William Rabkin - The Call of the Mild

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.

G us stared down at the body and tried to put together the steps that had led them here. Ellen Svaco had come to them looking for a necklace she’d lost in the park. After that, nothing made sense. There was an armed mime, a walk of shame in tissue paper diapers, and now a dead client. Not to mention a near case of heatstroke and wilderness-induced panic attack and hallucination.

For one happy moment Gus let himself speculate that he was still hallucinating. He wasn’t in Isla Vista at all, but still back in La Canada, wandering on that sun-blasted nature trail; he had dreamed everything that happened afterwards. It made a kind of sense, as most of his non-wilderness-related night-mares involved a spell of public nudity, and the toilet-cover diapers Shawn had made for them were humiliating enough to show up in one of his worst dreams.

But no one else in the house was acting like it was a dream. Shawn was carefully studying the room, while Lassiter, kneeling by the body, was barking orders into his cell phone. When he was sure no one was looking at him, Gus glanced down casually and made sure that his clothes were firmly in place. They were. This was reality.

Lassiter snapped his cell phone shut and stood up, seeming to notice for the first time that Shawn and Gus were still in the room.

“You two, out,” he snapped.

“Make that three.”

Gus, Shawn, and Lassiter all wheeled around to the front door. The man standing there was over six feet tall with the bleached blond hair and ropy muscles that come from a lifetime of playing beach volleyball. His uniform seemed to have been designed to show off his physique-short khaki pants that exposed most of his thighs and a baby blue polo shirt that was tight across the pecs and featured the stencil of a badge and official logo Gus couldn’t make out from across the room. A holstered gun hung off his thigh.

“Stand down, Officer,” Lassiter said. He reached into his breast pocket for his ID. But before he could get his hand near his lapel, the blond man had his gun out and leveled at the detective.

“Don’t move!”

“It’s going to be hard to get out if I don’t move,” Shawn said.

The blond man shifted his gun sights to Shawn, then back to Lassiter.

“You know, sometimes I can go for an entire week without having a gun pointed at me,” Shawn said. “Now it’s two in one day. Go figure.”

“Officer!” Lassiter’s bark brought the blond man’s attention-and his gun-back in his direction. “I am Detective Carlton Lassiter of the Santa Barbara Police Department. I am reaching very slowly into my pocket to pull out my ID.”

“You just make sure it’s nice and slow, ‘Detective,’” the man said.

“Now that’s impressive,” Shawn said.

“What’s that?” Gus said.

The man kept his attention focused on Lassiter.

“Most people would feel the need to use air quotes to put that much condescension around the word ‘detective,’ ” Shawn said. “Blond guy did it with his voice alone.”

Very slowly, Lassiter reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a wallet, then let it fall open to reveal his badge and ID. “I’ve identified myself,” Lassiter said. “Now you.”

“Officer Chris Rasmussen, Isla Vista Foot Patrol,” the blonde said. “All my ID is right here on my chest.” He patted the insignia on his polo shirt. “We small-town law enforcement personnel don’t get a pretty tin ‘badge’ like they give the big-city police folk.”

Now it was Gus’ turn to be impressed. “You’re right,” he said to Shawn. “I know both of his hands were occupied, but I could swear I saw air quotes.”

“Now that I know who you are, maybe you could tell me what you’re doing in this house?” Rasmussen said. He lowered the gun to his side, but he didn’t holster it.

“These two men are private detectives who have occasionally helped out the Santa Barbara Police Department,” Lassiter said.

“Occasionally?” Shawn said.

“That’s fair,” Gus said. “We don’t solve all their cases.”

“Just the hard ones,” Shawn said.

“Silence!” Lassiter snapped, then turned back to Rasmussen.

“They called me suggesting that the occupant of this house, one Ellen Svaco, might be in jeopardy. When we got here, the door was open-”

“And it sounded like David Hedison was about to be eaten by a spider,” Shawn said.

Lassiter glared at Shawn, then stepped aside, giving Officer Rasmussen a view into the bathroom. “Unfortunately we were too late. I’ve called it in, and the forensics team will be here in a few minutes.”

Rasmussen’s gaze flickered as he saw the body, but it hardened again as he turned back to Lassiter. “So you got a call and you just hoofed it on down here without a care in the world.”

“My ‘care’ was for the victim,” Lassiter said.

“That was pretty good, too,” Gus said to Shawn.

“Worth a one-handed air quote at best,” Shawn said. “I’ve heard Lassie much more condescending than that.”

“Was there some other ‘care’ I should have been concerned with?” Lassiter said.

“Much better,” Shawn said to Gus.

“Something we small-town law folk call jurisdiction,” Rasmussen said. “If you have reason to suspect a crime has taken place on my streets, you call me first.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Lassiter said.

“Try me.”

“Listen, McCloud,” Lassiter said. “This isn’t Dogpatch and it isn’t Hazzard, although if it were, you’d certainly have the shorts for it. This is still Santa Barbara County-”

“That’s right,” Rasmussen said. “Santa Barbara County, not city. You’ve got no jurisdiction here.”

“There’s a dead woman two feet behind me,” Lassiter said. “I hardly think the question of which law enforcement agency catches her killer is of primary importance.”

“Funny, that’s not what your people said when my hot pursuit crossed your precious city limits,” Rasmussen said. “That time, jurisdiction was important enough to throw me in jail overnight.”

Lassiter stared at him in astonished recognition. “You were the idiot who went screaming down State Street at ninety miles an hour?”

“It’s called hot pursuit for a reason,” Rasmussen said.

“You weren’t even in a police car,” Lassiter said. “Just some crummy old Mustang.”

“We’re the Isla Vista Foot Patrol,” Rasmussen said. “It would look bad if we had official vehicles, so when need arises we volunteer our private cars.”

“As I recall, the ‘need’ in this case was some punk spray-painting a street sign,” Lassiter said. “And that was your excuse for jeopardizing countless innocent lives.”