CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Two weeks later, Veronica had given up on the Manning case entirely. The last credible lead had evaporated like steam from a teacup. In the meantime she had been trying to refocus on the low-rent (and yet rent-paying) gigs she’d been ignoring.
On Wednesday afternoon she stood next to a concession stand at the Santa Anita racetrack, peeling the foil top off a single-serving of down-market white wine. She’d retreated to the shaded mezzanine walkway to escape the unseasonably hot sun. Down below, oblivious to the heat, were five hundred or so hardcore gambling addicts taking in some claiming races. Happily, the man she was tailing sat just ten rows down, enabling her to spy on him in relative comfort.
Parking her plastic wineglass on a condiment table, Veronica got out her mini camera and clicked several shots of her person of interest, a doughy, unwell-looking gent in a threadbare MIDNIGHT OIL 1988 WORLD TOUR tee. The final two snaps were keepers. One showed him on his feet, rooting his horse to the finish line. The other was taken right after the finish. It caught the guy with his head flung back in despair, clutching double fistfuls of his lank, greasy hair.
These, along with a previous shot of him at the betting window, would be plenty to satisfy Veronica’s client, the man’s sister—who also was executor of their late mother’s estate. The will specified that he had to quit gambling to earn his share of the inheritance. Thanks to Mars Investigation’s tireless quest for truth, the sister would now be able to claim her sibling’s share of the boodle—if any still remained.
Veronica knocked back the remainder of the wine in one gulp. She glanced heavenward. Yeah, yeah, I know: I am your daughter, in whom you are well pleased. No need to make a fuss over me, though. Just pay it forward by letting St. Vincent have a platinum album or something.
As she was heading for the exit, her phone rang and Mac’s face appeared on caller ID.
“Mac Attack. What’s up?” Veronica said, cupping the phone to drown out a sudden, blaring eruption of between-races music. She ducked into an empty women’s restroom to escape the noise.
“I need you to take a look at something,” Mac said, sounding psyched, perplexed, and exhausted all at once. “Can you get down here right now?”
“Is something wrong?” Veronica asked.
In the moment of silence that followed, she guessed the reason for Mac’s agitated state: She’d once again ignored explicit warnings to stay away from the Grace Manning case.
Veronica groaned. “Didn’t you have a teeth-cleaning appointment this afternoon? Because something tells me you blew it off to binge-watch the same fifteen hours of hotel security video you’ve already seen, like, three hundred times.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Mac said. The words came in a rapid-fire tumble, half apologetic, half desperate. “There’s just this thing I’ve got here and I need you to tell me if I’m crazy to…”
“Yes. You are. Now please, as a friend and as a fellow high-risk relapse candidate, just turn that computer off right now.”
“Veronica, I’ve found something we missed before,” Mac blurted, her voice suddenly firm and resolved. “I’m not saying it’s a huge breakthrough. But I have feeling it might be. And I really need you to see it for yourself.”
“Okay—wow,” Veronica said, trying not to sound as intrigued as she was. “Look, thanks for calling me, Mac. Forget the dentist; I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Fourteen minutes later—after shaving six off by driving illegally around a highway construction barrier—Veronica sat next to Mac back at the office, watching sped-up images zigzag across her thirty-inch monitor.
“This looks better than before,” Veronica said. “Did you enhance it somehow?”
“Just a little exposure gain in the shadows. It helps a lot for what I’m about to show you.” Mac slowed the video to normal speed and Veronica saw a numbingly familiar scene: Pacific Southwest University basketball players emerging from the Neptune Grand lobby with rolling gym bags, heading for their team bus. This camera, mounted just above the hotel’s main front entry doors, afforded a wide-angle view of a semicircular drive used mainly by guests who were checking in or out. Currently, the entire middle foreground was filled by the PSU Kestrels’ bus.
Mac, who’d looked alarmingly wrung-out when Veronica had first come through the door, now seemed to crackle with static energy. Impatient with the parade of drowsy, crotch-scratching hoopsters, she hit Fast Forward and turned to Veronica.
“Well, I guess we’ve seen this enough times already,” she said.
“Yep.” Veronica sighed. “Whoa! Heads up, Ice Cube!” Two seconds later, they watched for the umpteenth time as a burly player in retro Jheri curls walked face-first into a potted palm’s low-hanging frond, then angrily swatted it as his teammates cracked up.
“Don’t worry, we’re getting to the interesting part,” Mac said. As she spoke, the last few players, coaches, and trainers approached the bus for boarding. Each, in turn, passed around the back of the vehicle and out of sight—presumably to stuff their rolling duffels into the driver-side storage bin. When the final straggler, a diminutive trainer, trotted out the front door and behind the vehicle, Mac paused the video.
“Okay, boss, watch closely now. Here we go.” She hit Play again and, less than a minute later, the bus started to move, slowly gliding out of view on the screen’s right side. Veronica now saw another familiar scene: the crescent drive occupied by only a lone bellman sneaking a few hits from an e-cigarette. Veronica cocked her head and watched the static scene for a few more seconds, then turned to Mac.
“Well, I saw all the Paranormal Activity movies and clocked every spooky drifting balloon and ripple in the dog’s water bowl. But you’ve got me. What did I miss?”
Mac pointed to the top of the screen, a shadowy area beyond the entry drive. “The background—all the way back. The part we haven’t seen until now because it’s been blocked off by the bus. What can you make out?”
“A parking lot,” Veronica said, leaning into the screen and squinting at the dim, poorly resolved area on the outer limits of the camera’s range. She knew the area well; it was the hotel’s short-term parking lot, thirty or forty spaces used primarily by guests loading or unloading heavy bags. There were a couple of shuttle vans, a motorcycle, and six—no, seven—cars visible. Suddenly, she understood. “We’ve never watched the video this far, have we?”
“No. At least not with any real attention to this parking lot after the bus leaves. So okay, do we want nineteen more minutes of foreplay or…?”
Veronica lunged for the remote and Mac smacked her hand away. “Straight to the money shot it is!” she said, pressing Fast Forward. The image flickered under extreme acceleration, but no physical motion was visible until, as the eighteenth minute raced to its end, the headlights on one of the cars in the parking lot came on. Veronica and Mac watched, now at regular speed, as a small white compact car backed out of its space. It could be seen in full profile, but a parking lot light’s glare on the side window obscured the driver from view. The car unhurriedly crept toward the street exit, turned right onto Neptune’s wide central boulevard, and passed out of sight.
“To answer your obvious question,” Mac said, “those vehicles you can see after the bus pulls out are the same ones that were there before it arrived and blocked our view.”
“And later on?” Veronica murmured in amazement, suddenly realizing she’d watched the final few seconds with hands pressed to her face a la Munch’s The Scream.
“The parking lot view is clear all night. And from the time that one car pulls out, right up to when Grace is found, only two other people leave: A desk clerk who’s empty-handed and a teenage girl with a purse in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. So I think it’d be very interesting if we could find out who’s driving that car, don’t you?
Veronica turned to Mac and slipped her a congratulatory low five. “You rule, girl,” she said. “How many times did you have to watch this, at what ungodly hours? Don’t answer that. All I’ve got to say is, if anyone wants to throw shade on the OCD community, they best not do it around me, because I will mess them up good.”
Mac grinned. “But I feel obligated to step on our buzz a little. We may have just watched an incredibly stealthy rapist leaving a crime scene. But it just as easily could’ve been some guy out having brews with his bros. And afterward they dropped him off at his car while the bus was blocking our view.”
Veronica closed her eyes and drummed her hands furiously on the counter.
“Right,” she said. “All this tells us is that someone, somehow, managed to leave the hotel without getting ID’d on video. That doesn’t prove they’re the perp. And whoever the perp is, we still have no clue how he got Grace out of there.” She mulled this over as she scooted into the kitchen to grab a bag of salted caramel pretzels and a carafe of iced coffee, and hustled back to Mac’s desk.
They both munched for a long while in thoughtful silence, then Veronica picked up the video remote and backed the video up to the point where the first of the PSU players started ambling through the lobby and out the front door.
“Can I safely assume you have godlike total recall of everything that happens from here until, say, seven in the morning?” Veronica asked, not even looking up to register Mac’s Bitch, please! look.
“Speak to me of luggage, Mackenzie,” she said as she pointed to one of the players’ gym bags. “Other than these ballers and the mega-duffels they’re carrying, I don’t remember anyone else who checks out after this and who has anything bigger than a backpack. Am I right?”
Mac nodded absently. Then, as the weight of Veronica’s question sunk in, her hands fell to her side in disbelief. “No way, Veronica,” she said. “Those bags aren’t remotely big enough. I mean, look at ’em. You could stand one on end and it’d barely even reach above these dudes’ kneecaps.”
Veronica didn’t answer. She grabbed the mouse and dragged the video back to the scene where the basketball players trooped steadily out the door. The bags were Nike, soft black duffels on wheels with retractable handles. She opened an Internet browser on Mac’s smallest screen, and typed in Nike roller duffel black. Immediately, several models popped up. She started scrolling through, trying to find the right one.
“Are you hearing me, Mars?” Mac said. “I’ll grant you these guys are amply proportioned. But there’s no way their jockstraps and shorts and whatnot take up as much space as a grown woman’s body would. Even your midget ass couldn’t fit in there.”
“But what if it could?” Veronica said.
“It doesn’t fucking matter!” Mac groaned, her face pink with exasperation. “The rapist has a bleeding, semiconscious woman in his bag. So when they get to the outskirts of town is he like, ‘Hey driver, you mind pulling over next to that big, muck-filled pit and popping the luggage bin? I’ve, um, got something I need to drop off. No peeking, guys!’?”
“I didn’t say he got on the bus. We never see any of these PSU guys actually boarding because the door’s on the far side, out of view. We’ve just assumed they all did because they’re a team, and once the bus drives away, they’re all gone. But what if one of ’em, while everyone else is getting into the bus, rolls his team bag—with Grace Manning in it—straight out to his little white hatchback?”
—
“Coach Fennel!” Mac chirped when her old classmate picked up the phone. “I hope you’re enjoying these last heady days of summer vacation.”
Wallace’s voice was instantly wary. “Funny. This sounds like Mac, but that’s the patented Veronica Mars I-need-a-favor tone. Let me guess. You two belles are looking for a strapping black man to do something boring, strenuous, or illegal for you?”
“Look, Wallace,” Veronica chimed in, “all we really have is a sports gear–related question. I just texted you a photo and I need you to tell me how we can get one of these things very quickly.”
Seconds later, Wallace replied, “Well, it looks like you got this picture off of Amazon. Have you considered a Prime membership?”
“No, it kind of has to be today. And we’re more interested in just, you know, seeing it and poking around inside it than actually buying,” Mac said.
“Good luck, ladies. This is the biggest selling bag on the market right now, so those store managers may be a little on the unhelpful side.”
“Wallace, I’m going to cut to the chase here,” Veronica said. “We need to know if this is a gym bag that’s big enough to stuff an unconscious woman into.”
There was a long silence before Wallace spoke. “You know, Veronica, we go way back. And I’ve done all kinds of dubious favors for you without pushing for any explanations. But I kind of think I’m owed one here.”
“Oh, come on, Wallace! Why get all ‘morally culpable adult’ on me now, after all these years?”
Wallace sighed explosively. “Fine. I have a bag exactly like the one you’re talking about. You and Mac can come check it out if you like.”
“That is so awesome! But, um, is there any way you could maybe bring it over for us right now? I’ll owe you a nice warm batch of chocolate chip cookies…”
“What the hell. I can bring it over for you. Had thought about spending this afternoon bodysurfing with a special lady friend—but whatever. Driving used athletic gear across town works too. Oh, and one other thing: No chocolate chip. Snickerdoodles. Nonnegotiable.”