Pretty Wanted (2 page)

We were salty and sweet—together a perfect combination, like a caramel, which was our inside joke. If he was still a mystery to me in some ways, well, that made him all the more alluring.

“Think Corbin knows where we are yet?”

I shrugged. Corbin was supposed to take us into FBI custody, and we should have been back in Paradise Valley awaiting trial. But we’d skipped out on him. “Maybe. I hope not.”

Not that it mattered. We were going to have to proceed with our plan either way. I knew I couldn’t keep running forever, but I was going to do this thing, find out who my real mom was, while I still could.

We crossed the street and a man in a knockoff Burberry overcoat passed us, holding my gaze for what felt like a long time. Panic shot through me like an electric shock. Did he see us? Did he recognize us? Was he a cop? Or was he working for Chet and Bailey?

No
, I told myself. He was just some guy. Maybe he was admiring Aidan’s vest or he recognized someone behind us. There was careful, and there was complete paranoia.
Get a grip, Willa.

Besides, we were better off here than we’d been in all those small towns in California. In a big city, we could find resources more easily and duck into a crowd if we needed to. Surely, the people of St. Louis weren’t looking for us when they had their own criminals to worry about. This was one of the murder capitals of the United States, wasn’t it? I smiled to myself, mostly at the twisted fact that being in a murder capital could be so comforting.

Then I remembered that my real mom had been murdered. She was one of those statistics. The smile was replaced by a sudden bout of nausea.

“I see coffee,” Aidan rasped, extending his arms out like a caffeine-deprived zombie in the direction of the nearest green sign.

“That’s a Starbucks,” I said, trying to shake off the icky feelings. “Out of our budget.”

Our cash was limited—we had three hundred dollars our friend Tre and a network of supporters had given us. We’d used most of it on the bus tickets and we couldn’t use credit cards, not unless we wanted to be traced. (We also had our phones from home, but we couldn’t use them, either; they were secured in a GPS-free off position while we relied on a temp phone I’d bought in Tahoe.) I was pretty sure that Aidan, son of a high-tech CEO, had never heard the word
budget
in his life, let alone observed one. So it was up to me to be the guardian of spendage.

“You’re killing me, Colorado,” Aidan said, using the pet name he’d given me when we met at the beginning of the school year, because I’d moved to Paradise Valley from Castle Pines.

That was all before my life had spun out of control. Where my mom was my mom, where there were no secrets (that I knew of), where I was a regular teenager without so much as a mailbox-whacking on my record.

Aidan was still looking at me like my pupils were double espressos. He showed me his shaky hands. “C’mon. Help a brother out.”

What could I say? A four-dollar latte was out of the question. I scanned the blocks ahead for other options. “There’s a 7-Eleven across the street. Go in there. I’ll wait out here and look at the map.”

He disappeared through the hot dog–decaled doors, leaving me outside as I tried to orient us to our new surroundings. I could see where we were. Olive Street. I just needed to figure out where we were going.

As I trailed over the page, scanning landmarks and unfamiliar names, a moving smear of white and blue caught in the corner of my eye. I looked up.

Cops.

My pulse skipped over itself.

Two cop cars, actually. City police. Now in the parking lot. A few feet away from where I stood.

They were probably here for donuts, right?

Except, I remembered, it was late afternoon.

I cast a tentative glance over and saw an officer sitting in the front seat of the car closest to me, talking into a radio. Looking actively involved in police business of some kind. Like he could be reporting something suspicious. Me?

No. No way. No.

When Aidan emerged, carrying a brown paper bag and two cups of coffee, I grabbed his elbow and steered him away from the store parking lot.

“We need to move,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Five-oh at four o’clock,” he said.

“Right.”

We walked a few paces hurriedly. Then I saw a third police car, coming toward us in the opposite direction. It seemed to slow down as it neared.

Oh shiz.
I was tempted to break into a run.

“Act natural,” Aidan said, holding me back with his firm tone. “We’re just walking.”

There was nothing natural about it. We were wanted. I’d imagined the scenario too many times to count, when and how I’d be dragged back to juvie. The place I swore I’d never end up again. The place where everything seemed to veer offtrack.

If I hadn’t been caught stealing stuff and trying to help the kids in my school, I wouldn’t have been on TV. And if I’d never been on TV, those guys would never have found Leslie and gone after her. She and I would still be together. But then, I never would’ve learned about my real mom, either.

The police car was almost in line with us. We had only a minute, a minute and a half, maybe, before they caught up and dragged us away. My heartbeat raged through every artery and vein. My eyes darted around, looking for an escape hatch. On our right was a big granite building fronted with marble-relief panels, the bulk of the thing taking up most of a block. On our left was just a park. No cover at all.

Think, Willa.

If I didn’t find something quick, I’d never find out who my mother was. If I couldn’t figure this out, it was all over, before it had even begun.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

TWO

IT REGISTERED THEN
, somewhere in the back of my fear-addled brain. What that big hulking building was. The Central Library. The door was within our reach. There were probably labyrinths of shelves inside to get lost in. Best of all it was the most uncontroversial place two teenagers could go.

“In here,” I said, making a quick decision.

Beyond the main entrance was an oval-shaped pavilion with a soaring, coffered, gold ceiling and marble floor. Aidan trashed our still-full coffees but stuffed our food into his bag before we stepped past the front desk, cursing under his breath.

The library was relatively empty for a weekday afternoon, but we went downstairs, headed for the farthest corner from the front door. Cautionary tactic.

We watched. We waited, breathing hard. Aidan mourned the loss of his newly found beverage. I wondered how much luck I could reliably expect to have at this point, after so many close calls. The truth was, I’d been rolling sevens for a while now. Karma was probably sneaking up to nip me in the butt.

A good fifteen minutes elapsed and we looked at each other quizzically. There was no sign of cops inside. Maybe we’d lost them. Or maybe they weren’t really after us to begin with. Could I have imagined it?

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think we need to give it more time,” I said. I felt safe here, safer than I’d felt in a long time. Maybe it was the stillness, or the kind-looking people reshelving books, or just the old-fashioned idea that everyone should have access to free reading. In a library, you didn’t even think of stealing, because everyone was equal.

“Well, while we’re in this temple of knowledge, we may as well make use of it,” Aidan said, angling across the room to a bank of computers.

He was right. We had some research to do if we wanted to learn more about my mom.

I figured it would be easy enough to look up news reports about her murder. It had taken place in 1997, I knew that much. And I knew her name: Brianna Siebert.

I typed it into the computer and hit search. But nothing came up. Nothing useful, anyway.

“It’s been a long time. That info is probably not cached on Google. I think we need to try a news database,” Aidan suggested.

I went back to the home screen and scrolled through the library’s options, then clicked on NewsBank. But the service required a user name and password.

“We don’t have a library card,” I said, sighing. I should have thought of that.

“Did you forget that I’m here, Colorado?” He nudged me aside and got to work, typing quickly. “You don’t need a stinking library card when you have a hacker on your side.”

He recovered cookies from a previous user and within a few minutes, we were in. He made room for me again. I reentered my search terms and immediately articles from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
came up.

BRUTAL MURDER OF YOUNG MOTHER SHOCKS UNIVERSITY CITY

A thirty-two-year-old woman, identified as Brianna Siebert, was found dead last night, the victim of an apparent gunshot wound to the chest. The woman was discovered by a neighbor, and police were called to the Delmar Loop apartment building at about 11:35 p.m.

Police confirmed the death as a homicide and are looking into leads.

Siebert had recently moved to the apartment on Westgate Avenue. She was working as a waitress at Blueberry Hill.

Police have been unable to locate the family of the young woman, including her sixteen-year-old daughter and newborn baby. Anyone with information is urged to contact CrimeStoppers line at 888-555-STOP.

I stared at the screen, blinking. There was a photo of her, from a three-quarters angle, shoulders up. It was reprinted in black and white in the newspaper, so it was hard to make out her coloring, but her hair, which fell in textured layers to her jawline, seemed darker than mine or Leslie’s—maybe it was brown or red. She had finely plucked eyebrows and a smile that looked half formed, as if she’d been caught by the camera in midthought. Her eyes weren’t smiling. They were heavy—wary, almost.

I kept looking at the photo, desperate for some connection to this person. This was the first time I’d ever seen her. I don’t know what I expected to feel, but nothing about her seemed familiar to me.

“That’s my
mother
,” I said softly, trying it on. “How is that my mother?”

“She’s pretty,” Aidan said. “She looks nice.”

These were not judgments I was capable of making. She was dead. She’d been
killed
. I’d never even had the chance to know her. The baby they were talking about—that was me.

And the killer, there was no word of the killer. I scanned through the rest of the articles. After five years, the case had gone cold, apparently, dipping down to little mentions farther back in the papers. Blurbs.

But there were things we knew already—things I didn’t particularly want to know, that made me think the police had to be overlooking something.

We knew there was money, a lot of money—five million dollars in total—that Leslie had accidentally taken from our apartment the day she found our mom dead. She said she’d had no idea it was there. But sensing danger and the possibility that child services would separate us, she’d run out of the place as fast as she could, taking me and a duffel bag with her. The cash was in the bag, and we’d been on the road ever since—though I’d always stupidly believed it was because she was looking for inspiration for her paintings.

We also knew that the two goons we’d run into, Chet and Bailey, had been after Leslie, hunting for the money. It didn’t take a huge leap of deductive reasoning to assume that they were my mom’s killers. They were certainly capable of it—we’d seen that firsthand.

So we had some idea about the who. We just didn’t know the why. Or at least not completely. I still had no clue where the money came from, or how my mom was involved in any of this. Leslie said she thought our mom and Chet had some kind of thing going. That was something I didn’t want to think about. In fact, the idea made me want to heave.

Aidan’s breath was hot on the back of my neck as he read with me, saying out loud what I was thinking. “I don’t understand how the case could be cold. Wasn’t the murder on Chet’s FBI rap sheet?”

I nodded and unzipped my bag to pull out the FBI file we’d nabbed from Agent Corbin’s car. Flipping through it, I put my thumb on the line.

10/22/1997
SUSPECTED MURDER

“They knew Chet was involved, yeah. According to this, he was never convicted. Not enough evidence.”

Aidan cocked a shoulder. “Gotta love the justice system. They probably didn’t have DNA. I don’t think they even used it for most cases back then. So he’s gotten away with it all this time.”

I ran my hand over the bird pendant that rested between my clavicles. It was my mother’s. She’d given it to Leslie, who’d given it to me when we moved to Paradise Valley. Of course, it meant even more to me now, my one physical link to that unknown past.

“We’ll get those bastards,” Aidan said softly but with determination. That’s what I loved about him. He was always on my side. He had no fear, and he was ready to take on anything. But he was also all too happy to walk into trouble, and sometimes I had to be our voice of reason.

“I don’t want to solve this case, Aidan.” We weren’t detectives. If the police hadn’t found anything, then how could we? “I just want to know who she was. I want some closure.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Then we’ll get you closure. But I’d still love to see them fry.”

We studied the map again and figured out our plan of attack. We would start with the apartment building, see if we could talk to anyone that knew her. Then hit the restaurant. Someone out there would have to remember. Fifteen years was a while ago—my whole life-span—but it wasn’t ancient history.

For tonight, we would have to go squat somewhere. With so little money to rely on, we’d been finding fancy vacation homes to break into (à la Sam Beasley’s) since we’d been on the road. I’d never attempted a break-in in a city before but we would just have to wing it.

We powered down the computer, careful to erase all of our browsing history and went upstairs.

Our feet echoed on the floor, thin and metallic sounding in so much open space. I looked around. There was nothing else here, no carpet, no wall hangings, to absorb the noise, but it still didn’t seem right, the emptiness of the place.