Mulliner said now, his voice flat as Iowa and barely audible, “If anything happens to her . . . I’d just . . .” He stopped speaking and swallowed.
“I’ll help you,” Shaw said.
“Thank you!” A whisper. He now broke into real tears, racking. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”
“Not a worry.”
Mulliner looked at his watch. “Hell, I have to get to work. Last thing I want to do. But I can’t lose this job. Please call me. Whatever you find, call me right away.”
Shaw capped his pen and replaced it in his jacket pocket and rose, closing the notebook. He saw himself out.
6.
In assessing how to proceed in pursuing a reward—or, for that matter, with most decisions in life—Colter Shaw followed his father’s advice.
“Countering a threat, approaching a task, you assess the odds of each eventuality, look at the most likely one first and then come up with a suitable strategy.”
The likelihood that you can outrun a forest fire sweeping uphill on a windy day: ten percent. The likelihood you can survive by starting a firebreak and lying in the ashes while the fire burns past you: eighty percent.
Ashton Shaw: “The odds of surviving a blizzard in the high mountains. If you hike out: thirty percent. If you shelter in a cave: eighty percent.”
“Unless,” eight-year-old Dorion, always the practical one, had pointed out, “there’s a momma grizzly bear with her cubs inside.”
“That’s right, Button. Then your odds go down to really, really tiny. Though here it’d be a black bear. Grizzlies are extinct in California.”
Shaw was now sitting in his Chevy outside the Mulliners’ residence, notebook on lap, computer open beside him. He was juggling percentages of Sophie’s fate.
While he hadn’t told Mulliner, he believed the highest percentage was that she was dead.
He gave it sixty percent. Most likely murdered by a serial killer, rapist or a gang wannabe as part of an initiation (the Bay Area crews were among the most vicious in the nation). A slightly less likely cause of death was that she had been killed in an accident, her bike nudged off the road by a drunk or texting driver, who’d fled.
That number, of course, left a significant percentage likelihood that she was alive—taken at the hands of a kidnapper for ransom or sex, or pissed at Dad about the move and, the Luka poodle factor notwithstanding, was crashing on a friend’s couch for a few days, to make him sweat.
Shaw turned to his computer—when on a job he subscribed to local news feeds and scanned for stories that might be helpful. Now he was looking for the discovery of unidentified bodies of women who might be Sophie (none) or reports over the past few weeks of serial kidnappers or killers (several incidents, but the perpetrator was preying on African American prostitutes in the Tenderloin of San Francisco). He expanded his search around the entire northern California area and found nothing relevant.
He skimmed his notes regarding what Frank Mulliner had told him, following his own search for the girl Wednesday night and yesterday. He’d called as many friends, fellow students and coworkers whose names he could find. Mulliner had told Shaw that his daughter had not been the target of a stalker that any of them knew of.
“There is someone you ought to know about, though.”
That someone was Sophie’s former boyfriend. Kyle Butler was twenty, also a student, though at a different college. Sophie and Kyle had broken up, Mulliner believed, about a month ago. They’d dated off and on for a year and it had become serious only in early spring. While he didn’t know why they split he was pleased.
Shaw’s note: Mulliner: KB didn’t treat Sophie the way she should be treated. Disrespectful, said mean things. No violence. KB did have a temper and was impulsive. Also, into drugs. Pot mostly.
Mulliner had no picture of the boy—and Sophie had apparently purged her room of his image—but Shaw had found a number on Facebook. Kyle was a solidly built, tanned young man with a nest of curly blond hair atop his Greek god head. His social media profile was devoted to heavy metal music, surfing and legalizing drugs. Mulliner believed he worked part-time installing car stereos.
Mulliner: No idea what Sophie saw in him. Believed maybe Sophie thought herself unattractive, a “geek girl,” and he was a handsome, cool surfer dude.
Her father reported that the boy hadn’t taken the breakup well and his behavior grew inappropriate. One day he called thirty-two times. After she blocked his number, Sophie found him on their front yard, sobbing and begging to be taken back. Eventually he calmed down and they flopped into a truce. They’d meet for coffee occasionally. They went to a play “as friends.” Kyle hadn’t pushed hard for reconciliation, though Sophie told her father he wanted desperately to get back together.
Domestic kidnappings almost always are parental abductions. (Solving one such snatching, on a whim, in fact, had started Shaw on his career as a reward seeker.) Occasionally, though, a former husband or boyfriend would spirit away the woman of his passion.
Love, Colter Shaw had learned, could be an endlessly refillable prescription of madness.
Shaw put Kyle’s guilt at ten percent. He might have been obsessed with Sophie, but he also seemed too normal and weepy to turn dark. However, the kid’s drug use was a concern. Had Kyle inadvertently jeopardized her life by introducing her to a dealer who didn’t want to be identified? Had she witnessed a hit or other crime, maybe not even knowing it?
He gave this hypothesis twenty percent.
Shaw called the boy’s number. No answer. His message, in his best cop voice, was that he had just spoken to Frank Mulliner and wanted to talk to Kyle about Sophie. He left the number of one of his half dozen active burners, with the caller ID showing Washington, D.C. Kyle might be thinking FBI or, for all Shaw knew, the National Missing Ex-girlfriend Tactical Rescue Operation, or some such.
Shaw then cruised the three miles to Palo Alto, where he found the boy’s beige-and-orange cinder-block apartment complex. The doors were, inexplicably, baby blue. At 3B, he pounded on the door, rather than using the ringer, which he doubted worked anyway, and called out, “Kyle Butler. Open the door.”
Cop-like, yet not cop.
No response, and he didn’t think the boy was dodging him, since a glance through the unevenly stained curtain showed not a flicker of movement inside.
He left one of his business cards in the door crack. It gave only his name and the burner number. He wrote: I need to talk to you about Sophie. Call me.
Shaw returned to his car and sent Kyle’s picture, address and phone number to his private investigator, Mack, requesting background, criminal and weapons checks. Some information he wanted was not public but Mack rarely differentiated between what was public and what was not.