J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 by And Then She Was Gone Read Free Book Online Page B

porn company based in the city. Gravity probably did some work for them, got the phone without a credit check as a perk. Typical.
    Their offices wouldn’t be open until Monday, so I set a tickler on my phone. If I was still on the case Monday, I’d be driving into the city to grease a few palms.
    I looked at the pendulum clock on my wall. Eleven PM. Other things being equal I’d be tempted to go out for a late night showing of something or other in Berkeley, but I needed to be up early enough tomorrow to make the symposium at Stanford.
    Five minutes to make a rogue’s gallery of all the players on the field, and then half an hour reconciling all my notes from this evening with the ones from this morning while it was all fresh in my mind.
    Then there was Nya’s phone—useless until I could charge it—and her flash cards. I took a quick look, but they were all vids. At the rate this case was going, they’d all be porn vids, and I really didn’t want to deal with that kind of nonsense right now. Into the floor with them, next to the crypto drive from earlier.
    I closed the laptop lid. One day done.
    The third room in my suite was technically the file room—and yeah, I had the backup drives and the paper files in there—but it mostly served as my crash space. It wasn’t legal, but I wasn’t about to drive all the way out to Stockton and my studio apartment when there was a case going on—particularly when I had that apartment sublet to my sister’s kid for the summer.
    Bed time. I never have to worry about insomnia when I’ve got a case. It unwinds the mind. Nice change from my regular habit of sneaking up on the sun from behind.
    I locked up, flomped down, and was asleep within five minutes, with visions of strange-faced girls dancing in my head.
     

10:30 AM, Sunday
     
    The James H. Clark Center at Stanford claims to be one of the largest glass buildings in the entire world—it’s certainly one of the more shocking pieces of architecture I’ve ever seen. Four stories tall, big as a full city block, it houses labs, restaurants, a hotel, and god knows what else. The satellite photos make it look like something out of a sex-ed handbook drawn by that guy that does Dilbert.
    I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Crossing the green where the protestors roamed—what few of them there were—I found the place hopping with grad students who were all happy to give me directions to the symposium in terms like: “Oh, sure, go in through the vagina. Turn right at the cervix when you get to the end of the grass to pick up your passes at the table inside. Then go up into the uterus and down the staircase to the conference room…”
    You get the idea.
    From inside the vagina, though, the place looked like a shopping mall from a science fiction film. Huge, completely immersive. Twenty steps in and I just about forgot the rest of the world existed.
    I had to wait twenty minutes in line to get passes at the table—and then had to harangue my ass off to avoid getting kicked out on my ear. Trust someone working for scientists to be skeptical of the oldest cover story in the book.
    “I’m sorry Mister…”
    “Lantham.” I showed her my Chronicle ID again—provided for me free of charge by a lovely woman in the Chronicle’s Human Resources department who thinks I look like her son.
    “Lantham, right. I’m sorry, but with the threat of violence against some of the speakers, we can’t let anybody in who doesn’t already hold a conference pass.”
    “Please, Miss,” I made a show of squinting over my false glasses at her name tag, “Milton, if I don’t get in there, the Chron’s got no story, and I’ve got no job. You can call up my manager if you like.”
    “Excuse me, sir?” A wild-haired Indian guy with a British accent behind me—looked vaguely familiar. I’d probably seen him on PBS at one point. “Would you mind terribly hurrying up? You’re holding up the line.”
    “Moving as fast as I