Veronica Mars (17 page)

“Hello?”

A blurry shape appeared on the other side of the glass. Then a small window shot open, and a sagging, doughy face with bloodshot eyes and wiry gray hair appeared.

Veronica unfolded a copy of her flyer from her purse. “You called me. About the flyer?”

His expression didn’t change, but a little glint came into his eyes. They were pale watery blue, veined like a cracked marble. “Is there some kinda reward?”

“Depends what you’ve got.” She let her smile drop. “If you give me a lead I can use I have a crisp hundred dollar bill with your name on it. Actually, it’s more like five crumpled twenties. But it spends the same.”

“A hundred seems a little thin when there’s a ten-K reward for finding the girl.”

“Oh, does that mean you’re going to bring her home?” Veronica mimed wiping her forehead. “That is a relief. Because I’ve been running all over town looking for information, but if you know where she is, that lets me off the hook.”

“Hey, I just want to make sure my information is appraised at its proper value.” He mournfully raised the straw of a Big Gulp to his lips and slurped loudly, eyes tracking her every move.

Veronica pressed her lips together. There might be other ways to get his information—but every second she stood here was another lost opportunity to find the girls.

“Okay. I have a hundred and fifty for you to tell me everything you know, right now. And if I find Hayley Dewalt, I’ll come back and give you another fifty.”

He suckled at his soda for a moment, slurping the dregs up from the bottom. Then he slammed the Plexiglas window shut.

For a moment she thought that was it—she was dismissed. Then the door in the wall swung open. The face was now a body, slouching and slow, in a wrinkled khaki-colored shirt the same miserable shade as the carpet and the walls. He beckoned for her to follow him to the back room.

His work space was cramped and cluttered, every surface covered with a hodgepodge of equipment—electronic probes and scanners, tweezers, scales, gauges. Small bins lined the shelves on the walls, dusty and full of odd parts. A broken watch lay in pieces across a counter. A small TV was perched precariously on the corner of his workstation, tuned to Fox News, the screen smeared with something greasy.

The shopkeeper leaned down and pulled a small basket from a shelf below his workstation. A label on one end read 3/12. Inside, Veronica could see a jumble of plastic baggies, each containing something different—a gold-link bracelet, an ugly old brooch. A few engagement rings. She wondered briefly if any of their owners had been her or her dad’s clients.

“She’s not wearing it in any of the pictures they’re showing on the news,” he muttered. “But I recognized it the second I saw that flyer. Never seen another one like it.”

Veronica was about to ask him what he was talking about when he found what he was looking for. He ripped open the bag and poured a necklace out into one surprisingly fine-boned hand.

It was a pendant—a tiny gold birdcage, on a slender golden chain.

Veronica stared at the necklace in his hand. For a moment she didn’t recognize what she was looking at. Then, all at once, she understood. She reached into her purse and pulled out one of her flyers. There it was, hanging from Hayley’s neck on the night she disappeared. It dangled into her cleavage, the cage hitting the curve of a breast.

“This came in two days after that girl disappeared.”

“It’s pretty.” Veronica shrugged, playing it cool. “Are you sure all the girls aren’t wearing them? It’s not being mass-produced for Urban Outfitters or anything? Birds are sort of ‘in’ these days.”

“That’s not mass-produced,” he scoffed. “Whoever made it is a real craftsman. And look …” He opened the cage door on tiny hinges. “Her initials are engraved inside. I noticed ’em, but I didn’t put it together until I saw your flyer.”

Veronica held out her hand. The man reluctantly let the necklace slide into her palm. He was right—even she could see it, and she wasn’t exactly a jewelry expert. The birdcage was skillfully cast, the bars on the cage delicate and glittering. A cluster of three small diamonds was set in the roof. And there, inside, were the initials HD.

“Most of the stuff I get I sell for scrap. This? This is special. I was going to try to resell it.”

“Do you keep records on your clients? Who brought this in?”

He set his drink down on the counter and shuffled painfully over to the TV. A small stack of VHS tapes sat next to it. “It’s lucky I saw your flyer when I did. I usually only keep ’em for a week and then tape over ’em.” He
selected the tape that said
WEDNESDAY
and pushed it into the built-in VCR.

There were a few tense moments as he fast-forwarded through the day’s tape. It looked like he didn’t get a lot of business until late evening—but by 9:00 p.m. the parade of despair commenced. Very young women with young children clinging to their legs; wobbly old men with unkempt beards; strung-out, bone-thin beings of indeterminate age. They filed in, one by one, the black-and-white cameras picking up their raw hope, and then their defeat when they realized how little time their treasures had bought them.

Then, at 10:05, a white guy with a sprout of pale dreadlocks came in. The shopkeeper hit Play.

“This is the guy,” he said, pointing at the screen. His fingernail was lined with grime, but his hands were otherwise clean. “I’ve got his ID information on file too. William Murphy, twenty-four years old. He signed the paperwork ‘Willie.’ Real twitchy kid—I assumed he was jonesing. Talked non-fucking-stop.”

“What’d he talk about?”

“Oh, he had a big long story about where he’d gotten it. His sister’s best friend’s cousin sent him to see what he could get for it, because she needed milk for her sick infant son or some crap like that. Basically didn’t want me to think he’d stolen it.”

“Which of course you believed, because buying and reselling stolen goods is a crime.” Veronica gave a tight smile. The man gestured as if to say,
Sure, whatever
.

She leaned closer to the screen, trying to get a glimpse of his face. Something about Willie Murphy was familiar to her. She’d seen him somewhere around town—or maybe
he was just one of the handful of trustafarians who came to Neptune for spring break. He
was
twitchy—there was no sound, but she could tell by the quick, birdlike movements of his hands that he was talking excitedly. He kept looking behind him, like he thought someone might be sneaking up on him.

When he turned to leave, stuffing the bills into his wallet, he looked up for a split second, right at the camera. “There. Can you rewind and pause it when he looks up?”

The shopkeeper did.

And that was when she recognized him.

He’d been in the background in one of the pictures Hayley’s friends had given her, nursing a beer while Hayley Dewalt fed Rico Gutiérrez a strawberry. And he’d been at the party the night Aurora went missing—she’d seen him jumping into the pool.

She turned away from the shopkeeper, pulling her phone out of her purse. As she dialed, she put the necklace into her wallet.

“Hey, you gonna buy that?” the shopkeeper demanded. She snorted, covering the microphone to reply.

“You mean this stolen necklace that you illegally purchased? I don’t think so. This is evidence.” She uncovered the microphone. “Hi, Mac, sorry about that. Yeah, I need you to run another background check for me and e-mail the results, ASAP.”

“Sure,” Mac answered. “What’s the name?”

“William Murphy.”

She paused. For a split second she thought about telling Mac what she was planning to do. But then she remembered how Mac and Wallace had looked at her that night
in Mac’s apartment, after they’d discovered just who owned the house on Manzanita.

Well, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. And if she wanted to find Willie Murphy, she didn’t have a choice.

She was going to have to go back to the party.

The theme that night was simple: bikinis. Only for girls, of course; the guys seemed to be perfectly happy in pop-collar polos and baggy jeans. But to get in with a pair of X chromosomes, you had to be showing some skin.

Veronica moved slowly through the crush, a beach bag tucked under her arm like a life preserver. She didn’t have a lot of time for sunbathing these days, and she was painfully aware of the fish-belly white of her bared midriff. Still, she could feel eyes tracing the lines of her body beneath her pink string bikini, prying and eager.

As she made her way through the house, she kept her eyes peeled for any sign of Willie Murphy’s dark blond dreadlocks. Mac’s background check had yielded a portrait of a petty criminal: public intoxication, possession, disorderly conduct, trespassing. He’d been in and out of county lockup since he was seventeen years old, the longest stay a six-month stint for possession with intent to sell. His last known address was a grimy efficiency down the street from the Camelot, but he’d been evicted in January. Since then he’d had no known permanent address.

She’d considered calling Lamb, handing her new evidence straight to him—but she’d decided against it. Lamb
wouldn’t want to bust the party. He’d just put Murphy’s picture all over the news and give him a chance to run. No, the only way she’d get answers was to talk to him before he knew he was being hunted.

Now she just had to find him.

The house was packed with sweaty, bared bodies, faces leering from every dark corner she passed. Tonight’s celebration was, if anything, more frenzied than the party she’d seen the night before. It was nearing the end of spring break for most of these kids, and they seemed determined to push through the exhaustion, as if holding still would bring an end to this magical pretend world where everything felt good and you didn’t have to do anything you didn’t want to. Clouds of smoke billowed up from the crowd—she caught a whiff of tobacco and the sticky-sweet smell of pot, and something else, acrid and chemical, like the air in a cheap salon. Meth. She’d encountered the smell once before, tracking down a deadbeat dad in Riverside, finding him in a garbage-strewn apartment with a pipe in his hand.

She squeezed through the crowd, eyes sharp. A herd of beefy, shirtless boys stampeded past her in the hallway, chanting something she couldn’t quite make out. In the kitchen a game of strip poker was under way, and a smooth-chested boy had already lost his shirt. A girl in an electric-blue bikini sat across his lap, wearing an incongruous silk necktie. In the music room an elfin boy sat on a gilt coffee table, a friend helping him secure a length of tubing around his upper arm.

Out on the patio she took a deep breath of clean air. She made her way down the stairs to the lower level, where the pool roiled with activity. No sign anywhere of Willie—or the Gutiérrez cousins. She craned her neck to scan the pool and
the Jacuzzi and for a moment forgot to watch where she was going. She walked right into someone.

“Ow!”

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry …”

The words died on her lips. Standing in front of her, in board shorts and a puka shell necklace, was Dick Casablancas.

He did a double take. “Hey, Ronnie,” he said. “You know, this is
not
where I expected to bump into you.”

The cluster of girls he’d been standing with eyed Veronica with interest. She stood frozen to the spot, hoping against all hope that he wouldn’t say anything too stupid.

She’d known Dick since high school—for a while, after her father’s fall from grace, he’d been one of her tormenters. After she started dating Logan—who just happened to be Dick’s best friend—he’d eased up, and over time they’d made a kind of peace, though she wasn’t sure she’d call him her friend. He was rich and careless and had the emotional depth of a chunk of concrete; the only real goals that registered for him were surfing, drinking, and screwing.

In other words, she really shouldn’t have been so surprised to see him at a party run by the offspring of cartel kingpins a half mile down the beach from his own house.

“Hi!” she said, in her clipped, bright Amber-the-Coed voice. “Isn’t this party
amazing
?”

He gave her a confused, blank look. “Um, yeah? That’s kind of why I’m shocked to see you here.” He turned back to his audience of bikini-clad girls. “We went to high school together. I guess you girls would have been in, like, fifth grade? Crazy.”

She glanced at the girls—a few of them stared daggers at her, territorial aggression alight in their eyes.

“Anyway, Ronnie here’s a private dick,” he said loudly, gesturing at her. He leaned toward one of the girls, chortling and nudging her with his elbow. “I’m a not-so-private Dick, if you get what I’m saying.” The girls giggled as he thrust his pelvis at them.

Veronica grabbed him by the arm and pulled him, staggering, a few feet away from the little entourage. She threw a big, shiny smile over her shoulder at the girls, then turned back to Dick.

“Whoa, whoa. I know Logan’s been gone for, like, weeks, but I can’t go all the way with you, no matter how lonely you are.” He smirked affably. “Bros before hos, you know what I’m saying? Handies
only
.”

“Shut up,” she commanded. She kept a smile frozen on her face, her eyes darting over the patio. “I’m here to work, Dick.”

His gaze moved up and down her body. “Nice uniform.”

She punched him in the arm. From far away it might have looked playful. Dick clutched his bicep, groaning.

“Jeez, Double-O-Psycho, what’s your problem?”

“Listen, just keep your voice down, okay?” They were walking back along the edge of the patio now. On their left, a set of stairs led down to the dark beach. The ocean glowed gently beyond, the tidal roar completely swallowed by the noise from the party. She rummaged in her straw beach bag and pulled out her phone. “I need your help. Have you seen this guy here tonight?”

He glanced at the picture on her screen, frowning. “That guy? Yeah, I’ve seen him. He’s always hanging around Rico and Eduardo.”

She blinked. “You know the Gutiérrez cousins?”

“Yeah, kind of. I’ve played squash with Eduardo a couple
times. He’s a poor loser, so I stopped.” He shrugged. “He’s got a bad temper. Broke a two-hundred-dollar racquet last time I beat him. But dude knows how to throw a party.”