Veronica Mars (25 page)
Authors: Rob Thomas
“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.
She looked down at her phone. It was just 3:30 p.m. She could be in Bakersfield by sunset, easy.
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 shook 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.