Veronica Mars

by Rob Thomas

  In one fluid movement, she crossed the room and picked it up from where it lay. It rattled in her hand, heavier than she would have expected, the wood thick and quite hard. She raised it high over her head and brought it down against the edge of the hearth.

  With a satisfying crack, the instrument crumpled against the stone. And pinto beans—small, dry, innocuous—spilled out all over the immaculate carpet.

  The very same ones that had spilled out beneath Lee Jackson’s body at the Neptune Grand.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “Look, for the thousandth time, I didn’t attack Shep.”

  It was late Tuesday night, and Veronica watched Tanner’s interrogation unfold through a one-way mirror. Lamb hadn’t wanted her there—he’d been ready to throw her in the lockup for obstruction, never mind that she hand delivered the perp in question. She’d had to call Petra Landros and remind her that $600,000 was still missing—$600,000 that had been raised in part by Neptune’s Chamber of Commerce. “Do you think Lamb’s capable of tracking it down?” Veronica had asked.

  Within twenty minutes a hulking, concrete-faced deputy was showing her where she could hang her coat. She assumed Petra had put in a call to Lamb to remind him that his campaign funds and endorsements were on the line. Well, whatever works. She just wanted to hear what Tanner Scott had to say for himself.

  Tanner Scott sat across from Lamb, his forearms flat on the table. Next to him, Cliff McCormack jotted notes onto a legal pad.

  “Fine, yes, we were working together.” Tanner’s flat Midwestern drawl was a shade higher than usual. He was nervous. “I mean, I was working for him. This whole thing was his idea. I’ve been out of the game for a long time, living clean and legitimate. But then along come Shep …”

  “That’s Duane Shepherd? The victim?”

  “Yeah. He tracked me down in Tucson. I hadn’t seen him in eight years. We used to be partners.”

  At this point Cliff leaned over and whispered something to Tanner, but he shook his head.

  “No, look, I’ll come clean to anything I’m actually responsible for. But I swear to God, I wasn’t anywhere near that hotel tonight. I didn’t have anything to do with that maraca.”

  He pronounced “maraca” with a short “a” on the second syllable, like “rack.”

  “We used to hustle a little bit, back before I stopped drinking. I got busted nine years ago and served my time. It scared me straight. I got sober, I settled down. By the time I got out of prison, Shep had landed himself in. After that we lost touch. I didn’t see him again until last week.”

  Veronica had already been on and off the phone with Mac for most the night—enough so that she could piece together the parts that Tanner wasn’t telling. She already knew about Tanner’s check fraud. Shepherd, on the other hand, had a meatier rap sheet. He’d served six months in the nineties for selling forged athletic memorabilia in Sacramento, including a football supposedly signed by “the Juice” himself in the aftermath of the O. J. Simpson trial. A few years after that he was in trouble again, this time for passing off altered lottery tickets in Denver. The last sentence, the one that had come down while Tanner was serving his time, was for identity theft and credit card fraud, a five-year stint in federal prison for maxing out dozens of accounts he’d established with stolen Social Security numbers.

  The men had never been implicated in the same set of crimes, but she was willing to bet they’d worked together on and off for a long, long time. Mac had dug deep and found complaints in Reno, Fresno, and Phoenix—cases where victims had come forward claiming fraud but where nothing could be proven. Six women who claimed they’d been recruited by a “modeling firm” that had required them to pay money up front for their portfolios, only to find the firm vanished when they went back; a few socialites who claimed to have met “Denzel Washington’s charming brother” and loaned him vast amounts of money. An older couple who’d purchased a houseboat from a “little skinny guy with blue eyes,” only to find that the deed was forged. Veronica knew the statistics on swindling—most people never came forward, too ashamed of having been taken in, too ashamed of a situation where their own greed or lust or hunger had been laid bare. For every one complaint, it was worth assuming there were a half dozen other victims who’d stayed hidden in the shadows.

  “He had an idea for how to make some money. I told him no, I was out. But the thing about Shep is, he can be very persuasive.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “He forced me into it.”

  “How’d he force you into it?” Lamb’s voice was dripping skepticism, his left eyebrow arched over a baby-blue eye. “Did he threaten you with violence?”

  “Shep has stuff on me from way back. Enough to get me put away. I mean, nothing violent,” he said quickly. “Some scams we ran back in the day that are still technically, uh, unsolved. He threatened to turn me in. I never meant to hurt anyone. I swear.”

  “You believe him?”

  Veronica looked up. Norris Clayton had sidled up next to her, holding two cups of coffee. He handed one to Veronica.

  “About being blackmailed by Shepherd? I’ll give it a fifty-fifty. It’s possible—but Tanner’s an established liar, and Shepherd isn’t exactly in a position to argue.”

  “Oh, you didn’t hear?” Norris grinned humorlessly. “Shepherd disappeared from his hospital bed about an hour ago. No one’s sure how he managed it—but he’s vapor.”

  Veronica turned to stare at him, but she didn’t have time to speak. Lamb was still grilling Tanner Scott. She shook her head and turned back to the window.

  “Okay, okay. So what was Mr. Shepherd’s plan? Walk me through it like I’m stupid,” Lamb said.

  Norris snorted softly, and Veronica’s esteem for the man rose dramatically.

  “Well, he’d seen how much money was flooding into that Hayley Dewalt website. I mean, by noon on the first day it hit a hundred thousand. It was unbelievable. So he thought it’d be pretty easy to get in on that. All Aurora had to do was make sure to be seen at the same party the first girl went missing from, and then hole up for a few weeks while the money rolled in. Then we’d do the ransom drop, and a few days later she could stagger into a gas station, dirty and a little worse for wear. Shep would get the money out of town, and we’d meet up later and split it.”

  Lamb was staring at him now with unmasked skepticism. “Wait, wait. You’re saying your sixteen-year-old daughter was in on this?”

  Tanner hesitated, then nodded.

  The sheriff leaned back in his seat, arms crossed over his chest. “Look, we have this other kid—Adrian Marks—saying she ran off with some guy. I gotta tell you, that’s more plausible to me than the idea of a teenaged girl staying holed up during spring break.”

  “How many teen girls you know, Sheriff?”

  Lamb didn’t crack a smile. Tanner sighed.

  “Well, that’s how the whole thing fell apart. Damn girl told that friend of hers she was running off with a boy so he wouldn’t worry about her when she went missing. She was trying to be kind, I guess, but it was an amateur mistake.” Tanner erupted in a hoarse laugh. “I thought I taught her better.”

  “Mr. Scott, forgive me, but I don’t see how it’s funny to use a minor as an accessory to fraud, theft, obstruction of justice, and tampering with evidence.”

  Tanner sobered at once. “Look, don’t be hard on the kid. She didn’t want any part of this, either—but when she found out what Shep was threatening, she was scared. Last time I went to jail she was stuck in foster care for a year and a half. It wasn’t a day at the fucking beach. She’s terrified of losing me again.”

  “And what about your wife and your son? Did they know what was going on?”

  A strange look flitted across Tanner’s face. Veronica couldn’t decide if it was regret or relief.

  “No. They didn’t. They don’t.”

  Which meant, if it was true, that he’d been planning to leave her mom high and dry. The ticket to Bermuda spoke volumes about how he
’d planned to end the heist: on a beach, with a daiquiri in hand and no straight-and-narrow wife or noisy six-year-old in sight.

  Lianne was being questioned in a different interrogation room even now, a few doors down; Veronica had no desire to listen in on that session.

  “So you wrote both ransom notes?”

  “Shep did. He’s the one with the technical savvy. Knows how to encrypt things, knows how to mask an IP address, all that stuff. He thought we might get lucky and get the ransom for Hayley Dewalt too, but then that girl found the body.”

  Veronica smiled a little. She’d gone from being “Veronica, honey” to “that girl” in a matter of hours. All things considered, she preferred the latter. At least from Tanner Scott.

  “So today when Adrian Marks came forward with his story, you decided to move. You jogged to the Grand with one of your son’s maracas, waited for Shepherd to leave the hotel, assaulted him, and took the money.”

  “No!” Tanner slammed his fist on the table. “No, I didn’t. I wasn’t anywhere near the hotel. I was checking in on Rory. Room twenty-four in the Pinehurst Lodge, like I’ve been saying for two hours. Check it if you don’t believe me!”

  “We did check it.”

  A look of surprise flashed across Tanner’s face, too quick for him to hide it. “So? What’d she say?”

  Lamb’s chest swelled up, and Veronica could only guess how much he was loving this part—the trap sprung, the cat catching the canary. He’d taken the loss of Willie Murphy hard. But here he had a nice, juicy replacement for his trouble, a swindler who preyed upon the fears of anyone who’d ever seen a picture of a missing girl and imagined his or her own daughter in her place.

  “Mr. Scott, no one at the Pinehurst has ever laid eyes on your daughter. Room twenty-four has been vacant for a week. There’s no evidence she was ever anywhere near that motel.”

  Tanner shook his head, his jaw tight. “That’s not right. I just saw her there. Three hours ago, I just saw her there!”

  “So on top of everything else, I’m starting to have a strong inclination to charge you not just in the assault of Duane Shepherd but also for the murder of Aurora Scott.”

  “Lamb, get real.” Cliff broke in for the first time in a while. “You don’t have anything to indicate that Aurora Scott has been murdered—particularly not by my client.”

  “Not yet,” Lamb said, a leering grin spreading across his face. “But until I start getting more satisfied about some of these answers, it’s definitely a possibility.”

  “We’ve been searching the areas around the condo and around the Camelot,” Norris whispered. “I can’t figure out where he would have put the cash. I mean, look at him, he doesn’t even have pockets on his shorts. He had to hide it somewhere, right?”

  For a second, Veronica felt everything stop. The sound of the station, the beating of her heart, the blood in her veins. The earth tilting and swaying. It all went still. Flashes went off in her brain, brilliant and blinding. She closed her eyes. She could feel a smile, incongruous and strange, spreading over her face.

  “You won’t find that money hidden around the condo. Or the Neptune Grand,” Veronica said.

  She opened her eyes. Norris was staring at her expectantly.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Give me an hour and I’ll explain everything.” She adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder. “Thanks, Norris. I’ve gotta go.”

  She was halfway down the hall when she heard Norris calling after her. “Be careful, Veronica!” Veronica held up her hand in acknowledgment and rounded the corner to the exit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Adrian Marks lived in a shoddy apartment complex a few blocks from the wide green swaths of Hearst College. When Veronica arrived it was almost eleven. The pool was packed with kids—Hearst was back in session, but it looked like the residents were trying to stretch the party out a little longer. Coolers of beer lined the sides of the pool, and a few empty bottles bobbed like ducks on the water’s surface.

  Adrian’s unit was on the top floor. There was a light in the window, bands of yellow peeking out past the closed blinds. She pressed her ear to the door but she couldn’t hear anything over the thump of the music at the pool below. Then she knocked.

  The light in the window shifted as someone moved through it. It seemed to take a few minutes. She stood a few extra inches back from the door. She was so short people often had a hard time seeing her through the peephole.

  After what felt like a beat too long, the door swung open. Adrian stood silhouetted in the doorway. He wore an inside-out T-shirt and a pair of plaid boxer shorts, his dark hair tousled over one eye. It was the most undressed she’d seen him since she’d met him the week before—he usually gave the impression of being carefully put together, even when he was just wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

  “I didn’t wake you up, did I?” Veronica’s voice was apologetic. “I know it’s late.”

  Adrian rubbed the back of his neck. He gave an awkward smile.

  “I wasn’t asleep yet. Just getting settled in. It’s actually early for me, but it was a royal nightmare of a day.” He held up his hands, palms out in a gesture of exasperation.

  “Yeah, I heard you had to make a statement. That must have been tough.”

  He shuddered. “I never want to have to go through anything like it again.”

  Veronica smiled sympathetically.

  “The thing is, I have a few more questions about Aurora. I was hoping you could help clarify a few things for me.”

  Adrian glanced behind him into the apartment. “It can’t wait for tomorrow? I really was just on my way to bed.”

  “It’ll only take a moment.” She paused. “I just want to make sure Aurora’s all right.”

  Behind her she heard a shriek and then a splash from the pool. After another few seconds, Adrian swung open the door to let her in.

  The cramped little apartment was a catastrophe. Dirty dishes and empty pizza boxes cascaded across the floor. An overflowing ashtray sat on top of a statistics book, next to a cluster of beer bottles. One of the lightbulbs in the kitchen was out, giving the place a yellowed and dingy look. A smell of unwashed socks mingled with the smell of sour, turning food. Beneath it she could just make out a whiff of something sweeter, like the ghost of a vanilla candle.

  “So you said you had questions?” Adrian prompted.

  She stuck her hands into her pockets, rocking slightly on the balls of her feet. “Did you hear what happened tonight? Mr. Jackson—you know, that kidnapping expert? Someone attacked him outside the Neptune Grand and disappeared with the ransom money.”

  Adrian’s head jerked backward in a double take. “What?”

  “Crazy, right?” She shifted her weight. “The sheriff brought Mr. Scott in for questioning.”

  “Mr. Scott? But … why?” The boy’s brow furrowed.

  “Apparently Jackson and Tanner were working together all along. Well, Jackson, Tanner, and Aurora. According to Tanner she’s been in on it too.” She watched Adrian’s face carefully. He looked confused, his eyes wide with surprise. “They decided to stage her disappearance when Hayley went missing, then created the ransom notes, hoping to cash in on both Hayley’s disappearance and Aurora’s. But when it looked like their cover was about to be blown, Jackson tried sneaking off with the money. Lamb thinks it was Tanner who assaulted him and hid the money somewhere.”

  Adrian sat down hard on a lumpy easy chair. It creaked beneath him. “Oh. My. God.” He covered his eyes with one hand for a moment, then looked up, his eyes flashing. “I’m going to kill her! She let me sit here and feel like shit for covering her ass, and all this time she’s been in on everything? I can’t fucking believe her.”

  Veronica sat down across from him on a sagging sofa, hands in her lap. From where she sat she could see a little way down the darkened hallway—one door was closed, another cracked slightly, too dark to see in. “So you haven’t heard from her at all tonight?”


  He shook his head. “Have the cops found her yet?”

  “That’s the thing.” She leaned forward. “She’s not at the motel where Tanner said she’d be. She really is missing this time.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know.” She straightened up again. “Lamb is talking about charging Tanner with her murder, but I don’t buy it. For one thing there’s no evidence. Not that that’d stop Lamb. But for another, Tanner allegedly hit his partner over the head with a maraca. I don’t buy that he’d clock Lee Jackson with an amateur bludgeon if he were cold enough to off his own daughter.”

  “A maraca?” Adrian asked, looking thunderstruck.

  “So what I’m wondering,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken at all, “is if you think Aurora has it in her to double-cross her dad.”

  He stared at her for a moment, his mouth hanging open.

  “Because here’s the thing,” she said. “Tanner may be sketchy, but he seems like a pretty smart guy. So why would he take his child’s musical instrument—which I’d just seen him handling a few hours earlier—and use it to assault someone?” She grimaced. “Besides which, where the hell was he keeping it? He was out jogging. I saw his clothes—mesh shorts, T-shirt, no pockets. So did he just jog down to the Grand with the maraca clenched in his fist, then jog off with the duffel of money? I doubt it. But if Tanner didn’t do it—and I don’t think he did—that means that whoever did do it worked really hard to pin it on him. The only person in the scam who’s unaccounted for is Aurora. And if I’ve learned anything about Aurora in the past week, it’s that she’s clever, she’s ambitious, and she’s a damn good liar.”

  Adrian ran his fingers through his hair. He was quiet for a minute, staring blankly up at the ceiling. When he looked back down, his blue eyes were conflicted.

  “I don’t know anymore. I mean, a few hours ago, I would have told you no way—that Rory wouldn’t do something like that to her own dad. But … she’s been lying to me all this time. She’s been lying to everyone. So I don’t know what to think. I’m sorry, I wish I could help you.”