Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay by Gordon Carroll (tools of titans ebook .TXT) 📗

Lisa sniffled and blew into a tissue. Amber reached up and pulled a tiny section off and pretended to wipe her own nose. “I don’t know. I think we got them about five years ago. Why?”

“Well, there’s not a lot of demand for ancient computers on the black market these days, which means they weren’t after the hardware.”

“What then?”

“Something that was on the computers.”

Lisa looked bewildered. “But we just used them for school, and some games.”

“Do you let the kids use the Internet access?”

“Yes, of course.”

That opened a whole new can of worms. With Internet access Shane could have been involved in a slew of things: fraud, gambling, porn, all of them bad. Not something I relished telling, or even bringing up, to a nice middle class mom like Lisa.

“You said Shane has a credit card?”

“Two. The Visa, and a gas card. But he doesn’t have a lot of money.”

“Do you keep track of his accounts?”

She dabbed at her eyes. “No. I taught him how to balance his statements when we gave him the cards. He picked it up right away and he’s done it on his own since then.”

“Does he owe anyone money?”

She shook her head.

“Does he have a job?”

“Not full time, but he makes money mowing lawns in the summer and shoveling driveways in the winter. He takes some college classes at D.U. and does a little work for them, but that’s about it.”

I looked around the room. “You need to call the police, make a burglary report.”

She wiped tears from her cheeks and pulled a cell phone from her purse.

While she made the call, I sorted through the wreckage. Lisa said she helped her kids with schoolwork and there were plenty of educational books to prove it. The covers of the hard backs had been split and stripped.

I went through the kid’s rooms, they were trashed too. The room at the end of the hall belonged to Shane and Joseph. A bunk bed sat against one wall, while ripped posters of computer action games covered the others. The floor was littered with books and magazines and comics. I saw a Green Lantern, a Fantastic Four and an Iron Man scattered about the room. There was a PC Gamer ripped in half and a Game Developer Magazine on top of the computer desk. Where the computer tower had been there was now a clean outline with a slight covering of dust highlighting its emptiness and a mouse with a cord lying next to it. A copy of Popular Science lay on the bottom bunk with a picture of Steve Jobs, Roger Doors and Bill Gates under the title of “Tech Wars, Who Was the Greatest ?” Next to it was a pillow that had been stripped of its case and cut down the middle. The cut was clean and straight which meant a very sharp knife. In the doorway was an old issue of American Spectator with a painting of Ronald Reagan in front of the flag. How old were these boys?

I rejoined Lisa in what was left of the living room. “Have you told your husband yet?”

Lisa nodded, bending down and picking up one of the naked hardbacks. “He’s on his way. The rest of the kids are all at my sister’s in Denver. I dropped them off this morning before I met you. They were going to stay until Tom got off work, then he was going to bring them home.” She ran her fingers over the first page. She sighed and her soul sounded heavy. “Why would someone do this to a book?”

“They were looking for something small. Something that could fit in the cover or behind the spine.”

“But what?”

I felt a sudden pit open up in my stomach. I’d felt it before. It was fear. Her son was in real danger. Whoever did this was serious, playing for real. It could be that Shane knew someone was coming for him and decided to run. I hoped that was the case. Because the other option was that he’d been kidnapped by the people responsible for the directed chaos beneath my feet. And if they had him, I found it hard to believe they wouldn’t be able to get a seventeen-year-old to tell them where whatever they were looking for was. And that frightened me. If they had him, he was most likely dead.

I heard a sound at the front door and a good looking man with sandy blond hair, wearing a suit coat, white shirt with a blue tie and slacks walked into the living room. The look on his face said it all. I’d seen the same look on hundreds of victims of crashes and fires and burglaries like this. The stunned expression of incomprehension, of disbelief. A dawning realization that something vital in your world has just changed, and not for the better.

He went to Lisa, stepping over and around the rubble that had been his family’s cherished possessions a few hours before, but he didn’t hug her.

“You okay?” he asked.

She responded by breaking out in tears and holding a hand to her temple. She didn’t touch him and he didn’t touch her. I remembered the twisting of the wedding ring.

I saw him scan the room. His eyes lit on me and he stopped. “Are you from the police?”

“I’m a private investigator.”

“A private…?”

“I hired him,” said Lisa.

“When… why?”

When a dog’s ears go one this way and the other that way, it’s a sign of conflict. The dog is torn between two or more drives and can’t make up his mind. Tom’s ears didn’t go in different directions, but I saw similar mannerisms manifesting. A flexing of the jaw, the eyes darting back and forth between us, a little shine of sweat starting on his forehead.

Couldn’t say I blamed him. I decided to spare Lisa the hard part. “I’m Gil Mason. Your wife hired me this morning to find Shane. I think what happened here is related to his disappearance.”

Her husband’s face grew stern.