"Yes, searching for a character from a computer game set loose in real-life Santa Barbara sounds like a much better use of our time than trying to figure out where Tanner actually went," Gus said.

"I'm not the one who brought up the idea," Shawn said. "I said I thought we should look for clues inside the game."

"Why would there be clues inside the game?" Gus said.

"It's called Criminal Genius," Shawn said.

"So?"

"Whoever planned Tanner's disappearance is clearly intelligent," Shawn said. "Can we agree on that much?"

"Since I'm working on the a.s.sumption that Tanner did it himself, yes, we can," Gus said.

"The crime was perfect. There wasn't a single clue left behind," Shawn said. "No one could pull off that kind of job and not want to boast about it somewhere. And having that game sitting out there, the irony would be too great to resist."

"What if the guy who did it doesn't think he's a criminal genius?" Gus said. "What if someone killed Tanner in a moment of panic or pa.s.sion, and then threw some clothes in a suitcase to cover it up?"

"It doesn't matter what the intent was," Shawn said. "The loser who sticks up a 7-Eleven considers himself an evil mastermind if he gets away with it. All crooks do."

"And you know this how?" Gus said.

"The same way I know there isn't a man on Earth who thinks he's a bad father, or a woman who believes she's a lousy driver," Shawn said. "Every crook needs to boast about how smart he is, and the smarter the crook, the bigger the boast. He left a clue in that game."

"What if he didn't work on the game?" Gus said.

For the next twenty-five minutes, Shawn refused to acknowledge Gus' existence. That was fine with Gus. He used the time to discover that Tanner's name wasn't listed on any flights, trains, or ships within three days of his disappearance. Of course, since his car was also missing, that wasn't tremendously helpful, except as a way of ruling out various avenues to investigate. Finally Gus agreed to take an exploratory trip through the game, if only because he couldn't think of any other place to start and a dumb idea seemed better than no idea.

At least that's what he'd told Shawn. As he said the words he could hear their falseness so clearly he began to suspect his voice and lip movements might have fallen out of synch. He couldn't believe that Shawn would fall for his obvious untruth.

But Shawn did. And that disturbed Gus more than anything else. He tried to look at the situation generously: They'd been best friends for so long Shawn had no reason to doubt anything Gus told him.

That wouldn't stop the nagging feeling in the back of Gus' mind that Shawn accepted what Gus had to say only because it matched up with what he wanted to hear. That he was incapable of listening to anything that contradicted his prejudices.

That was why Gus wouldn't tell Shawn what he was really thinking. Not only about this case, but about the agency and about their profession. About his future.

Gus knew he had some serious decisions to make in the next couple of days. And whichever choice he made, it was going to change his life forever.

Chapter Four.

Oh, to be flying again, legs bare in the warm breeze, blond hair streaming against the blue, crowd noise Dopplering to a pulsing beat. To cast off the shackles of gravity and soar, higher each time before the Earth's gentle hand reached up to pull her softly down to that tender embrace of skin and bone and sweat.

This was Juliet O'Hara's dream, the one that recurred too rarely and left her humming all day when it did. The memories of her days on the squad remained with her always, part of her pool of experiences. But the sensation of it, the joyous floating freedom, she could regain only in her sleep.

This was something she never talked about. It was hardly a secret that she'd been a cheerleader in college, and those who didn't know a.s.sumed it based on her looks. If anyone ever asked what those days had been like, she made a joke about dating the quarterback or chanted a halfhearted victory call.

It wasn't that she was ashamed of her cheering days. Although the trajectory from pep leader to cop inevitably led to Buffy the Homicide Detective jokes, she'd been making them longer than anyone. And if the stereotype of the cheerleader was round-heeled and airheaded, she was secure enough in her self-knowledge that she never let other people's prejudices bother her. Let them think she was dumb--she'd find a way to use that to her own advantage.

It wasn't even the difficulty of persuading a noncheerleader that there was a spiritual aspect to the art. She'd never been shy about standing up for anything she believed in, no matter how obscure or unpopular.

But that sensation, that moment of floating--that was private. It belonged to her alone, and she wouldn't share it if she knew how. Every once in a while she'd catch the eye of another former flyer and an understanding would pa.s.s silently between them. They were a sisterhood of the flight, and they had something the rest of the world lacked--a memory of peace, a sense that there was always the possibility of transcendence in the world.

Which was why the tableau into which she had stepped made so little sense.

She and her partner, Head Detective Carlton La.s.siter, had picked up the call as they'd returned to their unmarked car after a fruitless morning searching for witnesses in the previous night's. .h.i.t-and-run death of a wino on State Street. Possible 187 on Lasuen Road.

Lasuen Road was one of Santa Barbara's most beautiful streets, a curving line of ocean-view houses leading up to the El Encanto Hotel. But no neighborhood was safe from crime, not as long as there were people in it. And if she'd had any doubt about that the flashing lights of the three police cruisers outside the rambling Spanish house would have put them to rest.

As La.s.siter pulled the sedan into the long driveway, O'Hara gave the scene a quick once-over. The house looked small from the front, but she knew that like many of its neighbors it was built down the steep hillside, and might have as many as three stories below the ones visible from the street. There was a tiled walkway cutting through a lush lawn toward the heavy oak front door.

A woman was standing in front of that door, staring into s.p.a.ce as if she were trying to figure out how she'd gotten here. She was sheathed in a gray St. John Knits suit that brought out the blue in her striking eyes even from this distance. Long blond hair framed a face that might have looked thirty just moments ago. Shock and grief had undone in a second all the work of Santa Barbara's top plastic surgeons, and there was no hiding the fifty-five years she'd been on the Earth.

O'Hara waited for La.s.siter to meet her on the pa.s.senger's side of the car, and they fell into lockstep as they walked toward the woman. Before they'd made it halfway across the gra.s.s, a uniformed officer stepped between them and the woman.

"DB's down this way," the officer said, attempting to steer them toward a concrete path that ran from the driveway down the hill along the side of the house.

"That's funny," La.s.siter said, whipping off his sungla.s.ses so he could aim his most terrifying glare at the officer. "I don't remember asking for directions. Do you, Detective O'Hara?"

The officer, who looked like he might have graduated from the academy that morning, turned pale. "I didn't mean to--"

"To tell us how to investigate a crime scene?" La.s.siter finished for him. "To determine the order in which we collect our information? Maybe you could save us all a lot of time and just let us know who killed the victim."

The rookie's throat muscles throbbed as if he were fighting to keep his lunch from coming up. He'd seriously overstepped and he knew it. O'Hara might have joined La.s.siter in torturing the kid, until she noticed the dark, wet patch on his uniform shirt just above his badge, and a small beige smudge next to it. Then she understood.

"Tears don't stain unless you let them, Officer Randall," she said, reading his nameplate. "But foundation is a b.i.t.c.h to get out of blues. That's the mother?"

The officer's face went from white to red like litmus paper dunked in lemon juice. "She asked me," the officer started. "That is, she's upset. Understandably upset, since it was her daughter and--"

"Unless she was understandably upset because she killed her daughter," La.s.siter snapped.

"I didn't think--"

"We're well aware of that, Officer Randall," La.s.siter said.

O'Hara could see a real danger that the rookie's tears would soon be joining those of the grieving mother on his shirt. "It's all right, Officer," O'Hara said. "Comforting grieving survivors is part of the job. Just make sure to keep in mind what the most important part of the job is. Now, where's the body?"

O'Hara could sense La.s.siter's irritation without glancing over at him. He wasn't done hazing the rookie yet. But something about this scene was troubling her, and she couldn't figure out what it was. There was nothing new to her about tragedy striking in the best neighborhoods, at the most fortunate people, on the most beautiful of days. Still, ever since they got the call she'd had a rumbling in the back of her mind that this was going to be bad, and she needed to find out just how much.

"Follow this path down the stairs," the officer said quickly, before she could change her mind. "At the end of the house turn right onto the deck. There's a sliding door to the laundry room. She's inside."

"Thank you, Officer," La.s.siter said with exaggerated politeness. "You may go back to comforting the bereaved. But do us one favor. If she should happen to say something--anything--jot it down with a little note about the time, would you?"

Without waiting for an answer, La.s.siter turned and headed toward the stairs. O'Hara considered saying something rea.s.suring to the kid, but really, what was the point? He had screwed up, and he deserved everything her partner had said to him, along with several of the things he'd wanted to but didn't.

O'Hara followed La.s.siter down a steep, narrow flight of concrete steps that plunged down the hill alongside the white stucco wall. Halfway to the garden there was a door set into the side of the house. Out of habit La.s.siter jiggled the k.n.o.b and found it locked, then continued down.

At the bottom of the hill the path led onto a small, flat parcel of garden surrounded by a high hedge of cypresses. The s.p.a.ce had clearly been landscaped by pros some time ago, but since then it had been allowed to go wild. A patch of roses was overrun by weeds, while the gate to the caged vegetable garden had been left open and deer had eaten everything inside down to the roots. Something had gone wrong in this household even before today's tragedy, and O'Hara made a mental note to check whether it was financial or medical or something else that might concern their investigation.

"This way," La.s.siter said, gesturing to the wooden deck that came off the path. She followed him to a sliding gla.s.s door that had been left open and stepped through.

She hadn't thought much about what she was walking into. A bas.e.m.e.nt converted into a laundry room or a hobby den, most likely. If she'd asked above she might have learned that the house's lowest level had been converted into a apartment for the owner's daughter.

But whatever she might have learned would have done her no good once she stepped through the door. She might as well have plunged down the rabbit hole or pa.s.sed through the mirror.

What Juliet O'Hara saw was herself, flying. There was the long blond hair, the blue-and-gold cheerleader's sweater and short pleated skirt revealing the toned tan legs floating effortlessly above the tiled floor.

She blinked hard and forced away the sensation of flight. Blinked hard and forced herself back to the now.

It was remarkable how strongly the young woman resembled O'Hara. It wasn't just the hair and the cheerleader's uniform; her face was the same Kewpie-doll oval and her eyes that piercing blue. She was a few years younger than the detective, but it was hard to tell by how many because of the way her eyes were bulging from their sockets and her mouth was twisted into an agonized grimace.

The cheerleader was flying, but gravity's gentle hand could not bring her down. There was a rope around her neck, tied to a pipe that ran across the ceiling, and it held her a foot above the ground.

Chapter Five.

Gus glanced at his watch, then looked down at the orange chicken congealing on the plate in front of him. When the kid in the paper hat with a panda on it had dropped it on his table forty-seven minutes ago, Gus had picked up the plastic fork and made an attempt to eat a little of it. Even after two tines snapped off somewhere between the outer layer of citrus-flavored goo and the inner sh.e.l.l of deep-fried chicken skin, he still thought he might nibble at a couple of the smaller pieces. But before he could yank a chunk of chicken out of the rapidly hardening sauce, his stomach growled a warning and sent a tendril of bile into the back of his throat. If he tried to swallow anything from this plate, he'd have reason to regret it.

It wasn't the quality of the food that was turning Gus' stomach. He'd eaten at several Chop Them Sticks outlets since they started popping up a few years back, and the Orange You Glad You Ordered the Chicken was always exactly the same--hardened nuggets of dubious poultry in a sauce that tasted like double-strength orange Jell-O. That was fine with Gus, who had long believed that an entree that doubled as dessert saved both time and money.

Gus looked back at his watch just in time to see the larger hand slide over the four. In ten minutes it would be twelve thirty, and in ten more his flight would start boarding. He'd timed the walk from the strip of fast-food restaurants to the terminal and he knew it wouldn't take him more than five minutes. Security wouldn't add more than another five. The Burbank airport's main midweek function was as a commuter portal, and since even the most laid-back techie tried to get to work no later than noon, the lines were rarely long this time of day.

Better yet, Gus was leaving from the smaller of the two terminals. He'd decided to fly into San Francisco, even though it would cost half as much to land in Oakland. It wasn't simply the convenience of being able to hop on a BART train at SFO that would take him to his ultimate destination--for the difference in ticket price Gus could have hired a limo in Oakland and still had money left over for a substantially better lunch than the one in front of him.

It was, in fact, the ridiculously higher ticket price that convinced Gus to fly from Burbank to San Francisco. He didn't think he'd left any clues about his trip, even making his plane reservations from what might have been Santa Barbara's last pay phone. If he'd been careless, though, he didn't want to make it easy for Shawn to track him down. That meant doing the opposite of what his friend would know he'd normally do. Which was, of course, to take the easiest flight or the cheapest, those two rarely occurring together.

If he'd cared about cost, he would have flown out of LAX, where compet.i.tion between airlines served to keep prices low. If convenience had been the key, there were frequent, if ludicrously costly, flights from Santa Barbara International to the Bay Area. Driving eighty miles down the always jammed 101 to Burbank only to spend as much as he would on a ticket from Santa Barbara was the dumbest thing he could have done.

He thought he'd made it out of Santa Barbara without being noticed. Shawn had scheduled himself for another immersion in Criminal Genius and was without a doubt completely occupied in burning down a police station or looting an orphanage when Gus slid behind the wheel of the Echo and headed out of town. But if Shawn had begun to suspect that Gus was trying to slip away unnoticed, he might try to track down his flight. With a limited amount of time before his plane took off, Shawn would have to prioritize his search, and terminal two at Burbank would barely kiss the bottom of the list.

Gus' stomach released a fresh flare of acid and he thought he could feel a piece of the lining burn away. This was all so absurd. He was sneaking around as if he were cheating on his spouse, and it was tearing his insides apart. What he should have done was just tell Shawn he was heading up to San Francisco for the afternoon, and on the off chance that there were any follow-up questions, simply told him the truth.

Except if he did that, he'd have to take the consequences. If he lied, if he snuck around, then he could put off that moment for just a little bit longer.

It didn't matter if his stomach felt like a face hugger had planted an egg in him and it was about to burst out. Once Shawn learned the truth, their entire lives as they knew them would be over. To postpone that, he'd take a little pain.

Gus looked at his watch again. The minute hand had moved ahead a couple of clicks. It was time to start moving. He checked all the tables in the restaurant, in case Shawn had slipped behind one while he was staring at his food, but he was the only customer. Shawn was clever enough to go undercover behind the counter, but unless he was also clever enough to have become Chinese over the past couple of hours, Gus was safe from all three members of the Chop Them Sticks team.

Gus slid out along his bench, then grabbed his tray and deposited his uneaten lunch in the trash. Normally he would have felt guilty about throwing away so much perfectly good food when there were hungry people all over the world, but he had more pressing things to feel guilty about right now, so this would have to wait. Besides, judging by the number of similarly full trays in the bin, this might not have counted as "perfectly good."

The air outside the restaurant was hot and dry; it stank of jet fuel and deep-fry oil. The sun blasted down through a cloudless sky and the heat waves radiating up from the asphalt made it feel like there hadn't been a breeze in days. Gus longed to be back in Santa Barbara, hanging out at the pier with Shawn, feeling the soft salt spray on his face. Instead he quickened his step and crossed the street to where a narrow concrete sidewalk snaked along the lanes of the airport entrance.

As he'd expected, the airport was practically deserted. Gus made a left at the Southwest counter and walked quickly through the narrow corridor that connected the two terminals. Fishing his driver's license out of his pocket, he stepped up to the United counter.

The ticket agent glanced at Gus' license, then typed his name into the system. "Looks like we're up for a quick trip today, Mr. Guster," he said. "We have you booked on the nine o'clock return flight tonight."

"That's right," Gus said.

"Must be business, then," the agent said, printing out Gus' boarding pa.s.s. "If you were going to San Francisco for pleasure, there's no way you'd be coming back in only six hours."

"Business," Gus agreed, feeling a sudden urge to confess everything to the complete stranger who was beaming across the counter at him. To explain everything he'd been feeling over the past couple of months and why what he was doing wasn't really a betrayal. Instead he scooped up his driver's license and boarding pa.s.s and walked toward the gate.

Chapter Six.

Shawn glanced at his watch, then looked down at the popcorn shrimp and clam strips the waiter had just deposited on his table. The smell of perfectly fried seafood filled his senses and made his stomach growl. That was something he hadn't expected. He'd taken a seat in the Yankee Pier only because it gave him a clear view of gate one, and he'd ordered only because there were other people waiting for his table. He'd chosen the first thing he saw on the menu and didn't expect to eat any of it, having polished off a fast-food burger and fries at the Santa Barbara airport before catching his flight to SFO. But now that the food was here, there was no way he was going to leave a speck of it behind. He'd never known you could actually get good food in an airport. If it was going to happen anywhere, he figured, it would happen in San Francisco.

If this turned out to be today's only surprise, that would have been okay with Shawn. United flight 6396 was already approaching the runway. Five minutes after its wheels touched down the gate doors would open and the Burbank pa.s.sengers would spill out. He'd sit here and watch them all as they deplaned, and if none of them looked the slightest bit familiar he'd be nothing but happy. He'd already bought a ticket for his return flight just in case, and it would start boarding in half an hour.

But he didn't expect to be on that plane. Not if Gus had been on this one. Because there was only one reason Gus would have taken the most expensive, least convenient flight he could have found, and that was to hide his trip from his best friend. That was why Shawn hadn't bothered checking out any of the cheaper or easier flights. If Gus had taken one of them, Shawn would have known not to worry. Sure, it would have been strange that Gus had flown to San Francisco without telling him, but there could have been an innocent explanation for that. The most likely, in fact, was that Gus had told him at one of those moments when Shawn hadn't been paying attention. Or that Gus had told him and he'd completely forgotten all about it, like he did most things that had no immediate impact on his own life. But for Gus to take this flight was a screaming admission that he was deliberately trying to hide the trip.

Even that wouldn't have seemed so disturbing if it had been the only strange behavior Gus had demonstrated in the last few weeks. But Gus had been acting so oddly that Shawn frequently found himself checking the back of Gus' neck to see if the Martian invaders had been tinkering with his brain.

It all started around the time they were hired to find Macklin Tanner. To Shawn this was the greatest case they'd ever landed. It was, in fact, the very case he'd had in mind when he first decided to become a private detective. In order to solve the crime he and Gus would have to live in a completely virtual world that no one had ever seen before. They were going to be paid to play and win the coolest computer game ever invented.

And yet when Brenda Varda came to them for help, Gus hadn't wanted to take the case. Instead he kept muttering about how the police had already looked into it and the guy had probably taken off on his own.

That had sparked their first real argument since they had given up trying to agree on whether or not it was right for George Lucas to digitally "upgrade" the original Star Wars movies. Shawn's point had been simple and, to his mind, obvious--if Tanner had gone for an unannounced vacation, then the case was guaranteed to have a happy ending. If, on the other hand, something had happened to him, then Shawn and Gus were the only ones who could help him. Either way they were going to get paid a lot of money for an experience most people could only dream about.

Gus finally agreed to help on the case, but Shawn could tell his heart wasn't in it. And once they were actually inside Darksyde City, the game's fictional locale, Gus managed to be no fun at all. The first two days, he hardly killed anyone, even when a good bit of mayhem might have moved him up a level. It was like he couldn't wait to get out of the virtual world.

Even when he was back on real ground, Gus seemed distracted, moody, and distant. Shawn tried to ask him if something was wrong, but Gus insisted everything was fine. Then he went back to being a grump.

This was not the Gus Shawn had known for so many years. Yes, he'd always had a tendency toward the judgmental and there was frequently an undercurrent of unnecessary seriousness running through him, but Shawn had never seen him in such a mood for longer than a day or so. Something was wrong.

Then it got worse. For the first time in as long as Shawn had known him, Gus started to become unreliable. He'd come into the office an hour late, claiming that his alarm hadn't gone off or that he'd been stuck in traffic. And once he got there he'd disappear for hours at a time. When he came back he'd give only the vaguest of excuses, claiming that there was some kind of problem at the pharmaceuticals company where he still maintained a second job as a sales rep.

This behavior presented Shawn with two immediate problems. The first was obvious--a small firm like Psych couldn't afford to have two partners who were both unreliable, and this had been Shawn's role since the firm's founding. It was a position he prized, and he didn't plan to give it up just because Gus was in a bad mood.