“Leap on.”
“D-Bob was impressed with my presentation-there’s no question about it,” Gus said. “But Ecclesine managed to derail it at the end. It was obvious he was going to be the biggest obstacle in my way. So he had to go.”
“I’m still with you,” Shawn said. “Or I would be if I hadn’t already gotten to this point about the time you started down this path. Now I’m up ahead waiting to see if you notice that it plunges off a cliff.”
Gus shot him a scowl. “The big question is Jim Macoby,” Gus said. “If he was pushing the issue why would Fellows have wanted him dead?”
“You’re not at the plunge yet, but at least you’ve skipped through the minefield,” Shawn said.
Gus thought hard until he finally had a glimmer of an idea. He typed furiously and a different file cabinet opened on his screen. He opened the cabinet. “Nothing here labeled ‘orphan drugs,’ ” he said. “But we’ve already established that it could have been deleted.”
“In the same way we’ve established what happened to my pancakes,” Shawn said. “Which reminds me, where’s the kitchen in this place? All this talk about breakfast is making me hungry.”
Gus opened another file. “This is it,” he said. “I’ve got it. Macoby’s calendar.”
“If he’s got dinner reservations for tonight, let’s see if they’re for someplace good,” Shawn said. “Because if we show up instead of him I don’t think he’s going to object.”
Gus flipped through screens. “He had reservations, but not for dinner,” he said. “It looks like he kept scheduling meetings with D-Bob to talk about orphan drugs, but then they all got canceled.”
“I know I’m not exactly the expert on how business works, but doesn’t that happen all the time?” Shawn said.
“Yes, but from the notations, Macoby canceled the meetings himself,” Gus said. “He talked a big game about tackling the issue, but he chickened out every time.”
“And you think Jerry doesn’t like chicken?”
“It makes sense,” Gus said. “If Jerry has a real sense of urgency about the issue, then he’d take this as a betrayal. Who knows how much time and energy he put into helping Macoby get his proposal together?”
“For that matter, who knows if any of this has the slightest connection to the truth?” Shawn said. “Oh, right, nobody.”
Gus wasn’t listening. His fingers were flying over the virtual keyboard, and after a few seconds another file opened up. “What about Mandy Jansen?”
“Well, if she did know, it’s not going to do us any good,” Shawn said. “Not unless you know someone who can talk to the dead.”
“Like Shawn Spencer, psychic detective?”
“Exactly,” Shawn said. “Just like him, only with actual psychic powers. Give me a call when you find the guy and I’ll buy him lunch.”
“We don’t need to talk to Mandy Jansen,” Gus said. “All we need to know is right here in her file. She said she quit Benson Pharmaceuticals to take care of her mother, and in fact here’s a digital copy of the letter she mailed just before I was hired. She said her mother had been diagnosed with mesenchymal chondrosarcoma and that she needed constant care.”
Shawn just looked at him. “You know, I feel like I’m supposed to come up with a witty riposte here, but you’ve left me completely blank.”
“Mesenchymal chondrosarcoma is a cancer of the cartilage, one of the rarest cancers there is,” Gus said. “There haven’t even been a hundred cases diagnosed in all the world. So obviously there’s no treatment for it.”
“Still waiting for my opening,” Shawn said.
“Don’t you see?” Gus wanted to hit Shawn in the face with the facts. Unfortunately they were nothing more than pixels on a screen, so he was reduced to waving his arms in the air to emphasize his point. “Mandy’s mother was suffering from an orphan disease. Mandy, who was supposed to take the job that eventually went to me, was the perfect person to lead the charge for the cause in the company. She would have had the passion, the firsthand knowledge, and the moral gravity to force Benson Pharmaceuticals down this path.”
“Instead she decided to stay home and take care of Mom,” Shawn said. “How selfish can you get? No wonder she killed herself.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Gus said, arms flapping so hard that if the glass had fallen out of the window right now he could have flown down to a safe landing. “She didn’t kill herself. She committed the same sin that Jim Macoby did: walking away from the cause. And for that sin she was murdered.”
“By Jerry Fellows.”
“By Jerry Fellows,” Gus agreed. “Don’t you see? It all makes sense.”
And for one brief, shining moment of clarity, it did. He had found the pattern. But that was only the first step. After he found it he needed to prove it, which meant using the pattern as a guide to find another instance that would fit. And he had done that, too. Gus had solved a series of terrible crimes when no one else had even suspected that the crimes had been committed, except for Shawn, and that didn’t count.
So why didn’t he feel that sense of triumph that always used to come with the solving of the puzzle? Where was that satisfaction as the last piece snapped into place and proved him right?
It wasn’t there. And, Gus realized, it wouldn’t be there. Because he hadn’t actually solved anything, except theoretically. Yes, everything he said held together, and he could connect every one of his dots to make a sound, logical case.
But there was nothing real about it. Nothing tying these bold rhetorical declarations down to reality. It was all fine as a word puzzle, but if he took it any further it would actually impact people’s lives. Living people, breathing people, people with hopes and dreams, all of which might be shattered by his little game. It might be fun to calculate where the train leaving New York at eighty miles an hour would meet the one heading out of Los Angeles at twice that speed, but once you realized that both of them were running on the same track and their meeting would entail the deaths of hundreds of innocent passengers, it seemed irresponsible to keep calculating instead of doing something to stop the catastrophe.
And Gus had caused enough catastrophes in exactly this way. When Professor Langston Kitteredge had come to him for help in battling the global conspiracy that only he knew about, Gus had leaped to his aid and worked out an entire theory about who had murdered the museum’s curator and why. It was logical, it was plausible, and all the pieces fit together.
The only trouble was that it was all based on a faulty assumption, and because of that everything he’d come up with afterward had been completely wrong. Logical, defensible, and wrong. And a man had died because of it.
Now he was doing exactly the same thing. He had taken a set of incidents and strung them together into a pretty pattern. But that didn’t mean the pattern represented what had really happened. It just meant that he was really good at coming up with arguments he could use to persuade himself.
When he stepped back and looked at what he was really talking about, he could see how stupid and dangerous the exercise was. And not just because he was already falling into the least obvious suspect trap. The theory about Jerry Fellows killing Benson executives rested on one necessary assumption-that a string of accidents and one suicide were actually murders that no one had noticed. Which was, of course, the most ludicrous part of the whole argument. There was no evidence to suggest that all these deaths were anything other than what they appeared. Shawn had skipped over that by simply assuming its opposite, and Gus had started piling details on top of that declaration.
Gus could feel the fear overtaking him again. His palms were sweating; his heart pounded against his ribs.
He wouldn’t do this again. Not to himself, and certainly not to Jerry Fellows. There was a reason Gus had given up working as a detective, and this was it. What was fun in the abstract could destroy people’s lives once he started to pretend he knew what he was doing.