Jonathan Kellerman - Flesh And Blood

He put the mustard jar down, finished his pickle, snagged another.

“You liked Mrs. Yeager,” I said. “That’s why you didn’t answer my question about material you kept out of your articles. You’d hate to do anything that compounded her grief.”

“The point is, what good is it gonna do? If no one’s found Shawna yet, she’s probably never going to be found. You’re doing some profile thing to collect data, whatever reason, but you probably don’t care either. So what’s the point? Why add to Mrs. Yeager’s misery?”

“It might help solve another case,” I said. “Maybe Shawna’s too.”

He chewed noisily, lowered his head.

“It might, Mr. Green.”

No answer.

“What did you find out about Shawna?” I said. “It won’t be released publicly unless lives are at stake.”

He looked up. “Lives at stake. Sounds ominous.” His eyes were bright blue, charged with curiosity. “Hey, here comes the grub.”

The waitress brought our sandwiches. My burger was good, and I ate half before putting it down. Adam Green’s order was a massive thing dripping with cold cuts and coleslaw, and he chomped furiously.

“I still don’t see why I should tell you anything,” he finally said.

“It’s the right thing to do.”

“So you say.”

“Yes, I do.”

He wiped his lips, held the sandwich like a shield. “Look, I need something out of this. If anything gets resolved – what happened to Shawna, or the other case you’re working on – I need to know before any of the media. ’Cause maybe I should write a book. Or at least an article for a magazine.” He wiped his mouth. “The truth is, it stayed with me – Shawna. She was so gorgeous, smart, had everything going for her – here she was, just a few years younger than me, and then it was all over for her. I’ve got a sister her age.”

“At the U?”

“No, Brown.” He placed what was left of his sandwich on his plate, reverentially, like an offering. “We’re talking great story elements here. If it’s not a book, it could be a screenplay. You learn something, I’ve got to know. Deal?”

“If the case resolves, you’ll be the first writer to know.”

“That sounds kind of ambiguous.”

“It’s not,” I said, without taking my eyes off him. He tried for impassive, fell way short. Just a kid. I felt exploitative, told myself he was over twenty-one, had come here voluntarily, was trying his own wheel-and-deal.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “It’s no big thing anyway. The basic point is that Shawna might not have been such an innocent farm girl.”

He took another giant gulp of sandwich, washed it down with root beer. I waited.

“Shawna – and this isn’t fact, it’s just my assumption, that’s why I never published it, along with not wanting to hurt Mrs. Yeager. Also, I did tell Riley and the unicops and they ignored me. The fact that you’re here tells me they never even bothered to put it in their file. Because obviously if they did, you’d have read it.”

“What did you learn, Adam?”

“Okay,” he said. “Shawna might’ve posed nude. Done a photo shoot for Duke magazine – or what she thought was a shoot for Duke magazine, ’cause I think it might’ve been a scam.”

“When did she do this?”

“Might’ve,” he emphasized. “And I don’t know. Probably sometime during the first part of the quarter would be my guess.”

“Not long after she arrived.”

He nodded.

“How’d you learn this?” I said.

“I saw a picture – what I’m pretty sure was a picture of Shawna. And the way her roommate reacted when I brought it up told me I was probably right.”

“Mindy Jacobus.”

“Yeah, Mindy. I bugged her a lot, ’cause she was the last person to see Shawna alive. She never wanted to cooperate, said she and Shawna were close, she didn’t want to bad-mouth Shawna. Maybe she was being sincere, but I also think she was a little jealous.”

“Why’d you figure that?”

“You’ve seen pictures of Shawna?”

I nodded.

“Mindy was cute, but she was no Shawna. I’m not saying there was overt animosity between them. But something about the way she talked about her – I couldn’t put my finger on it, I just felt it. Whatever the reason, Mindy really didn’t want to talk about Shawna. I kept bugging her – showing up at her dorm room, catching her in between classes, playing Ace Newshound.” He smiled wistfully. “I must’ve been a real pain in the ass – today, she’d probably have me arrested as a stalker. But I was like… driven. Things bothered me. Like why didn’t Shawna have a boyfriend? Mindy had a boyfriend. Any good-looking girl can have a boyfriend at the snap of a finger, right? Mindy’s answer was that Shawna was a super-grind, end of story. Went to class, came back to the dorm and studied, went to the library and studied some more. But I checked out the grinds in all the libraries, and no one remembered seeing Shawna, and neither did the librarians. I also managed to get hold of Shawna’s library records – big no-no, don’t ask me how. Shawna hadn’t checked any books out the entire quarter.”

“Your article said she was headed for the library the night she disappeared,” I said.

“That was the official story. Mindy’s story. And the unicops believed it. But I’m not sure Mindy believed it. I think she was covering for Shawna. Because she got all shifty when I bugged her about it. And finally I got her to admit that the reason Shawna didn’t have a boyfriend was because she liked older guys. Mindy had tried to fix her up with a buddy of her boyfriend, and Shawna had turned her down flat. Said she preferred older guys – ‘grown-ups’ was the term she used.”

“You’re thinking she was having an affair with an older man,” I said.

“It crossed my mind,” he said. “But I was never able to take it any further. Mindy got all pissed off at me and got her boyfriend – he was this refrigerator-sized behemoth named Steve – to warn me off. I wasn’t about to risk life or limb, so I backed off. I did suggest to the unicops that they check out whether Shawna had ever been seen with an older guy – maybe even a faculty member – but they brushed me off.”

“Why a faculty member?”

“Campus life is isolated. What other older men do students come in contact with? But no one cared – not even my editor. She pulled me off, said they needed to run more political stories.”

He shrugged. “Being on the receiving end of all that apathy and hostility was an eye-opener. So now I write jingles, which is whoring but good-paying whoring. Douche and toothpaste don’t slam the door in your face.”

“The photo you saw,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

“It was the first time I went to the dorm to talk to Mindy – maybe two days after Shawna was reported missing. I don’t know if you’ve seen the dorms, but the rooms are tiny – cells, really. Two people in an area barely big enough for one and not enough closet space, so you tend to keep your stuff out in the open. Shawna must have been a neat freak, ’cause she’d stored her junk in shelves above her bed. I was surprised the police hadn’t confiscated it – doesn’t that show you how seriously they were taking the case? Anyway, I stuck my hand up to pull down her stuff – I really had nerve – got hold of some books and saw this magazine in the middle of the stack. Recent copy of Duke . Which was kind of weird in a girl’s room, right? I grabbed the stuff when Mindy had her back to me, then she turned and started screaming at me and knocked everything out of my hand. That’s when the photos fell out of the Duke . Black-and-whites, clearly nudies. Mindy scooped them up too fast for me to get a good look at them, stuffed them back in the Duke , shoved all of it under her own pillow, continued screaming at me. It all happened really fast, but I did see a killer bod and big blond hair, and that would fit Shawna. Mindy starts shoving at me, yelling at me to get out, and I’m saying, What’s with the skin shots? and she says it’s none of my fucking business. Then she says it belonged to Steve and I’m out in the hall and the door slams.”