Nearly Found (11 page)

I studied the rest of the remains, a canvas of fragmented clues. What kind of person would exhume a body that had been buried for years, and carve a message in his bones?

“Who is he?” I asked softly, not realizing I’d said it aloud until Raj answered.

“No idea. He wasn’t buried with any identification. But detectives have a pretty strong lead. The body was hidden in a highly visible public place. Which means the hole was probably filled at night, when the golf course was closed. Most likely, he was buried while the false front was being constructed, or else someone would have noticed the cuts and imperfections in the turf. The false front was built about five years ago. If the detectives can confirm the dates between the time the front was back-filled and the turf grass was laid, they can cross-reference it with a list of missing persons from the same time period.” Raj scratched his head. “The condition of the poor guy’s teeth isn’t going to make it easy to ID him, but a forensic anthropologist can do a facial reconstruction of the skull fragments, and a forensic artist can use that to sketch the victim’s face. If they can find a possible match, Doc will be able to confirm an ID by sending DNA samples to the mitochondrial lab in Richmond.”

“When will we know?” I asked, trying to steady the tremor in my voice.

“Depends,” he said thoughtfully. “Days. Maybe weeks.”

I straightened slowly. A man, dead five years, buried in the golf course near my neighborhood. I hadn’t heard from my father since he disappeared . . . five years ago.

• • •

That night, I listened to Reece’s voicemail messages, saving them and replaying them over again.

I told myself I didn’t want Reece in my life anymore. That I didn’t need him. The same way I’d told myself I didn’t need my father. But lying here, alone in the dark, I wasn’t as sure. I had told Nicholson I hadn’t had any contact with my father in five years. I had made myself believe it. It was wrong to keep looking for him, to want him in my life. But now, all I wanted was to know he was alive.

I climbed out of bed and turned on the light. Then I fished around in my desk for a handful of pushpins. One by one, I put them back in the empty holes in my wall.

“Are you out there?” I whispered to them. “Is it you?”

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
F
RIDAY,
and I headed straight for the computer lab before school. There had to be a way to find my father.

I started to Google one of his aliases. Then backspaced through the letters until his name was deleted. It was a stupid idea anyway. Searching for him this way made no sense. I just wanted reassurance that he was alive. Somewhere. Anywhere but in pieces on a gurney in a cold room.

I bent down to pick up my backpack.

“Need a hand with . . . ?”

Jeremy looked over my shoulder and studied the blinking cursor on the search screen, even though there wasn’t anything left in the search field to see. His glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose and his eyes caught mine over the rim. Warmth spread over my cheeks, like I’d been caught doing something wrong.

“Still looking for him?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me. I stood up, almost knocking into him when he didn’t back out of my way. “Because I can help. If you want me to,” he added quickly. “There are all kinds of new facial recognition software and cell phone tracking and social media sites we’ve never tried. We could look for him, you know . . . like old times. If you want to find him.”

“I don’t care where he is,” I said.

“Oh.” Jeremy’s face fell.

I let out a long breath. “I need to figure out where he’s
not
.”

Jeremy pushed his glasses up his nose. An uncertain smile touched his lips, then retreated again. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s okay.” I rolled my eyes at my own foolishness. No matter how technically savvy Jeremy was, he couldn’t use a computer to prove my dad hadn’t been lying in a hole in Belle Green for the last five years.

Not unless he could use that kind of technology to prove my father was actually . . . somewhere else . . .

I suddenly thought of Lonny. The photos of Adrienne’s body on Lonny’s phone. They were time stamped.

Lonny didn’t have to prove he wasn’t at the park when Adrienne was murdered. He just needed to prove he’d been somewhere else. Far enough away that he could never have made it to the park where Adrienne’s body was found by the time the photos were taken. Police said he didn’t have an alibi, meaning there was no one to corroborate his location, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t left any tracks. There were always tracks. Some were just harder to see.

Maybe there was a way I could help Lonny without risking my internship. Maybe I could prove he was innocent without having to break any rules. All I had to do was retrace Lonny’s steps the night Adrienne was killed.

“Jeremy, you’re a genius.” I said, my mind buzzing so loudly, I was hardly aware of the first bell ringing, or the students filtering into the room.

Jeremy looked confused. “I didn’t do anything yet.”

But with any luck, maybe I could.

• • •

After school, I got off the bus at the corner of Sunny View Drive and Route 1 just as TJ’s uncle made it to the end of the crosswalk with a six-pack tucked in the crook of his arm. He glanced up as I descended the bus steps, and I wondered if we were both thinking the same thing . . . that it would be awkward to have to walk side by side all the way home, neither of us saying a word to each other. I was glad I didn’t have to.

Instead, I crossed the street and headed for Bui’s, feeling more and more confident in my theory. Billy Wiles had walked across the street to buy his beer at the Bui Mart every afternoon for as long as I could remember. Bui’s was easy. Bui’s was close. It was the nearest opportunity to satisfy an addiction, if you lived in Sunny View.

Lonny said his phone and lighter went missing the last time he’d seen Adrienne, which was several hours before she’d been killed. But Lonny had been smoking like a house on fire since he was twelve. At least a pack a day. If his lighter went missing before he left the house, he would have stopped somewhere for matches, or a cheap lighter on the way. Bui Mart would have been his first stop. Bao had been skittish after a series of break-ins last year, and if he’d been concerned enough to mount a gun under the counter, there was a good chance he’d installed cameras too. If I could prove Lonny had been at Bui’s, maybe it would be enough to prove he wasn’t at the crime scene.

AC/DC wailed through the overhead speakers inside, too loud for Bao to hear the bells jingling on the door. He stood behind the counter, rocking out with an air guitar and thrashing his head, his voice peeling out a whiny falsetto to “Back in Black.” As I neared the counter, the charred scent of burning popcorn filled my nose. Across the store, the microwave beside the slushie machines belched out black clouds. I sprinted past the counter to shut it off, catching Bao’s attention. The music cut off suddenly, and then Bao was at my side, waving a magazine in the air to disperse the smoke.

We both coughed and covered our mouths.

“Jeez, Bao,” I said, plucking the singed bag out of the microwave. There were still ninety seconds left on the timer. “How long did you set it for? There’s a popcorn button on the front of the machine.”

“It wasn’t me!” Bao took the bag and carried it into the men’s room. He dropped it in the sink. “Billy must have forgotten it.”

“Maybe he was too drunk to remember,” I said sharply.

Bao emerged with a thoughtful expression. He inspected the inside of the microwave and sighed. “You get to know a lot of drunks working in a place like this. Billy’s not the sloppy kind. He’s just been through some rough times.”

“You’re awfully forgiving, considering what happened to your sister.”

“Why shouldn’t I be? Billy wasn’t the one who kidnapped her. He wasn’t the one who killed those kids. If I blamed him—if I took my anger out on an innocent person just because they were related to someone who’d done bad things—I wouldn’t be any better than TJ. Would I?” He gave me a pointed look, before turning it inward. His lip quirked with a sheepish grin. “Sometimes I give great advice, huh?”

Bao propped open the store doors to air out the stink. Then he leaned back against the counter beside me. “Can we stop talking about Billy now? It’s ruining it for me.”

“Ruining what?”

“This fantasy I’m having, where we get naked and have crazy make-up sex behind the hot dog machine.”

I tried not to picture it. But had Bao just apologized? It sounded like the same almost-apologies I’d shared with Jeremy and Anh. The kind where neither of us says we’re sorry. We just sort of dance around the words and try to move on, like nothing’s changed. “Is Anh here?” I asked.

“No.” Bao’s eyebrows shot up. He pointed to the hot dog machine. “Does that mean—?”

“No! But I do need a favor.”

“What exactly do you need?” Bao wagged his eyes.

“Not in this lifetime. Name your price.”

“Anh tells me you scored some kind of forensics internship. How about something cool from your lab, like . . .” He scratched his chin and thought for a moment. “I don’t know . . . like one of those fancy UV lights they use to find evidence at crime scenes, or a human skull or something?”

“I can’t just take a human skull out of the lab! And those fancy lights cost a lot of money.”

“What about that cool luminescing spray they use to find blood spatter?”

I waited for the punch line. For the quirky smile that would give away the fact that he was kidding. “What on earth would you do with a bottle of luminol?”

He looked at me with an expression of utter disbelief. “Have you never watched
Dexter
?”

“There has to be something else.”

“It’s either that, or smokin’-hot sex behind the hot dog machine.”

I sighed. It wouldn’t be easy, but maybe there was a way to give him what he wanted without breaking any rules. Luminol was just a chemical with luminescent properties, and creating a chemical was no different than following a recipe. I made a mental list of ingredients and supplies . . . latex gloves, paint thinner . . . “I guess I could make it. I’d need a few days to—”

“No,” he said. “None of this generic homemade kiddie-chem crap. I want the real deal.”

“The lab doesn’t just give this stuff away, you know.”

“I don’t care how you get it. But if you’re going to ask me for a favor, it’s either that, or lick pickle relish off my—”

“Fine!” I held up a hand. “I’ll get it.”

Bao did a victory dance behind the counter.

“I want to see your security footage from the night of August twenty-ninth.”

He stopped dancing. “Who says I have security cameras?”

The guilty look on his face told me everything I needed to know. That he did have them. And that no one else knew. “Convenience stores have hidden cameras. So do creepy perverts. You’re two for two.”

He folded his arms and leaned a hip against the register. “So what if I did have this hidden camera? And I did let you see the recordings? You’d give up the goods?”

“I’d give up the luminol. And that’s it.”

Bao swung himself over the counter, dropping to the floor beside me with a wicked smile. “You don’t know what you’re missing, Boswell.” He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the office at the back of the store. “Just don’t tell Anh about this, okay?” He left the door cracked and sat down behind the computer. I wheeled another chair close beside him.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“I want to see who was in the store between nine and ten on the night of August twenty-ninth.”

Bao clicked open a window, revealing a grainy black-and-white image of the store, from a vantage point behind the counter. Anh must have been on duty that night, because we had a clear shot of the back of her head. The footage sped up, the clock racing in the lower right of the screen. People walked in and out of the store at high speed.

Bao paused the shot. “I knew it!” he said, pointing at the screen. “I knew Little Miss Perfect had a weakness. You saw that didn’t you? Anh took a Kit Kat. And she didn’t put it on her tab!”

A noise from the store drew Bao’s attention. He stood up, still shaking his head as he pushed the mouse toward me. “Here, knock yourself out. I have to be on the floor when customers are in the store. Just push the
PLAY
button to start the video again. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I slid his chair out of the way and scooted closer to the screen. Pressed
PLAY
and watched the faces come and go, trying to recognize Lonny in one of them. At 9:37, a white blond head stood at the counter. I paused the footage. Ran it back. Then slowed it down. It was Lonny. He paid cash for a cheap plastic lighter and a pack of cigarettes. This might be exactly what I needed to plant reasonable doubt in the prosecutor’s mind. The Bui Mart was only a couple miles from Mount Vernon Regional Park, but if Lonny was at Bui’s at 9:37, was it even possible that he could have abducted Adrienne and driven her to the park, then killed her in time to match the time stamps on the photos taken with Lonny’s phone at ten o’clock? If nothing else, this should at least lend credence to Lonny’s alibi, that his lighter had been missing.

Bao hadn’t returned, so I left the office and found him scouring the inside of the microwave, his nose wrinkling over the smell. “Still reeks like smoke in here. I’m never going to get the smell out of this place.”

“Can I get a copy of the video footage?” All I needed to do was get that information to Lonny’s lawyer, and let him handle the rest. I’d have officially paid off any debt I owed Lonny Johnson for saving my life. I could return his cell phone to the mailroom before anyone knew it was missing.

“Depends. What else can you get me from the lab?”

“Don’t push your luck, or I’ll tell your mom about the camera you put in the women’s bathroom.”

Bao paled and stopped scrubbing to look at me. “How’d you know about that?”

“Lucky guess. Can you get me a copy or not?”

He slung the rag over his shoulder and stared at me with his hands on his hips. Finally, he said, “Bring me the luminol and I’ll make you a copy.”

“Deal,” I said. The acrid smell of burned popcorn followed me out the door.