The Never Game

Owing to the drought, the place was not the verdant green that Rand McNally had promised, but was largely brown and beige and dusty.

The main entrance was on the opposite side of the park but Sophie’s route would have brought her here, to the bike paths off the broad shoulder of Tamyen Road. While not familiar with the area, he knew the avenue’s name. Hundreds of years ago the Tamyen, a tribe of Ohlone native people, had lived in what was now Silicon Valley. Their lands had been lost in a familiar yet particularly shameful episode of genocide — not at the hands of the conquistadors but by local officials after California achieved statehood.

Shaw’s mother, Mary Dove Shaw, believed an ancestor to be an Ohlone elder.

He killed the engine. Here were two openings in the line of brush and shrubbery that separated the shoulder from the park proper. The gaps led down a steep hill to trails, imprinted with many footprints and tire tread marks.

Climbing from the car, Shaw surveyed the expansive park. He heard a sound he knew well. The whine of dirt bikes, a particular pitch that gets under the skin of some but to others — Shaw, for one — is a siren’s song. Motorbiking was illegal here, a sign sternly warned. If he hadn’t been on a job, though, Shaw’d have had his Yamaha off the rack in sixty seconds and on the trails in ninety.

So: One, assume kidnapping. Two, assume it was Person X, in the gray stocking cap and sunglasses. Three, assume X put a tracker on Sophie’s bike and followed her.

How would it have gone down?

X would snatch her here, before she got too far into the park. He’d worry about witnesses, of course, though the area around Tamyen Road wasn’t heavily populated. Shaw had passed a few companies, small fabricators or delivery services. But the buildings had no view of the shoulder. There was little traffic.

The scenario? X spots her. Then what? How would he have approached? Asking for directions?

No, a nineteen-year-old honors student and employee of a tech company wouldn’t fall for that, not in the age of GPS. Exchanging pleasantries to get close to her? That too didn’t seem likely. X would see she was strong and athletic and probably suspicious of a stranger’s approach. And she could zip into the park, away from him, at twenty miles an hour. Shaw decided there’d be no ruse, nothing subtle. X would simply strike fast before Sophie sensed she was a target.

He began walking along the edge of the shoulder nearest the park. He spotted a tiny bit of red. In the grass between the two trail entrances was a triangular shard of plastic — that could easily have come from the reflector on a bike. With a Kleenex he collected the triangle and put it in his pocket. On his phone he found the screenshot of Sophie’s bike outside the Quick Byte — lifted from Tiffany’s security camera video. Yes, it had a red disk reflector on the rear.

Made sense. X had followed Sophie here and — the moment the road was free of traffic — he’d slammed into the back of her bike. She’d have tumbled to the ground and he’d have been on her in an instant, taping her mouth and hands and feet. Into the trunk with her bike and backpack.

San Miguel Park

1 — Bike Path 1

2 — Bike Path 2

3 — Access Road

4 — Collision Point

Some brush had been trampled near the plastic shard. He stepped off the shoulder and peered down the hill. He could see a line of disturbed grass leading directly from where he was standing to the bottom of a small ravine. Maybe the plan hadn’t gone quite as X had hoped. Maybe he’d struck Sophie’s bike too hard, knocking her over the edge, and she’d tumbled down the forty-five-degree slope.

Shaw strode down one path to the place where she would have landed. He crouched. Broken and bent grass, and gouges in the dirt that might have come from a scuffle. Then he spotted a rock the size of a grapefruit. There with a smear on it: brown, the shade of dried blood.

Shaw pulled out his phone and dialed a number he’d programmed in several hours ago. He hit CALL. About ten feet up the hill came a soft sound, repeated every few seconds. It was the Samsung whistling ringtone.

The phone number he’d dialed was Sophie’s.

11

Now, time for the experts.

Shaw called Frank Mulliner and told him what he’d found. The man greeted the news with a gasp.

“Those sons of bitches!”

Shaw didn’t understand at first. Then he realized Mulliner was referring to the police.

“If they’d gotten on board when they should have... I’m calling them now!”

Shaw foresaw disaster: a rampaging parent. He’d seen this before. “Let me handle it.”

“But—”

“Let me handle it.”

Mulliner was silent for a moment. Shaw imagined the man’s mobile was gripped in white, trembling fingers. “All right,” Sophie’s father said. “I’m heading home.”

Shaw got the names of the detectives whom Mulliner had first spoken to about Sophie’s disappearance: Wiley and Standish of the Joint Major Crimes Task Force, based in nearby Santa Clara.