Pretty Wanted (5 page)

“Ack,” he said, pulling at his hair.

“What’s up?”

“I can’t get in.”

“To what?”

“The police database.”

I pinched his arm.

“Ow!” he yelped.

Aidan and I exchanged looks. What mine said:
We can’t have these two randoms lurking around while we look up sensitive intel.

What his said:
They don’t care who we are. Chill out.

But the sideburns guy seemed to be looking at me for an extra-long time. I saw him give his friend an elbow.

“What was the date again?” Aidan asked.

“What?” I was distracted by Sideburns. He was grinning at us now. Or mostly at me. Maybe I was being paranoid again. I hoped.

“The date? Of the . . . event?”

“October 22, 1997.”

After another pause, Aidan groaned. “Aagh. This is so frustrating. I’m close, I think. I just can’t figure out the right string. . . .”

“Need some help with something?” Sideburns asked.

“No,” I answered for both of us. We most certainly did not. I didn’t trust most people right now, especially strange, scruffy boys who smelled like goat and eavesdropped and had the potential to rat us out. Even if they’d let us into a computer lab.

“I ask ’cause I’m good at tech stuff.” He was up on his feet now and he edged closer. “I’m actually tutoring my friend over here. I can help you, too.”

“I doubt you could help us with what he’s doing,” I said, trying to brush him off. “It’s very high level.”

“I’m on an accelerated track to get my PhD. No disrespect, but I know my stuff more than most people. And I’d like to help you.” He raised his eyebrows and smiled. Flirty-like. He saw I was here with Aidan, right? “I’m on your side, you know.”

There was no doubt now. It was obvious. He knew exactly who we were.

Aidan slid his chair away from the computer. “Actually, dude, I could use some help.”

“What are you doing?” I stood up and tried to block the screen from Sideburns.

“Trying to help
you
,” he said softly. “You want more information, right? Well, I want what you want.”

When he said stuff like that, how was I supposed to argue with him? Still, this was a bad idea. It was one thing to hack into the police database and quite another to do it with witnesses.

I inched away reluctantly, allowing a view of the screen.

“So there’s a database I want to hack into,” Aidan said.

“Aha,” Sideburns asked, pulling over a chair. “I knew you were doing something fun. SQL?”

“Yeah. I tried to query for an emailed password with a quote. I got the five hundred error message but when I tried to manipulate the query again I got a server error.”

“And you schema mapped the fields?”

“It’s not letting me.”

“You’re not asking the right questions. What about log-in underscore ID? Full underscore name? Try those.”

Great. Now they were deep in conversation, yammering away in Nerd. The other guy, who had the physique of a gnome and wore a knit skullcap, moved closer to watch over their shoulders. He glanced at me and I broke the eye contact quickly, not wanting to encourage either of them. They looked extra young, like they could be high school kids themselves but they were probably just malnourished from spending all their time in front of screens.

Sideburns leaned over and typed something into the keyboard.

Aidan’s face was knotted in concentration. “Right. Okay.”

“Try it now,” Sideburns said. Then he looked at me and winked. This guy was unbelievable. In another situation I might have found his boldness intriguing—he almost reminded me of Aidan, actually—but right now I couldn’t handle it.

Aidan keyed more in, then hit enter again. “This is it,” he said excitedly. “The complete case file. We’re in.”

Sideburns grinned. “Cha-ching. Told you.”

“You’re a genius,” Aidan said to Sideburns.

He did a little corny bowing gesture. “I like to help out my brethren where I can. Especially if there’s a cute girl among them.”

Brethren?
And now he was calling me cute in front of Aidan? He couldn’t be serious.

But he was. The guy totally knew who we were and he was Team Sly Fox. A few weeks ago I would have been happy to meet him, happy to know there were people out there who were rooting for us, but I now was filled with unease. Everything about this situation felt wrong and out of my control.

I looked over at Aidan and saw he was getting uncomfortable. He put a protective—or was that jealous?—hand on my shoulder. “Right,” he said. “Well, we’ve kind of got a thing going already.”

I was mortified.

“My bad,” Sideburns said. “Didn’t mean to overstep.”

I leaned in to look at the screen, desperate to change the subject and finish our job here. “So what’s in there?”

“Looks like some photos.” Sideburns clicked on the mouse and brought them up, a blur of red and white.

Aidan scrambled to quickly click away from the images. “We shouldn’t look at those.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“Crime scene photos,” he said, barely meeting my eye. He didn’t want me to be hurt.

I felt my stomach turn, although some small part of me was curious. Maybe there would be something useful in there. Not that I wanted to look at any of this stuff with Sideburns hovering around.

Sideburns must have finally gotten the hint because he was backing off and he and his friend returned to their spot on the couch. “Seems like this is personal. We’ll be right over here if you need us.”

Aidan clicked on another tab. “Here’s the inventory of the evidence that was found in her apartment.”

I read through.

Master Bedroom

      
(1)
  
clear drinking glass with 9 ounces brown liquid, tested and shown to be Diet Coke

      
(1)
  
television remote

      
(3)
  
DVDs

      
(1)
  
24-inch-screen TV

      
(1)
  
DVD player

      
(4)
  
pillows and pillowcases

      
(1)
  
jar of change and loose bills, totaling $430

      
(1)
  
poetry book, with a receipt from St. Louis Books, dated 10/22/97

      
(3)
  
.380 spent shell casings

My shoulders seized as a chill skimmed over them. Bullets. From the gun that killed her.

Master Bedroom Closet

      
(8)
  
trash bags of women’s clothing

      
(4)
  
cardboard boxes of household items, labeled

      
(1)
  
apron embroidered with the name McLaughlin’s Pub

Bedroom 1

      
(3)
  
sweaters, size 10

      
(5)
  
T-shirts, size M

      
(1)
  
American history textbook

      
(3)
  
loose-leaf notebooks

The clothes and books had to have been Leslie’s.

      
(1)
  
Graco Pack ’n Play

      
(1)
  
box Huggies diapers

Those were mine, I assumed.

Living Room

      
(1)
  
handbag, blue leather

            
Contents:

            
(1)
  
wallet, red leather

                  
Contents:

                  
$25 cash

      
(1)
  
Missouri driver’s license issued to Brianna Siebert

      
(1)
  
library ID card issued to Brianna Siebert

      
(1)
  
Blue Cross insurance card issued to Brianna Siebert

So she’d changed her name, but not legally.

      
(1)
  
ticket stub to Smashing Pumpkins concert

      
(1)
  
business card for Psychic Services

      
(3)
  
sheets from a Guest Services pad containing personal notes

      
(2)
  
photographs of victim with two children

      
(1)
  
ball-point pen, blue, with the name Blueberry Hill imprinted on the casing

      
(1)
  
Turkish evil eye keychain

      
(1)
  
Maybelline lip gloss, Bistro Red

      
(1)
  
CoverGirl powder compact, Beige

      
(1)
  
unopened package of Certs mints

A weird sense of recognition settled over me as I looked at this list of things that belonged to my mother, like I was filling out the picture of her in my mind, and she wasn’t that different from me. She used makeup. She liked to read. She ate mints—the fact that there were still uneaten mints left in her bag when she died filled me with sadness.

She’d bought a poetry book that day, too. She hadn’t planned for this. She’d had a future ahead of her. She had fully expected to live. She’d even thought about seeing a psychic. Maybe that would have changed things, if she could have possibly known what lay ahead.

At the same time, these little details felt so paltry. Was that all that was left of a person when they went, a few measly personal belongings, a couple of random clues? If this was the sum total of what I had, how could I ever understand who she was?

The more I knew, the more I wanted to know. I wished I could at least see the notes she scrawled on her waitressing pad. Or even the photographs they had of us. Maybe they could tell me more.

“Are you getting all of this?” Aidan asked.

I looked around. Unfortunately, there were no printers in here, so I had to write down what we saw the old-school way. He handed me a pen and a piece of paper from his bag.

“There’s some stuff about the witnesses,” he said. “Jot these names down, okay?”

My eyes trailed down the list. A few neighbors, the woman who ran my day care. I noticed Toni’s name wasn’t on the list.

“So is it true what they say?” Sideburns’s friend called out from his side of the room. “That your friends got out of a police roadblock by impersonating an FBI agent?”

“What are you talking about?” I snapped.

“Your friends. In California? There was something on the Facebook page about it. That’s, like, a felony offense. Bananas. How’d they pull that off?”

I stared at him blankly. All I knew is that the four of us, me, Aidan, Tre, and Cherise, had hijacked a Betelman’s snack truck in Tahoe. Aidan and I jumped out of the back when Tre texted us to say they saw a roadblock ahead. Tre and Cherise had gone on without us and somehow made it through but I never did find out how they escaped.

Impersonating FBI? I hoped that wasn’t it. That didn’t sound like either of them, and even if it was, it wasn’t something Tre would want going around online. But I certainly didn’t want to sit here and speculate with these two randoms.

“Don’t believe everything you read,” I said finally, and looked at the clock. We’d been in here for almost twenty minutes. “We should get going. We can come back to this site, right?”

“Assuming no one realizes it’s been hacked and changes the passwords, yes. That’s a big if,” Sideburns said.

Aidan closed out of the database and typed something else in.

“What are you doing?” I asked Aidan.

“Checking my email really quickly.”

I thought about checking mine but decided against it—there could be more mean messages from the Glitterati, taunting me, or even worse, nothing at all. After helping us out in Tahoe, Tre and Cherise were back home in Paradise Valley and they were probably waiting for us to get in touch. Talking to them would only raise questions, questions I didn’t have the answers to yet. Besides that, I had the growing sense that they were hooking up and as much as I hated to admit it, that bugged me a little. Not that I had any right to complain. It just made me feel left out, kind of, to think of them getting on with their lives without me.

And now that Leslie was gone, that was the sum total of people I had in the world. Sure, we had a bunch of stranger fans on Facebook who had glorified the legend of Sly Fox, people like Sideburns and his friend, but that wasn’t the same as actual loved ones. They would never really know me—they only knew Sly Fox.

I went back to my station and looked up Toni Cumberland. There was no direct match, but there was a T. Cumberland on Manderleigh Woods Drive. I wrote that down, along with the phone number. It was worth a shot.

Beside me, Aidan kicked at the table leg.

“What?”

“Another email from my folks. My dad is resorting to bribery now. He says if I come home, he’ll buy me a motorcycle or whatever else I want.”

“And . . .?” I looked at him, wondering if he was going to fall for it. Aidan’s relationship with his dad was strained before we went on the run, but now that the police and media were involved in tracking us down, things had gotten worse between them. Still, it would be so easy for him to just give up and go home now. Who could blame him?

“And he’s full of it. No way can he buy me back.” His jaw tightened. “Screw that guy. He didn’t even ask if I was okay. We all know he only wants me home so I don’t ruin his precious reputation or his stock valuation. I mean, all he had to do was show some genuine concern. But he can’t. He’s incapable of human emotion.”

I saw why he was angry. I’d never even met his parents, and they sounded like rich jerks. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling the tiniest stab of envy. At least his jerk parents were in his life. He had a dad, when I didn’t have the faintest clue who mine was. Even if we found out the truth about my real mother, that couldn’t change the fact that she was dead and I would never get to know her.