Whisper to Me(94)

“Nevertheless,” you said, “Lauderdale came up most. That means someone who owns an SRT8 either lives here or works here. Furthermore, a lot of the tweets mention Ocean Avenue. Which is why we’re on Ocean Avenue.”

“You’re a latter-day Sherlock,” I said.

“That makes you Watson.”

“Fine. I’m comfortable with—”

I shut up. A black Jeep SRT8 had just turned right onto the street in front of us. It traveled north slowly. Its windows were darkened—privacy glass. Perfect for a murderer, I thought. Murderers like privacy.

“There!” I said. “There!” There was a nasty worm of a thought at the back of my mind—this could be the person who …

who …

who took Paris.

“Yep,” you said. You turned the key in the ignition.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to follow it, obviously.” You checked the traffic and then gunned across the road to catch up with the Jeep. A guy in a BMW shook his fist at us.

“Keep two cars between us and them,” I said. “I saw it in a movie.”

“Yeah, I’m not going to do that,” you said. “I’d just lose them. I’m not a spy.”

“Okay.”

We fell silent as you kept after the Jeep, turning when it turned. At one point we hit some lights and the Jeep got through just before they went red. You braked, hard. “****,” you said, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of your hand.

But then the lights went green and you pulled away, and there was the SRT8, just turning left a block ahead. You accelerated—if there had been a camera, you’d have been so busted. You drove fast, turned the corner with the tires squealing. The Jeep was maybe two hundred yards ahead, just a Datsun mini-truck thing between us and it.

Then the Jeep slowed and turned into a driveway.

You slowed the pickup to a crawl and parked just down the street. I nodded at the car door and you nodded back; we both got out and walked down the street.

You took my hand. It was the first time our skin had touched. I don’t know if you felt it, but I did. It was … it was as if there were thousands of nerve endings there, in my palm, in my fingers, that I had never known about, that had just lain dormant for my entire life. How can I have all this skin I didn’t know about? I thought. How can no one ever have touched it before?

Because I had never felt anything like this before.

I swallowed.

I looked at you.

We paused at the driveway where the Jeep turned, feeling the warmth of each other’s hands.

We saw the Jeep’s taillights disappear behind a warehouse, which was next to a massive amount of heavy equipment—cranes, diggers, rollers. A few guys were walking around in yellow hard hats, hi-vis vests on, brown boots and jeans a kind of uniform.

But none of this was what had snagged my attention.

What had snagged my attention was: A sign on a couple of shiny stainless-steel poles, reading: DEVON AND SONS DEMOLITION.





“What?” you said.

“The sign. Let’s say you work for a demolition firm. Think you’d find it hard to hide a body?”

“Oh.”

Silence, as we both pictured Paris buried beneath the foundation of a building; her hair crushed by concrete.

Well, I did anyway. I don’t know about you.

That was when the Jeep SRT8 appeared again, around the warehouse. It bounced over the rutted earth toward us, the windshield darkened so we couldn’t see who was inside. We stepped back, eyes on the car.

Then another Jeep SRT8 came out behind it, black too, its windows darkened.

Then another.

And another.

“Oh,” you said. “Great.”

“It’s a company car,” I said, stupidly. “A company car.”

A long moment of silence.

“There’s a lot of stuff to demolish when the economy is down, I suppose,” I said. I felt bleak. Our lead was not a lead at all. It was just a firm that owned a load of SRT8s.

“Of course,” you said. “Stupid of me.”

We watched the four black Jeeps drive down the road west from us, in convoy, before disappearing from view as they turned onto Ocean, toward town. Then we started walking back to the pickup.

“Well, the tweet thing worked,” you said.

“Yep.”

“But now we have too many SRT8s.”

“So we’re nowhere,” I said.

“Yeah,” you said. “I mean, for now.”

You pressed the key fob and the pickup flashed and beeped. We opened our doors to climb in.

I put my hands against the dash. My breath was coming in gulps, violent. My heart was spinning, fast, like a blender. A blender that was turning my organs to mulch, to liquid.

I touched my cheeks. Tears were running down them; I felt like I was choking. Actually choking.

You put your hand on my shoulder. Nothing more. You didn’t say anything.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” I said.

“Cass …”

“She’s dead, and we had ONE LEAD. And now …”

“The cops—”

“The cops know NOTHING. You said so yourself.”