William Rabkin - Mind-Altering Murder

Intellectually he knew that was all true. But he didn’t care. Gus wasn’t here, which meant that Gus was not betraying him. At least not in the manner that he’d suspected. There would probably be plenty of things to feel terrible about, but they would come later. For the moment he could relax.

Shawn scrawled his name across the bottom of the credit card slip the waitress must have placed on the table while he was staring across the terminal and stood up. He was going to make that flight home after all.

He was halfway out of the restaurant when he noticed one of the gate agents rushing down gate one’s Jetway. He didn’t want to wait to find out what was going on. His departure gate was at least half a mile away and it was going to start boarding soon. But something made him stay, frozen, staring at the doors.

For a long moment, the doorway was empty. And then Shawn saw a flash of chrome and he relaxed again. There was a wheelchair coming up the ramp, carrying a woman who looked like she was born when her father was still fighting in the trenches of the Western Front. That was why the gate agent had rushed in-after all the walking passengers had gotten off the plane, he’d brought down a wheelchair for her.

Fighting the urge to whistle a merry tune, Shawn headed down the terminal toward his own homeward gate. If it hadn’t been for the bakery case at the Emporio Rulli Gran Caffe, he might have made it back to Santa Barbara in the same good mood.

But as he passed the case his feet came to an involuntary stop. It wasn’t that he was hungry. The first lunch had left him full, and the second had had to squeeze into whatever room remained in the odd corners of his stomach. But when he approached the cafe, it was as if he’d been hit by a tractor beam.

As far as he could tell, the beam was emanating from a slice of cake the label called “Honore” and described as allbutter puff pastry with Italian pastry cream filling, layered with sponge cake brushed with rum, decorated with chocolate whipped cream and pastry cream and pastry cream- filled cream puffs.

Shawn would be ill if he ate another bite, and while something as spectacular as the Honore might have been worth a spot of nausea, he didn’t want to spend his flight home in one of those tiny airplane lavatories.

Mustering all the strength in his body, Shawn stopped his foot midstride as it was about to take another step toward the bakery case. Then he commanded it to turn ninety degrees back toward the way he had come. Pressing his eyelids shut, he brought his other foot around and when he opened his eyes again the cafe was gone from his sight.

He found himself facing the ancient woman from the Burbank flight, whose wheelchair was just coming through the doors.

And now he wished he had stopped for a piece of cake. Now he wished he’d eaten the entire bakery. Because not only did he see the old woman, he saw the person who had volunteered to push her chair up the ramp.

It was Gus.

The high school had been a dead end. She’d known it would be, even as she made the appointment to talk to the principal. Mandy Jansen had graduated almost ten years earlier. Whatever had led to the moment of her hanging in her mother’s basement almost certainly had nothing to do with her years on the cheer squad.

The only reason Juliet O’Hara could find for taking the investigation all the way back to high school was the fact that she was found wearing that uniform. But as a clue that seemed like less than a long shot.

Even as she’d sat waiting outside the principal’s office, she knew she was wasting her time. And everyone she’d met over the next two hours seemed to prove her right. The principal had only been in the school for two years, and there had been three others since Mandy’s day. He was able to pull up her records on the district’s computer, but there was nothing there but the transcript of Mandy’s good, not great, grades. Mandy’s guidance counselor couldn’t place the name; she’d been one of a thousand students over the last decade. Even the coach of the cheerleading squad only remembered Mandy as a “nice girl, legs like springs.”

But O’Hara had needed to visit the high school, because she didn’t have anywhere else to turn. All the evidence seemed to suggest-to insist-that Mandy had taken her own life. There had been no signs of an intruder in the basement apartment, no signs that anyone besides Mandy had been down there in weeks.

What evidence they did turn up kept suggesting the same thing: that Mandy was a deeply troubled woman, who was battling depression for reasons no one seemed to understand. She’d apparently left a lucrative career in sales to move back in with her mother, who was undergoing treatment for some kind of rare cancer. Since then she had barely left the house except to take her mother to the doctor or to run to the supermarket or the pharmacy, and while she told her mother, who was too weak to make it down the stairs, that she was taking care of the garden, she’d clearly been letting it go for a long time. Mrs. Jansen thought Mandy had had a girlfriend over a few times, because she’d heard voices through the floor, but she had no idea who it might have been, and O’Hara was never able to find a trace of her.

As soon as they’d walked into the crime scene Lassiter had made the judgment that Mandy’s death was suicide, and O’Hara hadn’t found anything to suggest he was wrong.

But she couldn’t accept that. Wouldn’t accept it. When Lassiter showed her a draft of his report, she refused to sign off on it, and insisted they keep the investigation open just for a little while longer.

But that little while had already stretched past its breaking point and unless O’Hara could come up with something fast, she’d have to put her name on the report that would close the case.

If she could just articulate what she felt was wrong about the case Lassiter would have come over to her side. He would have grumbled, because that was what Lassiter did. But he trusted her instincts and he would have followed her lead.

But she had nothing. No suspects, no motives, no evidence. Just a conviction that Mandy Jansen hadn’t killed herself. A conviction for which she couldn’t find a single fact.

She was so busy trying to figure out her next move as she crossed the visitors’ parking lot that at first she didn’t hear the man following her. There were so many kids running to their next class that one set of footsteps didn’t make much of an impact on her consciousness. But as she got closer to her car, she could hear the steady slap of leather on asphalt and could tell the footsteps belonged to someone who was hoping to catch her before she reached the sedan.

This could be it, she thought. Someone who had heard her questions but didn’t want to speak up in front of other people. Someone who knew something about Mandy and needed to talk about it, even at great personal risk.

O’Hara slowed down just a little, then turned quickly to see the person who was going to break her case wide-open.

It was her partner.

“Gee, Muffy, didn’t mean to startle you,” Lassiter said. “I just wanted to know who was taking you to the prom.”

“How did you know I was here, Carlton?” she said.

“You had an appointment,” Lassiter said. “It was on your scheduler.”

“You broke into my computer?” she said, anger rising.

“Let me rephrase that,” Lassiter said. “You had an appointment. It was on your scheduler, right under the reminder about the meeting with the Coalition to Help the Homeless.”

O’Hara felt her anger melting rapidly into embarrassment. She’d completely forgotten about that. “How bad was it?”

“How bad was it?” Lassiter said. “Let’s see-how many times in an hour do you imagine one noble philanthropist could mention that his wife sits on the city council?”