18
When we left, Serena and I smoked a cigarette each, sitting in her car.
“So now what?” she said.
“Now I call Joe Laska and have him send the cavalry, to let Quentin out of the closet.”
“Let him out?” Serena said.
“The sooner the better.”
Recognition dawned. “You don’t think Quentin’s going to call this girl,” she said. “You think he’s going to go to where she is.”
“Yeah. Not really to protect her, but to be there when I show up. I know that to you and me it doesn’t seem likely that I can find her with the information I have, and that’s true, but look at it from Quentin’s point of view. I wasn’t supposed to figure out how Brittany passed herself off as me, but I did. I had no way of knowing where he lived, but somehow I turned up here. It’s easy to start overestimating your enemy when they’ve scored a couple of victories off you. He’ll believe I can find Brittany.”
“So we’re going to tail him.”
“No. As soon as we’re off the freeway, he’ll spot a tail.”
“Then what?”
This was going to be the hard part, getting Serena to accept this part of the plan. “I’m going to be in the trunk of his car the whole time.”
Serena almost dropped her cigarette into her lap. “No. No way. That’s just crazy. I’m not helping with this.”
The truth was, I could almost carry out this plan by myself. When I’d left the house, I’d taken Quentin’s keys. So I could open the trunk, get in, and hide myself as much as possible in the back. But I couldn’t slam the trunk lid from the inside, not hard enough to make it latch.
“It’s the only way,” I said. “He’s my only link to this woman. He’ll go to her because he thinks he’s chasing me there. My only way to find her is to go to the back of the line.”
“I know, but we can follow him. You don’t have to get in the f*cking trunk of his car.”
“It’s the last place he’d look for me,” I said. “There’ll be a trunk release for when it’s safe for me to get out, and if he opens the lid before that and sees me, I’ve got this,” I said, showing the Browning.
“You don’t even know he’ll go down there.”
“No, but there’s a good chance,” I said. “Think about it: If Brittany gets arrested, she’ll implicate him as a co-conspirator, both before and after the fact. That can carry a sentence as stiff as the original offense, which in this case is murder.” I let that sink in. “Quentin will tell Brittany that they need to kill me because the one thing that’ll close the Eastman-Stepakoff case with a certainty is if I turn up dead. The confession by suicide—it’s a classic.”
“How would he get your handwriting on a confession note?”
“You’re thinking way too elegant. Quentin’s idea of subtlety will be to walk me into an abandoned building, stick a gun under my chin, pull the trigger, and spray-paint the words I’m sorry on the wall.” Then I said, “Besides, he said he was going to kill me. He doesn’t mean someday years from now, when I’ve dropped my guard. He’s not a chess grand master. He wants to settle accounts now.” Then I played my trump card: “¿Cómo vivimos?”
She stared straight ahead, through the windshield.
“Serena. ¿Cómo vivimos?”
“Ad limina fortunarum,” she said, capitulating, underscoring her frustration by grinding her cigarette harder than necessary into the pullout ashtray.
It was our old affirmation, in Spanish and Latin. How do we live? To the limits of our fate.
Then Serena blinked, and for a moment her face looked so sad I thought she might cry. Now, that really was crazy.
She shook it off and said, “What if he flies?”
“He’ll drive. He’ll need a car once he gets down there.” I didn’t add that he wouldn’t rent a car, either, because he wouldn’t want to leave telltale blood or hairs in the trunk of a rental car.
“How’s he going to drive if we’ve got his car keys?”
“Hopefully he’s got a spare to the car,” I said. “But just in case, you need to tiptoe back and drop the keys somewhere near his front door.”
“Like we dropped them by accident?”
“Yeah. He won’t figure it out. The guy’s not the world’s deepest thinker, like I said.”
This part of the plan would have been easier if I were dealing with Joe Laska. I wouldn’t have to wonder if Laska had a spare key to his car. He would, and he’d remember exactly where he kept it. Quentin couldn’t be counted on to be that organized.
I held the smoke from the last of my cigarette in my lungs, then exhaled and squashed it in the ashtray. Then I took out Quentin’s cell phone. I’d taken it from his house because it would be useful to read whatever text messages Brittany might send him, at least until he got in touch with her and told her not to use that phone number anymore.
“Call that Laska guy,” Serena said. “I’m going to walk over to the car, make sure there’s a release in the trunk. Give me the keys.”
When she’d gone, I took out Quentin’s phone, scrolled to Joe Laska’s number, pressed “Options,” pressed “Call Number.” He picked up on the third ring. “What’s going on?” he said.
“This isn’t Quentin. It’s Hailey Cain,” I said.
“Last year’s girl,” Laska said, his voice mild and unsurprised. “What can I do for you?”
“Your man Corelli, the fellatio enthusiast, is in a closet in his apartment, tied up. I don’t think he’s going to get free by himself, so you’d better send someone to help him.”
“Your resourcefulness never fails to amaze me.”
“I’d love to play the banter-between-adversaries game,” I said, “but I’m short on time. Let me ask you one thing: Last year did Quentin keep my finger as a trophy?”
“What?” he said. “No, I dropped the finger down a sewer grate, because it would have been just like Quentin to keep it, even though it linked him to a violent felony.”
“Why do you even keep that guy on the payroll? He’s a loose cannon, and I’ve punked him twice now.”
“Maybe you should have killed him.”
“Nice talk, especially from his friend and employer.”
“Let’s just say employer,” Laska said. “Quentin’s a bad guy to have angry with you, especially if you’re a woman. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Why do you care what happens to me?”
“I don’t.”
Serena betrayed her nerves only by lighting up her second cigarette in five minutes as she and I crossed the street. Otherwise her face was set, cool. I didn’t have to catch my reflection anywhere to know that mine was, too.
“We’ve gotta do this fast and casual,” I said. “Once we’ve started, don’t scope around for anyone who could see us. Be as casual as if you were unloading groceries from the trunk. Don’t act guilty.”
“I know,” she said, stepping up onto the sidewalk.
It would have been much better if Quentin kept his car in a garage, but at least the long side driveway, shielded by two-story buildings on each flank, was nearly as good as a carport.
We walked down the alley and reached the car.
“What if there’s already a body in there?” Serena asked, and we both started laughing.
“Shut up,” I said. “Turn around, look around real casually. You see anyone?”
So far it hadn’t really mattered if one of Quentin’s neighbors saw us; all they would have seen were two young women entering and leaving Mr. Corelli’s place. But if anyone saw me climbing into the trunk of his car and Serena closing it, that’d be too strange to ignore.
I slid the key into the lock and opened the trunk, looked underneath for a release, and saw it, glow-in-the-dark yellow-white plastic tag on a cord. Good.
Beyond that was a mostly clean space, except for a tangle of jumper cables, a gallon of antifreeze, and a set of golf clubs.
“Golf clubs?” Serena said, echoing my own thought: Quentin Corelli golfs?
I said, “Maybe he’s on the executive track for thugs.” Then, “Come on, we’d better do this before someone comes along.”
She lifted out the golf clubs and pushed the jumper cables to the side. Gingerly I climbed in and edged all the way to the back, where the body of the car, not the trunk lid, overhung the storage space. It was a generous, deep trunk. Thank God not every car maker in America went for fuel economy. I’d slid Quentin’s cell phone into my pocket, switched off, and now I took out the Browning, to hold it in front of me. Quentin wouldn’t pack elaborately—he wasn’t going on vacation—so I hoped that what little he took with him he’d throw into the cabin space of the car. If he did open the trunk, I was hoping he’d just toss his bag in without really looking, the way an angry and distracted guy would.
If those two plans failed, though, I’d have only a short time in which to defend myself. I needed the gun ready.
“Come on,” I told Serena. “Cover me up.”
She leaned in, holding the blanket she’d taken from her own car in her hands, then stopped. She said, “I don’t like doing this, as if you’re a body already. It feels like seeing the future.”
I knew that Serena believed in past lives; she had never suggested before that she believed in premonitions. I made light of it. “Think about him,” I said. “Think how stupid he’s gonna look, racing down the freeway to catch someone who’s only four feet away.”
She nodded, but not with a lot of conviction.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
She arranged the dark brown blanket around me, and then I felt her push the bag of golf clubs back against me, leaving space for Quentin to easily toss in a bag. Then she said, “Tú estás en mi corazón, Insula.”
“Semper in corde meo,” I said.
Serena closed the lid, and I flinched as the pressure differential pushed against my eardrums.
19
This is your life: You were your parents’ only child, the light of your father’s world before he died much too young. You wanted to honor his memory, and to do so ran a gauntlet of challenges to get into one of the nation’s most elite institutions, the United States Military Academy. You’d spent the first eighteen years of your life mostly in places where trash blew up against fences and no one cared, so you decided that you’d live the rest only in the cleanest, brightest places, with people who made you better just to be around them.
And now, at not yet twenty-five years old, this is you: in the trunk of a car with an unregistered gun in your hands. When you get where you’re going, someone might try to kill you. Or you might have to kill someone.
I don’t know where I was when I started thinking about these things. Soledad maybe, King City. The confinement was making me stiff, sore, hungry, and increasingly reflective. That wasn’t a label you could often hang on me, but being in the dark, alone, with absolutely no distractions, that probably counts as special circumstances.
Things had worked out about as I’d hoped. I’d been in the trunk a little over an hour when I’d heard Quentin’s fast, angry footsteps on the pavement. He’d opened and slammed a passenger-side door—throwing in his bag, I assumed—and then the driver’s-side door. He did not open the trunk. My hands, on the Browning, had relaxed.
As the time wore on, I tried to imagine everyone I knew, where they were and what they were doing. Serena was easiest: She was on the road, maybe a little ahead of us. She’d had to return to the hotel for our things, but then Quentin had had to wait for whoever Laska sent to come and untie him, and then he’d had to throw at least a few things into a bag for his trip, so I was guessing Serena had gotten on the road a bit ahead of us. CJ was hardest: Was he still in Africa, or had he come back to the States by now? Was he alone or with friends? I couldn’t know.
My mother, Julianne, was living in San Diego now. With a man; there’s always a man. She and I hadn’t been in contact for months. Not an estrangement per se. Just very little in common.
My real family, as I sometimes thought of them, were CJ’s parents, sister, and brothers. Julianne and I had moved in with her sister Angeline and brother-in-law Porter, and their big, ramshackle house outside Lompoc was for me, after a lifetime of Army posts, my first real family home, with a sprawling yard and the smell of baking clinging to the kitchen wallpaper and arguments about who was spending too much time in the bathroom.
Angeline and Porter had since sold that place and were living in Washoe County in Nevada. Porter was retired, though Angeline, a homemaker, was still earning extra money the way she always had, giving piano lessons and selling flowers from her garden at a farmers’ market. Their children, the brood of four they’d transplanted from West Virginia, had all stayed behind in Southern California. Moira, their daughter, was a teacher now. Both Constantine and Virgil, CJ’s brothers, had inherited their father’s gift with machines and worked as mechanics.
Magnus Ford was probably at work, among the people who knew his face and found the sight of the Shadow Man unexceptional.
That brought me to Joel Kelleher. Was he still in San Francisco or back in Los Angeles already? Or en route? He could be driving on the 101 like Quentin and Serena, or he could be overhead, studying his notes and diagrams on a short flight back to Los Angeles.
I’d screwed up with him. He’d revealed a bit of himself to me—the thing he’d said about fear, about feeling like the only one who was hiding it. Even though it was just the Ambien that had brought his defenses down, I felt like I’d mangled my answer, that generic, useless line about everyone feeling afraid sometimes. I wished I’d said something better, though I wasn’t sure exactly what that would have been.
Joel probably would have envied me my severely blunted capacity for fear; Serena had already implied that she did. And as insensitive as their attitude might have seemed—I mean, my lack of fear came at a very high price, which I would pay sometime in the not-too-far-off future—I understood it. Because who really wanted to feel afraid? Who, being freed from fear, would deliberately re-create its smothering demands? A severely compromised ability to feel fear had been of obvious advantage when I’d been a bike messenger in San Francisco, where couriers are paid on commission, and speed and traffic-law breaking mean more runs a day and higher tips from satisfied customers.
And later, in the gang life? Don’t get me started.
But deep down, part of me envied Serena, and now Joel, too. People like them, who felt fear and acted anyway, they could know they were brave. I couldn’t say the same.
20
Another liability that comes from not feeling fear properly: It’s too easy to fall asleep when no sane person would. Like in the trunk of a car.
Now I’d lost what little sense of time, and therefore distance, I’d had. I’d come fully awake with a memory of hearing and feeling the car door slam, shaking the sedan’s body. The engine was off, and Quentin’s footsteps were receding outside. I groped for the Browning in the darkness; it had slipped from my hands. Then I raised my head and tried to listen for the sounds around me.
Was this a pit stop, or had we arrived? If it was the former, I couldn’t afford to open the trunk. People might see me, among them Quentin, if he was merely paying a gas-station clerk in one of those glass booths. And once I opened the trunk, that was it. I couldn’t simply flag down a passerby to do what Serena had done, close the trunk for me. Excuse me, sir, could you just give me a hand with this? Thanks, that’s perfect.
I slid my hand into my pocket and delicately withdrew Quentin’s cell phone, brought it to life. The screen threw off its greenish light, and then the digital display came on. The time was three minutes to nine p.m.
I ran the numbers. We’d left San Francisco a little after three, and if Quentin had driven around eighty miles an hour—he was probably a leadfoot—the timeline worked out. I was inclined to think we’d arrived in Los Angeles.
After perhaps ten minutes of listening and hearing nothing, I pushed the blanket off and edged toward the front of the trunk, my gun still in one hand. My neck was so stiff that I knew when I rolled it, it would crackle like broken glass. This would be a very bad time for Quentin to catch me. After lying still in a cramped space for nearly six hours, I didn’t think I could run at all; I’d hardly be able to walk. But I reached out in the dark, found the trunk release, and pulled. There was a dull metal popping sound as the trunk gave way and the interior light came on. Shit. If the car was parked facing the building where Quentin was, and he looked out the window … I cupped my free hand over the little clear glass bulb. In the dimness that followed, I saw a sliver of dark blue ambience, the nighttime world outside.
Go on and do this.
I pushed the trunk lid up farther, raised myself up and out, and dropped to the concrete below, crouching so that the body of the car sheltered me.
Quentin’s car was parked in the driveway of a one-story house on a quiet residential street. There was a large shade tree overhanging the lawn and a light glowing behind one large window. The other homes on the street were dark, their occupants likely asleep.
I scanned the wider area, getting my bearings. We were in the hills somewhere; I could see their black silhouette above the roofline across the street. While this was clearly a quiet suburban area, there was enough diversity in the sizes and shapes of the houses that I sensed this was an older neighborhood—the homes didn’t have the high-end uniformity of a luxury subdivision. There were paved sidewalks along the street, but no streetlights. The air was faintly scented with bougainvillea.
I wanted to go closer to the house, all the way up to the window. Although the shutters behind the glass were closed, at point-blank range there’d be narrow gaps that would provide me a glimpse of the people inside. I was maybe twenty yards away from the woman who’d ruined my name. I wanted pretty badly to see her.
But I couldn’t afford it. There were ornamental shrubs in front of every window, and they’d rustle if I pushed them aside to get up close. Under normal circumstances the inhabitants of a house might not be expected to hear it. When most people go into their houses, the world outside becomes a distant abstraction; they’re watching TV, talking to family, oblivious to anything else. But if Brittany was inside, with Quentin, both of them were aware of the possibility that I’d show up. That was the whole reason behind Quentin’s arrival. They’d be more alert than most people to stray noises.
Would the backyard afford a better view? Possibly. A lot of people kept the windows on their backyard open at night when they closed the blinds in front. But again that meant navigating unknown territory. Was there a dog? More bushes to shove through? Better not to risk it.
I wasn’t scared, but I was careful. What was the point of the hours I’d just spent cooped up in Quentin’s trunk if I recklessly got myself caught? I needed to confirm that Brittany was here and then tell Ford where she was.
And then what? It wasn’t enough for an arrest that I’d seen a woman who could pass for me, associating with the guy who only I knew had stolen my gun. Ford would need more.
Balked, I paced the edge of the property. There was a tall tree in the yard, with wide-spreading branches, and at the boundary line was an oversize oleander bush, or maybe two that had grown together in a shaggy mass. I knew about oleander bushes; they were everywhere in California, famous for being fabulously poisonous but also extremely popular as decorative bushes. When we were kids, CJ and I used to hide ourselves in the mostly hollow center of the oleander on his parents’ property, hanging out in the shade and privacy it gave us. This bush, now, might serve a similar purpose, a hiding place where I could watch the people close by.
While I was considering all this, the light in the living-room window went out.
I walked over to the mailbox and opened it. But it was empty. I’d thought if the house’s residents hadn’t collected their mail, I’d at least have a name to give Ford, maybe one he could link to Brittany’s past.
Just then the front yard was bathed in light from the floodlight over the garage door, and I sprinted for the shelter of the oleander bush. I pushed my way in through the dense branches and crouched down, my hand resting on my holstered gun.
“… must’ve just slid down behind a seat or something,” Quentin’s voice said. Under his words I heard the clopping of hard-heeled shoes.
He came into view first, moving quickly down the front walk to his parked car. He unlocked the passenger side and stuck his head, then half his body, inside. Languidly, a second figure moved into my narrow field of view. She was shorter than me, maybe five-four, and slighter. Her blond hair, pulled up into a high ponytail, was a brighter, paler shade than mine. I couldn’t see her face. She was wearing a silk robe that in the moonlight looked jade green, over pointed-toe cowboy boots. While Quentin poked around for a lost item in his car, she stood at the end of the driveway looking up at the stars.
I leaned forward as much as I dared behind the protective screen of branches. This was her; I wanted to drink in the sight as though I could understand her just by seeing her face.
She had fine bones, eyes more almond-shaped than mine. Hotter than you, Quentin had said, and I had to say he was right. But I could see where someone would look from her to my old driver’s license photo without saying, Hey, this isn’t you.
Quentin pulled out and slammed the door.
“Got it?” she said, turning.
She looked so normal. I’d expected to see something in her face, a cool vacancy that said sociopath. There was nothing like that.
Quentin was standing with his hands on his hips. “F*ck me,” he muttered.
“It wasn’t under the seat?” Brittany said. “You think you left it up north?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she’s got it.”
He was talking about his cell phone, I realized.
“What would she do with it?” Brittany asked him.
He shook his head. “I’m not sure, but she already used it to scam you—”
“That’s not my fault! I couldn’t have known what was going on! She said she was someone in your boss’s office!”
“Calling from my cell?”
“Well … I …”
“It’s okay, babe,” Quentin said. “Maybe I just left it up north.” I doubted he really thought so, but he was tired of arguing with Brittany. He changed the subject. “You know what I just thought of? We gotta move this car. She might know what I’m driving. If she sees this parked outside the house, it’ll scare her off.”
“Good,” the girl said.
“No, not good. You know why.”
“I don’t want—”
“If she doesn’t try to approach you, there’s no point in me having come here in the first place,” Quentin said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “We talked about this.”
Then he leaned in and kissed her, and his hand cupped her left breast.
She giggled. “That’s kinky, Cousin Quentin. Brian wouldn’t like it.”
His response, against her neck, was unintelligible, but she giggled again and then turned and went back inside.
I wondered how Quentin had explained his developing bruises to her, if he’d admitted I’d given them to him or he’d told her it was unrelated, a bar fight with a guy. A story that didn’t compromise his ego.
Quentin went around to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and started the engine. I shifted position again, pulling back. I didn’t want to be visible if headlights splashed over my hiding place.
It would have been nice if Quentin had called her by name, but there was no doubt in my mind that the young woman in the driveway was Brittany Mercier. It seemed likely that the house belonged to an ex-boyfriend—that was what I’d taken the “Cousin Quentin” remark to mean, that he was posing as family in order to not raise the possessive hackles of their host.
Still, none of this was anything I could adequately support in another call with Ford. She looks the part, I’d say, and she’s hanging out with the guy who confessed to selling my ID and gun.
Actually, that second part—the whole story that Quentin had told me in his apartment—was progress worth reporting to Ford. That was just another reason to get into town. I needed a pay phone.
Quentin returned, his feet tapping soft but fast on the sidewalk. He paused a moment in front of the house, looking around at the shadows, then went inside.
Still under the shelter of the oleander bush, I pulled out Quentin’s cell phone. It was time to call Serena, to get a ride into town and regroup. I didn’t want to leave Brittany alone for long, but I needed to eat, maybe to get an hour or two of sleep. Serena, if she’d left San Francisco a little before Quentin, should already be home. The timing was perfect for her to come by and pick me up.
First, though, I had to figure out where I was. I got to my feet and emerged from the bush. My legs were unsteady again; it was a surprise that I’d been able to run earlier, when I’d been surprised by the driveway floodlight. Slowly I walked out to the street; it took several minutes of crossing and recrossing the street, checking mailboxes, before I found one with mail in it. I was in Woodland Hills, the western reaches of L.A. County.
I dialed Serena’s number. Instead of ringing, her cell went straight into her recorded message: “It’s me, leave a message and I’ll call you back.”
She used neither her Christian name nor her street name in her message; some people in her life didn’t know the first, while others were ignorant of the second. A terse greeting was the safest kind.
I left her a similarly vague message: “Hey, it’s me. I’m safe and watching a house in Woodland Hills. She’s here, I saw her. Call me as soon as you can. I’m gonna need help.”
I disconnected the call and stood still for a moment, thinking. It wasn’t like Serena to have her cell off during waking hours. If she was back in town and had fallen into exhausted sleep, I wouldn’t hear from her until well into daylight hours, by which time I’d need to be here, watching the house.
This was more than a logistical problem. Why would Serena turn off her phone? She’d been so worried about me when I’d told her about the trunk-of-the-car plan. Had she, in the past six hours, somehow become cavalier about whether I’d made it to L.A. alive?
Whatever the reason for her silence, just waiting for her to call me back wasn’t much of a plan. I didn’t merely need stuff brought up from town—though food was becoming urgent—I needed to go into town, in order to ride the Aprilia back. Without it I’d be stuck here if Brittany and Quentin decided to move somewhere else tomorrow. It hadn’t sounded like they were going to, but you never could tell. Maybe they would even decide to move Brittany someplace more public and visible, in hopes that I’d track her more easily. According to the conversation they’d had, Brittany wasn’t keen on being used as bait, but she was allowing it.
If they went somewhere else, I’d have to be ready to tail them, which meant I’d need my bike. Quentin had never seen it, which was good. If I myself had to stay out of his sight, the Aprilia could easily be parked on the street outside a neighbor’s place without drawing suspicion.
Now I just needed to get down to where it was.
With long strides I hiked up to the top of the street. The cross street ran along the top of the hill, and it was wide and broad. Turning back, I could see down into the valley and the lights of town and, running through it, the glowing white vein that was the 101. A vague sense of familiarity tickled me, and I went to look at the street sign. I was on Mulholland Drive. I’ll be damned, I thought. I’d heard of it all my life and never driven it, and now here I was, standing on it, strictly by accident.
My cell phone remained silent. I was tempted to call Serena again, because I had nothing else to do, but it had only been five minutes. Calling so soon was pointless.
Who else was there? I wouldn’t drag CJ into this. Nor Tess. Things had gotten too serious.
Resigned, I began to walk toward town. Every time headlights approached, I turned back and stuck out my thumb, hopefully.
• • •
Half an hour later, I was at a pay phone outside the glowing windows of an all-night coin-op laundry. No one had picked me up hitchhiking on Mulholland, so I’d walked all the way down into town. Serena still wasn’t answering her phone. But when I saw the pay phone, I decided it was time to update Ford on what was going on.
I dialed his cell number. Somehow I never doubted he’d pick up. I imagined him working late at headquarters, his the lone lighted cubicle in an otherwise dim warren of empty desks.
“Ford.”
“It’s me.”
“Hailey,” he said. “When do you sleep?”
“I’ll sleep when she’s in a cell.”
“She? The other Hailey?”
“I found her. I’ve seen her.”
“Tell me,” he said.
I explained what I’d learned: Brittany’s full name, the address where she was staying, and the most salient parts of the story of how she came to kill Greg Stepakoff and V. K. Eastman.
“You got all this from her partner in crime, Corelli?” Ford said.
“Yeah.”
“Whom you identified and found how?”
“I had a pretty good idea that it was him who stole the gun,” I told him. “After that it was just a matter of getting his current address up north and us having a little meeting of the minds.”
“I see. And nothing he said might have been bullshit to get you going the wrong direction?”
“He was pretty inspired to tell the truth.”
Long pause after that. I expected Ford to comment, inquire further about my methods, but he didn’t.
Finally I said, “How about a little quid pro quo? What’s going on behind precinct doors?”
He said, “You don’t realize how much quid you’ve been getting from me already.”
Actually, I did, but I couldn’t let on that I knew about Joel’s fact-finding mission up north. I said, “I just keep hoping that something will come out that tends to exonerate me.”
Another pause, this one shorter, and then Ford said, “The SFPD had an interesting piece of information about a city-college newspaper up there.”
“The one Brittany enrolled at in order to get a student ID?”
“Did Corelli tell you that?” Ford said. “Then I guess he wasn’t jerking you around. The college has a weekly newspaper, and the kids on the staff just came back from spring break and wanted to do a story on this notorious killer being in their student body. They requested her ID photo from the administration offices, and the woman who pulled it for them thought, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look like the pictures on the news.’ ”
I felt myself smile, genuinely, for the first time in days.
Ford said, “This hasn’t been made public yet. Fortunately the administration staffer called us. Because the student-newspaper kids wouldn’t have—it’s a freedom-of-information issue for them. A fed went over to their offices and rattled his saber pretty hard for them to sit on the photo, as well as the news about the discrepancy. They didn’t like it, but we’re hoping they will.”
“Because you don’t want to spook her.”
“Yeah. Hailey, where are you?”
“Close to the finish,” I said, and hung up.