So maybe Shawn was blind now. He’d find a way to carry on. If Robert Urich could do it, so could he.
“Maybe this was a bad idea,” O’Hara said. “Mandy’s death was probably a suicide, just like everyone thinks, and I’m wasting your time dragging you here.”
“I owe you,” Shawn said. “If it hadn’t been for you, I’d still be in Darksyde City.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” O’Hara said. “You owe Gus.”
Shawn pulled his eyes away from their search of the floor and gave her a sharp stare. “Because he’s done so much to help solve this case?” he said.
“Not this one,” O’Hara said. “Macklin Tanner.”
“Believe me, he was even less use on that case than here,” Shawn said. “Every time I brought him into Darksyde City he spent the whole time whining about how he didn’t want to kill anymore. It was like having the Dalai Lama as a sidekick, except that Gus can’t shoot laser beams out of his eyes.”
“He was the one who came up with the explanation of the Dewey decimal classification,” O’Hara said. “When neither of us could figure out what the book clue was, I flew up to San Francisco to talk to him about it. He told me about the blacksmiths.”
“Mighty helpful of him,” Shawn said. “Although I guess it felt pretty good to do some real work instead of pushing papers across a desk.”
“He seemed pretty excited about what he was doing at Benson,” O’Hara said. “Said he felt he was really going to be able to help a lot of people there.”
“Oh,” Shawn said. “Well, it was nice of him to put off saving the world for a few minutes. I hope you gave him a big thanks.”
“I wanted at least to take him to lunch, but he didn’t have time,” O’Hara said. “He said he was absolutely swamped and couldn’t leave his desk.”
“I guess that’s what it’s like when you’re the bottom guy on the old totem pole,” Shawn said.
“He’s not,” O’Hara said. “He’s been promoted twice since he got there.”
“Twice?” Shawn said. That couldn’t be right. Gus was a great guy and all, but he wasn’t promotion material. He was a sidekick, not a star.
“He started off as a junior vice president, then moved up to senior VP within a couple of weeks,” she said. “Now he’s an executive vice president, whatever that is. Part of it is all the coincidences, sure, but they must really like him to move him up so quickly.”
Shawn felt a little tickle from his subconscious. He took a quick glance around the room to see if he had spotted a piece of evidence without being aware of it. But the little apartment was just as clue-free as it had been before. The dark part of his brain must have been responding to what she had said.
“Coincidences?” Shawn said as casually as he could.
“A bunch of them,” O’Hara said. “It’s really kind of weird. If you read it in a book you’d have trouble believing it.”
“And if it wasn’t in a book, but in real life?” Shawn said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.
“Well, it actually all starts in this room,” O’Hara said.
“You asked Gus for help on this case, too?”
“Yes, but not in the way you think,” O’Hara said. “It turned out that Mandy Jansen used to work in sales for Benson Pharmaceuticals. She resigned a few weeks before she died. Lassiter and I drove up to San Francisco to talk to her employers, and it was Gus who took the meeting. That’s how I found out he’d left Psych, by the way.”
If there was reproach in that sentence, Shawn chose to ignore it. He was too interested in the rest of her story.
“So Gus knew Mandy?”
“They missed each other by a few weeks,” O’Hara said. “In fact, if Mandy hadn’t died, Gus might never have been offered his job. The company had wanted her for the position.”
There was another jab from Shawn’s subconscious. Something was definitely weird here.
“Okay, that’s one coincidence,” Shawn said. “Or is it just happenstance at this point?”
“Either way,” O’Hara said.
“I’m still not sure why you ended up talking to Gus about Mandy Jansen,” Shawn said. “If he was hired after she quit and they’d never actually met, what did he have to tell you about her?”
“Not much,” O’Hara said. “Although he did give us her complete personnel file. We were sent to him because Mandy reported to the senior vice president of marketing, and that was the job Gus had just been promoted into.”
“What happened to the former senior vice president of marketing?” Shawn said. “They erased his memory when they gave him a different job?”
“We were told that if we wanted to pick his brain, we’d have to scrape it off the tree first,” she said. “He’d gone skiing the weekend before we got there and died in a freak accident.”
Shawn’s subconscious was screaming at him, and now there was no doubt what it was trying to say. “That’s not the last coincidence, is it?”
“Once Gus got the promotion to senior VP, he was reporting to a guy named Jim Macoby, who was second in command of marketing for the entire world,” she said.
“Don’t tell me,” Shawn said. “His plane crashed.”
“You think that’s funny, but you’re closer than you know. There was a problem with the electrical system in the office where they work. He went to get a cup of coffee from the machine and was electrocuted.”
Shawn felt a chill run through his body. “Is that the last of them?” he said carefully. “The last of your coincidences?”
“As far as I know,” O’Hara said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s more than enough,” Shawn said. “More than enough to tell me none of these deaths was coincidence.”
“Then what?” O’Hara said.
“They were murders.”
Chapter Twenty-five
“We are doing well, but we can do even better by doing good.”
That sounded right. Gus had been practicing his closing line for half an hour now, and he thought he had finally perfected the intonation. As long as he made sure to add that note of surprise to the last phrase, as if he had just stumbled across the formulation in the middle of speaking it, all taint of self-righteousness disappeared.
Gus was ready. He’d been preparing for this staff meeting for a week, although in a way his entire tenure at Benson Pharmaceuticals had been a warm-up for what he was about to do. “We are doing well, but we can do even better by doing good,” he said again, this time with a perfect little fillip of surprise when he hit that last phrase.
Gus glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes until the meeting started. Just enough time to practice his presentation one last time. He straightened his tie, shrugged his shoulders like a fighter entering the ring, and stood to address his imaginary audience. And he froze.
He knew his closing; there was no doubt about that. But that was all he knew. The beginning and the middle were completely gone.
Gus snatched the index cards off his desk and riffled through them quickly. He recognized his handwriting, but he couldn’t read any of it. What were these words scribbled down? What was it he was supposed to say? His mind was blank.
There was a gentle knocking, and the door cracked open. Jerry Fellows’ beaming head appeared in the doorway. “All ready?”
Gus dropped the index cards and let them scatter all over his desk. “Ready for my career to end.”
Jerry pushed the door open and wheeled his steel mail cart into the office. “Now you’re just being silly, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re going to be great.”
“I’ve been here for weeks,” Gus said. “Before that I was a half-time salesman, and not a very good one at that.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Jerry said. “I can see the fire in your eyes. I bet you had that in your last job.”
“One of them,” Gus said. “But I don’t think it was for the sales route.”