The Never Game

Crouching, he moved closer. Through the breeze-waving trees, he could make out what might indeed have been a vehicle. With the glare it was impossible to tell. The light wavered—which might have been due to branches bending in the wind. Or because someone who’d exited the car had walked to the edge of the ridge and was looking down.

Was this a jogger stretching before a run, or someone pausing on a long drive home to pee?

Or was it X, spying on the man with a troubling interest in Sophie Mulliner’s disappearance?

Shaw started through the brush, keeping low, moving toward the base of the ravine, above which the car sat—if it was a car. The hill was quite steep. This was nothing to Shaw, who regularly ascended vertical rock faces, but the terrain was such that a climb would be noisy.

Tricky. Without being seen, he’d have to get almost to the top to be able to push aside the flora and snap a cell phone picture of the tag number of the jogger. Or pee-er. Or kidnapper.

Shaw got about twenty feet toward the base of the hill before he lost sight of the ridge, due to the angle. And it was then, hearing a snap of branch behind him, that he realized his mistake. He’d been concentrating so much on finding the quietest path ahead of him that he’d been ignoring his flank and rear.

Never forget there are three hundred and sixty degrees of threat around you …

Just as he turned, he saw the gun lifting toward the center of his chest and he heard a guttural growl from the hoodie-clad young man. “Don’t fucking move. Or you’re dead.”

14.

Colter Shaw glanced at the attacker with irritation and muttered, “Quiet.”

His eyes returned to the access road above them.

“I’ll shoot,” called the young man. “I will!”

Shaw stepped forward fast and yanked the weapon away and tossed it into the grass.

“Ow, shit!”

Shaw whispered sternly, “I told you: Quiet! I mean it.” He pushed through a knotty growth of forsythia, trying to get a view of the road. From above came the sound of a car door slamming, an engine starting and a gravel-scattering getaway.

Shaw scrabbled up the incline as fast as he could. At the top, breathing hard, he scanned the road. Nothing but dust. He climbed back down to the ravine, where the young man was on his knees, patting the grass for the weapon.

“Leave it, Kyle,” Shaw muttered.

The kid froze. “You know me?”

He was Kyle Butler, Sophie’s ex-boyfriend. Shaw recognized him from his Facebook page.

Shaw had noted the pistol was a cheap pellet gun, a one-shot model whose projectiles couldn’t even break the skin. He picked up the toy and strode to a storm drain and pitched it in.

“Hey!”

“Kyle, somebody sees you with that and you get shot. Which entrance did you use to get into the park?”

The boy rose and stared, confused.

“Which entrance?” Shaw had learned that the quieter your voice, the more intimidating you were. He was very quiet now.

“Over there.” Nodding toward the sound of the motorbikes. The main entrance to the east. He swallowed. Butler’s hands rose fast, as if Shaw presently had a gun on him.

“You can lower your arms.”

He did so. Slowly.

“Did you see that car parked on the ridge?”

“What ridge?”

Shaw pointed to the access road.

“No, man. I didn’t. Really.”

Shaw looked him over, recalling: surfer dude. The boy had frothy blond hair, a navy-blue T-shirt under the black hoodie, black nylon workout pants. A handsome young man, though his eyes were a bit blank.

“Did Frank Mulliner tell you I was here?”

Another pause. What to say, what not to say? Finally: “Yeah. I called him after I got your message. He said you said you found her phone in the park.”

The excess of verbs in the last sentence explained a lot to Shaw. So, the lovesick boy had conjured up the idea that Shaw had kidnapped his former girlfriend to get the reward. He remembered that Butler’s job was bolting big speakers into Subarus and Civics and his passion was riding a piece of waxed wood on rollicking water. Shaw decided that the percentage likelihood of Kyle Butler being the kidnapper had dropped to nil.

But there was that related hypothesis. “Was Sophie ever with you when you scored weed, or coke, or whatever you do?”

“What’re you talking about?”

First things first.

“Kyle, does it make sense that I’d kidnap somebody hoping her father would post a reward? Wouldn’t I just ask for a ransom?”

He looked away. “I guess. Okay, man.”

The sound of the motorbikes rose and fell, buzz-sawing in the distance.

Butler continued: “I’m just … It’s all I can think about: Where is she? What’s happening to her? Will I ever see her again?” His voice choked.

“At any time was she with you when you scored?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Why?”

He explained that a dealer might have been concerned that Sophie was a witness who could identify him.

“Oh God, no. The dudes I buy from? They’re not players. Just, like, students or board heads. You know, surfers. Not bangers from East Palo or Oakland.”

This seemed credible.

Shaw asked, “You have any idea who might’ve taken her? Her dad didn’t think she had any stalkers.”

“No …” The young man’s voice faded. His head was down, slowly shaking now. Shaw saw a glistening in his eyes. “It’s all my fault. Fuck.”

“Your fault?”

“Yeah, man. See, Wednesdays we always did things together. They were like our weekend, ’cause I had to work Saturday and Sunday. I’d go out and new-school—you know, trick surf at Half Moon or Maverick. Then I’d pick her up and we’d hang with friends or do dinner, a movie. If I hadn’t … If I hadn’t fucked up so bad, that’s what we would’ve done last Wednesday. And this never would’ve happened. All the weed. I got mean, I was a son of a bitch. I didn’t want to; it just happened. She’d had enough. She didn’t want to be with a loser.” He wiped his face angrily. “But I’m clean. Thirty-four days. And I’m switching majors. Engineering. Computers.”

So Kyle Butler was the knight coming to San Miguel Park with a BB gun to confront the dragon and rescue the damsel. He’d win her back.

Shaw looked toward the shoulder of Tamyen Road. Still no cops. He called the Task Force. Wiley was out. Standish was out.

“Find me a bag,” Shaw said to Butler.

“Bag?”

“Paper, plastic, anything. Look on the shoulder. I’ll look here.”

Butler climbed the hill to Tamyen Road and Shaw walked the trails, hoping for a trash can. He found none. Then he heard: “Got one!” Butler trotted down the hill. “By the side of the road.” He held up the white bag. “From Walgreens. Is that okay?”

Colter Shaw was a man who smiled rarely. This drew a faint grin. “Perfect.”

Sticking to the grass once more, he walked to the bloodstained rock and picked it up with the bag.

“What’re you going to do with it?”

“Find a private lab to do a DNA test—I’m sure it’s Sophie’s blood.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“No, it’s just from a scrape. Nothing serious.”

“Why’re you doing that? Because the cops aren’t?”

“That’s right.”

Butler’s eyes flashed wide. “Yo, man, let’s look for her together! If the cops aren’t doing shit.”

“It’s a good idea. But I need your help first.”

“Yeah, man. Anything.”

“Her father’s on his way home from work.”

“His weekend job’s over in the East Bay.” Butler’s face showed pity. “Two hours each way. Got another job during the week. And he still couldn’t afford to keep their house, you know?”

“When he gets back, I need you to find out something.”

“Sure.”

“Sorry, Kyle. Might be kind of tough. I need to find out if she’s been dating anybody. Go through her room, talk to friends.”

“You think that’s who it is?”

“I don’t know. We have to look at every possibility.”

Butler gave a wan smile. “Sure. I’ll do it. It’s just a stupid dream I had anyway, us getting back together. It’s not going to happen.” The young man turned and started up the hill. Then he stopped and returned. He shook Shaw’s hand. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to go all Narcos on you. You know?”

“Not a worry.”

He watched Butler hike back toward the far entrance.

On his mission.

His futile mission.

From his interview with her father and examination of her room, Shaw didn’t believe that Sophie was seeing anyone, not seriously, much less anyone who might have kidnapped her. But it was important for the poor kid to be elsewhere when Shaw discovered what he was now sure he’d find: Sophie Mulliner’s body.

15.

Shaw was driving along winding Tamyen Road, having left San Miguel Park behind.

A serial kidnapper stashing his victims in a dungeon for any length of time wasn’t an impossible likelihood. It did seem rare enough, though, that he focused on a more realistic fate: that Sophie’d been the victim of a sexual sociopath. In Shaw’s experience, the majority of rapists might be serial actors, but almost always with multiple victims. The rapist’s inclination was to kill and move on.

This meant Sophie’s corpse lay somewhere nearby. X was clearly not stupid—the tracker on her bike, the obscuring clothing, the selection of a good attack zone. He wouldn’t drive any distance with a body in his trunk. There might be an accident or traffic violation or a checkpoint. He’d do what he wanted, near San Miguel Park, and flee. In this southwest portion of San Francisco Bay were acres and acres of wet, sandy earth soft enough to dig a quick, shallow grave. But the area was open, with good visibility for hundreds and hundreds of yards; X would want his privacy.

Shaw came to a large, abandoned self-storage operation of about a hundred compartments. The facility was in the middle of an expanse of weeds and sandy ground. He parked and noted that the gap in the chain-link gate was easily wide enough for two people to slip through. He did so himself and began walking up and down the aisles. It was an easy place to search because the paneled overhead doors to the units had been removed and lay in a rust-festering pile behind one of the buildings, like the wings of huge roaches. Maybe this was done for safety’s sake, the way refrigerator doors are removed upon discarding so a child can’t get trapped inside. Whatever the reason, this practice made it simple to see that Sophie’s body wasn’t here.

Soon the Malibu was cruising again.

He saw a feral dog tugging something from the ground about thirty feet away. Something red and white.

Blood and bone?

Shaw braked fast and climbed out of the Chevy. The dog wasn’t a big creature, maybe forty or fifty pounds and rib-skinny. Shaw approached slowly, keeping a steady pace.

Never, ever startle an animal …

The creature moved toward him with its black eyes narrowed. One fang was missing, which gave it an ominous look. Shaw avoided eye contact and continued forward without hesitating.

Until he was able to see what the dog was tugging up.

A Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket.

He left the scrawny thing to its illusory dinner and returned to the car.

Tamyen Road made a long loop past more marshes and fields, and with San Francisco Bay to his left he continued south.

The cracked and bleached asphalt led him to a row of trees and brush, behind which was a large industrial facility, seemingly closed for decades.

An eight-foot-high chain-link fence encircled the weed-choked facility. There were three gates, about thirty yards apart. Shaw pulled up to what seemed to be the main one. He counted five—no, six—dilapidated structures, marred with peeling beige paint and rust, sprouting pipes and tubing and wires. Some walls bore uninspired graffiti. The outlying buildings were one-story. In the center was an ominous, towering box, with a footprint of about a hundred by two hundred feet; it was five stories high and above it soared a metal smokestack, twenty feet in diameter at the base, tapering slightly as it rose.

The grounds abutted the Bay and the skeleton of a wide pier jutted fifty yards into the gently rocking water. Maybe maritime equipment had been fabricated here.

Shaw edged the car off the driveway. There was nowhere to hide the vehicle completely, so he parked on the far side of a stand of foliage. Difficult to see from the road. Why risk a run-in with local cops for violating the old yet unambiguous NO TRESPASSING signs? Shaw was mindful too of the individual twenty minutes ago possibly surveilling him from the ridge above San Miguel Park. Person X, he might as well assume. He placed his computer bag and the bloody rock in the trunk. He scanned the road, the forest on the other side of it, the grounds here. He saw no one. He believed that a car had driven through the main gate at some point in the recent past. The grounds were tall grass and bent in a way that suggested a vehicle’s transit.

Shaw walked to the gate, which was secured by a piece of chain and a lock. He wasn’t looking forward to scaling the fence. It was topped with the upward-pointed snipped-off ends of the links, not as dangerous as razor wire but sharp enough to draw blood.

He wondered if there was any give to the two panels of this gate, as there had been at the self-storage operation. Shaw tugged. The two sides parted only a few inches. He took hold of the large padlock to get a better grip. He pulled hard and it opened.

The lock was one of those models without keys; instead they have numbered dials on the bottom. The shank had been pushed in. Whoever had done it had not spun the dials to relock the mechanism. Two things intrigued Shaw. First, the lock was new. Second, the code was not the default—usually 0-0-0-0 or 1-2-3-4—but, he could see by looking at the dials, 7-4-9-9. Which meant someone had been using it to secure the gate and had neglected to lock it the most recent time he had been here.

Why? Maybe the laziness of a security guard?

Or because the visitor had entered recently, knowing he’d be leaving soon.

Which meant that perhaps he was still here.

Call Wiley?

Not yet.

He’d have to give the detective something concrete.

He opened the gate, stepped inside and replaced the lock as it had been. He then walked quickly over the weed-filled driveway for twenty yards to the first building—a small guardhouse. He glanced in. Empty. He scanned two other nearby buildings, Warehouse 3 and Warehouse 4.

Keeping low, Shaw moved to the closest of these, eyes scanning the vista, noting the vantage points from which a shooter could aim. While he had no particular gut feeling that he was in fact in any cross-hairs, the lock that should have been locked and wasn’t flipped a switch of caution within him.

Bears’ll come at you pushing brush. You’ll hear. Mountain lions will growl. You’ll hear. Wolf packs’re silver. You’ll see. You know where snakes’ll be. But a man who wants to shoot you? You’ll never hear, you’ll never see, you’ll never know what rock he’s hiding under.

Shaw looked into each of the warehouses, pungent with mold and completely empty. He then moved along the wide driveway between these buildings and the big manufacturing facility. Here he could see faded words painted on the brick, ten feet high, forty long, the final letters weathered to nothing.

AGW INDUSTRIES, INC.—FROM OUR HANDS TO Y

Shaw stepped across the driveway and into the shadows of the big building.

You’re the best tracker in the family …

Not his father’s words, his mother’s.

He was looking for a trail. In the wild, cutting for sign is noting paw prints and claw marks, disturbed ground, broken branches, tufts of animal coat in brambles. Now, in suburbia, Colter Shaw was looking for tire treads or footprints. He saw only grass that might have been bent by a car a month ago—or thirty minutes.

Shaw continued to the main building—the loading dock in the back, where the vehicle might have stopped. He quietly climbed the stairs, four feet up, and walked to a door. He tried to open it. The knob turned yet the door held fast.

Someone had driven sharp, black Sheetrock screws into the jamb. He checked the door at the opposite end of the dock. The same. At the back of the dock was a window of mesh-impregnated glass and that too was sealed. The screws appeared new, just like the lock.

This gave Shaw a likely scenario: X had raped and killed Sophie and left the body inside, screwed the doors and windows shut to keep trespassers from finding her.

Now, time to call the police.

He was reaching for his phone when he was startled by a male voice: “Mr. Shaw!”

He climbed off the loading dock and walked along the back of the building.

Kyle Butler was approaching. “Mr. Shaw. There you are!”

What the hell was he doing here?

Shaw was thinking of the open gate, the likelihood that the kidnapper was still here. He held his finger to his lips and then gestured for the boy to crouch.

Kyle paused, confused. He said, “There’s somebody else here. I saw his car in a parking lot back over there.”

He was pointing to the line of trees on the other side of which was one of the outlier structures.

“Kyle! Get down!”

“Do you think Sophie’s—” Before he finished his sentence, a pistol shot resounded. Butler’s head jerked back and a mist of red popped into the air. He dropped straight to the ground, a bundle of dark clothing and limp flesh.

Two shots followed—make-sure bullets—striking Butler’s leg and chest, tugging at his clothing.

Think. Fast. The shooter would’ve heard Butler calling him and would know basically where Shaw was. And to make the headshot, he would have been close.

But the shooter—most likely X—would also be cautious. He would have seen Shaw at San Miguel Park and suspected he wasn’t the law but he couldn’t be sure. And would be assuming Shaw was armed.

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