by Rob Thomas
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, MARCH 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Rob Thomas,
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., and Alloy Entertainment LLC
All rights reserved. Published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
Produced by Alloy Entertainment
1700 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
www.alloyentertainment.com
Based on characters from the series Veronica Mars, by Rob Thomas.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Thomas, Rob.
Veronica Mars. The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line /
Rob Thomas, Jennifer Graham. pages cm.
1. Women private investigators—Fiction. I. Graham, Jennifer. II. Veronica Mars (Television program)
III. Title. IV. Title: Thousand-dollar tan line.
PS3620.H639V47 2014
813′.6—dc23
2014001174
Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-7070-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7071-0
Thomas author photograph © Eric Doggett
Graham author photograph © Jennifer Gandin Le
www.vintagebooks.com
Cover design by Mark Abrams
Cover photographs: house and sky © Jamie Kripke/Corbis; fireworks © Mohamad Ramadan Photography/Flickr/Getty Images
v3.1
For all the Veronica Mars Kickstarter backers. You’re like the people who clapped loud enough to bring Tinker Bell back from the dead. Except instead of clapping, you sent money. And instead of a tiny blond fairy, you resurrected a tiny blond detective.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
About the Authors
Other Books by This Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First off, thanks to Rob Thomas, for imagining a world with Veronica in it and for giving the rest of us a chance to play there.
Enormous thanks to Lanie Davis. I could not have pulled this off without your expertise and your support. Thanks as well to Bob Dearden and Deirdre Mangan, who provided invaluable help in developing this story, and to the gang at Random House—particularly Andrea Robinson, Beth Lamb, and Anne Messitte—for all their hard work.
Thanks to Matt Donaldson and Cara Hallowell for their fight choreography, to John Preston Brown for his knowledge of the criminal element, and to Jack, Donna, and Zac Graham for their years of encouragement and care. I also had a ton of cheerleaders on this project and owe particular thanks to Alec Austin, Sarah Cornwell, Izetta Irwin, Jennifer Gandin Le, Patrick Ryan Frank, and Kyle John Schmidt, all of whom kept me going at various points of the process.
—JENNIFER GRAHAM
PROLOGUE
The buses began to roll into Neptune, California, late Friday afternoon and didn’t slow up until Monday. They arrived dusty, windshields speckled with dead insects and fractures from stray flying stones, the chaos of the interstate. They pulled in along the boardwalk, trembling with pent-up noise, shivering like dogs waiting for a command.
Their routes mapped out an arterial network, connecting the little seaside town to all the university cities in the western United States. To L.A. and San Diego; to the Bay Area and the Inland Empire. To Phoenix, Tucson, Reno; to Portland and Seattle, to Boulder, to Boise, even to Provo. Bright, excited faces peered from every window, pressed to the glass.
One after another the buses’ folding doors clattered open, and students poured out into the streets. They looked around at the sand and the surf, the carnival rides lit up along the boardwalk, the foot-tall drinks. Some had just finished term papers the night before; others had stayed up all night studying for tests. Now, suddenly, they’d awakened in a fairyland that had popped into existence, just for their pleasure. Screaming with laughter, they flooded the town. They stumbled through the streets, blind drunk, trusting that the magic that had brought them here would keep them from falling.
And for exactly three nights, it did.
By Wednesday morning, the coastal town that sparkled at night looked … mundane. Not just mundane. Dirty. Pools of spilled beer collected in the seams of the sidewalk, and the rank tang of overfilled Dumpsters wafted out from the alleys. The ghostly forms of used condoms littered doorways and bushes, and shattered glass covered the street.
The Sea Nymph Motel was eerily silent when eighteen-year-old Bri Lafond stumbled in. Almost all of the guests were spring breakers, and the party didn’t get started until early afternoon. She had been at a rave on the inland edge of town, and by the time the party had wound down at 4:00 a.m. she hadn’t been able to get a cab. She’d still been high enough that the idea of walking back to the motel had seemed feasible. Now, bone tired, she trudged through the sandy courtyard to the room she and her three best friends from UC Berkeley had rented. It was one of the cheapest available, facing the Dumpster in the parking lot. Now she didn’t care, fumbling with the lock and wanting only to fall into one of the two doubles they’d been sharing all week.
The room’s blinds gaped open, letting in a ray of pallid light. Leah was sprawled across the bed with her head shoved under a pillow, still wearing a sequined dress from the night before. Her legs were bruised and smudged with dirt. Melanie sat with her back to the headboard, sipping from a paper Starbucks cup. She wore board shorts and a bikini top, her long blond hair tousled and smears of makeup caking her eyes. She looked up when she heard the door open.
“I have a surf lesson in, like, half an hour, and I’m still drunk,” she said. She looked at Bri, her eyes focusing with difficulty. “Where’ve you been? You look like shit.”
“Thanks a lot.” Bri leaned down to unzip her boots, her feet throbbing. “Where’s Hayley? Is she surfing too?”
“Haven’t seen her.” Melanie closed her eyes and rested her head back against the wall. Bri froze, one boot off, the other still pinching her toes. She looked up.
“Since when?”
“Since … since the party on Monday, I guess.” Melanie opened her eyes. “Shit.”
Bri blinked, then tugged the other boot off her foot. She sank to the bed and gently pushed Leah’s shoulder. “Hey, Leah. Wake up. Did you see Hayley yesterday?”
Leah gave a low moan from under the pillow. For a moment she curled into a tight ball, her arm circled protectively over her head. It took them a few more minutes of prodding and cooing her name before she finally pulled away the pillow and looked blearily up at them. “Hayley? Not since the … the party on Monday.”
A bleak, empty feeling expanded into every corner of Bri’s body. She scrolled back through her messages. There was nothing from Hayley since Monday afternoon.
Invited to a party in a MANSION tonight. Wanna go?
They’d spent three hours getting ready, Hayley wearing an uncharacteristically low-cut tight dress that showed miles of smooth, tan leg. She kept insisting they look their best; she’d been invited by some guy who bought her a mai tai in the Cabo Cantina and told her to bring her hottest friends.
They’d all gone, walking up a winding private road where a pair of burly security guards waved them in. The house was sprawling and modern, a boxy, sculptural structure. Every room burned with light and luxury. Melanie melted into the crowd instantly, gyrating her hips to the music. In the kitchen, Leah caught sight of a guy from her biology class and beelined toward him. Hayley and Bri pushed through the house to the back patio to get their bearings. An enormous pool glowed aquamarine below them, and out beyond that the beach stretched black in the moonlight.
Hayley’s eyes shone, reflecting the bright colored lights of the patio. All weekend, she had alternated between sadness and outraged defiance. She’d be in tears one minute; the next, she’d spin on her heel to face one of her friends and snap, “Chad can’t tell me what to do. Who does he think he is?” She and her boyfriend had broken up for the hundredth time, but that night Hayley looked excited. It was almost as if all the heartbreak had sloughed off her body, like some kind of heavy cocoon, leaving her raw and fresh and new. She and Bri had thrown themselves into the mass of dancing bodies, and for a while, the thrumming bass cleared all thoughts from Bri’s head. She lost track of time, the number of drinks she threw back—and her friends.
Now Bri remembered seeing Leah doing lines of coke off an antique coffee table, holding her long honey-colored hair off her neck as she bent over. She remembered hands running up her hips, a slurring male voice telling her she’d be really hot if she grew her hair out. She remembered seeing flashes of Hayley, leaning up to whisper in the ear of a boy in a perfectly cut white suit, his eyes long lashed and sultry, his lips pouting playfully.
Beyond that everything was a blur. She’d woken up the next morning in a lawn chair by the motel pool, shivering in the early morning chill, her purse tucked under her head. She had no idea how she’d gotten home.
“Did you see her leave the party with someone?” Bri looked at her friends. Both shook their heads slowly.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Melanie said hesitantly. “She’s probably with some guy she met at the party. She’ll come up for air sooner or later.”
“But we promised we’d check in with each other at least once a day. We promised.” Bri’s voice was shriller than she’d meant for it to sound. They’d made a pact on the way down that no matter what they were up to, no matter how much fun they were having, they’d look out for one another. The dark, empty feeling in her gut yawned even wider. She opened her text window and typed a new message.
Where are you? Come meet us for breakfast. Text back ASAP.
All they had to do was wait. Melanie was probably right—Hayley had lost track of time, just like they all had. She was somewhere out there having the time of her life. Still, when Leah and Melanie got up to go to breakfast, Bri shook her head no, her phone clenched in her hand. She sat alone in the motel room, shivering but too tired to change her clothes. She texted Hayley again. And again.
Stop being SELFISH and respond, Hayley.
Everyone’s worried about you. TEXT ME.
That’s it—if we don’t hear from you in ten minutes we’re calling the cops. Totally serious.
Please answer.
Please.
CHAPTER ONE
“And what about this one?”
Veronica Mars sat in a hard plastic chair in the neurologist’s office, one leg crossed over the other, her motorcycle boot jogging up and down as she listened to her father’s exam. Keith Mars sat at a small table across from his doctor, watching as she flipped flash cards one by one with careful, deliberate movements.
“Wheelbarrow,” he said without hesitation. Dr. Subramanian didn’t nod or shake her head but, poker-faced, set the card down to her left.
The neurologist’s office was cool and dim, lit by the cozy glow of floor lamps instead of the usual harsh overhead fluorescents of most medical offices. It always felt like early evening in here. Veronica pretended to be interested in a four-month-old Redbook, her eyes skating over a feature titled “Twenty Hostess Gifts for Under Twenty Dollars.”
“And this?”
“Alligator.”
Veronica glanced at her father and the titanium cane that leaned against his leg. It had been two months since the car crash that almost killed him. Keith had been meeting with Deputy Jerry Sacks about corruption within the Sheriff’s Department when a van had broadsided them—then doubled back to hit them once more. Sacks had died, and Keith escaped only because Logan Echolls managed to pull him from the car before it exploded.
The official story—or at least, the one Sheriff Dan Lamb had fed to the media—was that Sacks had been on the take from a local meth dealer named Danny Sweet, and the van had been sent to kill Sacks after the deputy allowed three of Sweet’s soldiers to get taken in on trafficking charges. It was crap, but the local news outlets didn’t seem inclined to look any deeper.
Veronica had been trying to get her father to talk about the crash since the night it happened, but Keith was maddeningly cagey about the details, saying it was “my case, not yours.” It had almost become a game between them. Every time she’d try to draw him out, guessing at who might have been behind the wheel—Lamb? Another deputy? Someone else entirely?—he’d casually bat her guess away. All he’d tell her was that the murderer had been after Sacks, not after him, and to let it go.
“Candle. Ring. Umbrella,” Keith said loudly. Veronica examined her father. The violent purple bruises that had blossomed across his body had faded. But the real injuries—the broken ribs, the cracked pelvis, the torn liver—were still mending. He’d suffered a fractured skull, a subdural hematoma, and a mild cerebral contusion, and for a few weeks after the accident his reaction times had been slow. In the first days after he’d stabilized, he’d had trouble with word retrieval, sometimes floundering for a few seconds before he could speak. Now he answered most of Dr. Subramanian’s questions quickly and firmly. Word by word, Veronica saw him sit up straighter, like he was actually healing himself by getting the flash cards right.
“Very good, Mr. Mars.” The doctor’s Oxford-accented voice was clipped but pleased. She offered a rare smile, straightening the edges on her flash cards.
Veronica put down the magazine.
“So what’s the verdict, Doc? Is he good as new? Can we take him out for a test drive?”
Dr. Subramanian turned to give her a stern look over the tops of her wire-framed glasses. She wore her gray-streaked hair in a bun and sported a shade of lipstick Veronica had to believe was called No Nonsense. Veronica liked her.
“ ‘Good as new’ is not the phrase I’d use. But I’m pleased with his progress. How’s your reaction time, Mr. Mars?”
“Lightning fast,” Keith said, feigning a quick draw from his pocket.
“Any mood swings, strange behaviors, non sequiturs?” She turned toward Veronica.
“No more than usual.” Veronica smiled at her father.
“Hmm.” Dr. Subramanian looked down at the file folder in her hand. “How’s everything else healin
g up? It looks like you met with your internist earlier this week.”
“He says I’m not about to run any marathons, but I could probably sit quietly at a desk organizing paper clips. I’d like to get back to work as soon as possible,” Keith said, straightening his jacket. Every day since he’d gotten out of the hospital, he’d made a point of getting dressed in a crisp-pressed shirt and tie as if he were going to the office.
“Hmm.” The doctor slid open a manila envelope and pulled out several grainy MRI images, which she pinned up to a light box. Then she snapped on the light and grabbed a laser pointer attached to a set of keys. “Well, the brain scans came back looking much improved. The swelling is almost completely gone, as you can see here …”
Relief blurred Veronica’s vision, the image of her father’s healing brain disappearing into a myopic smear. She dabbed surreptitiously at her eyes. It was only now that he was so definitively on the mend that she understood how terrified she’d been at the idea that her father could be taken from her that easily. He was all the family she had. Each morning she woke up with an ache in the pit of her stomach, waiting for things to get back to normal.
Because normal’s the watchword, isn’t it? She smiled a little to herself. Nothing in her life had been normal since she’d come back to Neptune after nine long and quiet and normal years away. As a teenager she’d wanted only to get away, to flee the confines of a town run by the moneyed and the corrupt—to flee the scars of her youth. And she’d done it, for a while at least. She’d left, first to Stanford, and then to Columbia Law. The life she’d put together for herself had looked pretty good. Hole-in-the-wall Brooklyn apartment in spitting distance of Prospect Park; a job offer from Truman-Mann, where she’d have a chance to learn from some of the fiercest lawyers in New York. Cute, talented, even-keeled boyfriend named Piz.
But she’d left it all behind. It had taken only one call to pull her back to Neptune. When Logan, her high school boyfriend, had been wrongly accused of his ex-girlfriend’s murder, Veronica had dropped her entire life and rushed home to prove his innocence. She’d discovered the real murderer—and reclaimed a part of her that she’d lost, the piece that knew she was meant to be a private investigator, not a lawyer.