Wonderland (17 page)

But he didn’t love her anymore. Not that way. Finally, blessedly, it was over.

“B . . .” His voice was quiet. “I won’t lie, okay? I do want the restaurant. I’ve been here a long time, and I need something . . . more. I’m not getting any younger, and if I don’t take the risk now, I never will.” He put the check back into the envelope and held it out to her.

“I’ll double it,” she said. She didn’t take it.

“What?”

“Your bonus. I’ll double it. And I’ll add another ten percent to your salary.”

“B, that’s—”

“Okay, fifteen percent. And profit sharing. We talked about that before. You deserve a piece of this place. I’m CEO, I can make that happen.” She mistook his silence for hesitation. “Okay then, twenty percent. Do the math, Oz. Twenty percent more than what you make now. Where else could you possibly make that kind of money?”

“Nowhere. But it’s not about the money, goddammit.” Frustrated, Oscar stood up and started pacing. “I don’t need this anymore. More importantly, I don’t
want
this anymore.”

“What about me?” She looked directly at him. Her green eyes were sad. “You would really leave me?”

“I should have left a long time ago.”

If it were anyone else, those words might have been hurtful, but it was Bianca Bishop. She didn’t feel things like other people. Because she wasn’t like other people.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about us.” She attempted a smile, but it seemed desperate and not at all sincere. “I know when we talked last year you said you wanted more from me, and I couldn’t give you what you wanted. But I think I can now. I think you and I could be—”

“I’ve met someone.”

“Oh.” She was quiet for a few seconds, and then her sadness morphed into anger. “I see. So that’s what this is really about. You’ve met someone and now all of a sudden you want a whole new life. After everything Uncle Nick’s done for you. After everything
I’ve
done for you.”

“And what exactly is that?” Now Oscar was getting angry, too. “Everything you’ve done for me, everything Nicky’s done for me, I’ve paid back. And then some. I’ve been nothing but loyal to both of you, and to this park—”

“You’d be nothing without us.” Bianca’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Nothing.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t say things you’ll regret. Don’t make it ugly.” He tossed the check onto the table. “Keep your money. I’ll stay till we find someone to replace me.”

“I thought you loved me, Oz.” She reached for his hand.

He stopped in his tracks. “I did love you. But you never loved me back, I see that now. Everything I’ve done, I did for the wrong reasons. And you’ve never been grateful. You were too busy fucking your little Wonder Worker boy toys.”

“What?”

“You think I don’t know about that?” He extracted his hand from hers. “I know you were involved with Blake Dozier. You were upstairs, in your apartment, all night that night. Were you with him before he disappeared?”

“I—” Bianca seemed completely flustered. “No, of course not. I would never . . . I mean, we did . . . I had nothing to do with his disappearance.”

“I didn’t ask if you did. But thanks for confirming that you were sleeping with him.”

She turned red. “It’s none of your business.”

“Holy shit,” Oscar said. He took a step back, the realization dawning on him. “That’s why Blake climbed the Wonder Wheel. That’s why he did it wearing his uniform. He knew a stunt like that would get him fired, but he didn’t care.
You’re
the one he was giving the finger to. It was his way of telling you to fuck off. Are you the reason he’s missing?” He stopped, then held up a hand. “You know what, don’t answer that. I really don’t want to know.”

“You’re so angry with me.” Bianca’s smile was sad. “Oz, please. Let’s try again. Give me another chance.”

Oscar gave her a sad smile of his own. “I’ve given you enough,” he said. “I’m done.”

TWENTY-TWO

V
anessa sat impatiently inside her office at the department, waiting for the chief of police to finish up his phone call. Earl Schultz had scheduled a status meeting with her but he was running fifteen minutes behind, which ordinarily wouldn’t be a big deal, but she had plans to meet Jerry for an early dinner. They were heading over to Wonderland to surprise Ava, who still hadn’t seen Jerry yet, and then the three of them would pick up John-John from day camp.

Her head was throbbing slightly from the day before. She and Jerry had spent her afternoon off with Tanner Wilkins, first at the Devil’s Dukes, and then at the Monkey Bar for a late lunch, a local spot Vanessa had never heard of that served the best burger she’d ever tasted. If Tanner liked Vanessa in the way that Jerry had suggested, she definitely didn’t see it. The man was certainly nicer to her than he’d been at the beginning, but the conversation had focused on his son. The three of them had gone over Jerry’s notes and Tyler’s police file, dissecting every detail surrounding the boy’s disappearance, trying to find something—anything—that might have been missed. They hadn’t come up with any new theories, and it was disheartening.

There was a knock on her office door. “I got something, Deputy,” Donnie said.

Vanessa perked up. “You found Glenn Hovey?”

“No, sorry, nothing new there.” Stepping in, the young detective closed the door behind him. “You got a minute?”

“Earl’s going to summon me at some point, but he’s already running late, so yes, I do.” She smiled at him. “What’s up?”

“I know you’d mentioned sending the Wonderland surveillance footage to an outside forensics expert, but you don’t need to now. I watched the footage a dozen times and was about to give up on it, but something kept gnawing at me, so I went over all of it again.” Donnie placed a thumb drive on her desk. “Did Oscar Trejo explain to you how their security system works?”

“Not really.” Vanessa reached for her coffee and took a sip. “All I know is it’s old and pathetic, and he didn’t disagree.”

“It’s definitely both those things.” Donnie sat down. “The cameras are a hot mess. Some of them work, but not all of the time. Some don’t work at all. The picture quality, as you know, is shit. The computers are supposed to be recording everything from every camera all the time, but the system is buggy, so it only records some of the time. The system is also set to erase every twenty-four hours—”

“Twenty-four?” Vanessa almost choked on her coffee. “Then what’s the point of recording at all?”

“Twenty-four,” Donnie repeated. “Which means if you hadn’t grabbed the hard drive when you did, we might have lost everything that happened the morning Blake Dozier took his infamous selfie.”

“But it wasn’t helpful anyway.” Vanessa frowned. “We couldn’t see anything. And the video cut out.”

“I don’t think it did cut out, actually. I think someone stopped the recording. On purpose.”

She stared at him. “Don’t tease me.”

“I don’t know how much you know about computers—”

“Very little. You need to explain it to me like I’m a five-year-old, and not get technical, because I won’t understand it anyway.”

“Fair enough.” The detective leaned forward, rubbing the back of his head like he always did when he was thinking, a sure sign his brain was firing on all cylinders. “Okay, so when something’s deleted on a hard drive, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gone. A lot of stuff is retrievable if you know where to find it. When I went back and looked at the footage, and I mean really looked, like a techie would, I discovered three things. One, the camera in the midway that was pointed towards the wheel didn’t actually cut out. Otherwise it would have continued recording static, or showed nothing. I think someone stopped it from recording, on purpose. Which tells us that someone with access to the security office was in the park that night.”

“Glenn Hovey.”

“He’d make the most sense, but really it could be anyone with access to the admin building. Two,” Donnie said, getting ramped up, “the system didn’t cooperate when that person pressed stop. The recording glitched, kind of like a hiccup, and then it just continued recording. And it recorded for approximately one more hour.”

Vanessa was beginning to get excited. “Please oh please, tell me you were able to retrieve that hour.”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Shit.”

“Whoever it was came back to the security office and checked it to be on the safe side—which was smart—and then erased that extra portion. And then for good measure, wiped it again.”

“I knew it was too good to be true.”

“All but two and half minutes, that is.”

“What?
”
Vanessa said.

“I was able to retrieve two and a half extra minutes.” Donnie was triumphant. “Because of that stupid glitchy hiccup, whoever tried to wipe that portion of the drive missed that part. Which means that the shitty security system—for all its dated and archaic ridiculousness—is the reason we have those two and a half minutes. They were deleted, but not wiped, and so I was able to get them back.”

“Nice work, Detective.” Vanessa grinned. “So? Don’t keep me in suspense. What did you see?”

“Stick this into your hard drive.” Donnie came around to her side of the desk. She inserted the thumb drive into her computer and the video began to play. “I copied just this portion of it so you can see it real quick.”

They both watched her monitor. The video started with a repeat of Blake Dozier reaching the top of the wheel, and then taking selfies. His arms were extended while he used his cell phone to snap several pics.

“I never fail to get vertigo watching this,” Donnie said. “I’m sorry, but this kid is nuts.”

“Agreed.”

The video then glitched slightly, just as the detective said, and then after a couple of seconds, it continued. “Okay, we’re in overtime. Watch closely.”

Vanessa did. At first it was more of the same. Blake appeared to be typing into his phone, both hands now. Two minutes passed.

“Based on the timestamp, this is probably when he was uploading the photos to Twitter and Facebook,” Donnie said. “Okay, right now. Watch. Wait for it . . . wait for it . . . there.”

The video went black.

“Did you see it?” Donnie said.

“That he lost his balance?” Vanessa was confused. “Because that’s what it looked like to me. It almost looked like he was about to slip.”

“Yeah, but did you see
why
he lost his balance? Let’s watch it again.” The detective rewound it back about twenty seconds. “Watch closely. Don’t look at Blake. Watch the spokes of the wheel. Makes it easier to spot what’s happening.”

Vanessa focused on the spokes as Donnie instructed, and a few seconds later, she saw it. “Holy shit. Did the wheel
move
?”

“At least a foot, by my guess.” Donnie paused the video. “At that height, that could have been enough to cause him to slip. The bars between the spokes he was standing on are thin, and slanted. It would have been hard enough to keep his balance with the wheel moving.”

“But he didn’t fall.” Vanessa stared at the screen. “If he had, his body would have splattered all over the midway. And if that had happened, no way could anyone have cleaned it up that fast. We would have found traces of it when we processed Homeless Harry.”

“Right. If Blake’s dead, he’s dead some other way. But this footage does prove that someone turned on the Wonder Wheel while he was on it.” He went back around the desk and sat down again. “When I worked at the park way back when, you needed a key to turn on the Wonder Wheel’s motor. Whoever killed Blake had access to that key, which, from what I remember, was kept in a box in the maintenance building.”

“Which is just off the midway, right? Gray brick structure?”

“That’s the one. Whoever’s in charge of ride maintenance each day has to inspect the Wonder Wheel first. If it checks out okay, the key is signed out to whichever operator is working the first shift.”

“And does the key stay in all day?”

“Usually. Whoever worked the last shift then checks the key back into maintenance.”

“So what you’re saying,” Vanessa said, thinking hard, “is that for the wheel to move, someone had to
make
it move, and to do that, they’d have to know where to get the key. Blake’s weight couldn’t have caused it to rotate?”

“No way. That wheel weighs, like, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.” Seeing the look on Vanessa’s face, the detective shrugged sheepishly. “I looked it up.”

“Good work. This is a break in the case, for sure. It looks like someone was trying to kill Blake.” Vanessa drummed her fingers on the desk. “It had to be Glenn Hovey. He was the only person scheduled to be there that night. He has complete access to the park after hours, and obviously the security office, and he’d know exactly which cameras worked and which ones didn’t. He’d also know how to delete footage off the hard drives. He probably knows how to operate the rides. Not to mention, he watches porn during his shifts and his neighbor thinks he’s a creep. And lastly—and this is the big one—
where the hell is he
? It all fits. At the very least, I can charge him with the murder of Aiden Cole.”

“Congratulations Hovey, wherever you are,” Donnie said. “You’ve just graduated from a person of interest to an official suspect.”

Vanessa’s intercom buzzed, and Earl’s voice blared through the speaker on her phone. “Ready for you.”

She gave Donnie a look. “Well, this should be fun. And here I was worried I didn’t have anything new to report.”

“The chief isn’t going to like that someone murdered the Wonder Wheel Kid at his precious park.” Donnie rubbed his head. “Don’t envy you having to be the one to tell him that.”

“I’m not going to be the one.” Vanessa gave him a sweet smile. “Come on, techie. Get your ass up. I’ll let you take all the credit.”