Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

I thought he might have some information about a case I’m working on.”
    “He’s not in trouble, is he?”
    Only the worst possible kind. I said, “Frankly, I’m a little worried that no one seems to know where he is.”
    “I don’t understand. I thought you said his neighbor told you to call.”
    “She told me he’s moved away.”
    “Oh, lordy, lordy, I knew I shouldn’t have stopped writing him. My husband told me to, said Les would get in touch when he was ready; I think he thought he’d come home like the prodigal son one day.”
    “Maybe you should file a missing persons report.”
    “Oh, I couldn’t do that. We aren’t the kind of people who have dealings with the police.”
    “I see. I wonder if you could tell me something else. You said Les’s trouble started when he moved to San Francisco. Did something happen besides the incident on the cable car?”
    “Are you a Christian, dear?”
    “I’m not, actually.”
    “Well, I’m not sure I should be talking to you. I think I ought to pray about it.”
    “I understand how you feel; but I feel I should tell you the truth. I think Les really might be in trouble.”
    “Are you trying to help him?”
    There it was—the crunch of conscience. I took a deep breath, but before I could say anything, she spoke again: “I don’t think you are. You’re not a Christian and sometimes I don’t think there is one in the whole city of San Francisco—just last Easter they crucified someone like they did Jesus.”
    “Why don’t I give you my address and phone number, just in case?”
    She cheered up. “I could send you some very interesting pamphlets.”
    “I’d like that.”
    “And if you hear anything about Les, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”
    “I’ll be glad to. But turnabout’s fair play—if
you
hear something, will you let me know?”
    “I don’t know…” She sounded very doubtful indeed.
    “I know you’ll do what you can.” I gave her my stats and hung up in a cold sweat.
    I’d found the conversation chilling. Mom Mathison talked almost like the Trapper wrote—blaming all her son’s problems on the city itself. I went straight to the piano and spent most of the rest of the day there.
    * * *
     
    The next day I drove to Marin, squirmed through my parents’ slides of Israel, and finally managed to get Dad to take a walk with me; I knew talking about the case in front of Mom would cause about the same reaction as announcing I’d joined the Hare Krishnas.
    When I’d laid the whole thing out, he said, “I’d been wondering how you were going to pull this one out, Rebecca.”
    I breathed a sigh of relief—he hadn’t called me Beck; that meant at least he wasn’t about to have an aneurysm from worry. “The thing’s plausible, all right. A kid from an upright all-American home—and yet abused.”
    “Abused?”
    “They beat him, didn’t they? Beat him to make him kill his pets?”
    “Dad, they don’t think of them as pets in 4-H.”
    “But he thought of them as pets—his mother said so. Can you imagine anything more horrifying to a child than being beaten by his own parents because he refused to heartlessly kill the helpless animals he’d raised and loved?”
    “Dad, for heaven’s sake—this is me, not a jury.”
    “I may be being a little dramatic, but think about it—can you?”
    “It sounds pretty awful, all right. I wonder if any of them were lambs.”
    “I don’t think things like that unbalance a person, exactly, but suppose someone with that kind of history actually does go off the deep end; he’s bound to have a skewed sense of justice. And even as a youngster, this lad had justice on his mind—the mother said he thought it was unfair to kill animals that didn’t hurt anyone, didn’t she?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Add the element of Christianity and you get another set of contradictions. You get Jesus saying to turn the other cheek, but the Old Testament God saying, ‘Vengeance is mine.’ You also get Jesus saying, ‘Blessed are the meek,’ and Christian parents beating up their lads for acting wimpy. Most kids work it out somehow or other, but in the case of one who’s slightly unbalanced, all that stuff is still in the brain somewhere, mixing it up like a couple of street gangs.”
    Suddenly I had a mental image, not of thugs at a weekend rumble, but of tiny knights in heavy armor, flailing about with mouse-sized swords somewhere in Les’s skull.
    “I’ll bet Mrs.