Nice Girls(47)

“It was over money. DeMaria never asked for child support. Her mama kept giving her shit for it. But that day, DeMaria told her to fuck off and disappeared.”

My head began to ache.

During my interview with her, Leticia Jackson had never mentioned a fight. She made it seem like DeMaria had gone missing one random day. If there was no child support, then DeMaria was struggling on her own. Her ex, Charles, was in prison, so she couldn’t have asked him for money. And if she’d had a depressive episode, then she could have spiraled. The entire situation looked grim—it almost seemed as if she’d run away because of financial problems.

There was a reason why Mrs. Jackson had hidden the fight—she couldn’t afford the negative slant. She knew that the money situation would taint DeMaria’s story. It was hard enough to get the public to care about her, so why share the unpleasant details? It was easier to shape her daughter in simpler terms: a young single mother who had disappeared one day.

In hiding the fight, Mrs. Jackson didn’t implicate herself. She didn’t look as if she’d pushed her daughter away after the fight.

The car ignition suddenly roared. Jayden was pulling us out of the parking lot.

“Why are we leaving?” asked Charice, annoyed.

“We look suspicious if we park here too long. And I do not want to get caught whistleblowing,” said Jayden. Through the rearview mirror, he was looking at the unicorn envelope in my hands. “I’m just driving us around.”

“Thanks for watching out.” Charice and I quickly put our seat belts on.

“You should tell Mary about the medical shit, though. It’s important.”

Charice turned back, her eyes wide.

“The autopsy reports were hard to read. Not gonna lie—it was some horrible shit. Some rescue boats found DeMaria Jackson’s legs in the lake. Like . . . her entire legs.”

It corroborated with what Kevin had said at Espresso Haus. The legs would have floated along the lake current, about as indistinguishable as the tree branches that fell in.

“And you remember how the skin at the end of the arm looked ratty?”

I nodded. The splintered skin had looked like the frayed edges of a worn rope.

“The coroner said that her cuts might’ve been made with a splitting maul. They’re used for splitting down wood logs.”

“Okay,” I said slowly.

“The coroner said that the splitting maul is sharp enough for precise, clean cuts. But the marks on DeMaria’s legs were messy. There were like multiple marks, too, that barely scratched the skin. That’s not supposed to happen with a maul. The coroner suggested that whoever did the chopping was moving fast. Like they were angry. There might’ve been a struggle . . .”

“She was cut while she was alive?” I asked.

Neither of them wanted to respond. The unicorn envelope was sitting in my lap, both of my hands planted firmly over it. I was afraid the papers would suddenly disappear.

Outside the sky had grown cloudy, an eerie mix of white and gray blanketing over us. It was a sky that promised an early November snow.

“Do they know when it happened?” I murmured. “Her death?”

“The coroner said that the arm was frozen on the inside. But the exterior had already started thawing in the lake water. Coroner thinks she could’ve been frozen for a while. Potentially up to three and a half months.”

I swallowed.

“What an evil motherfucker,” muttered Jayden.

“Agreed.”

We were silent as he drove.

“Other issue here: How the fuck are we gonna leak all this?” he asked.

I took a deep breath.

“We send it to the online tip lines at the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, the big ones. They have programs that encrypt the information we send them, so there’s no online paper trail that leads to us. In theory, we don’t get tracked.”

“‘In theory,’” repeated Jayden. “I don’t like those odds.”

“We can also mail paper copies.”

“Won’t they catch our fingerprints on the envelope?” he pressed.

“Not if we’re careful.”

“If we get caught, I’m getting my ass beat. You understand that? Charice’s brother loses his job, we all go to jail. You might not—”

“No, I get it.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“How about we buy somebody’s used tablet?” asked Charice loudly. Jayden and I fell silent. “We use a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi and send the file to a bunch of newspapers through their encrypted system. Then we break the tablet and dump it somewhere else. They can’t really track us then. It’s almost foolproof.”

After a moment, Jayden whistled.

“Damn, that actually sounds good.”

When we returned to the Isles Mall parking lot, I dug into my purse and handed Charice thirty dollars.

“This is my share for the tablet. I’m not sure how expensive they are.”

Charice handed me back a ten-dollar bill.

“I’ll find some shitty tablet on Craigslist for less than fifty, don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll cover the rest in cash, too.”

“And what are you gonna do?” Jayden asked as he turned around. He gave me a hard look. “We’re leaking DeMaria’s police file to the big newspapers, and you are . . . ?”