The Competition

43

After Jenny left, Bailey reported on the uni interviews with Logan’s outer circle of friends. “None of them ever heard of anyone named Shane, and the unis had zero impression they were holding anything back. We can catch Caleb at home right now. I’ve got a call in to Kenny to see if he’ll meet us there.”

I filled her in on my call with Ed. Bailey agreed that the way the serial numbers had been burned off pointed to someone like Shane. Nice to know, but a minor detail that only left us more frustrated and miserable. With no line on either Shane’s or Logan’s whereabouts and disaster drawing closer with every second, it was all we could do to keep from punching the walls.

We headed back to my office so I could pick up my coat and scarf. I locked the door behind me, though I don’t know why. It obviously didn’t do any good.

“So we’re not going to use your office for the duration?”

“No way. Not until they figure out who planted that thing.” It depressed me, so I turned my thoughts back to the case at hand. As we headed out to the elevators, I thought of another question I meant to ask Jenny. “Why do you suppose they addressed the letter to me? Why not you? Or Dale Campbell?”

“Because you’re the famous one.”

It kind of made sense. The geeky nerd who wanted the world to know he was all-powerful. And Shane, the rebel without a clue, out to thumb his nose at authority in every way possible. Yeah, that could work.

We made it to Caleb’s house in record time. His mother, a pleasant-looking brunette on the attractively plump side, greeted us with a worried look. “Has something else happened?”

“No, ma’am,” Bailey said. “We’re just gathering information. Thank you for letting us impose on you like this-”

“Oh, my goodness, of course. Anything I can do. Kenny just got here. They’re in the living room. Can I get you anything?” We declined and she led us to a cozy room, where an inviting fire was crackling in the fireplace. Seeing it made me aware of how bone weary I was. I pushed the feeling aside.

Caleb, the pocket-protector nerd, and Kenny, a tall, handsome boy with shoulder-length blonde hair, were a study in contrasts. But seeing their easy body language, I got the impression they were pals.

We cut to the chase. “Do either of you know a person named Shane Dolan?” I asked.

“No,” Caleb said. “Why?”

“Kenny?”

“I know a guy named Shane,” he said. “Not sure about the last name. Maybe if you had a picture-”

Bailey held out her cell phone. The boys studied the photo.

Caleb shook his head. His expression said we may as well have asked if he’d been hanging around with Kim Jong Un.

Kenny didn’t hesitate either. “No,” he said. “The dude I know is my age. Who’s this?”

“We think he might be a friend of Logan’s,” Bailey said. “Do you remember ever hearing him mention the name?”

“No,” Caleb said. “Never.”

Kenny shook his head. I had no sense they were hiding anything. I had one last question. “Have either of you talked to Evan lately?”

Kenny said he hadn’t, but Caleb licked his lips and began to rub his palms on his pant legs.

“Caleb?” I asked.

He looked down. “He called me yesterday. Said you guys took his laptop and kept bugging him even though he told you he didn’t know anything.”

“How did he sound?” I asked.

“Stressed. Freaked.”

“And what did you tell him?” Bailey asked.

Caleb shrugged. “I told him you guys were talking to everyone. Seems like there are cops at someone’s house every day. So I told him he’s not the only one.”

That was certainly true. “What did he say to that?” I asked.

“Not much. I thought maybe hearing about how everyone was getting the same treatment would make him realize it was no big deal. But then I saw his tweets about you guys harassing him, so…”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe not.”

We asked how they were doing-not great, but as well as could be expected-and ended the interview.

Bailey dropped me off at the Biltmore, and I decided a hot bath might relax me enough to take a full breath. The double shot of Dalwhinnie didn’t hurt either.

Graden called around nine o’clock sounding every bit as tightly wound as I was. We tried to keep it light, but the conversation kept stalling as our minds wandered back to the case, so we gave up and said good night. For the thousandth time, I thanked the gods that I’d found someone who understood the all-consuming nature of the job.

I set out my clothes so I could jump into them in the morning, and put myself to bed by ten o’clock with a murder mystery set in London. All the descriptions of fog and damp made me slide farther and farther under the covers, till I was practically holding the book above my head. Finally, I got sleepy enough to put it down and turn off the light.

When the hotel phone rang Saturday morning, I looked at the clock. Six a.m. What the hell? I’d told Bailey I’d be downstairs waiting for her at seven thirty. I snatched up the phone. “I said I’d be on time-”

“Get dressed and get downstairs!” Bailey sounded tense. “I’ll tell you when I see you.”

I turned on the news as I got ready, expecting to hear about another shooting, but there was nothing. What could it be? The question whirred through my brain on an endless loop. When I got downstairs fifteen minutes later, Bailey was already there waiting for me. I hurried to the car and got in. It was still dark outside and icy cold.

“What? Tell me,” I said, as I pulled on my seat belt. Bailey jumped on the gas, throwing me into the dash before I could get it buckled. “If you’re trying to kill me, just use your gun, it’ll be quicker.”

“Sorry,” she muttered. She didn’t speak again until we’d merged onto the 101. “I got a call from the Topanga station. Evan’s gone.”

“Gone…how?”

“He ran away. There’s no sign of forced entry or a struggle. His dad knocked on his bedroom door to wake him up and got no answer…”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I put my head in my hands. “Maybe we should have-”

“What? Slapped an ankle monitor on him?”

Bailey was probably right. We couldn’t justify a twenty-four/seven tail on him. But that didn’t stop me from thinking we should’ve seen it coming.

Bailey grabbed my shoulder. “I know what you’re doing and you can stop it right now-”

“Caleb told us he was getting weird, he was tweeting-”

“So fucking what? Kids bitch and tweet a thousand times a day.”

True, but that didn’t make it feel any better.

Fog had blanketed the Valley by the time we pulled onto Evan’s street. The flashing blue-and-red strobe from a dozen squad cars glowed eerily through the mist, and the officers guarding the house looked almost ghostly. I saw a news truck parked at the corner. The press was here. Already. News of Evan’s flight would go nationwide within the hour.

Bailey left her car in the middle of the street and badged us through the crowd. Evan’s father was in the front room, standing nose to nose with a uniformed sergeant, poking his finger at the sergeant’s chest. “If they’d given him protection instead of haranguing him constantly, this would never have happened!”

The sergeant bore the tirade stoically. “Sir, I can understand you’re upset. But we need to process this scene for evidence. Every second I stand here is another second wasted. Now, if you’ll-”

Cutter spotted us. “This is all your fault! You come here, you disrupt my house, you harass my son. I’m going to sue you and your whole useless department!”

Bailey took a deep breath and spoke slowly in her Jedi voice. “Mr. Cutter, I am very sorry that this happened. It is your absolute right to file a complaint if that’s what you choose to do. But right now, we need to gather the evidence as quickly and efficiently as possible so we can find your son. We’ll need your cooperation. I’d like you to talk to a police officer and give all the details you can about where Evan might’ve gone. Can you do that?”

Cutter was still breathing hard, the veins in his neck stretched taut as piano wire, but he stopped yelling. Bailey stood and waited for him to respond to her question. Finally, he gave the barest of nods. As many times as I’ve seen her do it, it never ceases to amaze me the way she can calm anyone, no matter how rabid. Bailey asked one of the unis to sit down with John Cutter; then we moved down the hall to Evan’s bedroom, where crime scene techs were already at work. That was about as fast as I’d ever seen a team arrive.

The sergeant joined us. “The father said he didn’t hear anything last night. Didn’t know the boy was gone until he came down for breakfast and knocked on his door.”

I hadn’t noticed there was an upstairs when I was here before. “Where’s the staircase?” I asked.

The sergeant pointed to our far right. I walked in that direction and saw a short hallway that led to a flight of stairs. It looked like an add-on. I went back to Evan’s doorway-no one but the techs were allowed in right now-and craned my neck to get a glimpse of his room. The only thing that looked out of place was the window screen, which seemed to be missing. The window was cranked open. I pointed to it and asked the sergeant, “That how he got out?”

“Seems so. Mom says he always slept with it open.”

The window was fairly large, four feet by three feet, and it gave easy access to the backyard, which was encircled by a high, whitewashed wooden fence. Which meant Evan’s escape was perfectly shielded from view. And of course, it had been dark and too early for anyone to be out and about. The unis would door-knock everyone in the vicinity, but the odds of finding any witnesses in a quiet neighborhood like this were lousy. “Is there a side gate that lets out to the street?” The sergeant nodded. “What happened to the screen? Did you find it?”

“Outside on the ground,” the sergeant said.

“Did you call Dorian?” I asked Bailey.

“First thing,” she said. “Said she’d be here to make sure they didn’t miss anything.”

“They won’t,” the sergeant said. “These guys are the best in the business.”

“You haven’t met Dorian,” I said.

“Sure I have. Who do you think trained ’em?” The sergeant headed back to the front of the house.

I scanned the bedroom again. “I can’t imagine they’ll find anything of use, but I guess we’ve got to try.” I heard the rumble of approaching news vans. “This is going to hit the airwaves in three, two, one-”

“Probably already has.”

“Maybe this time we’ll luck out and get better tips than ‘Justin Bieber did it.’”

Bailey sighed. “Yeah, maybe this time they’ll tag Taylor Swift.”