Nice Girls(82)

I looked up slowly. The rest of me was frozen.

That was my way out.

No one else knew what I’d done. No one would hold me to it. I’d scared off Ron. He would leave me alone. And I could abandon the whole thing completely—everything with Dwayne, DeMaria, Olivia. I could move on with my life, just like she had done to me.

I could walk away.

My phone vibrated in my jacket. I thought it was Dad, but I nearly dropped the phone when I saw the text. It was a message from Kevin:

WHAT DID YOU DO?





39




My head was spinning.

Ron had contacted his cousin. Kevin knew what Jayden and I had done.

We were in danger. For all I knew, the police were already looking for us. But to Kevin, I posed a bigger threat. I knew what he’d done with Olivia’s nude photo. I’d put his job, his reputation, his freedom at risk. And I had the power to make Kevin a suspect in Olivia’s murder.

But he wouldn’t let that happen. Kevin, armed with a Taser, baton, and gun, would be after me. He was either waiting at home with an arrest warrant, or he was planning something else. I suspected the latter would be violent.

I was afraid of him.

Ron was adamant that his cousin hadn’t killed anyone. He only confirmed Kevin’s role in the nude photo leak.

But I didn’t believe him. Kevin had too much of a motive to kill Olivia. DeMaria could have factored in during a separate incident.

I looked out the window, half expecting to see a police car flashing through the snow.

My time was running out.

I needed proof against Kevin before he got to me first. There was the black car that Mr. Nguyen had seen and the independent porn contractor in the city—Lib3rty Inc., LLC. I had the name of the owner of the company, Paul Bleeker. Kevin was connected somehow. I just needed to find that link.

Outside, the snow was falling steadily. By the time the blizzard blew past, I would be in jail, if I was lucky.

I chugged the rest of my coffee, now cold, and sent Kevin a quick reply:

Why did you leak Olivia Willand’s nude at the search? What kind of boyfriend does that, Kevin? Why would you kill her?





I would make him as scared as I was.



I left Espresso Haus in a hurry. I struggled against the wind to get to Mom’s car. But I was more concerned about Kevin than the snow.

As I waited for the car to heat up, I looked up Paul Bleeker on my phone. There were over four hundred thousand hits on the Internet. But these Paul Bleekers were all in different parts of the country, like Florida, California, New Hampshire. A couple of them were dead World War II veterans.

One Paul Bleeker had gone to school in Minnesota, but his Facebook showed that he was currently living in South Korea with his family. The other one lived up north, and he was married to a man.

There were no other living Paul Bleekers in the state.

I tried narrowing the search to “Paul Bleeker Liberty Lake,” but the search results became convoluted. It seemed that there was no Paul Bleeker currently in town. The other two from the state made little sense.

It was an alias, then. And it was either Kevin or somebody else behind the name.

The wind began to wail louder outside. It droned mournfully, like a woman’s sad croon. I turned on the car radio to the classic rock station. I blasted the music until it drowned out the noise.

I tried searching online for “Lib3rty Inc., LLC,” but I found only insurance companies, gun shops, a few accounting firms. These businesses had all used the proper spelling of “Liberty.” But when I refined my search to the original spelling, I found no relevant results.

My leads on both Paul Bleeker and Lib3rty Inc., LLC, had been duds.

All I had left was the address for the company: 656 Ventura Way in Liberty Lake.

I looked up the address on an online map. It was located somewhere on the southeastern border of the city, deep in the Sewers. I entered the street view. After a minute, an image slowly loaded. It was a blurry snapshot of an auto shop. There was rust on the garage doors and wooden boards that blocked the windows.

The building looked as if it hadn’t been used in years.

It looked foreboding, like a place where young women were killed all the time.

Neither Olivia nor DeMaria would’ve walked willingly inside. Nobody was that dense—an abandoned auto shop in the Sewers would have stopped anyone cold. They only would have entered if forced.

Or, they’d never gone there at all. The auto shop was located along a worn block of businesses, but across the street, there was a gas station. The location was too visible. It would have been hard to use the empty building without being noticed, even late at night.

It seemed likely that the shop was only a placeholder on the business paperwork. Doberman Productions wouldn’t have noticed.

My head was starting to ache. The car was still running. I had already wasted a gallon of gas in the parking lot.

I pulled out from Espresso Haus, turning back onto the street. Around me, it seemed that the cars on the road were inching along slowly, their headlights shining feebly ahead of them. It looked like the whole sky was crumbling above us, like ash curling down.

I had checked everything. And everything was a lie: a fake porn company owned by a fake person who’d used a fake address.

It all led to a derelict auto shop.

But why?