The Never Game

“Now, finding her is our only goal. It might take a lot of people providing information to piece her whereabouts together. Five percent here. Ten there. How that reward gets split up is between me and the other parties. You won’t be out more than the ten.

“One more thing: I don’t take a reward for recovery, only rescue.”

The man didn’t respond to this. He was kneading a bright orange golf ball. After a moment he said, “They make these things so you can play in the winter. Somebody gave me a box of them.” He looked up at Shaw’s unresponsive eyes. “It never snows here. Do you golf? Do you want some?”

“Mr. Mulliner, we should move fast.”

“Frank.”

“Fast,” Shaw repeated.

The man inhaled. “Please. Help her. Find Fee for me.”

“First: Are you sure she didn’t run off?”

“Absolutely positive.”

“How do you know?”

“Luka. That’s how.”

5.

Shaw was sitting hunched over the wounded coffee table.

Before him was a thirty-two-page, 5-by-7-inch notebook of blank, unlined pages. In his hand was a Delta Titanio Galassia fountain pen, black with three orange rings toward the nib. Occasionally people gave him a look: Pretentious, aren’t we? But Shaw was a relentless scribe and the Italian pen—not cheap, at two hundred and fifty dollars, yet hardly a luxury—was far easier on the muscles than a ballpoint or even a rollerball. It was the best tool for the job.

Shaw and Mulliner were not alone. Sitting beside Shaw and breathing heavily on his thigh was the reason that father was sure daughter had not run away: Luka.

A well-behaved white standard poodle.

“Fee wouldn’t leave Luka. Impossible. If she’d run off, she would’ve taken him. Or at least called to see how he was.”

There’d been dogs on the Compound, pointers for pointing, retrievers for retrieving—and all of them for barking like mad if the uninvited arrived. Colter and Russell took their father’s view that the animals were employees. Their younger sister, Dorion, on the other hand, would bewilder the animals by dressing them up in clothing she herself had stitched and she let them sleep in bed with her. Shaw now accepted Luka’s presence here as evidence, though not proof, that the young woman had not run off.

Colter Shaw asked about the details of Sophie’s disappearance, what the police had said when Mulliner called, about family and friends.

Writing in tiny, elegant script, perfectly horizontal on the unlined paper, Shaw set down all that was potentially helpful, ignoring the extraneous. Then, having exhausted his questions, he let the man talk. He usually got his most important information this way, finding nuggets in the rambling.

Mulliner stepped into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a handful of scraps of paper and Post-it notes containing names and numbers and addresses—in two handwritings. His and Sophie’s, he confirmed. Friends’ numbers, appointments, work and class schedules. Shaw transcribed the information. If it came to the police, Mulliner should have the originals.

Sophie’s father had done a good job looking for his daughter. He’d put up scores of MISSING flyers. He’d contacted Sophie’s boss at the software company where she worked part-time, a half dozen of her professors at the college she attended and her sports coach. He spoke to a handful of her friends, though the list was short.

“Haven’t been the best of fathers,” Mulliner admitted with a downcast gaze. “Sophie’s mother lives out of state, like I said. I’m working a couple of jobs. It’s all on me. I don’t get to her events or games—she plays lacrosse—like I should.” He waved a hand around the unkempt house. “She doesn’t have parties here. You can see why. I don’t have time to clean. And paying for a service? Forget it.”

Shaw made a note of the lacrosse. The young woman could run and she’d have muscle. A competitive streak too.

Sophie’d fight—if she had the chance to fight.

“Does she often stay at friends’ houses?”

“Not much now. That was a high school thing. Sometimes. But she always calls.” Mulliner blinked. “I didn’t offer you anything. I’m sorry. Coffee? Water?”

“No, I’m good.”

Mulliner, like most people, couldn’t keep his eyes off the scripty words Shaw jotted quickly in navy-blue ink.

“Your teachers taught you that? In school?”

“Yes.”

In a way.

A search of her room revealed nothing helpful. It was filled with computer books, circuit boards, closetsful of outfits, makeup, concert posters, a tree for jewelry. Typical for her age. Shaw noted she was an artist, and a good one. Watercolor landscapes, bold and colorful, sat in a pile on a dresser, the paper curled from drying off the easel.

Mulliner had said she’d taken her laptop and phone with her, which Shaw had expected but was disappointed that she didn’t have a second computer to browse through, though that was usually not particularly helpful. You rarely found an entry: Brunch on Sunday, then I’m going to run away because I hate my effing parents.

And you never have to search very hard to find the suicide note.

Shaw asked for some pictures of the young woman, in different outfits and taken from different angles. He produced ten good ones.

Mulliner sat but Shaw remained standing. Without looking through his notebook, he said, “She left at four in the afternoon, on Wednesday, two days ago, after she got home from school. Then went out for the bike ride at five-thirty and never came home. You posted an announcement of the reward early Thursday morning.”

Mulliner acknowledged the timing with a tilt of his head.

“It’s rare to offer a reward that soon after a disappearance—absent foul play.”

“I was just … you know. It was devastating. I was so worried.”

“I need to know everything, Frank.” Shaw’s blue eyes were focused on the offeror’s.

Mulliner’s right thumb and forefinger were kneading the orange golf ball again. His eyes were on the Post-it notes on the coffee table. He gathered them, ordered them, then stopped. “We had a fight, Fee and I. Wednesday. After she came home. A big fight.”

“Tell me.” Shaw spoke in a softer voice than a moment ago. He now sat.

“I did something stupid. I listed the house Wednesday and told the broker to hold off putting up the For Sale sign until I could tell Fee. The Realtor did anyway and a friend up the street saw it and called her. Fuck. I should’ve thought better.” His damp eyes looked up. “I tried everything to avoid moving. I’m working those two jobs. I borrowed money from my ex’s new husband. Think about that. I did everything I could but I just can’t afford to stay. It was our family house! Fee grew up in it, and I’m going to lose it. The taxes here in the county? Jesus, crushing. I found a new place in Gilroy, south of here. A long way south. It’s all I can afford. Sophie’s commute to the college and her job’ll be two hours. She won’t see her friends much.”

His laugh was bitter. “She said, ‘Great, we’re moving to the fucking Garlic Capital of the World.’ Which it is. ‘And you didn’t even tell me.’ I lost it. I screamed at her. How she didn’t appreciate what I did. How my commute’ll be even longer. She grabbed her backpack and stormed out.”

Mulliner’s eyes slid away from Shaw’s. “I was afraid if I told you, you’d be sure she ran off, and wouldn’t help.”

This answered the important question: Why the premature reward offer? Which had raised concerns in Shaw’s mind. Yes, Mulliner seemed truly distraught. He’d let the house go to hell. This testified to his genuine concerns about his daughter. Yet murderous spouses, business partners, siblings and, yes, even parents sometimes post a reward to give themselves the blush of innocence. And they tend to offer fast, the way Mulliner had done.

No, he wasn’t completely absolved. Yet admitting the fight, coupled with Shaw’s other conclusions about the man, suggested he had nothing to do with his daughter’s disappearance.

The reason for the early offer of a reward was legitimate: it would be unbearable to think that he’d been responsible for driving his daughter from the house and into the arms of a murderer or rapist or kidnapper.

Mulliner said now, his voice flat as Iowa and barely audible, “If anything happens to her … I’d just …” He stopped speaking and swallowed.

“I’ll help you,” Shaw said.

“Thank you!” A whisper. He now broke into real tears, racking. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …”

“Not a worry.”

Mulliner looked at his watch. “Hell, I have to get to work. Last thing I want to do. But I can’t lose this job. Please call me. Whatever you find, call me right away.”

Shaw capped his pen and replaced it in his jacket pocket and rose, closing the notebook. He saw himself out.

6.

In assessing how to proceed in pursuing a reward—or, for that matter, with most decisions in life—Colter Shaw followed his father’s advice.

“Countering a threat, approaching a task, you assess the odds of each eventuality, look at the most likely one first and then come up with a suitable strategy.”

The likelihood that you can outrun a forest fire sweeping uphill on a windy day: ten percent. The likelihood you can survive by starting a firebreak and lying in the ashes while the fire burns past you: eighty percent.

Ashton Shaw: “The odds of surviving a blizzard in the high mountains. If you hike out: thirty percent. If you shelter in a cave: eighty percent.”

“Unless,” eight-year-old Dorion, always the practical one, had pointed out, “there’s a momma grizzly bear with her cubs inside.”

“That’s right, Button. Then your odds go down to really, really tiny. Though here it’d be a black bear. Grizzlies are extinct in California.”

Shaw was now sitting in his Chevy outside the Mulliners’ residence, notebook on lap, computer open beside him. He was juggling percentages of Sophie’s fate.

While he hadn’t told Mulliner, he believed the highest percentage was that she was dead.

He gave it sixty percent. Most likely murdered by a serial killer, rapist or a gang wannabe as part of an initiation (the Bay Area crews were among the most vicious in the nation). A slightly less likely cause of death was that she had been killed in an accident, her bike nudged off the road by a drunk or texting driver, who’d fled.

That number, of course, left a significant percentage likelihood that she was alive—taken at the hands of a kidnapper for ransom or sex, or pissed at Dad about the move and, the Luka poodle factor notwithstanding, was crashing on a friend’s couch for a few days, to make him sweat.

Shaw turned to his computer—when on a job he subscribed to local news feeds and scanned for stories that might be helpful. Now he was looking for the discovery of unidentified bodies of women who might be Sophie (none) or reports over the past few weeks of serial kidnappers or killers (several incidents, but the perpetrator was preying on African American prostitutes in the Tenderloin of San Francisco). He expanded his search around the entire northern California area and found nothing relevant.

He skimmed his notes regarding what Frank Mulliner had told him, following his own search for the girl Wednesday night and yesterday. He’d called as many friends, fellow students and coworkers whose names he could find. Mulliner had told Shaw that his daughter had not been the target of a stalker that any of them knew of.

“There is someone you ought to know about, though.”

That someone was Sophie’s former boyfriend. Kyle Butler was twenty, also a student, though at a different college. Sophie and Kyle had broken up, Mulliner believed, about a month ago. They’d dated off and on for a year and it had become serious only in early spring. While he didn’t know why they split he was pleased.

Shaw’s note: Mulliner: KB didn’t treat Sophie the way she should be treated. Disrespectful, said mean things. No violence. KB did have a temper and was impulsive. Also, into drugs. Pot mostly.

Mulliner had no picture of the boy—and Sophie had apparently purged her room of his image—but Shaw had found a number on Facebook. Kyle was a solidly built, tanned young man with a nest of curly blond hair atop his Greek god head. His social media profile was devoted to heavy metal music, surfing and legalizing drugs. Mulliner believed he worked part-time installing car stereos.

Mulliner: No idea what Sophie saw in him. Believed maybe Sophie thought herself unattractive, a “geek girl,” and he was a handsome, cool surfer dude.

Her father reported that the boy hadn’t taken the breakup well and his behavior grew inappropriate. One day he called thirty-two times. After she blocked his number, Sophie found him on their front yard, sobbing and begging to be taken back. Eventually he calmed down and they flopped into a truce. They’d meet for coffee occasionally. They went to a play “as friends.” Kyle hadn’t pushed hard for reconciliation, though Sophie told her father he wanted desperately to get back together.

Domestic kidnappings almost always are parental abductions. (Solving one such snatching, on a whim, in fact, had started Shaw on his career as a reward seeker.) Occasionally, though, a former husband or boyfriend would spirit away the woman of his passion.

Love, Colter Shaw had learned, could be an endlessly refillable prescription of madness.

Shaw put Kyle’s guilt at ten percent. He might have been obsessed with Sophie, but he also seemed too normal and weepy to turn dark. However, the kid’s drug use was a concern. Had Kyle inadvertently jeopardized her life by introducing her to a dealer who didn’t want to be identified? Had she witnessed a hit or other crime, maybe not even knowing it?

He gave this hypothesis twenty percent.

Shaw called the boy’s number. No answer. His message, in his best cop voice, was that he had just spoken to Frank Mulliner and wanted to talk to Kyle about Sophie. He left the number of one of his half dozen active burners, with the caller ID showing Washington, D.C. Kyle might be thinking FBI or, for all Shaw knew, the National Missing Ex-girlfriend Tactical Rescue Operation, or some such.

Shaw then cruised the three miles to Palo Alto, where he found the boy’s beige-and-orange cinder-block apartment complex. The doors were, inexplicably, baby blue. At 3B, he pounded on the door, rather than using the ringer, which he doubted worked anyway, and called out, “Kyle Butler. Open the door.”

Cop-like, yet not cop.

No response, and he didn’t think the boy was dodging him, since a glance through the unevenly stained curtain showed not a flicker of movement inside.

He left one of his business cards in the door crack. It gave only his name and the burner number. He wrote: I need to talk to you about Sophie. Call me.

Shaw returned to his car and sent Kyle’s picture, address and phone number to his private investigator, Mack, requesting background, criminal and weapons checks. Some information he wanted was not public but Mack rarely differentiated between what was public and what was not.

Shaw skimmed the notebook once more and fired up the engine, pulling into traffic. He’d decided where the next step of the investigation would take him.

Lunch.

7.

Colter Shaw walked through the door of the Quick Byte Café in Mountain View.

This was where Sophie had been at about 6 p.m. on Wednesday—just before she disappeared.

On Thursday, Mulliner had stopped in here, asking about his daughter. He’d had no luck but had convinced the manager to put up a MISSING flyer on a corkboard, where it now was pinned beside cards for painters, guitar and yoga instruction and three other MISSING announcements—two dogs and a parrot.

Shaw was surveying the place and smelling the aroma of hot grease, wilty onions, bacon and batter (BREAKFAST SERVED ALL DAY).

The Quick Byte, EST. 1968, couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a bar, a restaurant or a coffee shop, so it opted to be all three.

It might also function as a computer showroom, since most of the patrons were hunched over laptops.

The front was spattered plate glass, facing a busy commercial Silicon Valley street. The walls were of dark paneling and the floor uneven wood. In the rear, backless stools sat in front of the dim bar, which was presently unmanned. Not surprising, given the hour—11:30 a.m.—though the patrons didn’t seem the alcohol-drinking sort; they exuded geek. Lots of stocking caps, baggy sweats, Crocs. The majority were white, followed by East Asian and then South Asian. There were two black patrons, a couple. The median age in the place was about twenty-five.

The walls were lined with black-and-white and color photographs of computers and related artifacts from the early days of tech: vacuum tubes, six-foot-high metal racks of wires and square gray components, oscilloscopes, cumbersome keyboards. Display cards beneath the images gave the history of the devices. One was called Babbage’s Analytical Engine—a computer powered by steam, one hundred and fifty years old.

Shaw approached the ORDER HERE station. He asked for green huevos rancheros and a coffee with cream. Cornbread instead of tortilla chips. The skinny young man behind the counter handed him the coffee and a wire metal stand with a numbered card, 97, stuck in the round spiral on top.

Shaw picked a table near the front door and sat, sipping coffee and scanning the place.

The unbusy kitchen served up the food quickly and the waitress, a pretty young woman, inked and studded, brought the order. Shaw ate quickly, half the dish. Though it was quite good and he was hungry, the eggs were really just a passport to give him legitimacy here.

On the table he spread out the pictures of Sophie that her father had given him. He took a shot of them with his iPhone, which he then emailed to himself. He logged on to his computer, through a secure jetpack, opened the messages and loaded the images onto the screen. He positioned the laptop so that anyone entering or leaving the café could see the screen with its montage of the young woman.

Coffee in hand, he wandered to the Wall of Fame and, like a curious tourist, began reading. Shaw used computers and the internet extensively in the reward business and, at another time, he would have found the history of high technology interesting. Now, though, he was concentrating on watching his computer in the reflection in the display case glass.

Since Shaw had no legal authority whatsoever, he was present here by the establishment’s grace. Occasionally, if the circumstances were right and the situation urgent, he’d canvass patrons. Sometimes he got a lead or two. More frequently he was ignored or, occasionally, asked to leave.

So he often did what he was doing now: fishing.

The computer, with its bright pictures of Sophie, was bait. As people glanced at the photos, Shaw would watch them. Did anyone pay particular attention to the screen? Did their face register recognition? Concern? Curiosity? Panic? Did they look around to see whose computer it was?

He observed a few curious glances at the laptop screen but they weren’t curious enough to raise suspicion.

Shaw could get away with studying the wall for about five minutes before it looked odd, so he bought time by pulling out his mobile and having an imaginary conversation. This was good for another four minutes. Then he ran out of fake and returned to his seat. Probably fifteen people had seen the pictures and the reactions were all blasé.

He sat at the table, sipping coffee and reading texts and emails on his phone. The computer was still open for all to see. There were no tugs on the fishing line. He returned to the ORDER HERE counter, now staffed by a woman in her thirties, a decade removed from the waitress who had served him but with similar facial bones. Sisters, he guessed.

She was barking orders and Shaw took her to be the manager or owner.

“Help you? Your eggs okay?” The voice was a pleasant alto.

“They were good. Question: That woman on the bulletin board?”

“Oh, yeah. Her father came in. Sad.”

“It is. I’m helping him out, looking for her.”

A statement as true as rain. He tended not to mention rewards unless the subject came up.

“That’s good of you.”

“Any customers say anything about her?”

“Not to me. I can ask people who work here. Anybody knows anything, I’ll call you. You have a card?”

He gave her one. “Thanks. He’s anxious to find her.”

The woman said, “Sophie. Always liked that name. It says ‘student.’ The flyer does.”

Shaw said, “She’s at Concordia. Business. And codes part-time at GenSys. According to her father, she’s good at it. I wouldn’t know a software program if it bit me.”

Colter Shaw was quiet by nature, yet when working a job he intentionally rambled. He’d found that this put people at ease.

The woman added, “And I like what you called her.”

“What was that?”

“Woman. Not girl. She looks young and most people would’ve called her girl.” She glanced toward the waitress, willowy and in baggy brown jeans and a cream-colored blouse. She nodded the server over.

“This’s my daughter, Madge,” the manager said.

Oh. Not sister.

“And I’m Tiffany.” Mom read the card. “Colter.” She extended a hand and they shook.

“That’s a name?” Madge said.

“Says so right here.” Tiffany flicked the card. “He’s helping find that missing woman.”

Madge said, “Oh, girl on the poster?”

Tiffany gave a wry glance toward Shaw.

Girl …

Madge said, “I saw her pictures on your computer. I wondered if you were a policeman or something?”

“No. Just helping her dad. We think this is the last place she was at before she disappeared.”

The daughter’s face tightened. “God. What do you think happened?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“I’ll check inside,” said Tiffany, the mother—the generation-bending names of the women were disorienting. He watched her collect the flyer from the corkboard and disappear into the kitchen, where, presumably, it was displayed to cooks and busboys.

She returned, pinning up the flyer once more. “Nothing. There’s a second shift. I’ll make sure they see it.” She sounded as if she definitely would, Shaw thought. He was lucky to have found a mother, and one close to her child. She’d sympathize more with the parent of missing offspring.

Shaw thanked her. “You mind if I ask your customers if they’ve seen her?”

The woman seemed troubled and Shaw suspected she wouldn’t want to bother clientele with unpleasant news.

That wasn’t the reason for the frown, however. Tiffany said, “Don’t you want to look at the security video first?”

8.

Well. This was interesting news. Shaw had looked for cameras when he’d first walked in but had seen none. “You’ve got one?”

Tiffany turned her bright blue eyes away from Shaw’s face and pointed to a small round object in the liquor bottles behind the bar.

A hidden security camera in a commercial establishment was pointless, since the main purpose was deterrence. Maybe they were getting …

Tiffany said, “We’re getting a new system put in. I brought mine from home for the time being. Just so we’d have something.” She turned to Madge and asked the young woman to show Sophie’s picture to customers. “Sure, Mom.” The waitress took the flyer and started on her canvass.

Tiffany directed Shaw into the cluttered office. She said, “I would’ve told her father about the tape but I wasn’t here when he brought the poster in. Didn’t think about it again. Not till you showed up. Have a seat.” With a hand on his shoulder, Tiffany guided Shaw into an unsteady desk chair in front of a fiberboard table, on which sat stacks of paper and an old desktop computer. Bending down, her arm against his, she began to type. “When?”