But once he’d gotten the book he hadn’t known how to interpret the clue. He had no doubt that if he’d had a little more time it would have come to him. After all, the Dismal Dewdrop system number, or whatever it was called, was a pretty obvious sign, and once he had exhausted all the less likely possibilities he would have had to investigate the obvious ones. Still, he’d had help on this part and it had shortened the investigation substantially.
That help hadn’t come free, of course, and that was why he was standing next to Juliet O’Hara in the basement apartment of a fabulous Spanish house in one of the nicest parts of town. She’d agreed to help him with the Macklin Tanner case if he’d take a look at her cheerleader suicide, and now he was paying off his debt.
He was trying to, anyway. Even with his mojo back he was having trouble trying to understand what it was about the case that was troubling her. And she was having just as much trouble explaining it.
“So, in terms of evidence you’ve got what exactly?” Shawn said as he looked around the immaculately clean room. There was a bed in one corner and a small kitchenette directly opposite it. Just in front of the window overlooking the garden sat two armchairs and a small coffee table. The floor was covered in a cheerful blue carpet. If it hadn’t been for the exposed water pipes running along the ceiling there would have been nothing to say that this was a basement conversion.
“Nothing that indicates anything other than suicide,” O’Hara said morosely.
“That’s a good start,” Shawn said.
“It is?” O’Hara looked at him with a little glimmer of hope.
“Sure,” Shawn said. “You know you’re dealing with a master criminal if he didn’t leave any evidence behind.”
“Or I’m not dealing with a criminal at all,” O’Hara said. “That’s the standard interpretation of complete lack of evidence.”
“The standard interpretation!” Shawn scoffed. “The standard interpretation of the sun setting into the ocean every night was that it was moving around the earth. The standard interpretation of a yellow light is that you’re supposed to prepare to stop. There’s always a standard interpretation and it’s always wrong. Except for why people actually watch Two and a Half Men. No one’s been able to explain that. But the rule stands.”
O’Hara let out a heavy sigh. “It would be nice to think that’s true,” she said. “But the standard interpretation is almost always the right one, because it’s a product of many minds working from the same set of facts and coming up with identical answers. And in this case we’re not going to be able to change any of those minds if all we have to go on is the complete lack of evidence.”
“Well, in that case, the solution is simple,” Shawn said. “We have to find some evidence.”
If he’d actually unplugged a valve in her neck and let out all the air filling her body, O’Hara couldn’t have looked more deflated. “That’s kind of why I asked you to meet me here.”
“And you were right to do it,” Shawn said. “Evidence of murder, coming up.”
Shawn looked around the room and he saw… nothing. No wayward pill, dropped out of the handful that had been ground up and poured into Mandy’s evening cocoa. No carpet fibers torn up as Mandy’s high-heeled feet were dragged across the floor so that her unconscious body could be strung up from the beam. No button that would at first seem to be from Mandy’s blouse but on closer examination would reveal itself to be made out of a unique type of plastic that was only used by one designer of men’s shirts, which were sold to only one store in California and which would turn out to have had only one customer in the last ten years.
Shawn felt a new stab of panic. Before, when he’d thought he was losing his mojo, he knew it was mostly about confidence. But this was completely different and entirely worse. Before the confidence could come into action he needed the eye. It was great to be able to take tiny details that no one had noticed and then spin them into a web of meaning, and then invent some psychic vision to explain what he’d figured out. But that ability wouldn’t do him much good if he’d lost the ability to spot those details in the first place.
He took a deep breath. He was getting way ahead of himself. It was quite possible that the only reason he wasn’t seeing any details out of place was that there were none. Everyone else who’d looked at this case had concluded that Mandy Jansen had killed herself. Maybe that was what happened, in which case there would have been no reason for anyone to drop pills or buttons or carpet fibers.
But Jules was sure Mandy had been murdered, sure in a way that transcended evidence and came straight from her instincts as a detective. Shawn had known her long enough to know that she was good at what she did, and if she was feeling this strongly she was probably right.
Which meant that Mandy had been murdered. And unless the killer was the most brilliant criminal in history he had left evidence behind. Evidence that Shawn wasn’t able to see.
Shawn looked again, harder this time, straining the muscles in his eyes as if he thought they’d pop out of their sockets and roll across the carpet, looking for clues. But he still saw nothing.
“What is it?” O’Hara said. “What do you see?”
For one brief moment Shawn contemplated telling her the truth. Or at least his own version of the truth, something about how the spirits had been chased away by the aura of sadness lingering in the apartment. That might actually work, he realized. He could say that the spirits wouldn’t return until the place got a lot more cheerful, so they should tune the flat panel to the Full House marathon on TV Land, and then come back in a day when they’d been drawn in by the warm family humor.
But everyone had been blowing O’Hara off on this investigation. She’d been told by her fellow cops, by Mandy’s friends, and probably by complete strangers that this was an obvious suicide and she should just close the case and move on. If he gave her some nonsense about spirits not wanting to cooperate, she’d assume that he was doing the same thing. He didn’t want to let her down that way, especially after the help she’d given him with Macklin Tanner.
He was going to have to admit the truth. This was all Gus’ fault. Shawn had never had any problems like this when he was still around. Even though Shawn couldn’t remember anything he’d ever actually done, apparently his presence worked on Shawn’s subconscious like a security blanket.
But Shawn wasn’t five years old anymore. He didn’t need a security blanket. He didn’t need any kind of blanket. Well, there was that nice wool one he liked to snuggle in when the weather turned cold, but he was willing to throw that on the dustbin of history if it would help bring his mojo back for good.
“There’s nothing, right?” O’Hara said softly. “You’re not getting any emanations or seeing any spirit trails or doing whatever it is you do instead of what I do.”
She was giving him a chance to get out of this easy, he realized. Maybe she was looking for a way to extricate herself from the case, too. All he had to do was say there was nothing here and it would be over. She’d close the file on Mandy Jansen and everyone could get along with their lives, with the obvious exception of Mandy herself.
But if he did that here, what would happen on his next case? It was exceptionally rare that a client hired a detective only to tell him that it was okay if he wasn’t able to solve the case. He had to fight his way through this.
And if there was one thing he’d learned from watching TV, it was that he could do it. Had there ever been a single private detective who didn’t get blinded at some point in his career? And whether it was Spenser or Dan Tana or Mannix or Magnum or even Monk, none of them ever gave up. Instead when the acid was thrown in their face or the gunshot creased their brows or they had been exposed to superbright light intended to kill the brain-parasite-Jell-O thing stuck to their backs, they wrapped a bandage around their eyes and set out to solve the crime they’d been investigating.