J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 Read Online Free PDF Page A

inches an hour through Berkeley traffic, I looked up the Embryology department in the UCSF directory. Richard Sternwood, research professor, Embryology. His office hours were strictly weekdays only, so he probably wasn’t in at the moment.
    I called him anyhow, on the theory that it was better to poke a wild academic with a sharp stick than follow directions and get the runaround.
    He wasn’t in. His grad student was, though, and he was very helpful after a little sweet talk and the promise of chocolates.
    It seemed the professor was attending a bioethics symposium at Stanford all weekend, but would be in during normal office hours on Monday.
    Hurry up and wait? At a thousand bucks a day, I wasn’t going to take time off if I could help it. So long as I had to wait to do the next obvious piece of legwork, I might as well shore up my background on the missing girl.
    “Mrs. Thales, this is Clarke Lantham.”
    “Is everything okay?” Her voice on the other end of the line was steady and controlled, as if she were bracing herself for the worst.
    “Everything’s fine. I’ve got a couple hours waiting for some information that might help. I was wondering if I could drop by and take a look at Nya’s room.”
    “Umm…I guess so. Why?”
    “If she ran away, taking a look at her space might give me some ideas.”
    “Sure.”
    “Thanks. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
     
     

6:00 PM, Saturday
     
    The Thales place was one of those dot-com era tract homes up near Blackhawk, not too far from where Rawles lived. Maybe a quarter acre, set back from the street, the house overbuilt to the point where it was rubbing asses with the houses on either side. Probably had a back yard the size of a mouse’s bikini.
    Dora answered the door half-put-together, gearing up for some formal occasion or other.
    “Come in, quickly.” She stood aside and I stepped in. She brushed past me to the stairs and led me up them, fiddling with her earrings on the way. “We have to hurry. My husband will be home soon.”
    I’ve heard lines like that before. Seeing her not-quite-dressed was becoming a habit—based on what I’d seen of her performance under pressure, it wasn’t a habit I wanted to put much energy into. Beauty and halitosis, right?
    Lucky me, she didn’t sound like she meant it that way. More like she was afraid the cops were going to bust their way in at any second.
    She pointed at an open door with a boy-band-of-the-month plastered on it, then quick-marched on to her room to finish her preparations.
    I pushed, it swung back. I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found inside.
    Growing up with two sisters, and having spent six of the last fifteen years searching different rooms in one official capacity or another, I had a pretty good idea what to expect. Teenagers rooms are all pretty much alike once you account for gender.
    They all have that sense of being caught between two worlds. You might find clothes and underwear strewn haphazardly about with Barbies or teddy bears or juvenile-tinged decor—Care Bears next to Cosmo, or G.I. Joes alongside Hot Rodder magazine.
    Nya’s room was a woman’s room, not a girl’s room. Very little about it seemed particularly juvenile. Not a pink heart, not a teddy bear, not a romance book with vampires. It was done in deep, primal colors. Azure blue paint on the walls, white trim for the jambs. The doors—what I could see of them through the posters for industrial bands, Parisian skylines, and tropical islands—were gloss white.
    The sheets on her bed were the color of a crime scene, but the brown and dark green of the splotchy bedspread made it earthy instead of horrific.
    There was the normal carpet-bound population of dirty clothes and shoes, a half-open school backpack with some badly neglected textbooks spilling out.
    She’d managed to do an entire wall in digital photoframes instead of wallpaper, then gone the one step further and routed all the power cords to make geometric