Nice Girls(71)

But Mr. Nguyen was afraid. He had known more than he’d let on. He was fearful of his own role—that in firing her, he had pushed her to walk into the black car that might have taken her to her death. He was afraid that by withholding that information, he had prevented the investigators from finding Olivia in time. And he was afraid that it had led to Olivia’s death, and to her photo now hanging at St. Rita’s.

I didn’t know if it was true. None of us ever thought too much about our actions, our inaction—life was too fast, too complicated. We just kept moving forward. By the time we thought about it, it was too late. We kept moving forward anyway.

But there was a chance we could do better. We had to hope.

“Well, it’s out of your hands now,” I murmured. “You did what you could.”

“I know.”

“I shouldn’t have bothered you at the restaurant.”

“It’s all done now,” he said, sighing. He sounded tired. “It’s over. They caught him.”

“Right,” I said.

But I thought of the black car. I thought of Dwayne, who was locked up in prison. I thought of the email that had exposed me. They didn’t add up.

It seemed like there were other people involved in DeMaria’s death. It even seemed like there was a small chance that Dwayne hadn’t been the killer.

Uneasy, I looked at the pills in my hand. My palm was sweaty from clenching shut. My nails had left marks that now burned.





34




The email. The black car. Dwayne Turner.

It was my personal litany as I changed out of my work clothes and climbed into Mom’s car. When I pulled out of the garage, Dad’s truck was already parked in the driveway. He’d come home from church.

Dad rolled his window down.

“Why aren’t you at work?” he called.

“I quit,” I shouted back.

“What the hell,” Dad said, the anger flashing in his eyes. But I continued out of the driveway.

He was losing patience with me. In one month, I had gone to jail, I had been expelled, and I was now out of a job. I seemed to run into one issue after another. Dad was growing tired of it—he seemed to think my problems were becoming his. I was a burden.

But I would fix things in time. I would prove it to him, somehow.

I just had one other priority first.

My head was spinning as I left the neighborhood, the litany repeating over and over again, as if I were afraid that I would forget it completely.

The email. The black car. Dwayne Turner.



I sat at a corner table in Espresso Haus. I had my laptop in front of me, my emails displayed. I kept my back to the wall and made sure no one was around. I opened the email with Olivia’s nude photo in it, then the email with my mug shot.

I searched for the sender online: E69Ch3aT896. But not much came up. I only found news articles about the nude photo leak.

The email account was most likely a throwaway. The sender couldn’t risk being tracked that easily. I had no other means to trace them online. They could have been anywhere.

I shivered, thinking about it. Dwayne was in the county jail, so the sender was somebody else. That person had doxed Olivia with her nude photo.

Now they were after me.

I scanned the coffee shop again. There was a church family sitting nearby, enjoying their Sunday coffees.

It seemed like Dwayne had an accomplice. There had been more than one killer.

My mind jumped to Jayden. He was close to Dwayne and one of the last friends he had left in the city. He could’ve helped his cousin cover up the murders. Through Charice, he could also monitor the police department. Jayden knew that I was trying to connect DeMaria and Olivia together, and maybe that was why his texts to Dwayne had been so persistent. And if he knew that I had reported his cousin to the police . . .

I felt a lump in my throat. I closed out of Olivia’s email and looked at my own.

I was staring at my mug shot. The longer I looked at it, the less brutal it felt, as if I were applying pressure to a cut. The sender had tried to hurt me personally.

I checked the list of recipients. My email address was first. After mine, there was Jim’s, and then those of dozens of Goodhue Groceries employees. The sender had targeted my employer. They had wanted me to get fired.

Only Dwayne had access to those email addresses, unless he’d sent them to someone else. The sender might have even worked at Goodhue Groceries. They might have gone to the search, unnoticed.

All those late nights that I had left work alone, somebody had watched me. I might have been followed home.

I didn’t know how close I had come to disappearing like the others.

My legs shook beneath the table, restless.

It was an eerie thought. But whoever had exposed me and Olivia, whoever had helped Dwayne with the murders, whoever had driven DeMaria in the black car—they were going to pay. I would make sure of it.

But there was one other confusing thread: DeMaria had called herself a “model.” Her mother had never mentioned anything about it. Even Mr. Nguyen seemed confused.

I searched online for DeMaria’s name with the terms “modeling” and “model,” but I found nothing. I couldn’t even find her Instagram account. She either didn’t have one or she’d kept it hidden. But there was no evidence to back up DeMaria’s words.