Veronica Mars (6 page)

She made her way down the familiar hallway, decorated in shades of terra-cotta and gold, and turned into the Sheriff’s
Department. No one manned the tall wooden reception desk. Three or four officers sat at their desks working on computers or talking on the phone. She didn’t recognize any faces. Her father had told her that when Dan Lamb took over, the handful of worthwhile cops left on the force had taken early retirement or transferred elsewhere—along with Inga, the kind-hearted woman who’d been the office manager since Veronica was a little girl.

She stood at the desk and waited. No one appeared to notice her—or maybe they just didn’t care. One guy seemed to be swiveling his chair away from her as he talked on the phone. No surprise there—she was persona non grata around the Sheriff’s Department. The first thing she’d done when she’d gotten back to town was solve Bonnie DeVille’s murder right out from under the sheriff’s nose.

Dan Lamb wasn’t the type to forgive and forget. Then again, neither was she.

She caught sight of a tall man in departmental khaki, walking past with his arms full of files. “Excuse me. Sir? I have an appointment with the sheriff.”

When the officer turned to face her, Veronica blinked.

“Norris Clayton?” Veronica’s voice was breathless, shocked.

The man’s warm brown eyes flickered over her face and his lips curved up. “Veronica Mars. I was wondering when I’d run into you.”

For a moment they eyed each other warily. In middle school Norris had been suspended nearly every other week for fighting. By high school, he’d donned the trench coat and combat boots required for discontented youths—and had a weapons collection to make his scowl this side of terrifying.
For a while, he’d been suspected of calling in bomb threats to the school, but Veronica had been able to prove his innocence. Beneath his trench coat and fuck-the-man attitude, Norris was just a regular misfit with a Japanese weapons obsession—and, as it turned out, a crush on Veronica.

Now he was barely recognizable, muscular and clean-cut in his crisp khaki uniform. But something in his eyes was just the same—brittle, both wary and resigned. Like the world was just bullshit, all the way down. Veronica couldn’t imagine that working at the Neptune Sheriff’s Department would help that feeling.

Norris set his paperwork down on the desk and rested his hands on top. “You still working for your dad?”

“Kind of. More like tentatively with. Or perhaps in spite of?”

Norris’s lips curled up into a smirk. “Yeah, well, my dad is just glad I have a job.”

Veronica could only imagine. Norris’s dad was a law-abiding programmer at Kane Software. He’d once bribed his son with a trip to Japan if he’d stay out of trouble and keep his grades up. “I have to admit I never quite imagined you as an upholder of the peace.”

Norris gave a quick snort of laughter. “Yeah, well, we all have to grow up sometime, right?” Then he shrugged, suddenly serious. “I was pissed off about everything for so long. I guess I found a place to put my fight. Anyway, what are you doing here? You out here working a case?”

Veronica gathered herself. “Kind of. I have an appointment with Lamb.”

“Lucky you.”

They looked at each other for a moment, and then, at the same time, both broke into grins.

“This way.” Norris opened the little gate next to the desk and jerked his head back toward Lamb’s office.

In the hallway outside the sheriff’s office, her eyes darted unconsciously at the Fallen Heroes wall. That was where they hung the photos of all the cops who’d been killed in the line of duty. Down at the bottom was the most recent—Deputy Jerry Sacks, his mustache glossy and perfect in immortality. His picture was hung next to Don Lamb’s. She stared at both for a moment, complicated feelings fighting inside her. Lamb had made her life a living hell in high school, but she’d also come to suspect that he’d grown up in an abusive home. It was that same old vicious cycle: the Lamb boys were bullied; they became bullies. And while she’d never thought of Sacks as anything but Lamb’s gofer, his desire to help her dad investigate the Sheriff’s Department is what got him killed in the end. Now Lamb and Sacks were both gone, and something oddly like grief twisted in her gut.

“What’s
she
doing here?”

She turned to see Sheriff Dan Lamb staring at her through his half-open door. Petra Landros sat across from him, her long legs crossed, an impatient grimace on her face. Veronica exchanged glances with Norris, then stepped inside. Lamb’s office was dim and wood paneled, with a map of the states on one wall and an American flag in the corner.

She smiled sweetly. “Nice press appearance last week. Your hair looked
great
.”

They stared at each other across the desk. Logan had once told Veronica she didn’t have any flight—just way too much fight for her own good. Now she felt her hackles rising as she looked at Lamb. At his smug leer; at the way he leaned back in his chair like a toad on a choice lily pad, just
waiting for nice fat flies to fall in his mouth. He was in his early forties, tall and fit, with the mildly fussy air of a man vain about his looks. His face was boyish, with a wide, sullen mouth and round cheeks, and he wore his hair in a sleek mane around his ears. Most unsettling were his eyes—the same bright blue as his dead younger brother’s.

Don Lamb had been lazy and inept, a bureaucratic tool, and Dan wasn’t much better. He allied himself with the powerful and preyed upon the weak. She had reason to believe he was strategically redistributing evidence—just two months earlier a Glock 9 mm had been planted on her friend Weevil Navarro’s unconscious body after Duncan’s mom, Celeste, shot him, and while she couldn’t prove it yet, she was almost certain the sheriff—or one of his cronies—had planted it on him. And according to public defender Cliff McCormack, Weevil wasn’t alone. If there was a dollar to be made, the Sheriff’s Department happily bent the law for the highest bidder.

“Close the door, please, Ms. Mars.” Petra Landros gestured for her to come in. Veronica shut the door and sat down at a second chair across from Lamb. His eyes tracked her closely. She kept her movements casual, almost dismissive, but she felt the tension in her arms and legs, like bent springs poised to snap.

Petra turned to look at Lamb. “The Chamber of Commerce has decided to hire Ms. Mars to work the Hayley Dewalt case. I’d like for you to catch her up on any details you have so she can get started.”

“You have got to be kidding me.” An ugly flush swept through his cheeks. “Ms. Landros, there’s no need—”

“I’ve already made up my mind on this, Lamb.” Petra’s face was cool, her voice firm. Her smile widened slightly.
“Come on, Dan. With the upcoming election, don’t you think you’ve got your hands full enough already? The Chamber is invested in another Lamb administration in the Sheriff’s Department. We need you to focus on doing what you do best—keeping the town clean and the riffraff off the streets.”

The subtext was so obvious even Lamb couldn’t miss it.
If you want to keep your funding and your endorsement, you’ll play nice
. Veronica wished she had a camera to capture the particular shade of violet Lamb’s cheeks were turning.

His eyes flashed toward Veronica with unadulterated loathing, his mouth twisting wildly as if he was fighting to keep it shut. After a long moment, he grabbed a thin manila file folder and thrust it across the desk at her.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Lamb said as she opened the file. “You’re here to assist in an investigation. Not to run it. You’re in my house now, Mars. I set the rules.”

She flipped through the folder. There was nothing other than the initial missing person’s report filed by Hayley’s friends two days after the party. No notes, no transcripts, no records.

She looked up with a raised eyebrow. “This is it? Is one of your rules to
not
interview people?”

Lamb gave her a condescending sneer. “What else do you want, a
Family Circus
–style map retracing her steps? We took her friends’ statement and logged it in the system. There wasn’t anything else
to
do. There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone took Hayley anywhere against her will. If there were, we would have followed it.”

“Did you check out the house she disappeared from?”

Lamb flicked his hair back. “First of all, just because that
was the last place her friends saw her doesn’t mean she disappeared from that house.”

She stared at him incredulously. “So your argument for not checking the last place she was seen is that it’s just the last place she was
seen
? Nice. Very thorough.”

Something flitted across Lamb’s face and was gone. Then he shrugged. “My people are already spread thin. I’ve got most of my guys down by the boardwalks making sure kids don’t drown in their own puke. We don’t have the manpower to look under rocks for drunken sorority girls.”

Veronica gave him a withering look but didn’t say anything. She could ask for more—for the rental agreement for the house where Hayley went missing, for information on the owners, for the deed—but it’d be just as easy for Mac to access that. Not to mention faster, and one less time she’d have to talk to Lamb. All kinds of wins.

“Anything else we need to discuss?” she asked, looking at Petra. The hotelier was already on her feet, threading her arm through her purse strap.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I realize you don’t have much to work with. Please call my office if you need anything at all—my assistant has been instructed to put you right through.” She gave Lamb an icy smile. “I want Hayley Dewalt
found
, Lamb, and I expect you to assist Ms. Mars in any way she requires.” With that, she strode out the door.

Lamb looked up at Veronica, the color fading from his cheeks, his eyes narrowed to slits. She looked back at him steadily, unflinching, waiting for him to speak first. Watching the sheriff take his medicine from Landros had been fun—but she knew a humiliated Lamb was a dangerous Lamb.

After a long moment, he leaned back in his chair again, but this time without his former swollen smugness. He jabbed his index finger toward her. “I want to hear everything you find out. You don’t take a fucking step without reporting it to me, you understand?”

“So, the work is beneath you … until you want to take credit for it. Is that it?” Veronica shot him a contemptuous look and stood up. “Look for me under a rock if you’re curious. I’ll let you know when I find Hayley Dewalt.” And with that, she slammed his office door and left the station.

The number on the scrap of paper Margie Dewalt had thrust at Veronica turned out to belong to a girl named Bri Lafond, one of the three girlfriends who’d taken the bus down with Hayley from Berkeley. Veronica called her from the courthouse parking lot to ask if she could meet that evening. The eager, anxious voice on the other end told her that one of them—Leah Hart—had been taken home by her parents the week before. “She was really upset,” she said. “But Melanie and I are still here. We’ll tell you anything we can.”

They were staying in the Camelot Motel. The sun-bleached building was surrounded by pawn shops, storefront churches, and bars so divey even the spring breakers didn’t bother—which meant it was one of the only places the girls could afford after their spring break reservations ran out. Veronica had spent more caffeine-fueled nights outside the motel than she liked to recall—it was a favorite for the kind of trysts that resulted in shattered prenups, messy divorces, and broken hearts. Read: a home away from home for an enterprising young PI.

At just after seven, she knocked on the door to their room. From the other side of the blinds she saw the reddish glow of a table lamp.

The girl who answered the door was short and muscular and luridly sunburned. Her strawberry blond hair hung in an uncombed tangle around her face, and a small silver stud winked from one nostril. She peered out around the edge of the door with startled woodland eyes.

“Hi,” Veronica said gently. “I’m Veronica Mars. Are you Bri?”

The girl hesitated, as if she had to think about her answer, then nodded. “Hi. Yeah. Come on in.”

Veronica stepped into the drab, cramped little room. Two full-size beds were shoved against opposite walls, the faded floral coverlets made from the same material as the curtains. The décor was thrift shop Americana: a painting of ducks taking flight from a lake hung adjacent to one of a small cabin releasing puffs of smoke into a wintery sky. Clothes covered the floor, and an unwashed, sweaty odor mingled with the smell of old takeout.

A second girl sat on the far bed, but she stood up when she saw Veronica. Her long dark hair was looped through the hole in the back of a beat-up Dodgers cap. She wore a hoodie and a pair of denim cutoffs, but her curves were obvious even under the baggy clothing.

“Hi. I’m Melanie.” Her voice was husky but even. She held out a hand for Veronica to shake. She glanced around the room, then gestured wryly to the bed. “Sorry we don’t have a chair to offer you.”

“No problem.” Veronica sat down on the edge of the bed. Bri locked the door and leaned against the chipboard dresser. She chewed on the corner of a fingernail. Melanie sat cross-legged on the other bed, leaning toward Veronica, an intense, focused look on her face. Both girls were a stark contrast to
the bright, careless spring breakers on the beaches—they looked ragged edged and tired, more like kids who’d just finished finals than like kids at the end of a vacation.

“So you guys stayed in town to help with the search?” Veronica flipped her notebook to a fresh page and jotted down the date and their names.

They both nodded. Melanie twirled a lock of brown hair around a finger, coiling it so tight the tip of her finger was bone white. “Yeah. We’ve been handing out flyers at the boardwalk.” She took a piece of green paper from a stack on the nightstand and held it up. Hayley’s senior portrait beamed out from it.

“No one even cares, though.” Bri’s voice was so soft Veronica had to strain to hear it. Her lower lip trembled a little. “We hand them out to people and they take them. Then they just crumple them up and throw them on the ground a few feet away. No one cares that she’s missing.”