William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

Shawn buckled himself into the seat farthest away from the one Professor Kitteredge had taken, and a smile crossed his face that suggested all his troubles had just eased away. Gus took the recliner next to him and fastened his own belt, but even the softness of the leather didn’t make him feel much better.

“Where are we going?” Gus said to Shawn.

“Wherever he wants.” Shawn jerked a thumb at Malko, who had latched the cabin door and then headed into the cockpit, slamming that door behind him. After a moment they heard the whir of jet engines starting up, and the jet began to roll across the cave floor.

Gus winced as the plane passed through the cave’s mouth, but the wings cleared the walls with at least an inch to spare on either side. He tried to look back to see how the entrance was camouflaged, but he couldn’t tell in the dark.

The plane moved ahead a couple of feet, then stopped. Malko’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to take off. Please make sure your seat belts are securely fastened.”

Gus peered through the window to see if the cave led to an airfield, but it was too dark.

“If my knowledge of smugglers’ routes is any guide, I’m going to assume that the tunnel led us through the hill and the cave mouth empties onto a valley on the other side,” Kitteredge said. “No doubt Flaxman’s father owned this valley, too, probably under a different name to keep investigators from looking at it too closely. Then it’s a simple matter to disguise the runway as a country road. I suppose Flaxman keeps it hidden this way out of a sort of sentimental tribute to his father’s spirit.”

“No doubt,” Shawn said.

This was a side of Kitteredge Gus had never seen before. It was so obvious that everything Shawn had said about Low was the truth-he must be the smuggler and probably even the forger the “spirits” had accused him of being. But the professor, who knew everything about every subject, seemed completely blind to this obvious truth about his friend.

Well, it was obvious to Shawn, anyway, and now that it had been pointed out to him, to Gus as well. Not that Gus knew how Shawn had figured it out. They hadn’t had a chance for a private discussion since it had come up.

Still, it didn’t seem to be the time to school the professor on his old friend’s true nature, especially since that friend’s servant was at the controls of the jet they were using to escape the police. And since that jet was accelerating to liftoff down some darkened runway.

“Well, this is quite an adventure,” Kitteredge said. “Once again, I apologize to the two of you for dragging you into my mess. But I think when all is said and done, you’ll find it was all worth the trouble.”

“Uh, no trouble at all, Professor,” Gus said.

“Now you stop that right now,” Kitteredge said.

“What’s that?” Gus said, wondering what he had done wrong this time.

“You must stop calling me Professor,” he said. “We’ve been through so much together that I’ll be hurt if you don’t call me by my first name.”

Gus felt a surge of pride flow through him. Even if he had studied for that midterm, even if he had been able to name every one of those slides, he wouldn’t have been offered this privilege.

“I’ll be happy to… Langston,” he said. “And you call me Gus.”

“He has been,” Shawn said. “And speaking of hasbeens, maybe we should talk about what we’re going to do now, since it’s pretty clear that Langston here can’t go back to teaching, and we’re going to look pretty silly trying to run a detective agency from inside a prison.”

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Kitteredge said. “I imagine that with your unique abilities you could be tremendously useful to the other inmates. After an initial testing period, they would be coming to you with-”

Even Kitteredge, who frequently became so enraptured by his own thought process he had no idea what effect it was having on others, was stopped by the glare on Shawn’s face. “Although I can see why you’d prefer not to be in a position to start such an enterprise,” he said.

“Thank you,” Shawn said. “So let’s figure out how we’re going to avoid that.”

“It seems perfectly obvious to me,” Kitteredge said. “We know the Cabal was behind the murder of Clay Filkins, so all we have to do is expose them and let the truth come out. It will be a grand adventure.”

“That would be great,” Shawn said. “Except that the real truth about the murder is back in Santa Barbara. And since we’re climbing almost straight up, I think our flight is intended to go a little farther than thirty-five miles.”

“If the proof is in the picture, why do we have to go anywhere?” Gus said. “Why can’t we just figure it all out right here on the plane and then turn it over to the police?”

Kitteredge looked surprised, as if he’d expected Shawn and Gus to understand what he’d been thinking all along. “The picture, even now that we know about the crucial verse, isn’t enough to convince a doubting world,” he said. “We need to retrieve the sword.”

“And just where would all that be?” Shawn asked warily.

“That we still need to figure out,” Kitteredge said. “It’s in that verse, but we may have to compare it with some of Morris’ and Rossetti’s other works, along with those of some of their contemporaries, to understand the meaning. Those works are scattered far and wide.”

“How far?” Shawn said.

“And how wide?” Gus said.

“I believe in terms of those pieces freely available to the public at large, we’ll find several of them at the Tate Gallery,” Kitteredge said as he checked through a mental catalogue. “They’ve got both the Waterhouse Ophelia and Burne-Jones’ The Golden Stairs, which I believe together announce the Cabal’s manifesto. There are the Arthurian frescoes at the Oxford Union. Lizzie Siddal’s grave, of course, is in Highgate Cemetery. Those are the clues that seem the most compelling, although I’m sure now that we have the key, each one will lead to a discovery previously unimagined.”

As Gus listened to the list of locations, something was nagging at the back of his mind. He knew he hadn’t been to any of those places, but even aside from that, he was sure he was missing a connection. Then it hit him.

“Professor,” he started, then corrected himself. “Langston. The Tate Gallery, the Oxford Union, Highgate Cemetery-aren’t they all in England?”

“Of course they are,” Kitteredge said. “And we will be, too, in about ten hours.”

Even after all his years on the force, there was almost nothing Carlton Lassiter didn’t like about the institutions of law enforcement. He loved the ritual of the morning briefing, the ceremonial bonding of the post-shift cop bar, the rigid adherence to standards of excellence. Unlike most of his peers, he even welcomed strictures like the ones placed on police by the Miranda rules. Working within a rigid set of restrictions only forced you to be smarter, better, and stronger.

The one thing that Lassiter didn’t like about the profession was the replacement of thought with procedure. And this was a prime example, he said to himself as he pulled up a few car lengths behind the squad car sitting across from Henry Spencer’s house. When you were searching for a suspect, it was standard practice to post lookouts at the homes of his family and friends, and clearly that’s what was going on here. The department needed to find Shawn Spencer, and they hoped he might show up to see his father.

But one moment of thought would have made a chimp realize there was no reason to waste a team of officers and a departmental vehicle on Henry Spencer’s street. Or, more precisely, on former detective Henry Spencer’s street. Although he’d been retired for years, Henry was and always would be a pure cop. If a wanted fugitive showed up on his doorstep, he’d find a way to detain him and then call for backup.