“I’m glad,” she said with a smile that made Shawn think the San Francisco fog had been replaced by Santa Barbara sunshine. “People come and go so quickly here these days. Sometimes it feels like I never really get to know anyone.”
“Everyone certainly knows you,” Shawn said, only half thinking of the way that the men in the company would find any excuse to learn more about the receptionist by following her up those steep stairs. “Although I’m a little surprised that you haven’t gone off to run some other company.”
A faint blush colored her cheeks and her smile turned shy. “I’m not very ambitious,” she said. “Everybody around here seems to be trying to fix the world or at the very least use their jobs here to climb to some better position. I’m more like my da. We’re lifers here and we’re happy about it.”
“Some of the people who’ve left recently were also lifers,” Shawn said. “They just didn’t know it.”
She gave him a blank smile as if to acknowledge that she realized he’d said something funny even if she didn’t have the slightest idea what it could have been.
“You father is Jerry Fellows, right?” Shawn said.
“Since the day I was born,” she said. “Or even longer, if you believe the biology books.”
“He must like the company, since he was willing to bring you in to work here,” Shawn said, an idea beginning to percolate in his mind. “But all those years delivering mail must get kind of dull after a while.”
“Nothing’s dull when your mind works the way his does,” Chanterelle said.
“And which way would that be?” Shawn said. The phrase would be equally appropriate for the kind of mind that could understand string theory or one that couldn’t figure out how to untie a knotted string.
“He delivers mail now, but that’s just a temporary gig,” Chanterelle said. “He can do almost anything he puts his mind to. As a little girl, I used to spend hours watching him as he taught himself whatever caught his interest, from electrical work to construction to hypnotism. He’s going to do great things for this world. As soon as the time is right.”
“Glad to hear he’s not rushing anything,” Shawn said.
“I used to urge him to take a better job. But he loves what he does. It’s like he used to tell me: You don’t have to be the king to help the country,” she said.
“That’s what I say all the time,” Shawn said.
“Really?”
“No,” Shawn said, but when that lovely smile turned to a frown he was quick to amend his statement. “But it’s a nice saying and I’m sure I would have said it if I’d ever thought of it.”
He was heading toward the elevator when the thought hit him. Hit him so hard and fast he almost gasped for breath. This was the moment he lived for, when everything became clear and bright. Out of habit he turned to Gus, meaning to give him some cryptic comment that would let him have a hint that he had figured everything out without actually giving him any information, only to remember just before the words left his mouth that Gus wasn’t next to him anymore.
That was going to change soon, though. It would have to. Gus was going to be a detective again or he was going to be dead. Shawn was going to make sure of that.
Chapter Thirty-two
This was her punishment, self-imposed and self-administered. Detective Juliet O’Hara had spent every night for the last weeks canvassing the homeless population of Santa Barbara’s main business street, trying to get even one of them to say he’d seen a pedestrian knocked down by a speeding car.
This was a nothing case, she knew. Walon O’Malley, the victim, hadn’t been anyone important, just an older retiree who had stepped out of his adult living community late one night to grab a pack of smokes. His wife had died years ago, they’d never had any children, and if he’d had any friends in or outside of the home where he lived, none had materialized. He was apparently an unhappy old grouch, passing his final days waiting for the Reaper to swing his scythe.
The department would never let her waste this much time on the case; there was no question of that. So she didn’t ask them and she didn’t use their time. She put in a full day at work, clocked out, and then hit the streets. No one had to know until she got results, and even then she wouldn’t put in for the overtime. This was her own personal mission. Her penance.
Even as she walked down State Street she knew she was wasting her time. She had talked to every homeless person on the street who was ever going to talk to her. At first she tried to tell herself the reason she kept going back was so that the street people would get used to her presence there and finally begin to trust her. She even started bringing them the occasional cup of coffee or box of cookies.
Now most of them knew her by sight, and she was greeted as a friend almost every night. Which isn’t all bad, she thought to herself as she set off for one more pointless patrol. Maybe one of them would see evidence in some other crime someday. At the very least she’d always have a place to go if she lost her job, her apartment, her savings, and her ability to function in society.
But as the hit-and-run receded further into the past, she knew it was increasingly unlikely she’d find anyone here who had seen it or who would remember if they had. A couple more nights, she thought, and I can give this up for good.
Of course she could have given up on it anytime in the past weeks. The case was technically still open, but no one in the department expected it to be solved, and realistically no one cared. There were bigger cases with more important victims. There were missing children and murdered wives and stolen life savings; there were people hurting whose pain could only be salved once the ones who had injured them were behind bars. There was no one pushing the chief to solve Walon O’Malley’s killing; there were no anguished calls to members of the city council, no angry letters in the Santa Barbara Times. Even the homeless coalition people had moved on to more pressing issues. There was simply no reason for her to keep pursuing it.
And so she hadn’t. Not when it might have mattered; not back when it was still fresh. It was almost certainly true that it wouldn’t have made any difference then, either, but that wasn’t the point.
She hadn’t been focused on Walon O’Malley’s case. She’d put in the hours, but her heart and mind were still with Mandy Jansen. She’d been convinced that the former cheerleader had been murdered and could not let that go. So she put in her obligatory hours on the hit-and-run, but she was always aware she was only going through the motions.
Not that her focus on Mandy Jansen had done any good for that case. It was still sitting open on her desk, but she had given up any hopes of finding more evidence unless Mandy herself clawed her way out of the grave and explained exactly what had happened to her. The only reason O’Hara had left the case open was that there was no more pressure on her to do anything else with it. Mandy’s mother had taken a serious turn for the worse in the last few weeks, and now she was in the hospital, slipping in and out of consciousness. O’Hara had been to visit Mrs. Jansen once, and the poor woman had thought she was Mandy and kept talking about how beautiful she looked in her cheerleader’s outfit, as if she were still in high school.
At least she’d been spared the Macklin Tanner case. That was the department’s big black eye and everyone who’d touched it walked away badly burned. The detectives originally assigned to the case, Bookins and Danner, had been sure Tanner was a walk-away, and closed the case early on despite Brenda Varda’s entreaties for them to keep looking. After the clue O’Hara and Shawn had found in the game led them to the abandoned barn and the chopped-up remains of Tanner’s car, the case had been reopened. Chief Vick had threatened to put O’Hara and Lassiter on it, but Mickey Bookins begged her to give him and his partner a chance to redeem themselves, and she consented.
Since then the detectives had come up with precisely nothing. They’d traced the ownership of the blacksmith workshop to some division of VirtuActive Software, as she and Shawn had done before, but the financial trails were so complicated and the holding companies so gnarled that even the forensic accountant the department hired from outside couldn’t say with any certainty who had been responsible for the purchase, or even who might have known about it.