The Call of the Mild

Chapter Nine

Shawn 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.