The Never Game

“I don’t think it’s about money. There might not even be a motive. It could be he’s just deranged.” Shaw was going with he; no need to muddy the conversation with talk about gender.

Byrd turned his red eyes to Shaw. “You found that girl. I want to hire you to find Henry. Detective Standish seems smart... Well, I want you. Name your price. Anything. I may have to borrow but I’m good for it.”

Shaw said, “I don’t work for a fee.”

“Her father... He paid something.”

“That was a reward.”

“Then I’ll offer a reward. How much do you want?”

“I don’t want any money. I have an interest in the case now. Let me ask you some questions. Then I’ll see what I can do.”

“God... Thank you, Mr. Shaw.”

“Colter’s fine.” He withdrew his notebook and uncapped the pen. “With Sophie, the kidnapper spotted her ahead of time and followed her. It’s logical that he’d have done the same with Henry.”

“You mean, staking him out?”

“Probably. He was very organized. I want to check all of the places Henry was, say, thirty-six hours before he was kidnapped.”

Byrd’s fingers knitted once more and the knuckles grew white. “He was here, of course, at night. And we had dinner at Julio’s.” A nod up the street. “Two nights ago. The lecture at Stanford last night. Other than that, I have no idea. He drives all over the Valley. San Francisco, Oakland too. He must drive fifty miles a day for research. That’s why the blogs are so popular.”

“Do you know about any meetings in the past few days?”

“Just the lecture he was driving home from when he was kidnapped. Other than that, no. I’m sorry.”

“What articles was he working on? We can try to piece together where he was.”

Byrd looked down at the sidewalk at their feet. “The one he was most passionate about was an exposé about the high cost of real estate in SV — Silicon Valley, you know?”

Shaw nodded.

“Then there was an article about game companies data-mining players’ personal information and selling it. The third was about revenue streams in the software industry.

“For the real estate blog, he drove everywhere. He talked to the tax authorities, zoning board brokers, homeowners, renters, landlords, builders... For the data-mining and revenue-stream stories, he went to Google and Apple, Facebook, a bunch of other companies; I don’t remember which.” He tapped his knee. “Oh, Walmart.”

“Walmart?”

“On El Camino Real. He mentioned he was going there and I said we’d just been shopping. He said no, it was for work.”

“The panel at Stanford last night? What facility?”

“Gates Computer Science Building.”

“Did he go to any LBGT rights meetings lately?”

“No, not recently.”

Shaw asked him to look over Thompson’s notes and any appointment calendars he could find to see where else Thompson might have gone. Byrd said he would.

“Would Henry have gone to the Quick Byte Café in Mountain View recently?”

“We’ve been there, but not for months.” Byrd couldn’t sit still. He rose and looked at a jacaranda tree, vibrantly purple. “What was it like for the girl? Sophie. The police wouldn’t tell me much.”

Shaw explained about her being locked in a room, abandoned. “There were some things he left. She used them to escape and rigged a trap to attack him.”

“She did that?”

Shaw nodded.

“Henry would hate that. Just hate it. He’s claustrophobic.” Byrd began to cry. Finally he controlled himself. “It’s so quiet in the condo. I mean, when Henry’s away and I’m home, it’s quiet. Now, I don’t know, it’s a different kind of quiet. You know what I mean?”

Shaw knew exactly what the man meant but there was nothing he could say to make it better.

28

Shaw was making the rounds of places Henry Thompson had been prior to his kidnapping.

Apple and Google were big and formidable institutions and without the name of an employee Thompson had contacted there, Shaw had no entrée to start the search. And there’d be no chance to reprise any Quick Byte scenario in which a Tiffany would help him play spy and give him access to security videos.

Stanford University was a more logical choice. The kidnapper was likely to have followed Thompson from the lecture, then passed him on a deserted stretch of road, stopped a hundred or so yards ahead and, when Thompson caught up, flung the brick or rock into his windshield.

But the Gates Computer Center, the site of the panel, was in a congested part of the Stanford campus. There was no parking nearby and Thompson might have walked as far as two hundred yards in any direction to collect his car. He shared Thompson’s picture with a handful of employees, guards and shopkeepers; no one recognized him.

Shaw knew the road where Thompson had been taken. He drove past it. The car had been towed but a portion of the shoulder was encircled by yellow tape. It was a grassy area; probably picked by X to avoid leaving tire prints, like at the factory. There were no houses or other buildings nearby.

Then there was the Walmart that Byrd had said Thompson had driven to. Why had the blogger’s research taken him to a superstore?