The Call of the Mild

Chapter Sixteen

There was a lot Gus didn’t like about being a detective. The danger, for one. Although being threatened with imminent doom might sound exciting, after the first couple of times it began to get really old. And then there were the hours. Gus never had a problem with working hard, but he did like to know exactly when he could expect to knock off for the day, and that was rarely the case in an investigation.

For all the inconveniences, though, there were some things about the job that he loved enough to put up with anything. Best of all was the moment when a baffling mystery revealed itself into a crystalline, perfect solution.

This, unfortunately, was not one of those times.

Both Shawn and Gus were fairly certain that they had solved at least one part of the crime. The necklace was being used to smuggle a computer chip full of information out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And it was a safe bet that whatever that information was it had some sort of national security implications, since it seemed improbable that Ellen Svaco would have been killed simply so someone could find out what the weather was like on Mars.

Beyond that, however, they were stumped.

Clearly, Ellen Svaco had been some kind of courier. She was supposed to have picked up the chip and then delivered it somewhere else. But there was no way to tell whom she was working for, or why they might have chosen an elementary school teacher for the job. Had she even known what she would be transporting? The fact that she had hired Psych to retrieve it from the lost and found suggested she’d known that someone else was after it, but nothing more than that.

And then there was the mime. He had been desperate to get the necklace-desperate enough to risk a daring daylight robbery. But who was he? They briefly considered the idea that he was the JPL employee who had smuggled the chip out of the lab in the first place and then had developed second thoughts. But while that seemed to simplify things at first, it quickly led to far greater complications. Because if he had put the chip in the locket, then he was probably also the one who’d left it at the lost and found. Which meant he would have known where it was-and the mime hadn’t. If he had, there would have been no need to disguise himself and wait for Shawn and Gus to retrieve the necklace before taking it away from them. He could simply have asked for it at the booth.

And then there was the “Rushmore” he’d insisted he was protecting. A Google search of the word turned up multiple references to the mountain, the movie, and a Manhattan condo tower, but none of them seemed to have anything to do with purloined jewelry, public gardens, or the art of mime.

No matter how many times they turned their few facts over, they kept coming back to Ellen Svaco at the center of the mystery. Which was entirely unacceptable, because Ellen Svaco was the one part of the puzzle they weren’t allowed to investigate.

If this had been a normal case, Shawn and Gus would have dived into Ellen Svaco’s private life. They would have searched her house and car. They would have gone to her funeral to see who else showed up to mourn-and which of the mourners didn’t seem particularly sorry to see her go. They might even have attempted to go undercover as substitute teachers at her school.

But each of those routes led almost inevitably to a single roadblock: Henry Spencer. Shawn had learned the fundamentals of detective work at his father’s knee-or sometimes across his father’s knee, if Shawn had been the subject of Henry’s investigation-and the instincts that would be driving Shawn would also be driving his father. Shawn had promised Henry he’d stay out of Ellen’s murder, and unless he could figure out a retroactive weasel, he was stuck with the pledge.

The remaining pathways were much less appealing. The only obvious one was to knock on JPL’s front door and ask if they happened to be missing a microchip or two, and if they might happen to know what was on it. But it seemed unlikely that the guard at the front gate would be willing or able to share that information with a couple of guys who happened to walk up to him. In a normal situation they’d try to come up with a way to get into the lab posing as scientists or journalists or any other kind of “ists,” but JPL had made national news a few years back for forcing its longtime employees to sign waivers allowing government inspectors to dig into every aspect of their lives from birth onwards. It seemed unlikely that a pair of private detectives could slip into the facility by claiming they’d left their ID badges at home.

That left the mime as the sole loose end they might be able to pick up. But this presented a few problems as well. Like the fact that he was a mime. His face had been completely covered by makeup, his hair by a beret, and his hands by white gloves. Even if they had any idea where to start looking, they’d never be able to identify him unless he hadn’t bothered to de-mime himself in the intervening hours.

Shawn and Gus spent the evening trying to find a way into the case, stopping once only long enough to send out for pizza and then again to tear the office apart collecting change when the deliveryman arrived and they realized they didn’t have enough cash to cover the check.

By midnight they were both halfway to sleep and no closer to a solution. An hour later Gus was looking for his car keys and declaring he was going home as soon as they’d made a little more progress. Fifteen minutes after that he was snoring on the office couch.

Not that he was slacking, Gus told himself as his eyes fluttered closed. The thorniest problems are never solved in the conscious mind; the solutions have to bubble up from the subconscious. And what better way to access his subconscious than to let it have free rein for a couple of minutes? If he napped for just a couple of minutes he would certainly wake up with the answer on the tip of this tongue.

He’d used that argument with himself in the past, and it had never worked. He’d wake up a few hours later barely able to remember which member of En Vogue he was about to marry in his dream, let alone a solution to any problem that was plaguing him when he drifted off.

But this time turned out to be different. Because this time when he woke up, the solution was right there. Only it wasn’t on the tip of his tongue. It was on Shawn’s.

“I’ve found the mime,” he said.