Nice Girls(46)

“I thought that’s what we planned.”

“Nah. It’s the mall parking lot that’s safe. High traffic, lots of cars moving around. I figured I might as well buy something since we’re here. But I planned for all this.”

Charice unclasped her bag and handed me a unicorn folder. It was the kind I’d had back in elementary school.

“Not mine,” she added. “It’s my niece’s.”

There was a thin stack of paper inside. When I opened it, I felt my breath catch in my throat.

“Are these copies?” I whispered. Each sheet was in black and white, but the images were grainy and slightly off-kilter.

“I wish,” said Charice. “My brother was paranoid about being tracked, so he just took photos of everything. They were real shitty photos, too.”

“When did your brother do this?”

“For a while now . . . after I told him about what we saw,” said Charice, her voice faint. “Felix has been working on it unofficially, but he can’t really do much. He knows the people in the police department. They’re not like the kind you see on Law & Order. A few of them are smart, but a lot of them are dumb as rocks. And they don’t give a shit. No one thought a missing Black girl was someone to worry about.”

“Not surprised,” Jayden muttered. “Racist pigs.”

“But they’re okay with Felix.”

Jayden snorted.

“Of course they are. He’s one of them,” Jayden shot back. “He does what they want him to do. Felix doesn’t even care that much about DeMaria—he just wants to be a police hero, right? Get promoted to lieutenant or captain next year? Maybe get a cute medal or some shit?”

Charice glared at him, unmoving.

“Babe, you don’t have to be here with us,” she said, her voice eerily calm. “Mary and I can talk somewhere else.”

Jayden said nothing. He stared out his window instead.

“Anyway, Mary,” said Charice, turning back to me, “I cleaned up the photos as much as I could. It’s all readable.”

I skimmed through the first three documents. It was the filed police report on DeMaria Jackson’s forearm. It was less detailed than I expected—only a few sentences and descriptions about everything I’d witnessed at the beach. Next, there were the police reports for the subsequent rescue boat operations that day. Charice had organized the documents in order of relevance.

“I put the photos in the back. Just a warning, Mary. It’s . . . rough.”

I stopped flipping through the pages.

“Thanks,” I said. I meant it for both the warning and the documents. “You really didn’t have to do all this.”

Charice shrugged, but she looked sad.

“We wouldn’t have to do anything if people gave a shit,” she said softly.

I nodded.

“Me and Jayden skimmed through all of it, too,” she added. “We just wanted to see what was up.”

“That’s fine. If we plan to leak all of this, then it doesn’t matter who reads it,” I said quietly. “We’re all screwed if something happens.”

Jayden said nothing.

“A lot of the info is like red-tape legal mumbo jumbo,” said Charice. She lowered her voice. “Nothing about DeMaria being connected to Olivia. No mention of a serial killer. But the DeMaria Jackson case is messy on its own.”

“What do you mean?”

Charice shifted in the passenger’s seat so that she faced both me and the back window.

“Okay, so she disappeared on Friday, July tenth. Her mom said she was going to work at a bougie restaurant called La Rue. DeMaria left her house at three thirty and never came back. But you know what the cops found out? She hadn’t worked at La Rue for months. She’d lied to her mom. She was working at an Asian restaurant.”

I nodded, pretending to be surprised.

“A few days later,” continued Charice, “the police sent some rookie cop to look at DeMaria Jackson’s room. The cop said he saw nothing strange, except that her wallet, phone, and some IDs were missing. Which makes sense.”

“And then?”

“That’s it,” said Charice, looking glum. “There were no signs of foul play. Since she was over eighteen, DeMaria wasn’t considered to be a missing person. It seemed like she just abandoned her family. She had a baby boy—did you know that?”

I shook my head. I thought about Demetrius waddling around their living room.

“The whole story is so sad. And DeMaria’s mama kept calling the police, saying she was afraid that DeMaria had been kidnapped and placed in some sex trafficking ring.”

“That’s dark,” Jayden murmured.

I remembered the crime documentaries I’d seen, where women were shuttled throughout the country in semitrucks and passed from hand to hand like a cigarette. They were drugged, raped, and beaten. I didn’t want to think of DeMaria or Olivia being one of them.

“But that’s only what her mama said,” continued Charice. “Officially, the police think she ran away—DeMaria was stuck raising a baby on her own, and her medical records show she’d been diagnosed with depression. And before she disappeared, she’d gotten into a fight with her mama.”

“What fight?” I asked. My voice was so loud that even Jayden turned around.