Read Psyc 03_The Call of the Mild for Free Online Page B

approximation of the tone his mother used to use when she caught him feeding his brussels sprouts to the dog. “Thank you so much for the advice.”
    The light ahead was turning yellow. Gus floored it and made a fast left onto Storke Avenue.
    “It’s the least I can do,” Shawn said. “As an experienced private detective, I have a duty to train the generation that’s going to follow me.”
    “You’ve been a private detective for five seconds longer than me,” Gus said. “And that’s only because you said my fly was unzipped when we were walking up to the licensing window, and I stopped to look, so you got your license first.”
    “Which is why I feel I should share my experience and knowledge with you,” Shawn said. “So let’s walk through what we already know.”
    Gus didn’t want to walk through anything, but he knew he’d never get any answers unless he played along. “Ellen Svaco lost her necklace, so she went to the police to ask them to find it,” he said. “They wouldn’t help, so she came to us. We did find it, but then it was stolen by a gun-wielding mime.”
    “Very good,” Shawn said. “You’ve got it all exactly right. Except for one small detail.”
    “What’s that?”
    “All of it,” Shawn said.
    Gus turned right onto El Colegio Road and immediately slammed on the brakes. There was an unbroken line of cars in front of him. He cursed to himself, remembering why he hated coming to Isla Vista. Home of the University of California- Santa Barbara, and situated along some of the most beautiful coastline in California, Isla Vista needed to cram tens of thousands of penniless college students into some of the world’s priciest real estate. That meant packing dozens of people into apartments barely big enough for one, which gave the town a population density somewhere between that of Lower Manhattan and central Beijing. And since rents even for those cramped spaces were so high, very few of the students could afford a car. That meant the streets were flooded with alternative modes of transport—all ridden by people who sincerely believed that traffic laws applied to everyone on the earth except them.
    Fortunately the address Ellen Svaco had given them wasn’t too much farther, and they’d have to cover only a few blocks of the town’s main business district before they’d turn right, so there would be no need to cut across lanes of traffic. But Gus knew it could easily take fifteen minutes to go a quarter mile through the area, and there was no other way to get there.
    Gus resisted the urge to punch the pedal and simply shove the other cars out of his way and tried to put his adrenaline rush to work understanding what was going on.
    “I was there for all of it,” he said. “I remember it as if it happened today. Because it did.”
    “Lassiter had no idea who Ellen Svaco was,” Shawn said.
    “She never went to the police. She told us that story to manipulate us into helping her.”
    “Why all this intrigue? She lost her necklace on a field trip.”
    The car inched forward.
    “I don’t think it was lost,” Shawn said. “I don’t think she’d ever had it. And I have a feeling if we asked at her school, we’d discover that the Descanso Gardens field trip was her idea. But it wasn’t really a field trip.”
    “Then what was it?”
    “A handoff,” Shawn said. “She brought the kids there as cover so she could collect the necklace.”
    “From the tree?”
    “From the lost and found,” Shawn said. “I’m sure someone turned it in a few days before.”
    “Why so long?” Gus said. “And why the lost and found? Why not just give it to her?”
    “Whoever had it must have been worried he was being followed,” Shawn said. “He couldn’t take a chance on meeting Ellen Svaco in person. And then something happened—maybe he caught a glimpse of whoever was following him. He panicked. He ran—but first he stopped by Descanso Gardens and turned the necklace in to the