“So she sent us,” Gus said.
“Only they followed her to our office, and then they followed us the rest of the way,” Shawn said.
“Who is ‘they’?” Gus said. “Was the mime in league with Ellen Svaco or against her? And who or what is this Rushmore he claimed he was protecting?”
“Those are three of the questions we’re going to ask her.” Shawn drummed on the dashboard like Desi Arnaz with a bongo. The traffic in front of them moved forward, and Gus saw they’d reached Ellen’s street. He made a hard right turn onto a treelined residential boulevard and pressed the accelerator to the floor. Within seconds they’d reached Ellen Svaco’s address, a small bungalow a block from the ocean. The were three shallow steps leading up to a small porch in front of the door. And on the porch, facing the door, was a man.
If you had only one word to describe the man, it would be “average.” Average height. Average weight. Average suit. The only remarkable thing about him was his hair, which looked like it had been designed for the Romulan incarnation of Mr. Bean.
His hair and the gun he held in his right hand.
Chapter Nine
S
hawn jumped out of the car and ran up to the house, with Gus following. The average-looking man tensed at the sound of the car door, but when he spun around to see who was coming, he dropped his gun to his side.
“Lassie!” Shawn called to Carlton Lassiter, head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department. “What are you doing here?”
Lassiter scowled. “You called me repeatedly,” he said. “You begged me to come here.”
“And you refused. You thought it was a prank.”
“I did,” Lassiter said. “But if I have to choose between the chance you’ll make a fool of me and the possibility of helping a citizen in danger, I’ll risk my dignity every time.”
It was a straight line like none Lassiter had ever given Shawn. But Shawn was so pleased at the help that he let it pass.
“What changed your mind?” Gus asked.
“It wasn’t the fifteen subscriptions to
Guns and Ammo
you two took out in my name,” Lassiter said. He pointed down at the door latch. “It was that.”
Shawn and Gus followed his gaze.
“The door is open,” Shawn said.
The door was indeed unlocked and slightly ajar.
“Maybe she’s expecting us,” Gus said.
“This is a beach community and a college town, full of drifters and druggies,” Lassiter said. “No one leaves their door unlocked in a place like this.”
“She’s an elementary school teacher,” Gus said. “Maybe she doesn’t have anything worth stealing.”
“At least nothing that wasn’t already stolen from us,” Shawn said.
Lassiter gave him a sharp look. “You will be making a full report.”
“Right after we see what we’re going to be reporting,” Shawn said.
Lassiter nodded curtly, then rapped on the door with the barrel of his gun. “Ms. Svaco?” he said. “Police.”
There was no answer from inside. He rapped again. Still no answer.
“Ms. Svaco?”
The only sound was the crashing of the waves against the shore a block away.
“Don’t just stand there, Lassie,” Shawn said. “We’ve got to do something.”
Lassiter nodded, then holstered his gun and pulled out a cell phone.
“I meant do something useful,” Shawn said.
“I am doing something useful,” Lassiter said. “I’m calling Judge Napoli to request a warrant to enter the premises.”
“That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “We’ll meet you inside when you’ve got the paperwork figured out.”
Shawn reached for the door, but Lassiter positioned himself in front of it. “I can’t let you do that, Spencer,” he said.
“We called you for help.”
“And I came,” Lassiter said. “But if you request official police help, it comes with official police rules. Rule number one is you can’t search private property without a warrant.”
“Unless we’ve got a really good reason,” Shawn said.
“Not unless,” Lassiter said. “Not despite. Not because. Not even if.”
“There is such a thing as an exigent circumstance,” Shawn said.
“Technically true,” Lassiter said. “If I had reason to believe there was a crime in progress or a person in imminent danger, I would be able to go through this door. But I’ve already walked around the property, and the blinds are down on all the windows, so I couldn’t see inside.”
“Isn’t that suspicious?” Shawn said. “Who keeps their blinds closed on such a nice day?”
“People have a right to protect their privacy,” Lassiter said. “I have no reasonable expectation there is anything seriously wrong.”
“Not even a mime pulling a gun to steal the necklace Ellen Svaco hired us to retrieve?” Shawn said.
“I can’t guarantee what a judge would call reasonable,” Lassiter said, “but I’m pretty sure that’s not even close.”
Shawn and Gus exchanged a frustrated look. Then Gus straightened up. “Say, Shawn,” he said, “did you hear that?”
“Why, yes,” Shawn said. “Yes, I did.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Lassiter said.
“Listen harder,” Gus said. “It sounded like a cry.”
“A cry for help,” Shawn said.
“A cry for help from inside that house,” Gus said.
Lassiter squinted his eyes and listened so hard they could see his ears moving. After a long moment he opened his eyes again. “Nope,” he said. “Nothing.”
“Listen harder,” Shawn said.
Lassiter scowled, but he put on his listening face again. After a moment, a tiny voice floated on the wind. “Help me! Help me!”
“That time you had to hear it,” Shawn said.
Lassiter’s eyes flashed open. “I heard Guster doing the voice of the guy at the end of
The Fly,
” he said. “And I’m sorry, but the constitution doesn’t allow me to break into a private home even if I believe a half-man, half-insect is about to be eaten by a spider.”
“It doesn’t?” Shawn said. “You’d think the Founding Fathers would have planned for that kind of thing.”
“Don’t you ever watch TV, Lassie?” Gus asked.
“What I do in my private time is none of your concern.” Lassiter scowled again and raised his cell phone to his face. “If I want to find Judge Napoli while he still remembers his own name, I’ve got to start calling bars now.”
“What half-fly here is saying is that there’s a clever little police trick we’ve picked up from watching some of your better shows,” Shawn said. “We all agree we hear a scream coming from inside the house, and then we’ve got our exigent circumstance.”
“Unless there’s no one inside,” Lassiter said. “And then we’re stuck explaining under penalty of perjury how we heard an empty house screaming for help.”
“What, you’ve never seen
The Amityville Horror
?” Shawn said.
Lassiter turned to his phone in disgust.
“I can’t think why we don’t call the police for help more often,” Gus said.
“Lassie’s just doing his job,” Shawn said. “Say, I think your shoe’s untied.”
“It is?” Gus said.
“I believe so,” Shawn said. “You might want to check it while I take a step forward to press our case with Detective Lassiter.”
Gus crouched down on one knee. Shawn took a step forward and stumbled over him. He fell forward, right into Lassiter, pushing him backwards. Lassiter tried to right himself, but tripped over the door’s threshold and tumbled back. The door flew open under his weight, and he crashed to the floor inside the bungalow with Shawn on top of him.
Lassiter shoved Shawn off him and got to his feet. “All right, get out of here,” he commanded. “Right now.”
“I don’t know, Lassie,” Shawn said. “It looks pretty exigent to me.”
Lassiter knew he wasn’t supposed to be in here, and now that he was, it was incumbent upon him to get out as quickly as possible. But the cop in him couldn’t resist one look around. Ellen Svaco didn’t seem to have too many possessions—the furniture was all assemble-it-yourself quality, the wall decorations were unframed posters of famous paintings, her TV was a small, fat desktop tube model, and the major design element was lots and lots of old books.
It wasn’t the meagerness of the house’s contents that grabbed their attention. It was the fact that every bit of it was scattered across the bungalow’s floor. Furniture was smashed into pieces, the posters were torn in shreds, the TV was a mess of wires and plastic.
Gus joined Shawn and Lassiter in the ransacked bungalow.
“Ms. Svaco?” Lassiter called out, but there was no answer.
“Maybe she wasn’t here when they broke in,” Gus said.
“She was here.” Shawn pointed towards a door leading to the bathroom. Gus saw a small pink hand lying palm up on the ground.
Lassiter did a broken-field run across the demolished room until he’d reached the hand. He signaled for Shawn and Gus to stay back, but they were right behind him. By the time they were halfway there, they could tell there was no point in going any farther. Ellen Svaco lay sprawled lifelessly across the white tile, an angry red line across her throat where someone had garroted her.
Even knowing it was useless, Lassiter took her wrist and felt for a pulse. Her icy skin told him everything he needed to know.
“She’s dead,” he said.
Chapter Ten
G
us stared down at the body and tried to put together the steps that had led them here. Ellen Svaco had come to them looking for a necklace she’d lost in the park. After that, nothing made sense. There was an armed mime, a walk of shame in tissue paper diapers, and now a dead client. Not to mention a near case of heatstroke and wilderness-induced panic attack and hallucination.
For one happy moment Gus let himself speculate that he was still hallucinating. He wasn’t in Isla Vista at all, but still back in La Canada, wandering on that sun-blasted nature trail; he had dreamed everything that happened afterwards. It made a kind of sense, as most of his non-wilderness-related night-mares involved a spell of public nudity, and the toilet-cover diapers Shawn had made for them were humiliating enough to show up in one of his worst dreams.
But no one else in the house was acting like it was a dream. Shawn was carefully studying the room, while Lassiter, kneeling by the body, was barking orders into his cell phone. When he was sure no one was looking at him, Gus glanced down casually and made sure that his clothes were firmly in place. They were. This was reality.
Lassiter snapped his cell phone shut and stood up, seeming to notice for the first time that Shawn and Gus were still in the room.
“You two, out,” he snapped.
“Make that three.”
Gus, Shawn, and Lassiter all wheeled around to the front door. The man standing there was over six feet tall with the bleached blond hair and ropy muscles that come from a lifetime of playing beach volleyball. His uniform seemed to have been designed to show off his physique—short khaki pants that exposed most of his thighs and a baby blue polo shirt that was tight across the pecs and featured the stencil of a badge and official logo Gus couldn’t make out from across the room. A holstered gun hung off his thigh.
“Stand down, Officer,” Lassiter said. He reached into his breast pocket for his ID. But before he could get his hand near his lapel, the blond man had his gun out and leveled at the detective.
“Don’t move!”
“It’s going to be hard to get out if I don’t move,” Shawn said.
The blond man shifted his gun sights to Shawn, then back to Lassiter.
“You know, sometimes I can go for an entire week without having a gun pointed at me,” Shawn said. “Now it’s two in one day. Go figure.”
“Officer!” Lassiter’s bark brought the blond man’s attention—and his gun—back in his direction. “I am Detective Carlton Lassiter of the Santa Barbara Police Department. I am reaching very slowly into my pocket to pull out my ID.”
“You just make sure it’s nice and slow, ‘Detective,’” the man said.
“Now that’s impressive,” Shawn said.
“What’s that?” Gus said.
The man kept his attention focused on Lassiter.
“Most people would feel the need to use air quotes to put that much condescension around the word ‘detective,’ ” Shawn said. “Blond guy did it with his voice alone.”
Very slowly, Lassiter reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a wallet, then let it fall open to reveal his badge and ID. “I’ve identified myself,” Lassiter said. “Now you.”
“Officer Chris Rasmussen, Isla Vista Foot Patrol,” the blonde said. “All my ID is right here on my chest.” He patted the insignia on his polo shirt. “We small-town law enforcement personnel don’t get a pretty tin ‘badge’ like they give the big-city police folk.”
Now it was Gus’ turn to be impressed. “You’re right,” he said to Shawn. “I know both of his hands were occupied, but I could swear I saw air quotes.”
“Now that I know who you are, maybe you could tell me what you’re doing in this house?” Rasmussen said. He lowered the gun to his side, but he didn’t holster it.
“These two men are private detectives who have occasionally helped out the Santa Barbara Police Department,” Lassiter said.
“Occasionally?” Shawn said.
“That’s fair,” Gus said. “We don’t solve
all
their cases.”
“Just the hard ones,” Shawn said.
“Silence!” Lassiter snapped, then turned back to Rasmussen.
“They called me suggesting that the occupant of this house, one Ellen Svaco, might be in jeopardy. When we got here, the door was open—”
“And it sounded like David Hedison was about to be eaten by a spider,” Shawn said.
Lassiter glared at Shawn, then stepped aside, giving Officer Rasmussen a view into the bathroom. “Unfortunately we were too late. I’ve called it in, and the forensics team will be here in a few minutes.”