Veronica Mars (26 page)

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

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 chest, 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.

The sun was now sinking behind the hills, brilliant as it
died. She walked around the edge of the building. The motel lot extended back half an acre before the land started to climb, dense with buckwheat and sumac. An ancient chain-link fence ran along the property line, but it sagged in several places, and in one spot it’d tumbled altogether. The buzzards dispersed as she approached the site they’d been circling. She stepped over the fallen fence.

Something hot and fetid washed over her in waves, getting stronger as she went. She covered her mouth and nose, breathing against her own palm as shallowly as she could. Her mind spun, throwing out desperate possibilities. It could be a deer, a coyote, even a bear. But she knew it wasn’t.

She saw the hair first, a swath dark against the dun-colored earth, curling out from a haphazard tangle of branches. She took a few more steps and could see the body clearly then. She lay facedown under a low bush. It looked as if he had tried to cover her with leaves and twigs, but something—animals, most likely—had disturbed her. She caught a glimpse of a white dress so covered in dirt it blended with the ground. The distant and industrious buzz of insects sent electric prickles over Veronica’s skin.

She’d found Hayley Dewalt.

By 10:00 p.m., the area around the motel was swarming with cops. Bright yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the beams of the flood lamps. Three police cruisers made a barrier in the parking lot, their lights slowly rotating red and blue. Beyond the yellow tape a few onlookers loitered, and every so often a helicopter’s mosquito whine rose and fell.

Veronica watched through the window of Lucy’s All Nite, sipping a cup of coffee. She could see her own reflection superimposed over the crime scene, her lips a pale, downturned curve in the glass. Behind her she could see the bright lights in the kitchen and the row of flannel-clad truckers sneaking looks at her every few minutes.

She’d lingered at the crime scene long enough to make a statement, explaining who she was and how she’d retraced Hayley’s steps to the motel. A stocky, bespectacled officer whose name badge read
MEEKS
had confirmed for her that the body was Hayley’s; the girl’s purse had been tucked under one arm, with her ID inside.

“That’s off the record,” he’d said, glancing sidelong at Veronica. “Don’t go repeating it to anyone before we have a chance to contact the family. I’m not supposed to talk about
an ongoing case. But, as you found her …” He gave Veronica a strange look, part pity and part grudging respect.

Meeks had made her sit in the parking lot of the motel while an EMT wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and checked her vitals. After an hour or so, the officer had escorted her across the road to the diner. “Would you mind staying close for a few hours in case we have further questions? If it gets late, we’ll get you a room in town and we can speak in the morning.”

“Anywhere but the Bates Motel,” she’d said, trying to sound wry but coming out strained and shaky instead.

In the diner, Meeks took Geena aside and spoke to her in a whisper, Geena’s hands flying to her mouth partway through the story. Then the cop had given Veronica a solemn nod and headed out the door into the darkness. Geena had come to Veronica’s table and put a hand on the back of her jacket. Veronica didn’t mind. It felt almost motherly. Then that thought made her want to cry.

“What you want to eat, honey?” The waitress had a smoker’s voice, hoarse and a little phlegmy. “Anything you like. It’s on the house.”

More to placate Geena than anything, Veronica had ordered eggs and toast. Now the plate sat untouched where she’d pushed it away, unable even to look at the congealing yolk and slick, greasy sausage. But she was on her third cup of coffee, and while she could feel the caffeine start to rattle her eyeballs in her skull, it felt good to cup the warm mug in her fingers. The hot, bitter liquid helped wake her up from what felt like a long bad dream, and she slowly came back to herself.

Her phone sat to the left of her cup, set to vibrate. As
if on cue, Mac had called her twenty minutes after she’d settled in the diner, talking fast.

“Veronica, I feel like a moron. Chad Cohan’s credit cards didn’t have anything on them for that night—but his mom’s did. Her name’s Sharon Ganz—I guess she went back to her maiden name after the divorce. Chad charged the room to a card he has in her name.”

“It’s okay, Mac.” She poured a packet of sugar into her coffee and stirred. A little slopped out onto her saucer. “We couldn’t have saved her. She’s been dead all along.”

She could see a few of the patrons leaning subtly toward her, trying to overhear. She should probably care—she should probably try to protect Hayley’s privacy as long as she could. But everyone would know what had happened soon enough.