“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.
Then he knew what it was. He pushed past Lassiter and ran to the woodpile, tearing logs off and hurling them aside. Dodging the flying wood, O’Hara came up and worked beside him until they opened a large hole in the stack.
Gleaming red metal sparkled up at them. Stacks of it, cut into shards and scraps, hacked into chunks.
“What’s that?” Lassiter said as he peered down at the heap of metal.
“Right now, scrap metal,” Shawn said. “But before someone took a set of blacksmith’s tools to it, I’d say it was a cherry red 1964 Impala.”
Chapter Twenty-four
He was back, baby.
All that doubt, all that fear-all pointless. Shawn had followed his own instincts where they led him and he’d found the first evidence that Macklin Tanner had been kidnapped. The police quickly confirmed that the metal scraps had been the car Tanner disappeared with, and now there was a full investigation into his abduction.
Of course this hardly meant Shawn’s role in the case was over. He’d discovered where Tanner had disappeared to, but who took him and why and where he might be now were still completely unknown.
Or almost completely, anyway. Thanks to Shawn’s sleuthing methods, the police were fairly certain that at least one of the kidnappers worked for VirtuActive. After all, it was a clue planted in the game that had led to the barn and the discovery of the dismembered automobile. The cops were running background checks on every member of the programming team and had already started questioning everyone who’d ever worked for the company.
Shawn was content to let them take over this part of the case. That was the kind of thing the SBPD was good at-the hard, boring grunt work. His job was the brilliant flashes of insight that broke cases wide-open.
This time, though, he couldn’t take all the credit for himself. It was true he had figured out that the librarian in the game was the key to figuring out Tanner’s location, and that he had persisted in trying ways to worm it out of her no matter how many fictional people had to die along the way.