Veronica Mars (7 page)

The words swiped at Veronica, and she flinched. She suddenly realized that this was Bri Lafond’s first lesson that people sucked. Veronica remembered that letdown, the way the world suddenly seemed stripped of bright colors, your beliefs toppled like dominoes. She’d learned it when she was sixteen, after Lilly was murdered and Keith, sniffing out the cover-up but not the truth, had gone after Lilly Kane’s rich, handsome father. Keith was recalled as sheriff, and suddenly she’d found herself not only friendless but a pariah. Her friends circled their wagons around the Kane family, and Veronica spent the better part of the year scraping spray-painted expletives off her locker and replacing her slashed tires. And for a while, no one had raised a finger to stand up for her.

That had changed, of course. She’d made peace with some of her old friends—Duncan. Meg. Logan. And she’d found new, fierce ones in Wallace, Mac, and Weevil. She’d come out of it stronger, smarter.

But that didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt.

“Do you think Hayley’s okay?” Melanie asked, bringing her back to the messy little room.

“I don’t know.” Veronica took a deep breath. “The last thing I want is to give anyone false hope. I’m going to do everything I can to find your friend, but I need your help. Can you walk me through the last night you were with her?”

The girls glanced at each other, and then Melanie spoke.

“I was on a sailing trip with a bunch of other Berkeley kids, but we got a text from Hayley at seven that she’d heard about some party up the coast. We all met up at the motel—we were at the Sea Nymph last week, closer to the beach—and got ready together. It was a black-and-white party, so you had to wear—”

“Black or white to get in.” Veronica nodded. “Sure. Somewhere Truman Capote is spinning in his grave.”

“Who?” Bri cocked her head like a curious spaniel.

Veronica shook her head. “Never mind. Where were you that afternoon, Bri?”

She bit her lip. “Me and Hayley and Leah lay out on the beach for a while, but Hayley got bored and told us she wanted to wander around. We weren’t in the mood, so she went off on her own. A few hours later she texted us about the party.”

“How’d she seem that night while you guys were getting ready?”

“She was fine,” Melanie said, picking at the pilled fabric
of the bedspread beneath her. “Normal. She told us some guy had invited her and said she could bring as many girls as she wanted if they were as cute as her.” She rolled her eyes. “She always eats lines like that up.”

“Did she say anything else about this guy? Did you bump into him at the party?”

Again, that subtle exchanged glance.

“She didn’t say anything else about him. And the party was kind of … 
crazy
. If Hayley bumped into him, we didn’t see it. We were sort of out of it.” Bri took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Okay. Let’s talk about the party.” Veronica looked down at her notebook, where she’d jotted the address from the police report. “The address you gave the police was 2201 Manzanita Drive. Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Melanie said. “It’s a huge place, right down on the beach. A mansion. We showed up around ten. They had security guards at the gate doing pat downs and bag searches—it was kind of intense.”

Veronica frowned. Plenty of Neptune’s wealthier families had security precautions—cameras, alarms, the works—and it made sense for someone planning a Gatsby-esque blowout involving crowds of unknown people to hire some extra guards. But what kind of person required a pat down for a party?

“Did you meet the host?” Veronica asked.

“Well, no one ever came up to us and introduced themselves.” Melanie shook her head. “It wasn’t that kind of party. The place was packed. I mean, there were bartenders and waiters going around with drinks, and more security guards inside, but no one who was, like, obviously in charge or anything.”

“From what we heard, there’s a party at the house every night during spring break,” Bri said. “A couple kids we talked to had been a few times already.”

“Okay. So what did you do once you got there?”

“We … I mean, we partied.” Melanie’s eyes, so eager and so intense just a moment ago, darted away toward the window. “I danced for a while. There was a bonfire on the beach. I played a little pool. You know. Party stuff.”

Veronica glanced from one to the other, then set down her notebook on her thigh. “Okay, I get that some of the ‘party stuff’ might not be the kind of thing you want to write Grandma about. But the more I know about what happened that night, the better my chances of finding Hayley. I promise, I’m not here to bust you. I just want to help your friend.”

Bri’s cheeks were an even deeper pink than before, clashing horribly with her hair. She stared at the ground, eyelashes drooping with shame. But Melanie turned her gaze suddenly and firmly back to Veronica. She was blushing too, but her expression was steady, determined.

“Look,” she said. “The thing is, neither one of us remembers a whole lot about that night. We were both pretty wasted. We don’t even remember how the hell we got home. And before you tell us it was stupid and selfish to get that fucked up, trust us. We already fucking know.”

“Sheriff Lamb didn’t believe that Hayley was missing,” Bri said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “We thought if we admitted we were drunk and high it’d be worse.”

Veronica crossed her legs. “Okay. Why don’t we focus on what you
do
remember. What was Hayley like that night? Was she as drunk as you guys were? Was she talking to anyone specific?”

Bri grabbed a rhinestone-encrusted iPhone from the top of the dresser and started swiping her thumb over the screen. After a moment, she held the phone out to Veronica.

“She spent a lot of time with
this
guy,” she said.

The picture on the phone was of a buxom, scantily clad brunette draped across a boy’s lap—a far cry from the clean-cut photo of Hayley on the missing person flyers.

Veronica held it up to see it more clearly. Hayley was in a short white dress with a plunging neckline, one spaghetti strap sliding down her shoulder. Her eyes were heavily made up, making her look older than she had in her senior portrait, and a delicate pendant in the shape of a birdcage hung in the shadow of her cleavage. She looked up at the boy through heavy lashes, a small, sensual smile turning up the corners of her lips.

The boy was college age, dark haired, his posture the image of casual grace. His angular, sculpted face ended in a gently cleft chin, a lazy smile hovering around his mouth. One hand rested lightly on Hayley’s hip, and he watched her with undisguised hunger.

“You get a name?” Veronica looked up at Hayley’s friends. Both of them shook their heads.

“No. But Hayley spent the whole night all over him. There are more pictures,” Bri said.

Veronica scrolled through. One showed the two of them pressed tight together on the dance floor, Hayley’s legs between the unknown boy’s. Another showed her whispering in his ear, one hand on his chest.

“You took these?” she asked Bri. Bri’s already pink cheeks darkened.

“She asked me to,” she said, shrugging. “I took them with her phone, actually. You’re looking at her Facebook page.
She put them up that night.” Bri fidgeted with a gold bangle bracelet at her wrist. “I mean, she seemed to be having a really good time. We were happy she was on the rebound.”

“On the rebound?”

“Yeah,” Melanie broke in. “She and her boyfriend, Chad, broke up the week before spring break. She almost didn’t come with us. She’d been in her room crying her eyes out for a couple days.”

Veronica sat up a little straighter, the words jabbing sharp and sudden into her brain. “Why’d they break up?”

“They got in a huge fight over the phone when she told him she was coming to Neptune for spring break,” Melanie explained. “He goes to Stanford and his spring break is two weeks past ours—he didn’t want her running off to Neptune unsupervised. Whatever, they’ve broken up about five times this year. We were all hoping it’d take this time, but none of us had much faith.”

“Not a fan of Chad?” Veronica raised an eyebrow. Melanie just rolled her eyes.

“We told her time and time again she should get rid of the guy. He’s a creep. Controlling, patronizing. He’d tell her what classes to take and didn’t want her to party without him. He didn’t like her hanging out with us. He thinks we’re trashy,” Melanie said.

“We
are
kind of trashy,” Bri cut in. Melanie flipped her off. A beat later, both girls laughed. It sounded too high pitched, right on the edge of hysteria, but when they’d settled down they both looked a little calmer.

“Anyway,” Melanie said, taking a deep breath. “We were all kind of rooting for this guy at the party. He was the anti-Chad.”

“But if he had something to do with her going missing …” Bri’s voice trembled. “I mean, if he was the one who … who took her, or whatever …”

“Did you see them leave together at any point?” Veronica asked. Both girls shook their heads.

“But like I told you,” Melanie said, “that night is pretty hazy.”

Veronica looked at the phone again. The photos had been uploaded to Hayley’s Facebook at 11:57 p.m. on the night of the party. If what Ella said was true and Hayley and Chad’s relationship had been mercurial at the best of times, it seemed likely that in the wake of their breakup Hayley was making damn sure Chad saw just how much fun she was having.

Veronica pulled up an e-mail Mac had sent her an hour ago with Hayley’s phone records. Throughout the day there were a bunch of texts to her friends and one to her sister. Then at 12:13 a.m., she’d received a phone call from a number registered to Chad Cohan that lasted exactly fifty-three seconds. There was no activity after that.

“Has anyone spoken to Chad since Hayley went missing? Did anyone call him to let him know?”

Melanie gave a humorless bark of laughter. “Oh, he called me. Told me it was my fault Hayley was missing because I was the one who lured her down to Neptune. I told him if he was so worried he should come down, help us look. You know what he said?” She adopted a lilting, smug voice. “ ‘She’s not my responsibility anymore, Melanie. She made that abundantly clear.’ ” For a moment, she looked angry; then all at once her face crumpled. Her eyes went shiny with tears, and her lower lip started to shudder. “But he’s kind of right. I mean, we were supposed to look out for each other.
We talked about checking in twice a day on the way down. And we just … 
lost
her.”

Bri hurried to the bed, sliding an arm around the other girl’s shoulders. Melanie twitched beneath shallow sobs.

A motorcycle growled on the street outside. From the room next door Veronica could just make out the murmur of a television. She leaned across the gap between the beds, resting her forearms on her knees.

“Melanie, if someone did hurt Hayley—they’re the
only
ones responsible.” Veronica’s voice was low and urgent. “And if that’s what happened, I’m going to find them. And I’m going to make them pay.”

Melanie looked up at her from under her baseball cap, eyes wet with tears.

Veronica stood up and handed the phone back to Bri. “Do me a favor and send me copies. None of the pictures on the flyers show what she looked like the night she disappeared. It might be useful to circulate them.” She shouldered her bag. “I’m going to ask around about our Mystery Man. In the meantime—if you two remember anything else about that night, call me right away.”

The girls nodded. Melanie hesitated, then carefully disentangled herself from Bri and got to her feet. She straightened her cap, then held out her hand to shake Veronica’s.

“We will. We promise.” She opened the door, wiping fiercely at her eyes with her free hand. “Thanks, Veronica.”

In the parking lot, Veronica dialed Mac.

“How hard do you think it’d be to hack into the databases of a major research university?”

Mac hesitated. “Since you’re asking me on a cell phone, in front of God and the NSA—impossible.”

“Okay, fair enough. Look, I need to go home and check on Dad, but do you think I could come by your place later? I’ve got some, uh, overtime work for you. It might be a long night.”

“OT, huh?” There was no mistaking the excitement in Mac’s voice. It’d been a while since she’d had an excuse to take her skill set out to play. “Sounds fun.”

“In the meantime, can you get me on a flight to San Jose tomorrow morning? And I’ll need a car. Something sensible.” She thought about it for a moment. “Not too sensible, though. I need to represent the Neptune Chamber of Commerce in style.”

“Give a girl a BMW for a few weeks and suddenly she’s got standards.”

“See you tonight.”

The moon crested the skyline as she pulled the car out of the parking lot. It’d been a week to the day since Hayley’s disappearance. Now hundreds of innocent kids like Hayley were pouring out into the streets for another night of drinking and debauchery, oblivious to just how cruel the world could be.

An hour later, Veronica sat in front of the computer in her bedroom, fingers flying over the keys. Logan’s face grinned crookedly from the corner of his most recent e-mail—it was the picture she’d set as his contact photo, taken right before he’d deployed.

I wish you could have seen Lamb’s face when she told him I had the case. He looked like he’d just swallowed a bug
, she typed.
It would have made your day
.

Keith hadn’t been there when she arrived home at the little blue bungalow. He was most likely out for a walk. The muscles in his leg needed to be strengthened, so he’d taken to circling the block a few times a day, slowly, deliberately, his cane tapping lightly against the concrete. He was wearing away at his convalescence with the same patience, the same resolve that made him a good detective.

Veronica’s room—until recently known as “the guest room”—was decorated with a mélange of high school artifacts and the odds and ends her father had shoved in there before she’d moved back. One of his model ships sat on the dresser, between old photos of her as a little girl. All of her old books—Salinger, Plath, Toole, the literature of choice for the brooding outcast—were lined on the small wooden
bookshelf. It was a little surreal to be back under her father’s roof after all this time—but maybe a little comforting too. With all the changes she’d made, all the things in her life that didn’t make sense, she kind of liked the sight of her old panda alarm clock perched on her desk.