The Never Game

According to GPS, the Destiny Entertainment Inc. offices were not far away. Shaw recalled Foyle telling him that The Whispering Man was the company’s main game. Maybe they hadn’t had any other big hits and the failures had kept the company on the wrong side of the tracks.

Shaw mentioned this to Standish as she pulled off the highway onto surface streets. “But it’s my wrong side of the tracks.”

He glanced her way.

“Home sweet home. EPA. East Palo Alto. Grew up here.”

“Sorry.”

She scoffed. “No offense taken. EPA... Doesn’t that confuse everybody? It’s really north of the other Palo Alto. Place so far on the wrong side you couldn’t even hear any train whistle. Your father liked his cowboys. Well, this was Tombstone back in the day. Highest murder rate in the country.”

“In Silicon Valley?”

“Yessir. It was mostly black then, thank you, because of the redlining and racial deed restrictions in SV.” She chuckled. “When I was growing up here, there was gunfire every night. We kids — I have three brothers — we’d hang out in Whiskey Gulch. Stanford was dry and didn’t allow any liquor within a mile of campus. And what was one mile and one block away? Yep, a strip mall in EPA, with package stores and bars galore. That’s where we’d play. Until Daddy came looking and dragged us home.

“’Course, the Gulch all got torn down and replaced with University Circle. Lord, there’s a Four Seasons Hotel there now! Just imagine that sacrilege, Colter. Last year, the murder rate was one — and that was a murder/suicide, some computer geek and his roommate. My daddy’d roll over in his grave.”

“You lose him recently?”

“Oh, years ago. Daddy, he didn’t benefit from the new and improved statistics. He was shot and killed. Right in front of our apartment.”

“That why you went into policing?”

“One hundred percent. High school, college in three years and into the academy at twenty-one, the minimum age. Then signed on with EPA police. I worked street while I got my master’s in criminal justice at night. Then moved to CID. Criminal investigation. Loved the job. But...” A wan smile.

“What happened?”

“Didn’t work out.” She added, “I didn’t blend. So I asked for a transfer to the Task Force.”

Shaw was confused. The population he was looking at was mostly black.

She noted his expression. “Oh, not that way. I’m talking ’bout my father. I didn’t explain. Yes, I went into policing because of him. But not because he was some poor innocent got gunned down in front of Momma and me. He was an OG.”

Shaw could imagine how her fellow cops would respond to working with the daughter of an original gangster whose crew might’ve shot at or even killed their friends.

“He was a captain in the Pulgas Avenue 13s. Warrant team from Santa Clara Narcotics came after him and it went south. After I was in, I snuck his file. My oh my, Daddy was a bad one. Drugs and guns, guns and drugs. Suspect in three hits. They couldn’t make two of the cases. The one where they had a good chance, the witness disappeared. Probably in the Bay off Ravenswood.”

A click of her tongue. “Wouldn’t you know it, my brothers and I would come home from school and, damn, if Momma was sick he’d have dinner ready and be reading us Harry Potter. He’d take us to the A’s games. Half my girlfriends didn’t have a father. Daddy was there. Until, yeah, he wasn’t.”

They continued in silence for five minutes, driving over dusty surface streets, wads of trash and soda and beer cans on the sidewalks and curbside. “It’s over there.” She nodded at a three-story building that seemed to be about fifty, sixty years old. This structure, along with several others nearby, wasn’t as shabby as the approach suggested they’d be. Destiny Entertainment’s headquarters was freshly painted, bright white. Shaw could see some smart storefront offices: graphic design and advertising agencies, a catering company, consulting.

Tombstone as reimagined by Silicon Valley developers.

They parked in the company’s lot. The other cars here were modest. Not the Teslas, Maseratis and Beemers of the nearby Google and Apple dimension. The lobby was small and decorated with what seemed to be artists’ renditions of the Whispering Man, ranging from stick drawings to professional-quality oils and acrylics. They’d have been done, he supposed, by subscribers. Shaw looked for the stenciled image that the kidnapper was fond of but didn’t see it. Standish seemed to be doing the same.

The receptionist told them Marty Avon would be free in a few minutes. A display caught Shaw’s eye and they walked to a waist-high table, six by six feet, that held a model of a suburban village. A sign overhead read WELCOME TO SILICONVILLE.

A placard explained that the model was a mock-up of a proposed residential development that would be built on property in unincorporated Santa Clara and San Jose counties. Marty Avon had conceived of the idea in reaction to the “excruciatingly expensive” cost of finding a home in the area.