Standish approached and offered Shaw a bottle of water. He took it and drank down half, surprised at how thirsty he was. “We’ll leave it to Crime Scene and the ME. No hurry to get back. I’m going to hitch a ride in the vans. Not in an airborne mood at the moment.”
Shaw agreed.
The detective was staring over the cliff. After a moment she asked, “You see that big cat again?”
“No.”
Absently she said, “You know, there were a couple of them in Palo Alto the other day. I read the story in the Examiner. Safeway parking lot. Roughhousing like kittens. Then they ran off into the woods and disappeared. They interviewed somebody. He said, ‘The mountain lion you can’t see is worse than the one you can.’ Is that the truth about life or what, Shaw?”
His phone vibrated. He read the text.
A moment of debate as he stared down the rock face. He typed and sent a reply.
He slipped the phone away and said to Standish that he’d changed his mind and would take the chopper back after all.
46
Six p.m., and Colter Shaw was back in the Quick Byte Café.
He tilted the beer bottle back, drank long. It was a custom of his to drink locally brewed beer whenever he traveled. In Chicago, Goose Island. In South Africa, Umqombothi, which smelled and looked daunting but tricked you with a three percent alcohol content. In Boston, Harpoon — not that other stuff.
And in the San Francisco Bay Area: Anchor Steam, of course. Tiffany, back on duty, had given it to him on the house, delivered with a wink.
He set down the bottle and closed his eyes briefly, seeing Henry Thompson’s body, the gradient colors of his blood on the rock, as white and flat as that creek bed below Echo Ridge.
In ten years of seeking rewards Shaw been successful the majority of the time. Not a landslide but respectable nonetheless.
He might have given his success rate a percentage number. He never did. It seemed flippant, disrespectful.
He could remember some of the victories — the tricky ones, the dangerous ones, the ones occasioned by desperation and despair on the part of loved ones whose lives crashed when their child or spouse went missing and that Shaw pieced back together — like the final scenes in time travel movies when disaster is miraculously reversed.
Other than those, though, most jobs were just that: assignments, assignments like a plumber or an accountant might take on. They drifted down into the recesses of the brain, some lost forever, some filed away to be recalled if needed, which was rarely.
The losses? They stayed forever.
This one would. That there’d been no reward offered to find Henry Thompson was irrelevant. Because the truth was, for Colter Shaw it was never about the money. The reward was important mostly because it was a spotlight illuminating a challenge that no one else had yet been able to meet. What mattered was finding the child, the elderly parent addled by dementia, the fugitive. What mattered was saving the life.
Sophie Mulliner was safe, but that was no solace at all. Kyle Butler was dead. Henry Thompson was dead. And at times like this the restlessness grew and became a person itself, following Shaw, close behind. Like the Whispering Man.
He sipped more of the ripe, rich beer. The cold was more of a comfort than the alcohol. Neither was much of a balm.
He walked back to the counter and asked Tiffany for the remote. He wanted to change the station on the set above the bar. She handed it to him. They had a brief conversation about TV programs, to which he couldn’t contribute much. She would have liked to continue talking to him, Shaw could tell, but an order was ready. He was relieved when she went to deliver it and he sat down at his table once more. Shaw changed the channel from a sports game no one was watching — not a lot of jocks in the Quick Byte Café — to a local news channel.
A minor earthquake had troubled Santa Cruz; a labor organizer was fighting cries for removal, claiming the rumors that he’d paid money under the table for a green card were false; a whale had been saved at Half Moon Bay; a Green Party congressman in L.A., running for reelection, had withdrawn after stories surfaced he’d been allied with ecoterrorists who’d burned down a ski resort at Tahoe a few years before. He vehemently denied his involvement. “A man’s career can be ruined based on lies. That’s what it’s come to...”
His attention waned until finally: “And in local news, a Sunnyvale blogger and gay rights activist was found murdered today in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Police reported that Henry Thompson, fifty-two, was kidnapped on the way home from a lecture at Stanford last night, taken to the park and murdered. No motive has been established. A spokesperson for the Joint Major Crimes Task Force in Santa Clara said that the crime may be related to the kidnapping of a Mountain View woman on June fifth. Sophie Mulliner, nineteen, was rescued unharmed by the Task Force two days later.”
The story ended with a scroll at the bottom of the screen of the hotline to call if anyone was on the block when Thompson was kidnapped or was hiking in Big Basin today.
Behind him, in the Quick Byte, a woman’s strident voice interrupted Shaw’s thoughts.
“Well, I didn’t message you. I don’t know you.”
Shaw and other patrons looked toward the source of the shrill words. An attractive woman of about twenty was sitting in front of her Mac and holding a mug of coffee. Her long chestnut hair was tinted purple near the tips. She was dressed like a model or an actress: studied casual. The blue jeans were close-fitting and intentionally torn in places. The white T-shirt was baggy and off the shoulder, revealing purple undergarment straps. The nails were oceanic blue, the eye shadow autumnal shades.
Standing over her was a young man about her age, on the other end of the style spectrum. The baggy cargo pants were well worn, and the loose red-and-black-checked shirt too large; this made him seem smaller than his frame, which was probably five-eight or — nine, slim. He had straight hair that was none too clean and was self-cut or clipped by a mother or sister. His dark brows nudged close over his fleshy nose. A big gray laptop, twice as thick as Shaw’s, was clutched in his hands. His face was bright red with embarrassment. Anger was in his eyes too. “You’re Sherry 38.” He shook his head. “We instant-messaged in Call to Arms IV. You said you’d be here. I’m Brad H 66.”
“I’m not Sherry anybody. And I don’t know who the hell you are.”
The man lowered his voice. “You said you wanted to hook up. You said it!” He muttered. “Then here I show up and you don’t like what you see. Right?”
“Oh, excuse me. You really think I’m the sort of loser plays Call to Arms? Fuck off, okay?”
Once more a scan of the room. The young man surrendered and walked to the order station.
The perils of the internet. Had the poor kid been set up by bullies? Shaw recalled what Maddie Poole had told him about SWAT’ing. And what Marty Avon had told him about the ease of hacking gaming servers.
Or was the kid right, that the description he’d sent the woman online didn’t match the in-person geek version, so she’d bailed on him?
The kid placed an order, paid and took the number on the wire metal stand to a table in the back, dropped into a chair and opened his computer. He plugged in a bulky headset and began pounding away on the keys. His face was still red and he was muttering to himself.