Chapter Text
2006
“Mark the date, Gus. It’s the first day of summer, and our tenth-case-iversary.”
“Summer started over a week ago, Shawn. And this is only the ninth case we’ve taken for the SBPD — that last one with Robert, or Regina, was a private case that just happened to be related to a police case. We never formally signed on. We weren’t even invited to this crime scene.”
“Oh, once I solve it, we will be.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Shawn.”
“Don’t argue semantics, Gus — ”
“It’s not semantics, it’s — wait... huh. For once, I think it might actually be semantics.”
Shawn gives him a told-you-so smirk and leads him up the road from where they’ve parked, past the police cars and residential vehicles, to the address that they got from Shawn’s police radio. What makes this tenth-case-iversary particularly special, or at least interesting if it’s bad to think that way, is that it’s like they’re going back to their very first case!
That is, up until making it through the unguarded front door, all they know is that they’re dealing with a kidnapping.
This time the family isn’t practically famous, though — only upper middle class, with a house that looks right out of Step By Step. (Gus insists that it’s more like Boy Meets World.) Even then, the place seems to have a decent amount of wear and tear that they must not be able to afford to take care of.
And evidently from the pictures on the wall, instead of a young adult, it’s this family’s only child: a thirteen year-old girl. She’s apparently been taken right out of her bedroom... as they discover once they make it there.
“ Spencer .”
Lassiter notices him in the doorway immediately, and practically stomps past the confused parents in order to escort the two of them out.
“I don’t know or care how you found the place, but I sure as hell know that no one called for a psychic,” he says, grabbing their shoulders to turn them around. “I’m sure these people don’t need you clowns barging in and making fools out of yourselves while their daughter is missing — ”
“Sorry,” the mother buts in, “but — Detective Lassiter... did you say those men are psychics?”
Lassiter freezes in his tracks. “Well, he’s not really — ”
“Yes, he did!” Shawn says, stepping out of Lassiter’s grasp and into the room, then up to the mother to shake her and her husband’s hands. “Well, not quite. I’m sorry, I’m Shawn Spencer, psychic detective for the SBPD. And that black guy over there is my fully human partner, Gurton Buster. ‘Bus’ for short. Lassiter is right about one thing — I wasn’t called here, but I was drawn here... by forces beyond all of us, who want me to find your daughter.”
Out of the corner of his eye he can see both Lassie and Gus rolling their eyes at the pretentious bullshit that just came out of his mouth, but the parents seem to have mostly bought it. Perhaps not enough, though.
Out of the other corner he sees the girl’s bed, and her bedside table, and her backpack and shoes, and her window and the broken latches and the damage on the windowsill. He decides, then, to have a vision.
Shawn hisses in pretend pain as he clutches his head and reels back, to the audible concern of the parents and even a couple of the cops who are well acquainted with his antics. He lets himself stumble so that he almost actually hurts himself, but catches himself on the bedpost.
“I’m seeing — I’m seeing Cameron, I’m feeling her struggle, but — no, it’s not that bad, it’s a twenty-second fight at best, I... the window! I’m feeling it pushed — outward ? Yes, definitely outward — it was broken from the inside!”
“Are you saying someone came in the house some other way and then just took her out through the window?” comes Lassiter’s skeptical tone.
“No, Lassie,” Shawn breathes, slowly letting himself appear more attached to reality. Then he looks to the parents. “Mr. and Mrs. Vanover, is it possible that your daughter just... ran away?”
“What?” says Mr. Vanover, sounding offended. “I mean, I don’t... I don’t know why she would want to — ”
“None of her things are missing,” Mrs. Vanover says. “All her clothes — except the pair of pajamas she wore last night, all her books, her backpack ... I promise you, it’s all still here!”
“Well, you’ve caused enough trouble, Spencer,” Lassiter starts to say, stepping forward to try to throw him out again — but, before he can,
“Has Cameron ever tried to run away in the past?” Juliet asks.
“O’Hara—”
“...Well, yes,” Mrs. Vanover says sheepishly, making everyone, including her husband, turn their heads. “But it was three or four years ago—around the age that probably every kid tries to run away! She didn’t even get all the way down the street. And since then she’s been incredibly well-behaved, I promise you.”
“The window latches...” Mr. Vanover starts, walking over to get a closer look at them. “I mean, that could mean a lot of things, couldn’t it? Maybe they broke a week or so ago and we just didn’t notice, and then the kidnapper only had to open the window.”
“That’s certainly possible,” Lassiter tells him, and he’s pretty clearly leaning toward believing it, regardless of how unlikely it is.
Shawn grimaces and pushes himself all the way up, then pushes a finger to his head.
“However, you haven’t received a ransom note, and I’m also sensing that neither of you heard anything during the night.”
“You’re right,” Mr. Vanover says, “we didn’t, but...”
“Ransoms aren’t the only reason thirteen year-old girls are kidnapped, Spencer,” Lassiter says lowly — but probably not low enough because Mrs. Vanover proceeds to let out a sob, and everyone else gives him a sharp, uncomfortable look. He continues regardless: “This isn’t like the McCallum case. You can’t let it set a precedent.”
“Lassie, I want to find Cameron safe as much as you do — possibly even more so! And I think the Vanovers would benefit from as many hands on deck as possible, as well as open minds.”
He frowns deeply, glancing a few times in between Shawn and the girl’s parents, then takes a breath.
“Fine. You and Guster stick around and ‘feel the energies’ or whatever it is you do. Just do it with minimal jackassery — and Mr. and Mrs. Vanover, feel free to kick him out... well, whenever. Come on, O’Hara, let’s get a look of the outside.”
Juliet throws him and Gus each a small smile as she follows, and behind her are the parents, who seem hopeful but clearly more drawn to what the “real police” are doing. Really, Shawn prefers it this way.
Now he has the room to himself, plus Gus, and a nameless cop finishing up notes of the scene in the corner.
“I hate to say it, Shawn, but Lassiter’s right about this not being the McCallum case. Shawn — are you listening to me?”
“Hold on.”
Shawn remains where he stands but pivots around to get a decent look at all of the room, and tries especially hard to pick out abnormal details. But still, nothing really stands out — at the same time that he knows something is off about this whole scene.
He kneels down next to Cameron’s backpack, hazards a glance to the one cop in this room to make sure they’re not watching him, and uses a pencil from her desk to flip through the contents. Once again, nothing particularly unusual. The closest it gets to noteworthy is that her sketchbook is full of pretty good drawings for a thirteen year-old, and her final report card seems to be straight A’s.
If anything, it makes this weirder.
“Looks like Cameron’s a little over-achiever...,” he mutters.
“Just look at her bookcase,” Gus responds from across the room, sounding impressed. “Harry Potter, Maximum Ride, Eragon, Narnia, pretty much every book by Roald Dahl, and the whole Nancy Drew series.... And there’s an acoustic guitar in her closet. This kid does it all.”
That other cop is gone by now, so while Gus thumbs through Cameron’s book collection, Shawn heads straight to the aforementioned closet and opens up the bi-fold doors all the way. There’s the guitar, like Gus said, and some stuffed animals, and shoes and clothes. And... that’s it.
Outside the window, he can hear Lassiter talking about having cops up and down the street, asking the neighbors if they saw anything last night, as well as through the nearby woods in case the kidnapper went through there.
Frustrated, he abandons the closet and proceeds to open every drawer in the room. And still finds nothing that tells him anything he didn’t know before.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Gus finally asks.
Shawn straightens himself up and pouts. “...I don’t know. We should go take a tour of the rest of the house.”
“How’s that gonna help? Shouldn’t we get a look of the outside — ?”
But Shawn is already out of the room.
Gus catches up to his side. “What would the rest of the house have to do with it when the kidnapping only happened in there?”
“Or did it?”
“So you really think the kidnapper came in from somewhere else?”
“Gus, don’t be an absolute madman,” Shawn tells him as they enter the kitchen, and as he opens the Vanovers’ fridge. “Of course I don’t think that.”
“Then it... nevermind. What do you expect to get from their fridge, though?”
“A capri sun. Want one?” he asks, pulling out two.
Gus scowls. “I’m not stealing from the victims of a kidnapping, Shawn.”
“Suit yourself.”
Then, as he closes the door and struggles to stab the straw into the capri sun pouch, Shawn notices all of the things stuck to the front of the fridge. In particular, a chore chart — odd, because Cameron is the only child and neither of the parents have spaces on the chart, but it seems that she does a great deal of work around the house pretty consistently and gets an allowance for it.
Like the mom said, a really well-behaved kid. Hm.
Truth be told, Shawn has no idea what kind of hints he wants or expects to find around the house. After just another few minutes he’s starting to relent, and he almost decides to finally go investigate outside instead — but then he realizes.
“Gus, I got it!” he says abruptly, slapping his friend on the arm. “There was something missing from her room. Her parents just didn’t know because they don’t normally see it!”
“What was it?”
“Her wallet . Or whatever else she uses to hold her money. Cameron does all these chores and gets a decent allowance, but where is it, huh? Not in her drawers, not in her closet, not in her backpack, not stuck in her pillows....”
“Maybe she just hides it really well,” Gus suggests.
“But from whom ? She has no younger siblings, Gus, and if her parents were the type to steal her money, they wouldn’t give it to her in the first place. Besides, she’d have had to hide it inhumanly well. No, this kid...”
In his own amazement and disbelief, Shawn starts pacing across the upstairs hallway.
“Cameron planned this, Gus. She even waited until school got out for the summer so she wouldn’t have to miss time with her friends! She’s been doing as many chores as possible to save up money, and I would bet you all the capri suns in that fridge that she spent some of it on new clothes, a new backpack, and probably even some new books so it would look like nothing was missing. And then she mussed up her bed, broke her window, and... and probably got a bus ticket or something. There’s a bus station a few blocks away, isn’t there?”
“Yeah, but... she’s only thirteen, Shawn. Even if she’s really smart and she knows how to, why would a thirteen year-old fake their own kidnapping? Wouldn’t that just make more of a hassle?”
“Because...”
Shawn leans back against the wall, frowns, and wracks his brain. Why indeed ? Cameron should be smart enough to have thought of everything, shouldn’t she?
“...Because she knows that if her parents believed she had run away, then they would find her faster,” he realizes slowly, feeling the weight of it creep in. “This girl really doesn’t want to be found, Gus.”
“But what could — ?” Then Gus seems to understand the look on Shawn’s face, and suddenly looks very sad. “Oh my God.... Now that I think about it, most of her books were about kids escaping abusive situations....”
With minimal effort, Shawn gets a mental walkthrough of the house — he recalls the plaster on the walls, all exactly the size of a hole that a fist would make. The sheer amount of alcohol in the fridge. The condition of the staircase... down which he can now vividly imagine a small person being thrown.
Part of him wants to grab the nearest flowerpot and break it, and otherwise do some extra damage to this house. Part of him wants to run outside, and scream, and do the most damage he can to Mr. and Mrs. Vanover’s faces. Part of him even wants to cry on Cameron’s behalf.
But Shawn knows, in spite of his impulsive nature, that none of that would help the situation. Especially not the crying — then Gus would just start crying with him, and they’d both be messes, and nothing would get done.
“We should go tell Lassie and Jules about the bus station hunch,” Gus says a moment later, snapping Shawn out of it. “Then maybe they can go question some people and figure out what line she got on, and — ”
“No, that’s too flimsy!” he yells, not entirely meaning to. “We have to be sure where she went before we do anything — her parents would know where she went, remember? We have to be the ones to get there first.”
Now, to just figure out where Cameron would have gone.
Shawn immediately and swiftly starts walking through the whole house again, scanning the walls for any pictures that might hint to it. It must be some place that the whole family has been before, somewhere Cameron has expressed love for, somewhere they’ve visited multiple times in the past but for some reason won’t be visiting in the future....
Then he notices a backdrop for a family photo that bears a resemblance to something he saw in Cameron’s sketchbook. He’s about ninety-percent sure that that’s it.
“Hey Gus, you did that week-long hike in the Santa Ynez Mountains, right?”
“When I was still in college, yeah. The rash I got lasted months. Why?”
“Okay, please never tell me about your rashes ever, ever again. More importantly, do you think you can identify where this is based on what the mountain range looks like behind it?”
*
O’Hara is giving some kind of sympathetic talk to the Vanovers, and Carlton is in the middle of an important call, and then they hear it: A sound that can only be described as... two idiots running around the corner.
“ Aaahhhhhh — I know where she is!” Spencer shouts as he rushes into the scene, hands over both eyes as though he’s in a great deal of pain.
As positive as Carlton is that it’s not any kind of psychicness , the emotion seems intense enough that he can’t help but wonder if it’s at least a little bit real.
“What? Really?” Mrs. Vanover says before anyone else can — and then, when Spencer all but collapses against the windowsill, “Is... he alright?”
Guster runs up next to his friend to help him stand up straight, then tells her,
“He’s having a very intense vision, and it’s taking a lot of energy just to speak — ”
“I swear to god, Spencer, if you really know where she is, you better not waste our time — ”
Spencer proceeds to let out a long, loud groan of pain, and nearly causes Guster to fall over with how he’s leaning on him.
“I am seeing Cameron, I — I’ve got her but I don’t see the space around her, she’s... she’s pulling me, Lassie! You’re just gonna have to f — ” He then dissolves into gibberish, as though he’s losing his breath (and doing a very good job of seeming like it).
“What is Shawn saying?” O’Hara asks, sounding genuinely concerned.
“Shawn doesn’t know the address, but he has a psychic link that can give him the directions — more on a physical sense than anything that can be articulated,” Guster translates. “He can drive there, and you guys would have to just follow us.”
Carlton wants to argue. He knows that Spencer does not feel a “psychic pull” to this kid, that this must be an act, however good... And more importantly, he has no idea how Spencer could have possibly solved this from inside the house. But the past nine cases with him have proven that underneath the act, there is something real going on, and that Spencer has a tendency to solve the unsolvable.
And even if he tried to argue, the Vanovers are already getting into the back of McNab’s cruiser, and O’Hara is pulling him by the elbow.
“What are you waiting for? Come on!”
*
They arrive, one car after another, at a rustic lakeside cabin. It looks like it’s meant to be used for camping, or at least like no one has really lived in it for several decades. No one from this generation would want to, with the apparent lack of plumbing.
The only method of transportation already on the property, meanwhile, is a fishing boat.
The Vanovers say, according to McNab, that this is their summer cabin, but they haven’t been here in years. Still, they’re ordered to remain behind while Detectives Lassiter and O’Hara — who at the moment must operate under the assumption that this is a kidnapping — rush the building, guns drawn.
Shawn and Gus are ordered to stay behind under the same pretenses, as they’re unarmed consultants, but they of course don’t listen.
And, of course, the cabin is empty... but for a small kitchen, a bed, and a brand-new-looking backpack. Carlton shares a look with his partner as they holster their guns, turns around to get a better look of the place, and starts to understand.
Simultaneously, Shawn and Gus share a look and wordlessly decide to make their way down to the edge of the lake.
It’s only after a few minutes of searching around the lakefront that Shawn spots what must be Cameron, clearly bathing. After another minute, she spots them, too.
“Don’t worry, Cameron!” he shouts so she can hear him, then covers his eyes before approaching further. Gus immediately does the same.
“This is private property!” she shouts back. She sounds desperate.
“We’re with the police, Cam — can I call you Cam? Sorry, I’ve just always liked that nickname — but I promise you! Everything is gonna be fine .”
She doesn’t sound any closer to coming out of the water, but just then, Shawn hears two sets of feet jogging down the bank. He twists around and sees exactly the two he hoped to see — as opposed to Mr. and Mrs. Vanover.
“Speak of the devil,” he says far too casually, looking between them.
Then Gus turns around and uncovers his eyes, too. “You guys, don’t let the parents get to — ”
“We know,” Juliet interrupts. She swallows and looks urgently out into the lake, but, like the rest of them, make no effort to urge Cameron out yet.
A few seconds of silence, other than the light waves hitting the sand bank, pass. Then Shawn takes a breath.
“I gotta say, Gus, Lassie, Jules... This tenth-case-iversary has turned out to be a real bummer.”
The girl’s still in the water, but Carlton can see bruises from here. Jesus Christ.
“It sure is,” he finds himself agreeing.
*
He almost feels bad for finding her. Yes, her parents are getting arrested, but now Cameron might wind up in the system — which was probably what a kid as smart as her was specifically trying to avoid.
“All she wanted to do was hang out, catch some fish, re-read Harry Potter, and live in peace,” Gus agrees. “And then we had to crash it the same day she got here. Honestly? I’d be pissed if I was her.”
“She’ll be thankful later,” comes Lassiter’s voice from around the corner, making both of them jolt against the wall of the cabin. He doesn’t acknowledge it and simply sidles up next to them. “If nothing else, she’ll realize that she never would have been able to survive here for more than a few months, anyway. Even if she was able to catch fish on the regular and find edible plants, come winter the resources would have run out.”
“Wow, Lassie, that’s... very sensitive of you,” Shawn deadpans.
“Thank you,” Carlton responds genuinely, though without looking at him.
Shawn and Gus share a look.
“What I’m confused about,” the former says, “is why the parents even wanted to find her so badly. I mean — I sensed it, I know the emotion was real. It wasn’t an act, and I wasn’t even able to sense that they were... like that at first.... I just don’t get it!”
At that outburst, Gus looks and feels too awkward to say anything. But Carlton, who is also pissed with himself for not catching it earlier, and who has very clearly been impressed against his will this entire time, speaks up immediately.
“I’ve seen this plenty of times before, Spencer, and I know I’m going to see it plenty of times again. Parents who abuse their kids, no matter what kind of abuse it is, rarely seem like it on the outside. They cover up, put on a mask — hell, they may even convince themselves that they still love their child, and that that makes it okay....”
For a moment he trails off, loses himself, clenches his jaw, goes white-knuckled — and it’s obvious to all of them that he and Shawn alike are murderously angry about this.
And, in spite of how many times Carlton has seen it... he honest-to-god cannot understand it.
“...Some people are just evil, Spencer,” he tells him, much softer than before. “And you’re gonna have to get used to it in this line of work.”