“I didn’t know Preston wore contacts,” I said.
“Me neither.” Parvati flipped to another picture and pointed at Preston’s open closet door. His rich-kid pants and designer sweaters hung on one side, a wash of deep blues and greens, muted tans and yellows. The other side was full of black rock-band T-shirts and ripped jeans. In private, Pres dressed like me, but his parents had bribed him to quit “looking like a thug” in public by buying him a second wardrobe and a brand-new BMW. I guess they thought if he dressed like a yuppie and drove the car of a forty-year-old that he’d join the country club and start building a stock portfolio instead of getting wasted and gambling away his allowance. It had never worked, as far as I could tell.
I looked back and forth between the wardrobes. If you didn’t know Preston, you’d swear this closet belonged to two different people. There was a small ribbon of blank space in the middle.
“Normally it’s overflowing with clothes,” Parvati said. “I wonder if Pres planned on staying with Ms. Violet for more than just a couple of days.”
The closet looked pretty full to me, but obviously Parvati had been in his room more than I had. “Or maybe Esmeralda was just behind with the laundry,” I offered.
Parvati snorted. She scrolled to the next image. “Unlikely. I never saw that woman fall behind on anything. Did you happen to notice if Pres had a lot of stuff packed?”
“His whole car was full of camping stuff, but I thought it was just for the alibi. He gave me some, but I didn’t go pawing through the rest.”
“Did the FBI guys ever find his car?” she asked.
“Not that I know of, but they haven’t exactly been keeping me in the loop.”
Parvati’s laptop beeped, and the start-up screen finally appeared. She plugged Preston’s external drive into the USB port.
“Where’d you find that, anyway?” I asked.
She smiled enigmatically. She was good at that enigmatic thing. She pointed at her phone, at the picture of Pres’s bookshelf. “False book,” she said. “No one would ever decide to pull out Essentials of Trigonometry and start thumbing through.”
“How did you know?” For the first time, I felt jealous of Parvati instead of Preston. It was irrational—they’d been friends for three times as long as Pres and I had—but still, it kind of bothered me that she knew things about him I didn’t.
“We made them together freshman year—razor-bladed out a square in the middle of the pages. It was my idea,” she said proudly.
I could see them there, sitting cross-legged on Preston’s bed, silver blades poised over the crisp pages of unused math books. Parvati looking conspiratorial. Preston with that usual relaxed grin of his. I wondered what else they’d done together, what other stories I’d never heard.
“Was there anything else hidden in there?”
She shrugged. “Just his passport and a few pictures from when he was a kid.”
I stared at the laptop screen as a group of folders popped up, arranged in two orderly rows. The good thing about investigating someone who kept his external hard drive in a doctored trigonometry book was that he didn’t think he had to encrypt his files. I scanned the folder names: docs, tunes, pix, vids.
“Let’s try docs first,” she said. “Maybe he saves emails.”
No luck: it was full of school papers. Pix was more interesting. There were several sub-folders with two-letter names that seemed to be initials. I saw my own initials, as well as Parvati’s. Only one folder started with V. Parvati seemed to be sharing my train of thought. She clicked on the VC folder, and sure enough, three thumbnail images of a blonde girl came up.
Parvati clicked on the first one to enlarge it, and her jaw dropped slightly. “Is it just me or does she look kind of old?”
“It’s not just you,” I said. The girl stood in front of the pirate ship display at the Treasure Island Hotel. She wore the same short skirt–tall shoes combo that a lot of the chicks at Vista P were always rocking, but there was just something about the photo that made her look older. Maybe it was the hairstyle, or the way her shirt fit, or the hardness of her smile. I couldn’t put my finger on it. The second picture was a headshot, a little blurry, like someone had snapped it with a cheap cell phone. The woman was pretty, but I could see ridges in her forehead and tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that only came with age. She was wearing a bikini in the third picture, and although her body was banging, she was still clearly much older than Preston.
I squinted at the photo’s background, but it just looked like a generic beach. It could have been taken anywhere. I guess a picture of her posing in front of her house, address prominently displayed, was asking a little much.
“Let’s see if we can find her.” Parvati connected the hard drive to her phone and transferred over the image files. She fiddled around until she got a decent signal and then opened a search engine page and pasted the first picture into the image search box.
I leaned over her shoulder. “I didn’t know you could search by picture.”
“Watch and learn.” Parvati smiled as a social networking profile pulled up. I peeked over her shoulder, but the text was too tiny to read. “Get this,” she said, in a voice that let me know a big reveal was coming. “I think I know why Preston didn’t tell us about her.” She paused for emphasis. “Violet Cain. Las Vegas. Thirty-five years old.”
SEVENTEEN
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OLD? WHAT WAS Preston doing hooking up with someone almost old enough to be his mom?
“Let me see that.” I glanced back at the bikini picture, which was still open on Parvati’s laptop. Violet’s skin was tan, her body flawless. Okay, so she did have that going for her, but still. We had hot teachers younger than her, and Preston had never seemed interested in any of them.
“What else does her profile say?” I asked.
“Violet only shares some of her information.” Parvati read from her phone. “For more about Violet Cain, send her a message or friend request.”
“Should we send her a message?” I asked. “Maybe Pres is totally fine and just lost his phone.”
“But if she’s crazy, we’ll be tipping her off that we know about her. Let’s see if her address is listed.” Abandoning the incomplete profile, Parvati found the page for Las Vegas directory assistance and typed in the name Violet Cain. There were three listings—two in Las Vegas and one in North Las Vegas. “If we went to Vegas ourselves, we could check out all three of these addresses in less than an hour,” she said. “If we left here around seven tomorrow morning, do you think we could make it to Vegas and back by five?”