The Never Game
Which this one did, efficiently and with modest spectacle.
A silent fireball rose about four feet in the air.
Shaw dodged the risk of singe and Carole ran, screaming, to her cabin. Shaw debated pursuit, but the crescent of grass on the shoulder was burning crisply and getting slowly closer to tall shrubs. He vaulted the chain-link, sprinted to his RV and retrieved one of the extinguishers. He returned, pulled the pin and blasted a whoosh of white chemical on the fire, taming it.
“Oh my God. Are you okay, Mr. Shaw?” Carole was plodding up, carrying an extinguisher of her own, a smaller, one-hand canister. Hers wasn’t really necessary, yet she too pulled the grenade pin and let fly, because, of course, it’s always fun. Especially when the blaze is nearly out.
After a minute or two, Shaw bent down and, with his palm, touched every square inch of the scorch, as he’d learned years ago.
Never leave a campfire without patting the ash.
A pointless glance after Rodent. He’d vanished.
A patrol car braked to a stop. Oakland PD. A large black officer, with a glistening, shaved head, climbed out, holding a fire extinguisher of his own. Of the three, his was the smallest. He surveyed the embers and the char and replaced the red tank under his front passenger seat.
Officer L. Addison, according to the name badge, turned to Shaw. The six-foot-five cop might get confessions just by walking up to a suspect and leaning down.
“You were the one called?” Addison asked.
“I did.” Shaw explained that the person who’d thrown the cocktail had just run off. “That way.” He gestured down the weedy street, handfuls of trash every few yards. “He’s probably not too far away.”
The cop asked what had happened.
Shaw told him. Carole supplemented, with the somewhat gratuitous addendum about the difficulty of being a widow running a business by herself. “People take advantage. I push back. I have to. You would. Sometimes they threaten you.” Shaw noted she’d glanced at Addison’s left hand, where no jewelry resided.
Addison cocked his head toward the Motorola mounted on his shoulder and gave Central a summary, with the description from Shaw. It had been quite detailed but he’d left out the rodent-like aspect, that being largely a matter of opinion.
Addison’s eyes turned back to Shaw. “Could I see some ID?”
There are conflicting theories about what to do when the law asks for ID and you’re not a suspect. This was a question Shaw often confronted, since he frequently found himself at crime scenes and places where investigations were under way. You generally didn’t have to show anybody anything. In that case, you’d have to be prepared to endure the consequences of your lack of cooperation. Time is one of the world’s most valuable commodities, and being pissy with cops guarantees you’re going to lose big chunks of it.
His hesitation at the moment, though, was not on principle but because he was worried that his motorbike’s license had been spotted at the site of yesterday’s transgression. His name might therefore be in the system.
Then he recalled that they’d know him already; he’d called 911 from his personal phone, not a burner. So Shaw handed over the license.
Addison took a picture of it with his phone and uploaded the details somewhere.
Shaw noted that he didn’t do the same with Carole, even though it was her trailer court that had tangentially been involved. Some minor profiling there, Shaw reflected: stranger in town versus a local. This he kept to himself.
Addison looked at the results. He eyed Shaw closely.
A reckoning for yesterday’s transgression? Shaw now chose to call it what it was: theft. There’s no escape in euphemism.
Apparently the gods of justice were not a posse after him today. Addison handed the license back. “Did you recognize him?” he asked Carole.
“No, sir, but it’s hard to keep track. We get a lot of people here. Lowest rates in the area.”
“Did he throw the bottle at you, Mr. Shaw?”
“Toward. A diversion, not assault. So he could get away.”
This gave the officer a moment’s pause.
Carole blurted: “I looked it up online. Molotov secretly worked for Putin.”
Both men looked at her quizzically. Then Shaw continued with the officer: “And to burn the evidence. Prints and DNA on the glass.”
Addison remained thoughtful. He was the sort, common among police, whose lack of body language speaks volumes. He’d be processing why Shaw had considered forensics.
The officer said, “If he wasn’t here to cause you any problem, ma’am, what was he here about, you think?”
Before Carole answered, Shaw said, “That.” He pointed across the street to the vacant lot he’d noted earlier.
The trio walked toward it.
The trailer camp was in a scruffy commercial neighborhood, off Route 24, where tourists could stage before a trip to steep Grizzly Peak or neighboring Berkeley. This trash-filled, weedy lot was separated from the property behind it by an old wooden fence about eight feet tall. Local artists had used it as a canvas for some very talented artwork: portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and two other men Shaw didn’t recognize. As the three got closer, Shaw saw the names printed below the pictures: Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who’d been connected with the Black Panther Party. Shaw remembered cold nights in his television-free childhood home. Ashton would read to Colter and his siblings, mostly American history. Much of it about alternative forms of governance. The Black Panthers had figured in several lectures.
“So,” Carole said, her mouth twisted in distaste. “A hate crime. Terrible.” She added, with a nod to the paintings, “I called the city, told them they should preserve it somehow. They never called back.”
Addison’s radio crackled. Shaw could hear the transmission: a unit had cruised the streets nearby and seen no one fitting the description of the arsonist.
Shaw said, “I got a video.”
“You did?”
“After I called nine-one-one I put the phone in my pocket.” He touched the breast pocket, on the left side of his jacket. “It was recording the whole time.”
“Is it recording now?”
“It is.”
“Would you shut it off?” Addison asked this in a way that really meant: Shut it off. Without a question mark.
Shaw did. Then: “I’ll send you a screenshot.”
“Okay.”
Shaw clicked the shot, got Addison’s mobile number and sent the image his way. The men were four feet apart but Shaw imagined the electrons’ journey took them halfway around the world.
The officer’s phone chimed; he didn’t bother to look at the screenshot. He gave Carole his card, one to Shaw as well. Shaw had quite the collection of cops’ cards; he thought it amusing that police had business cards like advertising executives and hedge fund managers.
After Addison left, Carole said, “They’re not going to do winkety, are they?”
“No.”
“Well, thanks for looking into it, Mr. Shaw. I’d’ve felt purely horrid you’d gotten burned.”
“Not a worry.”
Carole returned to the cabin and Shaw to his Winnebago. He was reflecting on one aspect of the encounter he hadn’t shared with Officer Addison. After the exasperated “Really?” in reference to the 911 call, Rodent’s comment might have been “Why’d you do that shit?”
It was also possible—more than fifty percent—that he’d said, “Why’d you do that, Shaw?”
Which, if that had in fact happened, meant Rodent knew him or knew about him.
And that, of course, would put a whole new spin on the matter.
3.
Inside the Winnebago, Shaw hung his sport coat on a hook and walked to a small cupboard in the kitchen. He opened it and removed two things. The first was his compact Glock .380 pistol, which he kept hidden behind a row of spices, largely McCormick brand. The weapon was in a gray plastic Blackhawk holster. This he clipped inside his belt.
The second thing he removed was a thick 11-by-14-inch envelope, secreted on the shelf below where he kept the gun, behind condiment bottles. Worcestershire, teriyaki and a half dozen vinegars ranging from Heinz to the exotic.
He glanced outside.
No sign of Rodent. As he’d expected. Still, sometimes being armed never hurt.
He walked to the stove and boiled water and brewed a ceramic mug of coffee with a single-cup filter cone. He’d selected one of his favorites. Daterra, from Brazil. He shocked the beverage with a splash of milk.
Sitting at the banquette, he looked at the envelope, on which were the words Graded Exams 5/25, in perfect, scripty handwriting, smaller even than Shaw’s.
The flap was not sealed, just affixed with a flexible metal flange, which he bent open, and then he extracted from the envelope a rubber band–bound stack of sheets, close to four hundred of them.
Noting that his heart thudded from double time to triple as he stared at the pile.
These pages were the spoils of the theft Shaw had committed yesterday.
What he hoped they contained was the answer to the question that had dogged him for a decade and a half.
A sip of coffee. He began to flip through the contents.
The sheets seemed to be a random collection of musings historical, philosophical, medical and scientific, maps, photos, copies of receipts. The author’s script was the same as on the front of the envelope: precise and perfectly even, as if a ruler had been used as a guide. The words were formed in a delicate combination of cursive and block printing.
Similar to how Colter Shaw wrote.
He opened to a page at random. Began to read.
Fifteen miles northwest of Macon on Squirrel Level Road, Holy Brethren Church. Should have a talk with minister. Good man. Rev. Harley Combs. Smart and keeps quiet when he should.
Shaw read more passages, then stopped. A couple sips of coffee, thoughts of breakfast. Then: Go on, he chided himself. You started this, prepared to accept where it would lead. So keep going.
His mobile hummed. He glanced at the caller ID, shamefully pleased that the distraction took him away from the stolen documents.
“Teddy.”
“Colt. Where am I finding you?” A baritone grumble.
“Still the Bay Area.”
“Any luck?”
“Some. Maybe. Everything okay at home?” The Bruins were watching his property in Florida, which abutted theirs.
“Peachy.” Not a word you hear often from a career Marine officer. Teddy Bruin and his wife, Velma, also a veteran, wore their contradictions proudly. He could picture them clearly, most likely sitting at that moment where they often sat, on the porch facing the hundred-acre lake in northern Florida. Teddy was six-two, two hundred and fifty pounds. His reddish hair was a darker version of his freckled, ruddy skin. He’d be in khaki slacks or shorts because he owned no other shade. The shirt would have flowers on it. Velma was less than half his weight, though tall herself. She’d be in jeans and work shirt, and of the two she had the cleverer tattoos.
A dog barked in the background. That would be Chase, their Rottweiler. Shaw had spent many afternoons on hikes with the solid, good-natured animal.
“We found a job close to you. Don’t know if you’re interested. Vel’s got the details. She’s coming. Ah, here.”
“Colter.” Unlike Teddy’s, Velma’s voice was softly pouring water. Shaw had told her she should record audiobooks for kids. Her voice would be like Ambien, send them right to sleep.
“Algo found a hit. That girl sniffs like a bluetick hound. What a nose.”
Velma had decided that the computer bot she used (Algo, as in “algorithm”) searching the internet for potential jobs for Shaw was a female. And canine as well, it seemed.
“Missing girl in Silicon Valley,” she added.
“Tipline?”
Phone numbers were often set up by law enforcement or by private groups, like Crime Stoppers, so that someone, usually with inside knowledge, could call anonymously with information that might lead to a suspect. Tiplines were also called dime lines, as in “diming out the perp,” or snitch lines.
Shaw had pursued tipline jobs from time to time over the years—if the crime was particularly heinous or the victims’ families particularly upset. He generally avoided them because of the bureaucracy and formalities involved. Tiplines also tended to attract the troublesome.
“No. Offeror’s her father.” Velma added, “Ten thousand. Not much. But his notice was … heartfelt. He’s one desperate fellow.”
Teddy and Velma had been helping Shaw in his reward operation for years; they knew desperate by instinct.
“How old’s the daughter?”
“Nineteen. Student.”
The phone in Florida was on SPEAKER, and Teddy’s raspy voice said, “We checked the news. No stories about police involvement. Her name didn’t show up at all, except for the reward. So, no foul play.”
The term was right out of Sherlock Holmes yet law enforcement around the country used it frequently. The phrase was a necessary marker in deciding how police would approach a missing-person situation. With an older teen and no evidence of abduction, the cops wouldn’t jump on board as they would with an obvious kidnapping. For the time being, they’d assume she was a runaway.
Her disappearance, of course, could be both. More than a few young people had been seduced away from home willingly only to find that the seducer wasn’t exactly who they thought.
Or her fate might be purely accidental, her body floating in the cold, notoriously unpredictable waters of the Pacific Ocean or in a car at the bottom of a ravine a hundred feet below sidewinding Highway 1.
Shaw debated. His eyes were on the four hundred–odd sheets. “I’ll go meet with the father. What’s her name?”
“Sophie Mulliner. He’s Frank.”
“Mother?”
“No indication.” Velma added, “I’ll send you the particulars.”
He then asked, “Any mail?”
She said, “Bills. Which I paid. Buncha coupons. Victoria’s Secret catalog.”
Shaw had bought Margot a present two years ago; Victoria had decided his address was no secret and delivered it unto her mailing-list minions. He hadn’t thought about Margot for … Had it been a month? Maybe a couple of weeks. He said, “Pitch it.”
“Can I keep it?” Teddy asked.
A thud, and laughter. Another thud.
Shaw thanked them and disconnected.
He rebanded the sheaf of pages. One more look outside. No Rodent.
Colter Shaw lifted open his laptop and read Velma’s email. He pulled up a map to see how long it would take to get to Silicon Valley.
4.
As it turned out, by the estimation of some, Colter Shaw was actually in Silicon Valley at that very moment.
He’d learned that a number of people considered North Oakland and Berkeley to be within the nebulous boundaries of the mythical place. To them, Silicon Valley—apparently, “SV” to those in the know—embraced a wide swath from Berkeley on the east and San Francisco on the west all the way south to San Jose.
The definition was largely, Shaw gathered, dependent on whether a company or individual wanted to be in Silicon Valley. And most everyone did.
The loyalists, it seemed, defined the place as west of the Bay only, the epicenter being Stanford University in Palo Alto. The reward offeror’s home was near the school, in Mountain View. Shaw secured the vehicle’s interior for the drive, made sure his dirt bike was affixed to its frame on the rear and disconnected the hookups.
He stopped by the cabin to break the news to Carole and a half hour later was cruising along the wide 280 freeway, with glimpses of the suburbia of Silicon Valley through the trees to his left and the lush hills of the Rancho Corral de Tierra and the placid Crystal Springs Reservoir to the west.
This area was new to him. Shaw was born in Berkeley—twenty miles away—but he retained only tatters of memories from back then. When Colter was four, Ashton had moved the family to a huge spread a hundred miles east of Fresno, in the Sierra Nevada foothills—Ashton dubbed the property the “Compound” because he thought it sounded more forbidding than “Ranch” or “Farm.”
At the GPS guide’s command, Shaw pulled off the freeway and made his way to the Westwinds RV Center, located in Los Altos Hills. He checked in. The soft-spoken manager was about sixty, trim, a former Navy man or Merchant Marine, if the tattoo of the anchor signified anything. He handed Shaw a map and, with a mechanical pencil, meticulously drew a line from the office to his hookup. Shaw’s space would be on Google Way, accessed via Yahoo Lane and PARC Road. The name of the last avenue Shaw didn’t get. He assumed it was computer-related.
He found the spot, plugged in and, with his black leather computer bag over his shoulder, returned to the office, where he summoned an Uber to take him to the small Avis rental outfit in downtown Mountain View. He picked up a sedan, requesting any full-sized that was black or navy blue, his preferred shades. In his decade of seeking rewards he’d never once misrepresented himself as a police officer, but occasionally he let the impression stand. Driving a vehicle that might be taken for a detective’s undercover car occasionally loosened tongues.
On his mission over the past couple of days, Shaw had ridden his Yamaha dirt bike between Carole’s RV park and Berkeley. He would ride the bike any chance he got, though only on personal business or, of course, for the joy of it. On a job he always rented a sedan or, if the terrain required, an SUV. Driving a rattling motorbike when meeting offerors, witnesses or the police would raise concerns about how professional he was. And while a thirty-foot RV was fine for highways, it was too cumbersome for tooling about congested neighborhoods.
He set the GPS to the reward offeror’s house in Mountain View and pulled into the busy suburban traffic.
So, this was the heart of SV, the Olympus of high technology. The place didn’t glisten the way you might expect, at least along Shaw’s route. No quirky glass offices, marble mansions or herds of slinky Mercedeses, Maseratis, Beemers, Porsches. Here was a diorama of the 1970s: pleasant single-family homes, mostly ranch-style, with minuscule yards, apartment buildings that were tidy but could use a coat of paint or re-siding, mile after mile of strip malls, two- and three-story office structures. No high-rises—perhaps out of fear of earthquakes? The San Andreas Fault was directly underneath.
Silicon Valley might have been Cary, North Carolina, or Plano, Texas, or Fairfax County, Virginia—or another California valley, San Fernando, three hundred miles south and tethered to SV by the utilitarian Highway 101. This was one thing about midwifing technology, Shaw supposed: it all happens inside. Driving through Hibbing, Minnesota, you’d see the mile-deep crimson-colored iron mine. Or Gary, Indiana, the fortresses of steel mills. There were no scars of geography, no unique superstructures to define Silicon Valley.
In ten minutes he was approaching Frank Mulliner’s house on Alta Vista Drive. The ranch wasn’t designed by cookie cutter, though it had the same feel as the other houses on this lengthy block. Inexpensive, with wood or vinyl siding, three concrete steps to the front door, wrought-iron railings. The fancier homes had bay windows. They were all bordered by a parking strip, sidewalk and front yard. Some grass was green, some the color of straw. A number of homeowners had given up on lawns and hardscaped with pebbles and sand and low succulents.
Shaw pulled up to the pale green house, noting the FORECLOSURE SALE sign on the adjoining property. Mulliner’s house was also on the market.
Knocking on the door, Shaw waited only a moment before it opened, revealing a stocky, balding man of fifty or so, wearing gray slacks and an open-collar blue dress shirt. On his feet were loafers but no socks.
“Frank Mulliner?”
The man’s red-rimmed eyes glanced quickly at Shaw’s clothes, the short blond hair, the sober demeanor—he rarely smiled. The bereft father would be thinking this was a detective come to deliver bad news, so Shaw introduced himself quickly.
“Oh, you’re … You called. The reward.”
“That’s right.”
The man’s hand was chill when the two gripped palms.
With a look around the neighborhood, he nodded Shaw in.
Shaw learned a lot about offerors—and the viability, and legitimacy, of the reward—by seeing their living spaces. He met with them in their homes if possible. Offices, if not. This gave him insights about the potential business relationship and how serious were the circumstances giving rise to the reward. Here, the smell of sour food was detectable. The tables and furniture were cluttered with bills and mail folders and tools and retail flyers. In the living room were piles of clothing. This suggested that even though Sophie had been missing for only a few days, the man was very distraught.
The shabbiness of the place was also of note. The walls and molding were scuffed, in need of painting and proper repair; the coffee table had a broken leg splinted with duct tape painted to mimic the oak color. Water stains speckled the ceiling and there was a hole above one window where a curtain rod had pulled away from the Sheetrock. This meant the ten thousand cash he was offering was hard to come by.
The two men took seats on saggy furniture encased in slack gold slipcovers. The lamps were mismatched. And the big-screen TV was not so big by today’s standards.
Shaw asked, “Have you heard anything more? From the police? Sophie’s friends?”
“Nothing. And her mother hasn’t heard anything. She lives out of state.”
“Is she on her way?”
Mulliner was silent. “She’s not coming.” The man’s round jaw tightened and he wiped at what remained of his brown hair. “Not yet.” He scanned Shaw closely. “You a private eye or something?”
“No. I earn rewards that citizens or the police’ve offered.”
He seemed to digest this. “For a living.”
“Correct.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
Shaw gave him the pitch. True, he didn’t need to win Mulliner over, as a PI seeking a new client might. But if he were going to look for Sophie, he needed information. And that meant cooperation. “I’ve got years of experience doing this. I’ve helped find dozens of missing persons. I’ll investigate and try to get information that’ll lead to Sophie. As soon as I do, I tell you and the police. I don’t rescue people or talk them into coming home if they’re runaways.”
While this last sentence was not entirely accurate, Shaw felt it important to make clear exactly what he was providing. He preferred to mention rules rather than exceptions.
“If that information leads to her you pay me the reward. Right now, we’ll talk some. If you don’t like what you hear or see, you tell me and I won’t pursue it. If there’s something I don’t like, I walk away.”
“Far as I’m concerned, I’m sold.” The man’s voice choked. “You seem okay to me. You talk straight, you’re calm. Not, I don’t know, not like a bounty hunter on TV. Anything you can do to find Fee. Please.”
“Fee.”
“Her nickname. So-fee. What she called herself when she was a baby.” He controlled the tears, though just.
“Has anybody else approached you for the reward?”
“I got plenty of calls or emails. Most of ’em anonymous. They said they’d seen her or knew what had happened. All it took was a few questions and I could tell they didn’t have anything. They just wanted the money. Somebody mentioned aliens in a spaceship. Somebody said a Russian sex-trafficking ring.”
“Most people who contact you’ll be that way. Looking for a fast buck. Anybody who knows her’ll help you out for free. There’s an off chance that you’ll be contacted by somebody connected with the kidnapper—if there is a kidnapper—or by somebody who spotted her on the street. So listen to all the calls and read all the emails. Might be something helpful.