“ The real killer,” Gus said. “You’ve said that about six thousand times,” Shawn said.
“I keep hoping if I say it one more time the words will actually make sense.”
Chief Vick had arranged for a squad car to take them back to the Psych office. During the ride, Shawn had refused to let Gus discuss the case on the assumption that the officer behind the wheel would report back every word they’d said. Which Gus hoped fervently wouldn’t turn out to be the case, since Shawn had spent the entire trip talking about how much more alluring Chief Vick had become since they’d removed the Interim from her title.
The mindless conversation did allow Gus to think through what Shawn had said at the station. But by the time the squad car pulled up outside their bungalow, he still couldn’t find a way to see it as anything but wishful thinking. They’d seen Tara standing over Steele’s body, the knife in her hand. How could anyone disprove that?
“Think about it,” Shawn said. “What do we really know about Tara?”
“She’s crazy, for one thing,” Gus said.
“Let’s not use technical terms,” Shawn said. “What else?”
“She’s slavishly devoted to you, and she has a propensity toward violence.”
Shawn started writing a list on a yellow legal pad. “That’s good.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I meant as a list,” Shawn said. “What else do we know about her?”
“She likes to wear red,” Gus said. “She never apologized for nearly running me over and sending me off a cliff. And-Hey!” Gus had a sudden flash of memory, followed by a spasm of muscle pain as his body joined in the remembering. “I don’t know about Dallas Steele, but there’s no way Tara could have killed John Marichal.”
“That’s good,” Shawn said, writing furiously. “Why not?”
“You said it yourself,” Gus said. “When I was in the hospital, she was with you every second of the night.”
“That’s good,” Shawn said. “Except…”
“Except what?”
“Is that whole perjury thing still illegal?” Shawn said. “Because that might have some bearing on my testimony.”
“You told me she was with you the whole time.”
“Whole, part-that’s just quibbling,” Shawn said. “Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder exactly when Tara first learned my feelings on the pickle-burger conundrum?”
“Never.”
“Really? Because that turns out to be such a major part of this whole situation, and I’d think that someone as smart as you might have put some thought into it. As my dad says, when you can’t find a clue, follow the time line. And the time line here would-”
“Shawn!”
“While we were waiting at the Community General Hospital waiting room, she might have stepped out for a moment to grab a couple of burgers.”
“She might have or she did?”
Shawn was too busy writing on the pad to hear the question. Gus tore it out of his hands. “Hey, that’s work product,” Shawn said.
Gus glanced at the writing. Shawn’s work product was one sentence repeated all the way down the page. “‘All work and no play makes Gus a dull boy’? That’s not even original.”
“I changed the name,” Shawn said.
Gus tossed the pad back at him. “So what you’re saying is that Tara could have killed Marichal.”
“It’s not what I’m saying,” Shawn said. “More like what the facts are hinting at. Or at least what Coules can make the fact look like.”
Gus sunk down into a leather chair, which settled under him with a whoosh. “Shawn, if she killed those people, how are we ever going to prove that we weren’t all part of a criminal conspiracy?”
“That’s why we have to prove she’s innocent,” Shawn said. “And to do that, we’ve got to-”
“Figure out who the real killer is,” Gus finished the sentence for him. “There’s still that one small problem. What if she’s the real killer?”
“I know she’s not,” Shawn said. “Look, we both know I’m not really psychic, but you have to agree I have a pretty good eye for detail. And those details say so much about who a person is. I’ve studied Tara in depth from the first moment I met her, and I’ve never seen a trace of malice or danger or cruelty in her. She can’t be a murderer.”
Gus had rarely heard Shawn speak this sincerely. And he knew it was true sincerity, since it was actually far less convincing than when he was faking sincerity. “We’ve got work to do,” he said.
“Great,” Shawn said. “What do we know about Tara?”
“You were the one making the list.”
Shawn glanced down at his pad. “Hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “Apparently all work and no play makes Gus a dull boy.”
Gus grabbed the pad back and stalked to the desk, where he planted himself in front of the computer. “Maybe we should do a little research and figure out what Tara was doing before she was slavishly following your psychic orders.”
Gus typed the words “Tara Larison” into a search engine. There were references to a couple of women with the same name, but since the Tara they knew was neither a housewife running an organization for the protection of songbirds in Mississippi or a teenage girl with a MySpace page devoted to resurrecting Vanilla Ice’s career, this proved to be a dead end.
“I seem to recall she used to take care of her aunt Enid in Arcata,” Shawn said. “Let’s see what we can find out about a certain fat divorcee Realtor.”
Shawn leaned in over Gus’ shoulder and typed a string of words into the search engine, then hit ENTER. After a moment, they found themselves staring at a series of photos of large, middle-aged naked women. “Tara’s aunt was a plus-size porn queen?”
“This is Fat Divorcee Realtor Dot Com,” Gus said, muscling Shawn away from the keyboard. “Let’s try actually entering her name.”
Gus typed in the name “Enid Blalock.” The first few hits were real estate listings she’d had in Arcata. The fourth was her obituary in the Arcata Advertiser. Gus clicked the link, and after a millisecond, the article loaded.
Enid Blalock, according to her obituary, was the queen of the Arcata real estate scene. Despite her short time in the profession, she was uniformly admired and even loved by the other agents in her office. She was on track to win the coveted Arcata Arrow Award for most sales in a single year when her life was cut short in a tragic accident. She had fallen down the stairs in an empty house she was trying to sell and broken her neck.
“There’s nothing there,” Shawn said.
“Yet.” Gus clicked the button at the bottom of the screen and loaded the article’s second page.
“Look.” Shawn pointed to the screen. “In lieu of flowers, donations should be made to the Association for Divorcee Rights. I told you she was bitter.”
“That’s very helpful,” Gus said.
“Okay, maybe not,” Shawn said. “What about this?”
Shawn pointed at the last line of the obituary. Apparently, Enid was survived by a sister who lived in New Jersey and a niece, Tara Busby.
“She changed her name,” Gus said. “I wonder why.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Shawn said.
Gus returned to the search engine and typed in “Tara Busby plus Larison”. The handful of results seemed to have nothing to do with the woman they were looking for, with each of the three names drawn from long-separated sections of various texts.
“I guess she didn’t marry someone named Larison,” Gus said.
“That’s good,” Shawn said. “The last thing we need is to have a jealous husband coming after us. Then we’d really be in trouble.”
Gus stared at the search engine. It was like one of those genies in a fairy tale. It would tell you everything you needed to know, but only if you asked exactly the right question. Unfortunately, there was no way to ask the one question he needed to answer first: What was the right question to ask?
“You’d think someone as crazy as Tara would have popped up somewhere before,” Shawn said. “You don’t just start out following psychic instructions to beat up burger chefs. You’ve got to work up to that. I can’t believe she waited until she heard my voice to go completely nutso cuckoo.”
Gus sat up straight. That was it-the clue he had been looking for. “She first heard you while she was listening to Artie Pine’s radio show.”
“So? Lots of crazy people listen to Artie Pine. In fact, I think it’s required.”
“Don’t you see?” Gus said. “She was already interested in psychic phenomena before she met you.”
“Because she was hearing voices in her head.”
“So maybe you weren’t the first psychic she decided was giving her orders.”
“You’re making me feel cheap,” Shawn said.
Gus typed the words “Larison plus psychic” into the search engine. The screen that popped up listed hundreds of newspaper articles and Web sites referencing someone named Fred Larison who lived somewhere outside St. Louis. Gus clicked on the third listing, which appeared to be Larison’s Web site.
Spooky music started playing out of the computer’s speakers as the page loaded. Red text flashed over a black background: Fred Larison, Psychic Detective. The glowing ENTER HERE button was surrounded by pulsating skeleton hands.
“At least I don’t feel that cheap,” Shawn said.
Gus clicked the ENTER button, and the opening screen wiped away to reveal a black-and-white photo of a thin, balding man with a pencil mustache and a pronounced overbite staring directly into the camera. Underneath, more red type exclaimed that master psychic Fred Larison was available to solve the deepest mysteries of life, rates quoted on application.
“Sure, I’m going to trust him to solve the deepest mysteries of life when he can’t tackle the basic mystery of finding a decent Web site designer,” Shawn said.
Gus picked up the phone and dialed the number at the bottom of the page. After two rings, a recorded voice informed him that the number he’d dialed had been disconnected or was no longer in service.
“He also can’t solve the mystery of how to pay his phone bill,” Gus said. He hung up and keystroked back to the search engine. The next entry down was a news article titled “Psychic Solves Mystery.”
“Does it mention if it was one of the deepest mysteries of life?” Shawn said.
“Let’s find out.” Gus hit the link, and a page popped up from the Jefferson City Gazette, “Central Missouri’s News and Classifieds Leader.” A picture showed the same man, still wearing the mustache but this time adding a cape to the look. He was holding an open jeweler’s box with what appeared to be a large diamond inside.
“‘Renowned local psychic Fred Larison solved one of Jeff City’s most perplexing mysteries yesterday when he used his mental prowess to find a two-carat diamond that had been lost since the days of the Civil War,’” Gus read. “‘The owners, Misses Bonnie and Eugenia Frakes, twin sisters, eighty-three years young, had searched their entire lives for the gemstone their late grandmother Prudence Winsocket had hidden from marauding raiders during the Civil War. But Prudence, living up to her name, went to her grave without ever telling a living soul where she had hidden the jewel. Larison’s answer? Forget about talking to the living. He contacted Prudence directly at her address in the afterlife and asked her what she had done with the precious stone.’”
“I can’t believe this,” Shawn said.
“What? That there are other psychics working the same scams as you?”
“That anyone gets paid for writing this badly,” Shawn said. “And this guy Peter Jones calls himself a reporter. I’ve never met Fred Larison, and I can tell from two thousand miles away that he’s a fraud.”
“Not everyone has your sharp eyes,” Gus said. He pointed to the photo. Next to Larison, two old ladies stared at him with a look that would be considered indecent if the faces sharing it had even one unwrinkled square inch between them.
“Can you make that bigger?” Shawn said.
“Really? You want to see him better?”
“Not him. The person standing behind his left shoulder.”
Shawn tapped the screen to show Gus what he was talking about. There was a hint of a face peeking out of the shadows. Gus centered the cursor on the face and clicked his mouse. The small section of photo enlarged. What had been a small blur of white was now a big blur of white.
“Okay, now focus in on that face,” Shawn said.
“Okay,” Gus said. “No, wait. I just remembered. This is reality, not Mission: Impossible. And this computer just shows me what’s on a Web site. It can’t make faces out of mush.”
“Not much of a computer, is it?” Shawn said. “Let’s see what else they say about Larison.”
Gus clicked back to the search page and scrolled through the list of links. Many of them were references to the Gazette ’s article on various sites devoted to psychic phenomena. At the bottom of the page, there was another Gazette article: “Local Psychic Wows Tough Critics.”
“Let’s see that one,” Shawn said.
This story was also written by Peter Jones, and if anything it was even more breathless in its prose.
“They say that hardened cynics make the toughest audiences, but harder still are those minds that don’t know enough to doubt what they believe. Such a crowd was faced by local psychic celebrity Fred Larison when he brought his bag of mental tricks to Suzie McKee’s first-grade class at Harry S Truman Elementary School last Friday. By the end they were all won over by Larison’s psychic stylings. Some had even decided to give up dreams of growing up to be policemen, astronauts, or nurses to follow him into the realms of worlds unknown.
“And they say public schools don’t educate children,” Shawn said.
“I don’t remember my first-grade teacher being that hot,” Gus said, looking at a woman who was partially hidden behind Larison’s cape. “And I certainly don’t remember her wearing hot pants to school.”
“Mrs. Wilson had her charms,” Shawn said, peering at the screen. “And since she was built like a cement mixer, not wearing hot pants was definitely one of them. But that’s not Suzie McKee.”
Gus craned his head to the screen to study the image. “How do you know?”
“I’ve spent a lot of time studying those legs,” Shawn said. “That is definitely Tara. The question is, what’s she doing there?”
“Maybe she was held back in first grade fifteen times,” Gus said.
“Wait-here.” Shawn scrolled down the page. “‘Larison was as always ably assisted by his lovely assistant.’”
“Tara was Fred Larison’s assistant?”
“More than that,” Shawn said. “It says here that Larison never needed to give her instructions. ‘When asked how they worked together, the lovely helper, who chose not to give her name, said that she took her orders from Larison psychically.’”
“How does it feel to learn you weren’t the first?”
“I’m devastated,” Shawn said. “Let’s find out why she left him.”
Gus went back to the search engine and hit the button for a second page of hits. Shawn pointed to a listing halfway down the page. “I think I figured it out.”
Gus clicked the link, which led to a page of funeral listings provided by a mortuary in central Missouri. “‘Memorial services will be held today for Fred Larison, noted local entertainer.’”
“Entertainer, ha!” Shawn said. “At least someone there wasn’t fooled by that fraud.”
Gus continued reading. “‘Mr. Larison died in St. Joseph’s Hospital Tuesday night after suffering a broken neck in a freak accident.’ Blah blah blah.”
“No dependants.” Shawn pointed to the end of the article. “I guess Tara took his last name without his permission.”
“At least we know why she left him,” Gus said. “He’d have to be a pretty good psychic to keep sending her orders even after he died.”
“We know more than that,” Shawn said. “We know that I was wrong. Dead wrong.”
Gus noticed that Shawn’s face had gone pale.
“When you say wrong, you mean about something unimportant, right?” Gus said. “Like pickles are really good on a burger, or Gremlins 2 wasn’t really better than the original.”
“I mean I was wrong about everything,” Shawn said. “I looked at Tara and saw innocence. I missed every sign. How could that be?”
“How could what be?”
Shawn waved weakly at the monitor.“How did Larison die?”
Gus glanced back at the screen. “In an accident. He broke his neck.”
“Uh-huh. How did Enid Blalock die?”
“Didn’t she fall down the stairs in an empty house?”
“And?”
Gus began to see the pattern that Shawn had already recognized.
“And John Marichal at the impound yard. His neck was broken, too.”
Shawn and Gus stared at each other across the office. “She’s not just a killer,” Shawn said. “She’s a serial killer.”