by Rob Thomas
She looked down at her phone. It was just 3:30 p.m. She could be in Bakersfield by sunset, easy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
She’d just crossed the L.A. County line and was driving past the gray-green hills of Los Padres National Forest when her phone rang.
“Hello?”
Logan’s car was equipped with Bluetooth, and he’d synced it with her phone before he’d deployed. The radio cut out, and Mac’s voice came clear and crisp through the BMW’s speakers.
“Veronica? Where are you?”
“En route to Bakersfield. I got a lead. What’s up?”
“Well, it might be nothing, but I thought you should know. That story about the Meat Loaf song in the ransom message? You know, the proof-of-life stuff?”
“Yeah?” Veronica was suddenly alert. She sat up.
“Well, she posted it on Facebook five years ago.”
Veronica’s fingers curled more tightly around the steering wheel. She stared intently at the road.
“Still there?”
“Yeah. Sorry, Mac. I’m just thinking.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean she’s, like … not alive. Does it?”
“I don’t know what it means yet. Is there anything else?”
“That’s all I’ve got for now. Should I stay in the office in case you need anything?”
“No, there’s no sense in that. Go home, Mac. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She stopped at the turn-off to Frazier Park and found Oxman’s card in her bag. He answered on the third ring.
“Mr. Oxman, this is Veronica Mars. I know you asked me not to interfere until you get Hayley home safe, but I wanted to give you a little information. It looks like the proof-of-life story they offered for Hayley was actually a story she posted on Facebook when she was thirteen years old.”
There was a long silence on the line. When he spoke, his voice was low and careful. “I see. That’s … good information to have. I’ll have to look into it.” Another pause. “Thanks, kid.”
She didn’t have Jackson’s card, but the Meridian Group’s website had a number listed for “general inquiries.” A nasal female voice answered.
“Meridian.”
“Hi, this is Veronica Mars calling for Lee Jackson. Any way you can patch me through?”
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Mars, but Lee is in the field.”
“I know that, but I really need to get in touch. Can you maybe forward me, or give me a number where I can—”
“I can take a message for you.”
She gritted her teeth in frustration but left her name and number. For just a moment she considered calling her mother, but the idea of having that conversation with Lianne—of having to discuss everything this new development could mean—made her squirm in her seat. Better to leave it to the professionals. Better to tell Jackson and let him make of it what he would.
There were three truck stops along I-5 just outside of Bakersfield, but only one of them had a twenty-four-hour diner, meaning it had to be the place where Willie Murphy had his breakfast at about 4:00 a.m. the morning Hayley had disappeared.
Murphy’s story still didn’t make sense. For one thing—why Bakersfield? She hadn’t been able to find any evidence that Hayley Dewalt knew anyone at all in Bakersfield—no friends, no family—and it wasn’t like it was some spring break mecca. But it was the detail that made her want to believe him. It was too random, too unlikely, to be anything but true. If he was trying to save his butt, he’d have come up with a better story.
She parked outside a low building with dented and dirty aluminum siding. A buzzing neon sign overhead read LUCY’S ALL NITE, with a red neon pie below. A gas station blazed with light on the other side of the parking lot. About fifteen trucks were parked in slanting rows between diner and diesel. It was nearly 6:30 p.m. and the regimented palm trees around the edge of the parking lot sent long shadows across the ground. In the east the sky was already a deepening blue.
She went into the diner, a bundle of sleigh bells on the door handle announcing her arrival. The inside was hot and steamy, the smell of burnt coffee and bacon hanging like a dense fog on the air. The walls were covered in cheap seventies wood paneling. Red-and-white gingham oilcloth covered the tables, and foam stuffing sprouted out of the holes in the vinyl booths like mushrooms.
A few stray travelers loitered at the tables, dragging french fries through globs of ketchup or nursing cups of coffee. At the counter, a wall of plaid flannel faced her, the backs of several men and one particularly barrel-chested woman. It seemed too quiet to Veronica, especially after all the revelry of Neptune. No one was talking except for two men in mesh-backed hats, who were arguing loudly about a boxing match.
“If his damn corner hadn’t told him he had to finish it that round, he would’ve knocked Chavez into next Tuesday.”
“You’re fucking dreaming.”
A waitress with a hard crest of bottle-red hair and a mouth ringed with lines approached Veronica with a menu. She wore a yellow puff-sleeved dress that made her look jaundiced. Her badge said her name was Geena. “What can I do for you, honey?”
“Hi. I’m … I’m hoping you can answer a few questions for me. I’m investigating a missing persons case in Neptune, and I’m trying to figure out if this guy came through here. It would have been two weeks ago—the morning of the eleventh.” She held up her phone, where she’d loaded a photo of Willie Murphy. In it he wore an aloha shirt hanging open to show off his skinny chest. A tattoo in Gothic lettering spelled out BAD DOG across his sternum. He held a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor up for the camera in a toast. She’d gotten it from an article on Trish Turley’s blog; Turley had probably gotten it from Facebook.
The waitress looked down at the picture, then shook her head. “Lots of people come through here. It’s hard to say. Any idea what time he’d have been here?”
“It would have been early in the morning. Four or five a.m.”
Geena frowned. “Well, I work four p.m. to midnight, so I wouldn’t have seen him. You might come back tomorrow, before eight. One of the graveyard girls may know something.”
Disappointment rose up in Veronica’s gut. She hadn’t considered the time of day, but now it seemed obvious—anyone who would have been on the clock at 4:00 a.m. probably wouldn’t be serving the dinner crowd. She turned to go.
“Oh, wait!”
Geena’s eyes had gone very round. She smiled, the heavy smoker’s pucker of wrinkles bunching around her lips. She turned to look at the counter, where a pretty bronze-skinned girl wearing the same yellow dress was refilling the truckers’ coffee. “Rosa usually works the night shift but she’s covering evenings this week. Chantelle just had her baby and we had to turn the schedule on its head. Rosa, honey, we’ve got a question for you when you have a sec.”
The girl’s dark eyes flickered up over the slouching line of flannel-clad backs. She nodded, finished pouring, and put the carafe back on the warmer. Wiping her hands on the edge of her apron, she pushed her way out from behind the counter.
“What’s up, Geena?”
“This little girl has a question about someone who may’ve come through a week ago.”
“Two weeks ago,” Veronica cut in, holding out her phone. “This guy. It would have been early.”
Rosa stared down at the small screen, her brow crinkling. She was younger than Veronica—maybe even close to Hayley’s age—with round, flushed cheeks and a bow tie of a mouth. “Yeah, I remember him. He drank like fifty cups of coffee and stiffed me on the tip. It seemed like he was in a really bad mood.”
“Was anyone with him? Did he talk to anyone?”
“No. He sat right over there”—she gestured to a booth beneath the window—“kind of scowling. He just looked out the window and ate breakfast. Didn’t say anything to anyone.”
Heart beating fast, Veronica pulled one of her flyers from her bag. She showed to it both women. “Have you seen her at all in the past two weeks?”
Both shoo
k their heads.
She thanked them for their time and gave them the flyer, just in case. Some of the people in the diner were watching her now, with hard, curious eyes. She left them to their tired dinner, the bells jingling behind her.
Veronica stood for a few minutes in the parking lot, letting her eyes drift over the surroundings. The ground was parched and cracked, with shoots of green grasping up through chinks in the paving. Across the highway a threadbare-looking motel sat like a squat unfrosted cake, the neon in the vacancy sign stuttering on and off. The hills stretched out behind it, dotted with scrub and low stunted cedars, birds wheeling overhead in the wind. Besides that, there was nothing. The air smelled faintly of manure, and of exhaust, and of something sour and unclean. She took a few steps away from the diner.
Then her eyes settled on the sign. It was one of the plain green markers the California Department of Transportation used to indicate distances. How far to the next landmark, the next rest stop, the next city.
SAN JOSE—239 MILES
SAN FRANCISCO–280 MILES
And even though it wasn’t listed on the sign, she could do the math in her head. She’d driven it dozens of times herself:
STANFORD—263 MILES
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Veronica stood rooted to the spot. Distantly, she could hear the sound of traffic, but it wasn’t as loud as the sound of the blood in her ears. Chad Cohan didn’t have to get to Neptune and back in time for class. He had to get to Bakersfield. Four hours one way. Four hours back.
It worked. The math worked.
She looked up and down the highway. Traffic was light, and after a semi roared past, she hurried across the road toward the Lake Creek Motel, a scraped-looking two-story row of rooms. She pushed her way into the main office.
It was dank and smelled like sweat. The wallpaper, faded and peeling, was printed with roses twining up gold vertical stripes. A completely incongruous deer head hung over the front desk, its antlers lopsided on its forehead. The desk was unattended, but in the room behind it she could hear the sound of a TV.
An old man peeked around the corner, then came tottering out to the desk. He was small and rumpled, in a moth-eaten sweater and saggy jeans. She noticed that he was missing two fingers on his left hand, and when he scratched at his chin it was with his thumb. “Evening, ma’am.”
“Hi. I have kind of a strange question for you.”
The old man stared at her from a nest of wrinkles. His eyes were dark and shiny and hard to read. “We get some of those from time to time.”
“Do you happen to work early mornings? Like, four, five a.m.?”
The old man shook his head. “My son taps me out sometime after midnight, usually works until ten or eleven the next day.”
“Is he here at all?”
He shifted his weight, his expression unchanging. “He’s asleep, ma’am. We work pretty long nights here. He won’t be up for a few more hours.”
She nodded. “Well, maybe you can help me. I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but there are a couple of missing girls in Neptune …”
His face lit up. “I saw that! It’s been on Trish Turley all week long. Awful thing. I hope that fella they caught gets the death penalty.”
“I’ve been hired to try to find the girls, and I have reason to believe that one of them stayed here on the eleventh of March, checking in during the very early morning. Maybe four or five a.m.? She may have been staying under a false name, or with someone else who footed the bill. Is there any way you can pull up the records for that morning?”
“Well, we don’t usually give out names or personal information of our guests without a subpoena.” He tapped a complicated tattoo on the desk with his mangled hand—thumb, pinky, ring, thumb, thumb, pinky, ring. He watched her face curiously, as if he was looking for some evidence that this might somehow put him one step closer to being on Trish Turley’s show. It gave her an idea.
“I completely understand,” Veronica said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t want all the attention either.” She leaned in confidingly. “I mean, all those interviews are a huge pain. I’ve heard Trish Turley is calling anyone with any kind of connection to the case and begging for interviews.”
His eyes went wide. For a moment he stood there, thinking. Then he turned to a boxy old computer perched on the edge of his desk, pecking the keys one by one with his good hand.
“What time you say they were here?”
“Between four and five on the morning of the eleventh.”
His eyes scanned over the monitor. She didn’t breathe.
“Looks like we had one check-in,” he said slowly. “At four fifteen a.m.”
“Was it a couple?”
He gave her another long deadpan look. She realized right then that he wasn’t going to tell her anything else.
“Sorry. Okay. But let me ask you one more favor, and then I’ll be out of your hair.” She took a deep breath. “Is there any way you could let me in to look around the room?”
The sunlight was a dark burnished gold when she let herself into the first-story room a few minutes later. She swung open the door and turned on the light.
It was shabby and stale smelling, not so much bland as despairing. The walls were papered in the same faded rose-trellis pattern as the lobby was, and the gray carpet was stained and threadbare. The clumsy old furniture seemed weirdly bunched up at one end of the room, a pile of thickly varnished wood, the bedspread pilling and thin.
She stood in the middle of the room for a moment. Déjà vu. This was every shitty motel that’d ever been someone’s undoing—this was the Camelot, where she’d followed philanderers and con artists night after night. This was the Palm Tree Lodge, where she’d long ago looked for another missing girl, poor Amelia DeLongpre. This was the Lake Creek Motel, and she was almost certain Hayley Dewalt had been here.
She started with the obvious, opening drawers, feeling around in the back of the closet, unsure what she hoped she’d find, but looking for it anyway. Perhaps she’d turn up something Chad or Hayley left behind, a clue that would tell her what had happened the morning they arranged to meet halfway between Neptune and Stanford. She ran her hands along the seams of the room—the AC vents, the paneling in the walls, the outlets—trying to feel anything loose, unusual.
When she’d finished she sat on the edge of the bed. She softened her gaze, no longer looking for something but looking at everything. Her mind rolled gently over the objects of the room, the facts she knew, and the suspicions she had. Sometimes you had to see both the forest and the trees.
That was when they sharpened into view: the marks on the wallpaper. Boxy outlines where the wallpaper was brighter, less faded and filthy. As if something had been sitting in front of it, protecting it from the light the rest of the roses were exposed to. The shapes were low on the wall.
Approximately where furniture would usually sit.
She jumped off the bed. First she grabbed the nightstand—it was bulky but surprisingly light. The bed was harder. She had to drag it in fits and starts. It’d been crowded close to the dresser, but based on where the wallpaper had faded it’d recently been moved about three feet. She pulled it back to where it’d once stood. Then she walked around to the other side. And that’s when she saw it.
There, in the carpet, was the unmistakable stain of blood.
Someone had tried to clean it up—a wide, pale circle around the spatter showed where it’d been scrubbed. But the rusty splotches were too deep, too rich to be wiped away so easily. A pointillist collection of drops formed a small circle, about six inches in diameter. From there the spray radiated left, fanning out about two feet.
It’d been about ten years since she’d done her FBI internship—and she’d only worked for a few days with blood spatter. But it was obvious someone had been hit, hard. And probably more than once.
Her throat felt raw. She straightened up again, eyes darting over the room. Something frantic scuttled in her ches
t, a panicked and sharp-nailed feeling. She tried to ignore it. But the only thing that mattered right now was the evidence—the physical facts.
There was nowhere to hide anything large in the motel room. And besides, two weeks out, the smell of a body would have gotten someone’s attention. She left the door to the room ajar as she walked back outside. The world seemed suddenly more desolate than it had twenty minutes before, dry and brown beneath the setting sun. Down at the end of the row of rooms, she saw the cool light of a vending machine. Next to it was the icemaker.
She walked toward it as if she were in a dream. Or a memory? How many dead girls drifted in her wake? How many ghosts did she have to carry? She could almost see Amelia walking ahead of her, translucent and shimmering. Lifting up the flap to the ice machine and climbing inside.
That was where she’d found DeLongpre’s body all those years before, covered in ice in another crappy motel courtyard. Murdered by her boyfriend for the money she’d received in a settlement from Kane Software. Lightning couldn’t strike twice. It couldn’t.
She stood in front of the machine for a moment and then lifted the metal flap. Crushed ice glistened inside. She grabbed the scoop and started shifting it around, rummaging toward the back. Then her shoulders collapsed as she exhaled.
Nothing there. Nothing but ice.
Hayley Dewalt could still be alive. Maybe the blood wasn’t even hers—or maybe it was and she’d just run off, hoping to get away from everything in her life that had led her to that tawdry room, everything that had led her to a boy who would hurt her when he was supposed to love her. She went back to the room and shut the door, putting the key in her pocket. She turned to head back to the office. And then she saw something that made her jaw go tight.
The birds she’d seen from across the street still wheeled in tight circles behind the motel. She could see them more clearly now—their dark red heads, the silent, focused gliding of their bodies, wings wide and motionless for seconds at a time as they hung on an updraft. The desperate, scared thing in her chest went very still as understanding, irrevocable as the blood on the carpet, settled on her.