicked on the light in the walk-in closet just as Dora’s weight creaked on the staircase.

Dresses on the right, shirts and pants hanging up on the left. Fetish tops hidden behind them, in the corner between the jackets and the chest of drawers.

The little dresser held her underwear, lingerie, a vibrator, some PVC cuffs and accessories, and a sizable stash of…

“Mr. Lantham? What are you doing?”

I closed my fist around the product—a good couple ounces of top shelf bud—and concealed it behind my body. “Trying to find out a little more about her.”

“By looking through her underwear?”

“Thought there might be a boyfriend she keeps photos of. Girls often do.”

“Really?”

“Well, if you were a girl, where’s the last place you’d expect your parents to look?”

“Oh.” She blanched for a second, as if the notion that her daughter might have a boyfriend made her distinctly uncomfortable. Odd, since she’d been the first one to tell me about Nya’s rep. Did I mention I hate things that don’t fit? “Are you finished?”

“Yes. Do you see anything missing in here? An overnight bag, maybe?” I pointed to the shelf above the clothes. When she looked up I pocketed the bag of cannabis and closed the lingerie drawer.