The barista nodded. I took my mug of tea and sat down in a worn leather armchair, the kind manufactured in the era before furniture was filled with the cheapest synthetic materials possible. I used my phone to search online for Kenny Brayfield, hoping I could find a picture of him wearing anything but a bathrobe. Next Level’s Web site featured his photo, but he was wearing a blazer and looked like a different person. His Facebook profile pic showed his eyes only and the rest of his photos were private. I found a decent one on Next Level’s Instagram account though, of Kenny grinning in front of a tower of vodka bottles. I took a screenshot of it. He looked like a minor deviant to me, a harmless troublemaker. But maybe that was part of his thing. Maybe the women would go with him willingly, this mildly charming rich kid they’d known forever, offering a ride or a drink or whatever.
The connection to Mallory and Sarah was solid—he knew them well. I wasn’t sure how well he might have known Colleen Grantham, if her father would have ever introduced his teenage daughter to his boss, or if Curtis had even worked for Next Level at the time. She was about ten years younger than Kenny was, though it sounded like they had converging interests—in Belmont’s drug trade. Veronica was the biggest question mark—how did Kenny know her? I wondered darkly if Kenny had kept an eye on Mallory’s daughter all these years, if he had seen Shelby and Veronica together. It all sounded crazy, even in my head. But there were too many connections here to write any of this off as a coincidence, not to mention the fact that Kenny’s father had Jake Lassiter on speed dial. Brad had told me that Kenny got out of a lot of trouble growing up because his family was loaded, and it seemed like nothing had changed.
Nothing except the nature of his crimes.
I drank some of my scalding hot tea, gasping a little when the liquid hit my throat just as a kid in an apron walked over and sat down across from me. He was probably nineteen, sleepy-eyed and with dyed black hair that looked like it had been styled with a sock. “Hey,” he said. “I’m Aaron. Maura said you wanted to talk to me.”
I cleared my throat and sat up. “I’m a private investigator,” I said, holding out my phone. “I’m looking for this girl, she came to your show last night. Did you see her?”
Aaron looked down at the picture. “Veronica,” he said, “right?”
“Yes,” I said, perking up a little. It seemed like a good sign if she’d made it to the show, although she was still gone. “Was she here?”
His mouth twisted. “I don’t think so? I didn’t talk to her, anyway. She comes to a lot of my shows and she always comes up to me and says hey or whatever, afterward. It was crowded though, so I’m not sure.”
I showed him Kenny. “Okay. How about him?”
“No, but I know that dude, he came in here once and wanted to put a flyer on the community board, for some flavored vodka or something. I told him, it’s for community events only.”
That sounded about right. “Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
He started to stand up, but I added, “Wait, one more thing. Have the police been here to talk to you?”
“The police?”
I nodded.
“Nope.”
He walked away and I finished my tea, barely tasting it or noticing the temperature. It had been hours since Shelby gave Meeks her information about where Veronica might have gone last night. Even if she went somewhere else, they should have been checking, they should have been looking. They were mighty quick to attend to my whereabouts, but not a missing girl’s. I returned my mug to the counter and went back outside. Maybe the police didn’t feel like looking, but I sure did.
TWENTY-FOUR
Insomnia sat in a strip mall with a grocery store, a dry cleaner’s, a tutoring center, a dentist, a small, crusty bar called the Varsity Lounge, and a hair salon. With the exception of the grocery store and the bar, they had all been closed on Monday night. But I went into each store, asked about security cameras, and showed my two photos. The dry cleaner’s, tutoring center, hair salon, and dentist did not have cameras that faced the parking lot. The grocery store had cameras, but they weren’t allowed to show them to me without a warrant or written authorization from their corporate loss prevention department. But the Varsity Lounge had lot-facing cameras without any such policy attached. I offered the bartender twenty bucks if he’d let me look at them.
“I don’t know,” he said.
But the twenty had already disappeared into his pocket. A social contract had been made. I waited. He waited too. So he agreed to the terms, and it was a matter of price. I opened my wallet and teased another twenty out.
“I could get into a lot of trouble,” he said. He was a tall, broad fellow with a bushy red beard. I didn’t exactly buy him tolerating any trouble with anyone. But I still pulled out the twenty and a ten. That was all the cash I had on me.
“It’s this or nothing.”
“Okay,” he said.
The bar’s office was a storage closet stacked high with beer kegs and papers. “Don’t touch anything else,” he told me officiously, nudging the computer mouse to wake up the machine. “There’s payroll stuff back here.”
“You just took a bribe,” I said, “be nice.”
After he left, I sat down at the computer terminal. It was an old system with a jerky frame rate of five or so per second, but the interface was straightforward and I clicked through the folders of the previous day’s video files. The bar had six cameras: two on the sidewalk, facing each other so that I had a clear view of several yards in either direction; two inside, one in the front and one in the back; and two in the rear of the bar. I focused on the front sidewalk cameras, starting with seven o’clock last night. Veronica had left Shelby’s house at seven thirty, and though the show at Insomnia wasn’t until ten, I thought maybe there was a chance she had walked over early, intending to kill time somewhere before it started. I didn’t expect to catch a crystal-clear picture of Kenny luring Veronica into his late-model Lexus, but I was at least hoping for something: a sign that would help establish more of the timeline, something that the Belmont police couldn’t ignore.
At eight ten, I got my wish: Kenny Brayfield walked up the sidewalk and into the bar.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
I felt my jaw tightening as I navigated to the interior cameras and watched as he went up to the bearded bartender, pointed, and shook his head. The bartender shrugged, turned away. A minute or two later, Kenny left.
I went back to the outside cameras and saw him walk back in the direction he came, and that was it.
I sped up the footage and watched through three hours of the bar’s Sunday-night business in a half hour. Then I stood up and walked back into the bar, the picture of Kenny pulled up on my phone. “You told me you didn’t see him,” I said.
The bartender was muddling an orange for someone who was obviously feeling lofty. He stopped what he was doing and looked at the picture. “I didn’t.”
“You did,” I said. “He came in here, and you talked to him. It’s on the camera. He was probably asking you something about that cinnamon vodka with the gold flakes in it.”
“Oh,” he said. “That guy.”
“Yeah, that guy.”
“He wanted to know why it wasn’t on the top shelf. I told him because no one who comes into this bar is ordering that shit.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he said. “He said he talked to the owner about placement, that’s his word, placement. I was like, Whatever, dude, we’re busy, go away.”
“I thought bartenders never forget faces.”