by Rob Thomas
She stood in the mirror, running her fingers through her hair. For one ridiculous moment she considered changing into something sexier—at least from the waist up, as that was all he’d see on his camera—but decided not to bother. Logan had fallen in love with her in striped T-shirts and jeans. There was no need to mess with a winning formula.
She looked around her bedroom, a sudden strange weight pressing down on her chest. The hazard of living in a place where you had so much history—so much pain and so much rage and so much love—was that every item could turn on you in a flash. Sure, the photo of her at Disneyland that perched on the bookcase? Cute as a button. But then she had to remember that Lianne had taken it. And even if she took the picture down, how many other belongings were just waiting to remind her of everything she’d ever lost? There was the teddy bear she’d kept since Duncan Kane won it for her at the Winter Carnival sophomore year. There was Lilly Kane’s necklace, twinkling from a jewelry tree on her dresser. There was Logan’s T-shirt, left behind after the days they’d spent together, which she kept draped over the back of a chair.
Veronica suddenly missed him worse than she had in weeks. She steeled herself. Dealing with Mom has got you maudlin. Remember the rules, Mars—no pining, no whining. Keep it light.
She was adjusting the angle of the lampshade on her desk when she heard the singsong chime that meant a call was coming in.
And then he was there, at the top of her screen. He wore his sage-green flight suit, unbuttoned partly to show the black T-shirt underneath. This time his eyes seemed to meet hers; the camera must have been adjusted properly. And even though she knew it was an illusion and that their eye contact was being filtered through lenses and wires, it sent a little shiver down her spine.
He smiled. “There you are,” he said.
“Here I am,” she answered.
For a moment they just grinned at each other, each taking in the other’s presence.
“How long do you have?”
It took him a beat too long to answer. They must have a lag.
“Not long enough. Fifteen, twenty minutes? There’s a wait list for the computers.” He smiled ruefully. “Hey, so, sorry I had to miss our last date. I, uh, lost my Internet privileges. Something about insubordination.”
“That doesn’t sound like you,” she said, eyes wide.
“It was a frame job, I tell you.”
“So, business as usual.”
He laughed softly, and the image froze for a moment, streaky digital lines across his face. She held her breath, waiting. After a moment it came unstuck again.
“Can you see me now?” She tried not to cringe at her words. It seemed like half of their scant and precious time together was spent asking that. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Still there? This fucking computer. Mac had helped her optimize her video chat capabilities, but Logan was approximately eight thousand miles away, floating, as he put it, in a giant metal box, surrounded by God knew what kind of equipment interfering with their connection.
He smirked. “Billions of dollars of defense technology at work.”
They were quiet for another moment, awkward. Then his face softened. “You look great.”
“Thanks,” she whispered. “How’re you doing?”
“I’m okay. The flight surgeon cleared me yesterday. I’ll be on deck for a mission this afternoon, so it may be a few days before I can e-mail you again.” He licked his lips. “So how’s Lianne?”
“Well, she’s clean now. She’s got a new family, a new life.”
“Yeah? How’re you doing?”
She hesitated.
“I’m … fine,” she said softly. “I mean, it hasn’t been easy, seeing her again like this. But I made my choice a long time ago. And so did she.” She gave a short, heavy laugh. “It seems like she was really happy, before all this happened. Apparently no one in her new life drives her to drink.”
Logan’s brow furrowed. “Veronica. You know she didn’t leave because of you, right?”
She didn’t answer. She felt impossibly adolescent again. Does Mommy love me? was the kind of thing you scrawled in a diary, not the kind of thing you discussed at twenty-eight years old with your boyfriend.
Logan said something else then, but the screen froze again, his voice so broken up she couldn’t make out the words.
“Logan?”
“You … better … your dad,” he finished. She smacked the side of the desk, more out of frustration than in the hopes it’d provide better reception. But she didn’t have the heart to ask him to repeat himself, to spend another fifteen minutes laboring over the same twenty words, as they’d done several times before. She just nodded.
“Are you there?” he asked. He leaned forward and frowned at the camera.
“Yeah, I can hear you. Logan?”
“Veronica? Are you there?”
Her heart sank. She craned her neck at the monitor, hoping the connection would correct itself, that his voice would come clear through the digital noise. His image shifted jerkily once, twice. She caught the sound of his voice deconstructed into halting and meaningless syllables. And then the window went dark.
She stayed in her chair for a long time. A dark hollow seemed to carve itself out under her chest, frustration and despair curling her fists at her sides. She knew not to worry about the sudden disconnect—he’d often warned her it was just the connection, not some kind of emergency or attack. But now she felt more cut off from him than she had before their awkward, aborted chat.
After a few minutes, she powered down her computer. Logan had said out loud what everyone else had danced around: the fact that, no matter how “professional” and detached Veronica tried to be, Lianne was still the woman who’d left. Still the woman who’d cut and run when things got too hard. And watching her soldier through the search for a missing stepdaughter hurt some deep, childish part of Veronica more than she wanted to admit.
In the hall outside her room, she heard her father’s uneven steps as he made his way to bed. Veronica stood up from her desk, staring at the faint outline of her face reflected in the darkened window. Logan had seen through her; that was one of the reasons she loved him. He could tell her things she couldn’t bear to tell herself sometimes. But what good did it do to dwell on all the ways Lianne had let her down? The bridges between them had burned to ash a long time ago. She couldn’t go back in time. She couldn’t fix what had gone wrong. She couldn’t make Lianne love her.
She touched the surface of Aurora’s diary where it sat on her desk. Not for the first time, she felt a connection to the girl, an ache of recognition.
Both of us are lost, she thought. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to bring one of us home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Balboa County Public Defender’s Office was a utilitarian concrete slab of a building, conveniently located a few blocks away from the Sheriff’s Department in downtown Neptune. Veronica arrived at 1:00 p.m. the next afternoon with lasagna from Mama Leone’s and a smile and took the elevator up to the sixth floor, where Cliff McCormack’s office was situated.
Cliff and her dad had been friends for almost twenty years now, and Mars Investigations had cleared more than a few of his clients of wrongdoing. Of course, evidence gathered by Mars Investigations had also put a handful of his clients away—but that was life in the seedy underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sometimes you had to defend the indefensible.
As far as she knew, there wasn’t another McSomething working for the Public Defender’s Office. Which meant that Cliff, the low-rent local lawyer near and dear to her heart, was her best shot at getting access to Willie Murphy’s statement. But as cynical as Cliff pretended to be, he sometimes got a tiny bit hung up on ethics—especially on sticky little issues like attorney-client privilege. Veronica hoped the piping hot lasagna currently turning the white bag translucent would coax him toward a moral gray area.
His door was open, but she knocked lightly on the frame. Cliff l
ooked up from his desk, where he sat thumbing through the contents of a manila folder. When he saw her, his eyebrows furrowed.
“I brought lunch” she sang, dangling the bag tantalizingly in front of her. “Fresh from Mama Leone’s”
“How cheap do you think I am?” His nostrils flared. “Don’t answer that.”
She took a few steps into his office, closing the door softly behind her. It was a windowless closet of a room with walls painted in a soul-killing greenish gray. A heavy bookshelf took up the greater part of a wall, covered in dusty law books and three-ring binders. The desk was a disaster site, strewn with manila folders and stray scraps of paper, interspersed with sandwich wrappers and a half-eaten box of Cheez-Its. She sat down in a stiff-backed chair across from him.
“You’ve been dodging my calls, Cliffy.”
Cliff scowled. He was a tall, rangy man, his dark hair slicked with pomade. His lips were always on the verge of a sour smile, his brows expressive and skeptical. He watched warily as she uncovered a to-go portion of lasagna, stuck a plastic fork in the still bubbling cheese, and handed it across the desk to him.
“Contrary to what you and your father may think, I do have a life.” Cliff closed his eyes for a moment to inhale the savory aroma, then frowned. “It just so happened that I had plans yesterday.”
“Was it double-coupon day at Les Girls already? My, time flies.”
“If you must know, I was at a winery, with a friend. A lady friend. And it turns out lady friends are much less friendly when you interrupt a date to answer a call from a perky young blonde. Especially a perky young blonde who has a habit of asking for favors.” He gave her a pointed look, picked up the loaded fork, and took a large bite.
“What are favors between old friends?” She cocked her head to the side.
“What do you want, Veronica?” His mouth was full as he spoke, sauce spattering along the length of his ten-dollar tie.
“I heard you lost a client on Saturday.” She nibbled a piece of her own lasagna. “Any idea why?”
“At a guess? Probably because someone wanted him to win his case.”
“Someone … like the Gutiérrez cousins?”
“Someone like that, yes.” He set down his fork. “Honestly I’m glad. Cases where stupid people do stupid things are really more my forte. Like this guy.” He picked up a folder from the mess on his desk. “He updated his Facebook account from inside a house he was robbing. Classic Cliff McCormack material. I’ll leave the murderers to someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“So you think he did it?” Veronica leaned forward. “You think Willie Murphy killed those girls?”
Cliff counted off on his fingers. “Well, let’s see. He was at the parties where both victims were last seen; he tried to pawn the property of the first victim; and strands of the first victim’s hair were found on the passenger seat of his car. Add that to the fact that the guy has priors and that he had a pharmacopoeia of narcotics in his bloodstream the night of his arrest, and all signs point to—”
Veronica sat up straight. “He had Hayley Dewalt’s hair in his car?”
“They’re still waiting for the lab tests to confirm it, but it looks like a perfect match with hair found in her brush.” He shrugged. “Sometimes, if it looks like a murderous duck and quacks like a murderous duck … well, you know.”
She laced her fingers together and rested her chin on her hands, frowning. Cliff’s eyes narrowed. “It scares me to see you thinking that hard.”
“Something about this just isn’t adding up, Cliff.”
Cliff shook his head. “Look, kid, I’m no fancy Columbia-educated profiler, but I’ve worked with the ‘ethically challenged’ for a long time. They call it ‘deviant behavior’ for a reason—it’s hard to predict and doesn’t make a lot of sense. Believe me. If you’d heard the guy’s story your bullshit detector would be—”
“So you got his story?”
He closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. “Yes. I got his story. And no, I can’t tell you anything about it.”
“Sure, of course, I know that. Attorney-client privilege.” She scooted her chair forward confidentially. “I did go to law school, after all.” She paused. “I’m just wondering if he said anything about what he did with the girls. Because you know as well as I do that if Lamb can get a conviction, he’ll consider that the end of it. He doesn’t care if we find the bodies.”
She sat on the edge of her chair, watching him. Some sort of battle seemed to be raging in his face. His jaw tensed. His eyes locked on hers and then looked away thoughtfully. After a few seconds, his face relaxed, and he sighed and stood up.
“Well, this has been a fun conversation, but I have a meeting in just a few minutes.” She started to stand up, an argument leaping to her throat, but he held up a hand. “Hey, I know your administrative skills are probably rusty after all this time, but if you wanted to really do me a solid you could clean up my desk. Since we’re talking favors and all.” He looked at her from under heavy, exasperated brows. “I’ll just close the door so no one comes in to bother you. Lock it on the way out.”
He buttoned his suit jacket, brushed a thick coil of hair off his forehead, and, giving her one last pointed look, left the room.
Veronica stared down at the expanse of his desk. Stacks of paperwork cascaded across it. Three different coffee mugs sat with a rime of scum across the bottom of each. One of the mugs said KEITH MARS FOR SHERIFF. Another said NEPTUNE IS FOR LOVERS. A small smile played at the corners of her lips. She cracked her knuckles.
Twenty minutes later, the wastebasket was full, the mugs were in a drying rack in the break room down the hall, the paperwork had been sorted, collated, and alphabetized—and she had Willie Murphy’s file spread across her lap. She flipped through it page by page, past his rap sheet and his mug shot, until she found it—a transcription of the statement he made to Cliff.
She glanced at the door one more time. Then she started to read.
CM: So here’s thing, Mr. Murphy—the sheriff is building a case against you as we speak. They know you were at the parties where both girls disappeared. They have the necklace you cleverly pawned two days after Hayley Dewalt’s disappearance. And they’ve found three long brown hairs in the passenger seat of your car. We’re still waiting on the forensic report, but they look identical to hair pulled from Hayley’s brush back home. It’s not looking good.
WM: Look, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never killed anyone. I’m not into that kind of shit. It’s not … I don’t even like the sight of blood, okay? I mean, okay, yes, she was in my car that night. But I didn’t, like, hurt her. I mean, I was trying to do her a fucking favor.
CM: A favor?
WM: Yeah, man. I mean, fine, we talked a little at the party. She was getting friendly with a friend of mine—like, real friendly, if you know what I mean—and then all of a sudden she freaked out.
CM: What do you mean she freaked out?
WM: I don’t know, man, one minute she was curled on the couch nibbling Rico’s earlobe, and the next minute she was running around the party asking if anyone could give her a ride north. Rico was pissed. He’d been working on her all night long and suddenly she’s running for the hills.
CM: This would be Federico Gutiérrez Ortega?
WM: Yeah.
CM: What did he do?
WM: He called her a cocktease. She didn’t care, though. She wanted to go to Bakersfield. Like, right then and there. She was desperate. I felt bad for her. I told her if she had gas money I’d take her.
CM: So you expect me—and more importantly, the jurors—to believe that a girl you didn’t even know decided to head to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, and you gallantly offered to drive her? That’s like, what, four hours?
WM: Three. And yeah. That’s what happened.
CM: And you did this out of the goodness of your heart, did you?
WM: Look, man, I thought she was flirting with me.
I figured, she’s a damsel in distress, I’m a knight with an ’86 El Camino—maybe a little chivalry would get me an in, you know what I’m saying?
CM: Okay. So what did you do once you got to Bakersfield?
WM: She had me pull into a truck stop just outside town—said she wanted a Coke. Then when I got out to fill up the tank, she bolted. Ran right across I-5. I don’t know where she was going. I called after her, but, like, I’m not chasing after some crazy bitch at four in the morning in the middle of nowhere. I went and had some breakfast in the diner, just to give her some time to come back. But she didn’t. So I went home and went to bed. She never even paid me for the gas.
CM: So how do you explain how you got your hands on her necklace?
WM: When I got back to my car from the diner it was in the passenger seat. It must have come loose or something on the way up. I don’t know—I’d just used a whole tank of gas getting her there. Six hours round trip! I wanted to cover my losses, so I sold the stupid thing. I didn’t know she was missing. If I’d known I would have just thrown it in the bushes.
CM: Right. And what about Aurora Scott? Did she express an urgent need to drive straight into the Mojave?
WM: I never even talked to her. I saw her at the party—I mean, everyone did. She was in the tan-line competition. Super hot. But she didn’t have the time of day for me. I don’t know what happened to her. You’ve got to believe me, man, I don’t know anything else.
Veronica took photos of the transcript with her phone. Then she shut the folder, put it on Cliff’s desk on a neat stack of files, and stood up.
Cliff was right. It was a stupid story. A clumsy, terrible, stupid story.
But she couldn’t help but feel that it was stupid enough to be true.