Endangered (20 page)

He huffs, “No wonder you attract such charming dudes.”

This snark feels right. Normal.

“Thank you.” I touch his arm and take the stairs. That's enough for one night.

THE NEXT MORNING I'M THROUGH THE
door like thirty seconds after my parents leave for work. I pick Taylor up at his place, and we make the drive to Coach Bottin's. We park on the street, a block away from Preserve.

“Let's go. Try to look like we belong here.”

He falls in line, moving quickly, casually. We walk the lot for several hundred feet.

Taylor notices the security panels at each door. “You don't have a pass code, do you?”

“I don't.”

At Bottin's building, I approach the door and press the plastic buttons mounted beside each unit number. I detect faint buzzing from inside the building with each push and fight the increasing anxiety when I don't get an answer. The longer we're standing still, the more memorable and suspicious we become. I get lucky on the fifth try.

“Yeah,” some guy I plan to never see says through the intercom.

“This is FedEx.” I check the number of the last unresponsive condo I
buzzed. “I've got a delivery for unit 204; the order says I can leave it at their door, but I don't think they meant
this
door. I don't want to have to take it back if I can help it, because it's marked urgent, and—”

There's an angry buzz from the other side of the security door and a loud
ca-clunk
of a lock releasing. Taylor grabs the handle and we let the oblivious neighbor in 205 get back to his day.

“I can't believe the crap you do works,” he says.

“Sometimes it's hard for me to believe, too. Good thing we weren't coming to kill whoever's in 204.”

“At least the guy in 205 could buzz the cops in afterward.”

Coach Bottin's apartment is on the third floor. Aside from the sound of hushed TV voices flitting from other apartments, the floor feels abandoned. Great. If taking too long to get buzzed in was suspicious, what comes next will definitely get cops called should we get caught.

“Watch my back.” I crouch in front of Bottin's door, pull my lock pick set from my jacket pocket.

Taylor's face droops. He turns away, watching the stairs and other doors on the hall, tapping his thigh in a nervous rhythm. He whispers, “How'd you learn to use lock picks?”

“YouTube is a second-story man's best friend.”

“A what?”

“If we're going to do this more often, you gotta learn the lingo.”

A deadbolt is the only lock on the door. Tougher than padlocks, but not as tough as the average homeowner likes to think they are. My tension rod goes in first, then I work the pins with my C-Rake. A quick flick of the rake—like swiping a debit card through the reader on a gas pump—will sometimes be enough.

This isn't one of those times.

I give up on the rake and opt for my short hook, which requires a more delicate (time-consuming) touch than my previous tool. Deep breaths are necessary to keep a stressed hand tremor at bay.

Taylor says, “Are you trying to get someone to call SWAT on us? Hurry up!”

“Don't rush me. You asked to come.”

“I didn't think we'd be doing this. If I acted like you, I would've been locked up a long time ago. Must be nice on the other side.”

That makes me pause, only for a moment. He's right on one thing. I need to hurry.

The next three minutes feel like three years. Aborting the mission is starting to look like an option when—

CLICK
.

There's give, the tension rod turns. I never get tired of that feeling.

We step inside, and I close the door gently, reapplying the locks. I ask, “The other side of what?”

He plays dumb amnesiac. I remind him, “You said ‘must be nice on the other side.' The other side of what?”

His annoyance is unhidden. “The other side of getting away with stuff. You're a girl, and you look”—he shrugs—“you don't look like me.”

“You mean I don't look black enough.” Ghostly echoes of elementary school teasing haunt me.

He rolls his eyes. “I mean no one assumes you're a criminal, even though you really are. For me, it's the opposite.”

“Oh, boo-hoo! Guess what, you just broke in with me. You're a criminal now. Leave if you want, but don't go full a-hole over something I have no control over because you're scared. I'm scared, too. We're in, so look around.”

He does. “Someone's been here.”

Drawers and kitchen cabinets are open, revealing mismatched drinking glasses and dinner plates. Furniture's shifted wrong, the couch is at an odd angle from the wall. Blotchy residue powders the TV screen, and the counter, and the glass door leading to a balcony. Fingerprint dust.

I say, “The cops are building their case. Let's not leave any extra prints, in case they come back. That's how smart criminals do it.” My lock picks go in my right pocket; I pull a balled-up pair of latex gloves from my left.

Taylor gives me the stink eye.

“What? You didn't bring any?” I let him stew before I pass him the extra pair I always keep on me.

“What are we looking for?” he asks.

“Maybe a photo album. He might have pictures of himself in his old place. I can see if it looks like
Dante
. Speaking of pictures . . .” I brought along my trusty point-and-shoot, give it to him. “Photograph the whole room. The memory card's big, so take a thousand shots if you have to. I want to examine everything when I get home.”

“Question.”

“The shutter release is on the top right.”

“That's not my question. Why are you just now trying to track this guy down?”

“He hurt Ocie and ruined my life.”

“Before that. You did some poking, but you didn't think to use all your secret agent skills to find this guy's identity sooner?”

“I got sidetracked. I haven't been myself.”

“Which self? You're like three people.”

What's he want to hear? That I liked the game at first? I thought the Admirer was someone like me, someone I'd been looking for without
knowing it. I'm feeling a certain nostalgia for working alone.

“Let's get this done. I'll be in the back.”

Taylor gravitates toward glass and metal shelves in the corner of the living room, home to a few books, but mostly an extensive DVD and CD collection. I move into the back rooms. A bathroom, home office, and the bedroom. I shudder, thinking of Keachin making this same walk with different intentions.

The
man
smell in the bedroom lingers though the place feels long vacated. A mix of overly sweet deodorant and a laundry hamper that's decaying in his absence. The silk bed linen is a coiled mess, the fitted sheet snatched from the mattress, exposing a full third of yellowed pillow top padding. The dresser is like the kitchen, drawers extended and picked through. The closet door is open. I shift a few dangling golf shirts aside, but find nothing of interest hidden behind them. No safe. No secret perv dungeon.

The shelf above the closet rods are full of neatly folded towels, and jeans, and novelty tees featuring familiar characters on the creased shirt faces. Darth Vader. Wolverine. Superman's
S
in primary colors.

The comic tees would've seemed cute and quirky if not for Bottin having youthful tastes in more than his clothes.

On the closet floor, a few more shirts lie scattered. More cartoony kids' stuff, except for a faded Portside Pirates shirt and an AGG Tech shirt that's stained with what might be grape juice.

I take several shots of everything with my phone before moving on to the office.

Black fingerprint powder is more prevalent here, dusting his keyboard and monitor. There was a rectangular impression in the carpet where a PC tower probably sat. Makes sense that the police took it. Probably checking
for kiddie porn, or something else that could help stack the charges against him.

In here, Coach's
Star Wars
fetish is on full blast. Framed poster art from the original trilogy occupy three of the walls. Above the desk is an image made to look like an oil painting. Luke Skywalker, both hands over his head, wielding a light saber that's more lightning than the neon glow sticks I've always associated with this franchise. Kneeling at Luke's hip, almost in worship, is the princess, far sexier than I recall her being in the film. In the background, Darth Vader's helmet, large and looming like a black sun. There's a tiny gold plaque in the bottom right corner of the frame that reads:

Star Wars

Released '77

On the next wall, a poster for
The Empire Strikes Back
, released in '80. Then
Return of the Jedi
, released in '83.

Next to the
Jedi
poster, there's a wall calendar featuring a girl that looks my age—though the calendar logo identifies her as a “College Hottie”—in a string bikini mounting a Japanese motorcycle. Bile rises in the back of my throat, and I decide it's best to leave this place before I catch something.

A page from a mini-notepad is taped to the desk, four or five usernames and passwords scribbled on it. They're not much good without the computer, but I photograph them anyway in case Taylor, or maybe Roz, can work some sort of cyber magic with them.

For the rest of the room, I opt for a couple of panoramas that will give me a detailed 360-degree view of everything. When I close the door so I can get the whole room uninterrupted, I discover a fourth movie poster. Something called
THX 1138
.

It looks odd and old. I've never heard of it, unlike
Star Wars
, which
everybody knows. Shrugging it off, I move to the center of the room, start the panorama in my camera app, and spin slowly in place to capture everything. I do this a couple of times to make sure I have backup shots. I'm completing the last one when Taylor calls to me.

In the living room, he's leaning behind the DVD shelf, tugging at something.

“What did you find?” I ask.

He emerges, sliding a frame as tall as his hip into the open, flips it so we can see the front.

A poster, featuring a funny little man gripping some sort of magical staff. There's a tiny bronze placard in the lower right corner of the frame reading:

Willow

Released '88

“There are a couple more back here.” He drags those out.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and
Red Tails
. Each with a bronze placard. Released '81 and '12 respectively.

Together, we prop them against the wall side by side, a movie poster lineup.

He says, “I thought they were important because they were hidden.”

“You weren't wrong. These are important.”

“Him liking movies?”

“There's a pattern here.” I bring up
Dante
on my phone. “Look.”

I point to the burning framed
American Graffiti
poster in the photo.

Taylor looks at me, then the posters, frowns and says, “I see where you're going, but it's a stretch, right? A lot of people hang posters.”

True. Posters in
Dante
and posters in this apartment don't mean the flaming room was in Coach Bottin's house. I suspect there's another
connection, though. One that will be harder to write off.

With the internet app on my phone, I enter the following string in Google:
American Graffiti, Red Tails, Star Wars
.

Almost immediately, a picture of a chubby, salt-and-pepper-haired man in a flannel shirt appears, the top hit.

I turn my phone to Taylor. “Recognize him?”

“George Lucas. He, like, invented
Star Wars
.”

Coach Bottin's bumper sticker,
My Other Car Is an X-wing
, bounces lewdly in my thoughts.

Another quick search on
Willow
and
Raiders of the Lost Ark
confirms that George Lucas is affiliated with all the films as a writer, director, or producer. In some cases, as all three.

“Liking framed movie posters might be a coincidence,” I say, giddy, “but liking everything one guy does. No. This is Bottin's house in
Dante
. My Admirer torched his place, and Bottin lied to the police about it. It has to be over Keachin. He wouldn't have wanted to explain that.”

“I'm glad arson makes you tingly, but I still don't see what you have here, Lauren. We broke into a murder suspect's crib for this?
We
could go to jail.”

“Lower your voice.
We're
not going to jail. If we can piece all this together the right way, then we can make everyone see, and they'll believe me.” I want to say,
Then I can fix this
.

That's too far. What's happened isn't some broken vase that can be Krazy Glued back together with reason and evidence. Mainly because one huge piece is missing. Keachin.

Taylor stomps across the room. “Believe you about who? You don't have anyone in mind.”

“But I'm closer! It's not great, but things are starting to make a kinda-sense.”

“Is ‘kinda-sense' a word?”

“I'm not the rookie here. I've been doing this for—”

A knock at the door interrupts me.

Taylor and I exchange frightened looks, deer smelling humans on the breeze. If we get caught here . . .

I mouth the words, “Turn on the sink.”

“Huh?”

“Just do it,” I hiss, and move back toward Bottin's bedroom.

More knocks. Louder and harder. “Hello?” a woman's voice calls. “Who's in there?”

Speeding up, I go to Coach's closet and grab a couple of bath towels off the shelf.

Then, I do what a dead girl probably did here not so long ago.

I strip.

THE WATER IS RUNNING AND TAYLOR
is pacing when I return to the kitchen wrapped in a towel, a second towel dangling from my hand. The shock freezes him, but we don't have time for frozen. I yank the spray nozzle next to the faucet, stretching the hose to the limit, motioning for him to take it.

He grabs it. I flip my head forward so my hair dangles into the basin. “Spray me.”

The knocker is really persistent now. “I'm about to call the police.”

“Hang on! I'm just getting out of the shower!” I shout, praying she's not already dialing 911. “Taylor,” I whisper-scream.

He triggers the nozzle and a cold stream douses me. Mussing my hair enough to spread the moisture, I whip the second towel around my dripping locks like a turban. “Hide.”

Taylor ducks behind the counter while I move to the door.

Deep breath, I open it a crack. “Yes?”

An elderly brown-skinned lady with eyes so big they seem insectile, like they should be on stalks, examines me. There's a cordless in her hand, as ready as a gunslinger's weapon. “Who are you?”

“I'm your new neighbor,” I say. “Moved in yesterday.”

“I didn't see any moving trucks yesterday.”

Think, Panda
. “My furniture hasn't arrived yet. All I've got is an air mattress and some luggage. That's why it took me so long to answer. Got in the shower and realized I didn't unpack my towels. Stupid.”

The old lady's lips pinch, making the lower half of her face look like a sad prune. “It's just
you
who moved in?”

Did she hear Taylor talking before? Is she trying to trip me up? I play it neutral. “I have a boyfriend.”

More prune puckering. She sighs, becomes more relaxed before my eyes, but with a strange air of sadness. “You're such a pretty girl. I think you can do much better.”

“Excuse me?”

“I can't tell you what to do, but if I hear any fighting I will call the police on him. Do you understand?”

My eyes, the bruises. She thinks . . . “Oh, ma'am. No. My boyfriend didn't do this.”

She backs off. “I'm sorry to have disturbed you. I don't know if the landlord mentioned your apartment belonged to that nasty teacher who's been in the news.”

“I don't watch much news. I need to go. My hair.”

She seems put off, but moves away, mumbling, “That's what's wrong with your generation now.”

“Good day, ma'am.” I close the door, then lean against it because there's very little strength in my legs.

Taylor rises, awed, though I misinterpret what's got his interest piqued.

“Are you naked under there?” he asks.

My cheeks blaze. “I've got on underwear, jerk.”

I rush back to Bottin's room where I left my clothes. “We're leaving. Take some pictures of those posters first.”

He gets to work with the point-and-shoot. “Then what?”

“We show my darling Admirer exactly what we've found.”

We're parked at the supermarket where I first met Quinn Beck so we can piggyback the Wi-Fi from the bookstore next door. I upload all the pictures Taylor took to my MacBook, then sync them to my phone so I have everything we shot in hand.

“You sure this is a good idea?” he asks.

“No, but he likes to taunt me. It's how he keeps me off balance. Let's see if it works both ways.”

I send snapshots of the Lucas collection with this text:
Any reason you didn't burn these?

He responds quickly.

I show Taylor the message. He gets grim.

“What's ‘GTA-style'?” I ask.

“
Grand Theft Auto
, I think.” His voice is a little growly, he's flexing his fingers into a fist. “You can run people over for points, or fun.”

I'd forgotten about those horrible games. “You like things like that?”

“As of today, no.”

What's it like to have your life threatened? Not in some after-school-playground-fight sort of way, but, like, a scary person knows your name. I pat his knee, compounding the weirdness that carried over from last night. After two quick taps, I pull away slowly. “I think we're getting under his skin.”

Taylor nods, doesn't seem to grasp the silver lining.

I silence the phone. He'll keep texting, wanting to keep the jabs going. Let him squirm.

“What now?” Taylor asks.

“We can't sit here all day.”

“We could go back to my place.”

Now the car seems uncomfortably warm, unusual for fall. “Um.”

“I don't mean like”—his voice deepens, faux-smooth—“
come back to my bachelor pad
. I'm saying we can get a better look at those photos. Or watch TV and have a sandwich. Whatever.”

“What about pizza?” I've suddenly got a taste for it.

“Pizza's cool. Half peppers and mushrooms.” He remembers my preferred toppings.

“Half sausage and those nasty olives you like.”

His order. My order. And never the two shall meet.

He plays with a pair of my discarded pizza crusts, forming a
T
on his plate and grinning like he just finished the
Mona Lisa
. Boys.

Without his siblings going Cirque du Soleil on the furniture, the apartment feels vast, and at the same time cramped. Me and him take up a lot of space.

I work around the discomfort by clicking through the photos of Bottin's apartment. The pictures of the coach's passwords are for Taylor. He gets to work on his own rebuilt laptop made from mismatched parts. He notices me noticing the oddity.

“I call it ‘the Bride,' as in Frankenstein,” he says. “I put this baby together from old throwaways the school was recycling.”

“Does lightning need to strike for it to work?”

“Funny. She doesn't look like much, but she's powerful.”

When the Bride boots up, the spinning hard drive sounds as loud as a helicopter rotor. My faith in her is not high.

Within minutes, Taylor and the Bride prove me wrong. He says, “The first two accounts were clearly labeled. One is Netflix—I didn't bother to look at his queue. The other is a Patriot Trust bank account log-in. Dude only has twenty-four dollars and seventy-two cents in checking and savings combined, but his credit card debt is crazy. A lot of big purchases in the last six months.”

“Like what?” I circle behind him and lean in close to see what the Bride has to offer. Taylor wears cologne now. He didn't used to.

“There's a bunch of different charges, but if you sort it so the highest ones are on top, you get . . .”

A list of high-end clothing stores. Some of the very same stores I photographed Keachin frequenting in the days before I busted her. I thought she was using her daddy's money. Actually, her
sugar
daddy's.

“There are also a few hotel charges. And this.” He points to a single charge that's over a thousand dollars. A tuition payment for AGG Technical Institute.

The same tech school I used to gain access to the roof of the Patriot Trust Building.

Coach Bottin had one of their T-shirts in his closet. Of all the assumptions I can make from the charges on his credit card—purchases from a dead girl's favorite stores, random hotel stays—tech school tuition should be the least creepy.

So why is my skin crawling?

“What about the other accounts on that paper?” I ask.

“One's labeled ‘PHS'—that's the Portside High faculty portal. I'll take a look at it now. The last one is labeled ‘VDMV.' What exactly are we looking for here, Lauren?”

I wish I knew. “Maybe nothing. That bank info might be the best we get, but you're—uh,
the
tech guy. If something looks strange, you're going to know, right?”

He grins, and doesn't seem to notice that I almost called him “
my
tech guy.”

“Keep doing your thing,” I say, returning to the photos on my MacBook. “I'll do mine.”

My thing doesn't go so well. What
am
I looking for?

The quick shots, and the panoramas, and the close-ups tell me nothing new. Sleaze and George Lucas.

Also a stunning level of narcissism. There's a cropping of framed photos on the wall in Coach's living room. Selfies showing Coach Bottin on hiking trails, and in a park, and staring at the ocean from a balcony, and posing on his bed with his silk sheets wrapped around him like a
centerfold. There are at least a dozen shots showing his appreciation of himself.

Beyond that, nothing.

In the early afternoon, Taylor says, “You're going to want to see this.”

I go to the Bride.

“That ‘VDMV' log-in, it's for a site the coach has marked as a favorite in his personal faculty portal. The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.”

He shows me the site with the state seal, and logs in with Coach's credentials. “Coach teaches—
taught
—Driver's Ed. This is how he reported exam scores to the state. It's how they determine if we get to drive.”

“Okay.”

“Those scores are linked to our driving records,” he says, and clicks through a few screens until he gets to a SEARCH field, “which are also linked to the pictures we took for our learning permits. Those pictures eventually end up on our driver's licenses.”

He searches his own name, and a picture appears. The same one the Admirer sent me.

“Holy crap,” I say.

Taylor repeats the steps and shows me Ocie's picture, then Keachin's. “All three of these photos have been searched for recently. Mine and Mei's were retrieved
after
Coach Bottin was arrested. Your Admirer has access to this account, too.”

“Kinda figured.”

“Why go through all this?”

Is there a more frustrating question? Arson, murder, elaborate games with pictures, threats, and cars. “It's all such . . .”

“Such what?”

I'm thinking. About what I was going to say. Because I'm not the first person to say it.

She was trying to get away from Bottin's crazy shit
.

“Such crazy shit,” I say, “she wanted to get away from it. Marcos told me in the hall.”

“I thought you said he didn't fit, no tech skills.”

“No. He's not
my
Admirer. He knows stuff. More than we do. I was too”—
distracted
—“close to see it. I've been focused on everything after Keachin died, and it's not enough. If Marcos really was Keachin's friend, then she probably told him her side of all this. Stuff that happened
before
she died. That's where we get our answers.”

Taylor shakes his head. “Okay, you're better at this part of it than I am. Where do we find him?”

I check the time on my phone. School ended an hour ago. “Monte FISHto.”

“Oh, gross. The fried stink of that place gets in your clothes.”

“When a twenty-four-piece buffalo popcorn shrimp meal costs five ninety-nine, there are bound to be consequences. Let's go.”