He buttoned his suit jacket, brushed a thick coil of hair off his forehead, and, giving her one last pointed look, left the room.
Veronica stared down at the expanse of his desk. Stacks of paperwork cascaded across it. Three different coffee mugs sat with a rime of scum across the bottom of each. One of the mugs said KEITH MARS FOR SHERIFF. Another said NEPTUNE IS FOR LOVERS. A small smile played at the corners of her lips. She cracked her knuckles.
Twenty minutes later, the wastebasket was full, the mugs were in a drying rack in the break room down the hall, the paperwork had been sorted, collated, and alphabetized—and she had Willie Murphy’s file spread across her lap. She flipped through it page by page, past his rap sheet and his mug shot, until she found it—a transcription of the statement he made to Cliff.
She glanced at the door one more time. Then she started to read.
CM: So here’s thing, Mr. Murphy—the sheriff is building a case against you as we speak. They know you were at the parties where both girls disappeared. They have the necklace you cleverly pawned two days after Hayley Dewalt’s disappearance. And they’ve found three long brown hairs in the passenger seat of your car. We’re still waiting on the forensic report, but they look identical to hair pulled from Hayley’s brush back home. It’s not looking good.
WM: Look, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never killed anyone. I’m not into that kind of shit. It’s not … I don’t even like the sight of blood, okay? I mean, okay, yes, she was in my car that night. But I didn’t, like, hurt her. I mean, I was trying to do her a fucking favor.
CM: A favor?
WM: Yeah, man. I mean, fine, we talked a little at the party. She was getting friendly with a friend of mine—like, real friendly, if you know what I mean—and then all of a sudden she freaked out.
CM: What do you mean she freaked out?
WM: I don’t know, man, one minute she was curled on the couch nibbling Rico’s earlobe, and the next minute she was running around the party asking if anyone could give her a ride north. Rico was pissed. He’d been working on her all night long and suddenly she’s running for the hills.
CM: This would be Federico Gutiérrez Ortega?
WM: Yeah.
CM: What did he do?
WM: He called her a cocktease. She didn’t care, though. She wanted to go to Bakersfield. Like, right then and there. She was desperate. I felt bad for her. I told her if she had gas money I’d take her.
CM: So you expect me—and more importantly, the jurors—to believe that a girl you didn’t even know decided to head to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, and you gallantly offered to drive her? That’s like, what, four hours?
WM: Three. And yeah. That’s what happened.
CM: And you did this out of the goodness of your heart, did you?
WM: Look, man, I thought she was flirting with me. I figured, she’s a damsel in distress, I’m a knight with an ’86 El Camino—maybe a little chivalry would get me an in, you know what I’m saying?
CM: Okay. So what did you do once you got to Bakersfield?
WM: She had me pull into a truck stop just outside town—said she wanted a Coke. Then when I got out to fill up the tank, she bolted. Ran right across I-5. I don’t know where she was going. I called after her, but, like, I’m not chasing after some crazy bitch at four in the morning in the middle of nowhere. I went and had some breakfast in the diner, just to give her some time to come back. But she didn’t. So I went home and went to bed. She never even paid me for the gas.
CM: So how do you explain how you got your hands on her necklace?
WM: When I got back to my car from the diner it was in the passenger seat. It must have come loose or something on the way up. I don’t know—I’d just used a whole tank of gas getting her there. Six hours round trip! I wanted to cover my losses, so I sold the stupid thing. I didn’t know she was missing. If I’d known I would have just thrown it in the bushes.
CM: Right. And what about Aurora Scott? Did she express an urgent need to drive straight into the Mojave?
WM: I never even talked to her. I saw her at the party—I mean, everyone did. She was in the tan-line competition. Super hot. But she didn’t have the time of day for me. I don’t know what happened to her. You’ve got to believe me, man, I don’t know anything else.
Veronica took photos of the transcript with her phone. Then she shut the folder, put it on Cliff’s desk on a neat stack of files, and stood up.
Cliff was right. It was a stupid story. A clumsy, terrible, stupid story.
But she couldn’t help but feel that it was stupid enough to be true.
She looked down at her phone. It was just 3:30 p.m. She could be in Bakersfield by sunset, easy.