CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Veronica stood rooted to the spot. Distantly, she could hear the sound of traffic, but it wasn’t as loud as the sound of the blood in her ears. Chad Cohan didn’t have to get to Neptune and back in time for class. He had to get to Bakersfield. Four hours one way. Four hours back.
It worked. The math worked.
She looked up and down the highway. Traffic was light, and after a semi roared past, she hurried across the road toward the Lake Creek Motel, a scraped-looking two-story row of rooms. She pushed her way into the main office.
It was dank and smelled like sweat. The wallpaper, faded and peeling, was printed with roses twining up gold vertical stripes. A completely incongruous deer head hung over the front desk, its antlers lopsided on its forehead. The desk was unattended, but in the room behind it she could hear the sound of a TV.
An old man peeked around the corner, then came tottering out to the desk. He was small and rumpled, in a moth-eaten sweater and saggy jeans. She noticed that he was missing two fingers on his left hand, and when he scratched at his chin it was with his thumb. “Evening, ma’am.”
“Hi. I have kind of a strange question for you.”
The old man stared at her from a nest of wrinkles. His eyes were dark and shiny and hard to read. “We get some of those from time to time.”
“Do you happen to work early mornings? Like, four, five a.m.?”
The old man shook his head. “My son taps me out sometime after midnight, usually works until ten or eleven the next day.”
“Is he here at all?”
He shifted his weight, his expression unchanging. “He’s asleep, ma’am. We work pretty long nights here. He won’t be up for a few more hours.”
She nodded. “Well, maybe you can help me. I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but there are a couple of missing girls in Neptune …”
His face lit up. “I saw that! It’s been on Trish Turley all week long. Awful thing. I hope that fella they caught gets the death penalty.”
“I’ve been hired to try to find the girls, and I have reason to believe that one of them stayed here on the eleventh of March, checking in during the very early morning. Maybe four or five a.m.? She may have been staying under a false name, or with someone else who footed the bill. Is there any way you can pull up the records for that morning?”
“Well, we don’t usually give out names or personal information of our guests without a subpoena.” He tapped a complicated tattoo on the desk with his mangled hand—thumb, pinky, ring, thumb, thumb, pinky, ring. He watched her face curiously, as if he was looking for some evidence that this might somehow put him one step closer to being on Trish Turley’s show. It gave her an idea.
“I completely understand,” Veronica said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t want all the attention either.” She leaned in confidingly. “I mean, all those interviews are a huge pain. I’ve heard Trish Turley is calling anyone with any kind of connection to the case and begging for interviews.”
His eyes went wide. For a moment he stood there, thinking. Then he turned to a boxy old computer perched on the edge of his desk, pecking the keys one by one with his good hand.
“What time you say they were here?”
“Between four and five on the morning of the eleventh.”
His eyes scanned over the monitor. She didn’t breathe.
“Looks like we had one checkin,” he said slowly. “At four fifteen a.m.”
“Was it a couple?”
He gave her another long deadpan look. She realized right then that he wasn’t going to tell her anything else.
“Sorry. Okay. But let me ask you one more favor, and then I’ll be out of your hair.” She took a deep breath. “Is there any way you could let me in to look around the room?”