Veronica Mars (16 page)

“I thought you wanted my information, Lamb. I thought you wanted to find these girls.”

He looked at the picture again, a conflicted expression flitting across his face. “Do you have any proof that this guy had any part in either disappearance?”

“No, but he was seen with both girls just before they went missing. That’s enough to get him in for questioning.”

“Is it? Suddenly you’re some kind of legal scholar?”

“Uh, yeah.” She smirked. “Suddenly I kind of am.”

They glared at each other for a minute.

“Look,” she said. “Cartels are a little out of my comfort zone.”

He flinched at the word “cartel,” but his gaze didn’t shy away from hers. For a moment his eyes raked her face as he tried to gauge what she knew. She waited.

“This is a delicate situation,” he said finally. “I’m not hauling anyone in without real evidence. So if you find something on them and bring it to me, I’ll consider questioning them.”

“So, let me get this straight.” Veronica tapped her lips thoughtfully with her index finger. “You’re going to let me do all the legwork, because it’s not politically viable for you to look into wild, orgiastic parties thrown by the junior members of one of the most violent crime organizations in Mexico. I’ll save you some trouble and just assume you’re getting a kickback of some kind from the Milenios—maybe in one of their more legitimate guises.” She cocked her head, feigning confusion. “But if I find actual evidence that they’re, I don’t know, using their parties as some kind of lure to kidnap pretty girls? Or worse?
That’s
when you want me to hand it over to you.”

“Sounds about right.” Lamb gave her a smile that was all reptile. “The Sheriff’s Department appreciates your assistance in this matter.”

He gave her a little mock salute, and then he was sailing out the door, leaving the lingering notes of his Axe body spray in his wake.

She went to the reception area. Mac didn’t even look up. Her fingers were flying over the keyboard. Veronica took in her friend’s jutting chin, the jerkiness of her shoulders. She wasn’t happy. Not for the first time she thought about how Mac had left a safe, quiet office—and a fat paycheck—for this. Now here she was, working as a glorified secretary, taking abuse from anyone whose toes Veronica stepped on.

“Are you okay?” She sat on the edge of Mac’s desk.

“I’m fine.” Mac looked up, her eyes bright and fierce, but a small smile flitted across her face. “One of these days, I’m going to find something on that guy that’ll wipe the smile right off his face.”

“You handled him like a pro.”

“Luckily, my intimidated face looks remarkably like silent defiance.” She exhaled loudly. “So is he trying to nab our collar?”

“Sure is. But only once I’ve got something on the Gutiérrezes. He’s scared of the big bad drug lords—doesn’t want to take them on until we’ve got something solid.”

“Well, shouldn’t
we
be?” Mac raised an eyebrow. “Scared, I mean? Some of those stories …”

“Believe me, I am treating the ultraviolent gangsters with all the caution required. I’m not about to poke a rattlesnake nest if the snakes are all comfortably asleep. Did any of those background checks come in yet?”

Mac looked up at her, hesitating. Veronica rolled her eyes. “It’s fine. Just tell me.”

“Okay, well … Lianne Scott—I mean your mom—has a few misdemeanors on her record, none more recent than 2006. Public intoxication, shoplifting, and trespassing. Looks like she moved around a lot between 2004 and 2006. I’ve got her in Barstow, Reno, Scottsdale, and then finally Tucson.” Mac’s eyes flickered from her screen to Veronica and quickly back again. “Married Tanner Scott in January of 2007. Gave birth to Hunter Jacob Scott in December 2007. She started working for the dental office last year, after Hunter started school.”

“And Tanner?”

Mac pursed her lips. “He’s been kind of hard to track. Spotty employment history and no permanent address between 2000 and 2006.”

“That’s not too surprising. He told me he’d been in the bottle pretty hard before he met my mom.”

“He was married to a woman named Rachel Novak in 1996; they divorced in 2000. Aurora was born 1998 in Albuquerque. Looks like he served ten months in jail for check fraud in 2005; Aurora was a ward of the state while he was away. After he got out he seemed to settle down. He got custody of Aurora and started working more steady jobs. Before Home Depot he was a janitor for the city for a few years.” Mac looked up. “That’s all that’s coming up on the basic search. You want me to keep digging?”

Veronica shook her head. “No. I think I can fill in the gaps.”

She knew the recidivism rates for petty crimes; no former criminal worked as a janitor for a few years unless he was
determined to go straight. The idea of easy money became much too alluring after scrubbing toilets all night. Tanner Scott may have set off her bullshit detector, but it looked like he really had cleaned up.

She realized Mac was watching her closely, her forehead creased with concern.

“This has got to be weird for you,” Mac said.

“It’s not. It’s fine.”

“Veronica, look who you’re talking to. If anyone has mom issues, it’s me.”

Veronica forced a smile. In high school, she’d been the one to uncover the fact that Mac had been switched at birth, that the family she’d never really fit in with wasn’t really hers.

“Okay. It’s completely weird. But I’m trying not to think about it. Right now I really just want to focus on finding Hayley and Aurora.” She looked out the window over Mac’s head. A seagull hung on the breeze outside, a pale streak against the sky.
Pretty, for an animal waiting for an unguarded Dumpster
. “Did you have a chance to look in on our other guys?”

“Yup. Chad Cohan is, as far as I can see, still snuggled up in Stanford. I’ve gotten into the Stanford security logs, and it looks like he’s used his student ID to access the gym and the library in the past few days. No flight records, and no charges on his cards that would indicate travel.”

“What about Crane?”

Mac shook her head. “I don’t have much of an electronic trail for him. It doesn’t seem likely that he’d be able to slip away from his family and hurt someone while they’re the subject of so much media attention, though, right?”

“Unlikely, but not impossible. I’ll check in with the Dewalts tomorrow. I should do that anyway.” She put her hands over her eyes for a moment. A small headache was forming over her temples.

“What should we do next?” Mac’s voice was quiet, almost tentative.

“The only thing we can do.” Veronica drew her hands away from her eyes. Mac sat very still in front of her, waiting. “We keep going over the evidence, and we hope like hell that sooner or later, some part of it makes sense.”

“You know what I definitely don’t miss about New York?”

Veronica swayed slightly in the hammock strung between two stolid oaks in Keith’s backyard, a finger stuck between the pages where she’d been leafing through Aurora Scott’s diary. It was just after dinner, and the last of the day’s sun filtered gently through the leaves.

Keith looked up at her from where he crouched, yanking weeds from around the agapanthus. Their dirty dishes and the remainder of their lasagna sat on the little wooden table on the patio; they’d come out to enjoy the evening while they ate, a well-earned break.

“I’ve heard the sewer alligators are very intimidating,” he said, wiping beads of sweat from his brow.

She leaned back in the canvas of the hammock, enjoying the sense of being supported.

“I don’t miss crummy little apartments without yards or gardens or windows that open. I definitely don’t miss that.”

It was her favorite part of Keith’s house—the yard. When she’d been in high school, after the recall election in which they’d lost everything, they’d made their home in an apartment, less crummy and less little than anywhere she’d lived
in Manhattan, but definitely not anyone’s picture of the good life. It’d been comfortable, though, and it’d been theirs, back when it was the two of them against the world. And at least there’d been a courtyard with a pool where she could sit and get some air.

But it was a true luxury to be able to sit in a little patch of garden while the light faded, to take charge of the weeds in the garden, to swing gently between oaks older than she was.

“Oh yeah? You might miss it more after cutting the grass every weekend for a few months.” He glanced up at her from where he knelt, his mouth twisted wryly.

“Hm. I was thinking about adopting more of a supervisory position when it came to yard work. But I’ll bring you lemonade between mowings.”

He tugged a tough, sinewy weed from the soil. Its roots were dense and gnarled.

“What’s that you’re reading?”

She held up the little book. “Aurora’s diary. Last entry is a little over a year ago, so it might not be the most up-to-date information. But it’s somewhere to start.”

The diary was actually a sketchbook, filled with line after line of wide, looping handwriting in multiple colors of ink. Sketches and doodles showed up throughout in pencil—a cartoon Frankenstein’s monster shambling his way across the page, a perfectly shaded picture of a flower in a vase, an abstract doodle illuminating the margins. Aurora was a good artist. Sometimes the text ran in straightforward lines, but sometimes she’d turned the diary sideways or wrote in weird curlicues that spiraled around her drawings.

Aurora wasn’t always so hostile—almost every page had a reference, sometimes punctuated by hearts or smiley faces, to “Barkley,” who Veronica gathered was a family dog. And a full page of the journal was devoted to a sketch of Hunter, looking sober and skeptical, captioned with the words “The Boss.” But the image of Aurora Scott that started to emerge somewhere between the lines was prickly and impatient. She was smart, creative, petulant, bored. Unlike Hayley Dewalt, she didn’t seem eager to please anyone but herself.

“So how was your mom today?”

Veronica looked upward through the filigree of leaves. That morning, seeing Lianne on the small screen in the kitchen, neither of them had even said her name out loud. Veronica had watched the press conference open mouthed, lost in her own shocked horror, and it wasn’t until the screen went back to Trish Turley that she thought to wonder what Keith was feeling. But there’d been no time to discuss it; Petra Landros had called, and she’d had to hurry to get dressed and out the door.

When she’d gotten home, Keith had dinner on the table, glasses of wine at the ready. They’d eaten in an almost polite silence. She had the feeling he was waiting for her to talk
about it. She’d opened her mouth to speak once or twice and changed her mind. Maybe it was just habit that made it so difficult. She and Keith talked about almost everything—but Lianne was one of the few topics they’d always avoided.

Now she propped herself up on her elbow to look at him. “Devastated. She’s terrified.”

Keith nodded, not looking up. He jabbed a gardening fork into the tender earth, trying to pry out the deep and stringy roots of another weed. She watched him for a moment before going on.

“But besides that? She seems like she’s doing well.” She paused for a moment. “She has another kid. A little boy.”

He nodded. “I saw that in one of the articles.” He paused. “Did you meet him?”

“Yeah. He’s cute.” She just had to avoid saying the word “brother” and she’d be able to keep it together. “And Tanner’s nice enough. I mean, he’s a little sketchy. Mac turned up some old check forging charges from back before he married Mom. And he does that bullshitty, self-mythologizing thing addicts always seem to do. But it seems like he really does care about her. Since they’ve been together, he’s been on the straight and narrow.”

“I’m happy for them,” Keith said simply. “I mean, not about what they’re going through, obviously. But I’m happy they found each other.”

She sat up in the hammock and swung her legs down. “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. It’s been a while. When are you going to get back on the horse?”

Keith grimaced. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, honey,
but I’ve currently got my hands full recovering from a catastrophic injury or two. I’m not sure I could handle dating.”

“Come on, ladies love vulnerability. You’ve just got to limp on out there and be yourself.”

“Why, you know any MILFs in the market for a cripple?” He waggled his brows.

“Oh my god. Please never say MILF again as long as I live.”

Her laughter was interrupted by the sound of her cell phone trilling in her pocket. She stood up out of the hammock and pulled it out.

“Veronica Mars.”

For a minute all she heard was background noise—traffic, maybe, or the patter of a TV. Then there was a phlegmy cough. “I got this number off a flyer.”

She froze, her senses going on alert. “I’m listening.”

“I might have some information for you.” Another cough. “You should probably come on by, 20111 Meadow View Road.”

“I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

She drove down the stretch of smoke shops, free clinics, and pay-by-the-hour motels that ran along Meadow View. The address landed her in front of a small square building, a bright yellow banner hanging across the front that read
WE BUY GOLD
. A picture of a capering leprechaun was painted across one window. The iron bars over the glass made it look like he was in jail.

There was a bell on the door that jingled as she entered. A smell of burnt coffee and heavy-duty cleaner stung her
nostrils. Inside was a waiting area, with a small vinyl chair adjacent to an empty water cooler. There was a service window in the wall, filled with warped Plexiglas like a bank-teller’s station. To the left of that was a door, with a sign that read
EMPLOYEES ONLY
.