As they pulled up to one more useless stop, this one a veterinarian’s office, Rasmussen gave Henry a firm chuck on the shoulder with his fist. “The brainwork is the key, but it’s the leg-work that makes it turn in the lock.”
Henry sighed heavily. This whole day was like being trapped with a human fortune cookie-worse, because Henry had written all the fortunes himself. “I don’t understand how you know all these things I’ve said.” Henry got out of the car and waited for Rasmussen to join him at the vet’s entrance. “It’s not like I wrote a self-help book or anything.”
“That would be great,” Rasmussen said. “I’d love to own a complete collection of your wisdom.”
“Where did you hear the stuff you’ve been parroting back to me?”
“Isla Vista Junior High,” Rasmussen said as he pushed through the door to the veterinary offices.
Henry had never worked a case at any junior high school anywhere, let alone Isla Vista. And while it was flattering to think his collected works were being studied by eleven-yearolds, the fact was he didn’t have any works, collected or otherwise. This guy had to be playing with him.
But when Henry entered the waiting room, Rasmussen didn’t seem to be playing. If anything, he was even more serious than before. He stood at the waist-high counter drumming his fingers impatiently as a young woman in scrubs wrestled with a border collie who had no intention of letting himself be weighed.
Henry joined Rasmussen at the counter. “I have to admit, I don’t remember what case brought me to your school,” he said. “Are you sure you have the right guy?”
“Absolutely,” Rasmussen said. “Although you were there undercover.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Henry said. “I never worked undercover at a school.”
“Sure, you did,” Rasmussen said. “You were going under the name Officer Friendly. But for me, you were Officer Role Model. Before I heard you speak, I wanted to design surfboards. Afterwards, I knew I was meant to be a cop.”
Now Henry remembered. Twenty years ago he’d gotten into a shouting match with his chief over a string of robberies, and as discipline he’d been assigned to travel to the area’s schools as Officer Friendly. It was a miserable assignment, and the only way he’d gotten through it was making sure to introduce Officer Friendly to Officer Bourbon every night as soon as he finished his daily lectures.
But this one kid had listened to every word. Listened and remembered. Remembered for all these years.
“I couldn’t have talked for more than forty-five minutes,” Henry said.
“It was enough.”
Henry thought of all the things he’d tried to teach Shawn, and how few of them actually took. If only his son had been this receptive to Henry’s wisdom, he’d be running a police department today. Maybe this kid wasn’t so bad after all.
The woman in scrubs managed to get a reading off the scale and sent the border collie off down a corridor with an attendant, then came up to Henry and Rasmussen.
“How can I help you?” she said.
Chris Rasmussen tapped the badge printed on his shirt. Oddly, this time Henry didn’t find the gesture annoying. Instead he saw the pride behind it. “I’m Officer Chris Rasmussen of the Isla Vista Foot Patrol,” he said. “This is Detective Henry Spencer of the Santa Barbara Police Department. We’re wondering if you have any record of a client by the name of Ellen Svaco.”
“I don’t know if I’m allowed to give out that information,” the woman said. “Isn’t there doctor-patient privilege?”
Rasmussen gave her a dazzling smile. “Only if we ask about her pet.”
She smiled back warmly. Henry had to admit, this kid had something going for him.
The woman went to a large filing cabinet against the back wall and started digging through a drawer.
As they were waiting, Henry glanced around the room. It was a standard vet’s office, with easy-to-clean linoleum floors, half-chewed waiting furniture, and, on the walls, pictures of grateful pets and posters warning of heartworm.
And in the corner was something Henry had never seen before. He nudged Rasmussen and pointed at it.
“Did I mention something to your class about looking too hard for information?”
“Sure,” Rasmussen said. “Don’t be so fixated on the thing you think you’re looking for that you don’t see what else is there.”
“Like that?”
It was a large cardboard standee of what might have been the cutest dog in canine history. A word balloon over its head claimed it was thinking, “Fluffy saved my life.” And at the bottom was a cartoon kitten and the slogan “When all else fails, Fluffy can help. The Fluffy Foundation.”
The woman came back up to the counter with a helpless shrug. “I’m afraid we’ve got no pet owners named Svaco,” she said. “Is there another name she might have used?”
“Who’s Fluffy?” Henry said, gesturing towards the standee.
The woman looked confused for a moment, then realized what he was talking about. “The Fluffy Foundation,” she said. “We love them. If your pet is sick and you can’t afford the treatment, they’ll pay for it.”
“That must cost a fortune,” Henry said. “Where does the money come from?”
“No one knows,” the woman said. “An anonymous donor. The only thing we know for sure is that whoever it was used to have a cat named Fluffy, and he died because his owner couldn’t afford treatment. So when she came into a lot of money, she donated huge amounts of it to start this foundation.”
“How huge?” Officer Rasmussen said.
“I have no idea,” she said.
“I do,” Henry said. “Enough to kill for.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The mood in Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss’ palatial conference room was somber. Even the view of the sunlight-speckled ocean seemed dimmer than it had when Shawn and Gus first took their seats.
That was only appropriate to the occasion. The firm’s senior partner had announced Archie Kane’s death as soon as the other five lawyers assembled around the mahogany table, and then spent the next half hour eulogizing his protege.
But beneath whatever sorrow the people in this room might have been feeling ran another emotion. Gus could feel the tension in the air, almost smell the suspicion. And he had no question what the cause of it was.
It was him.
More precisely, it was him and Shawn. They had been sitting on either side of Rushton at the head of the table when the other lawyers filed in for the meeting. But Rushton hadn’t introduced them, hadn’t even spared a single word or even a glance to acknowledge their existence. It was a testament to his power over his junior partners that not one of them asked anything about the two outsiders. Most of them wouldn’t even look at the detectives except in furtive glances, when they seemed to think no one would notice.
This left Gus free during Rushton’s eulogy to study those faces that were so studiously not looking at him. Three men, two women, all in their midthirties to early forties, all polished, buffed, waxed, and tanned to perfection. Gus didn’t know if there was such a thing as a human equivalent to the full detailing to which he treated the Echo every six months, but if there was, these people had it done to themselves on a weekly basis.
At first Gus was so blinded by the lawyers’ uniform perfection he could barely tell them apart. But as Rushton continued to speak, he began to spot differences between them. The first one who stood out was the closer of the two women. She had jet-black hair cut in bangs that fell low on her brow, and piercing blue eyes, a combination Gus suspected had not been crafted by nature. As he looked around the room, his eyes kept being drawn back to her. He tried to tell himself that it was because she had a uniquely forceful personality that overwhelmed the room even as she sat silently absorbing Rushton’s words, but the fact was that she was a dead ringer for Tanya Roberts in Beastmaster, except that she wasn’t climbing out of a sylvan pool naked. In Tanya’s honor, Gus mentally nicknamed her Kiri.