her cell phone from her jeans pocket. It must have vibrated. She asks the room service clerk to hold on, then checks a text message. Her mouth opens in surprise.
”What?“ I ask.
She puts her finger to her lips, then she pulls me into the next room.
”No arguing in front of the children?“ Lucien calls.
Mia holds up her phone and shows me the blue LCD screen. It reads:
”What’s Square 1?“
”That’s where the first clue will be.“
I recall Sonny’s description of the complicated security precautions that precede a rave. Kids are prompted by various riddles or poems to drive from place to place until they’re sure no one is following them. Then they’re told the location of the drug party.
”What do you think?“ Mia asks, her eyes sparkling. ”You want to go?“
I glance back toward the other room, but what I see in my mind is the LCD screen.
Mia grins. ”Yeah!“
”What about Lucien?“
”He sleeps at school, not at home. For five hundred bucks, he’ll come back later.“
”I
”Well?“ I ask, walking back into the main room of the suite. ”Can you come back later?“
Lucien slaps the Enter key, then stands and steps away from the keyboard. ”No need. Job’s done.“
”You’re kidding.“
He smiles, revealing small white teeth. ”I don’t kid about work.“
”I gave you two drives.“
”That was the second one. View them at your leisure. No password, no problems, and yes, I take cash.“
I take out my wallet and remove five one-hundred-dollar bills. ”I’d like you to look at one other drive, Lucien.“
”No problem. It’ll cost extra, though.“
”I pay for results.“ I open the portfolio on the coffee table and remove the flash drive I stole from Marko’s garage apartment. This one’s a Sony, not a Lexar, but Lucien seems unconcerned.
”We really need to go,“ Mia says.
”What’s the hurry?“ asks Lucien.
I give Mia a pointed look. ”This is important.“
Lucien takes the drive and slides it into the USB port. Mia stands on tiptoe and whispers in my ear, ”The clue won’t be there long. If we’re late, we’ll miss the party. And Marko.“
”We really need this. And Lucien’s fast.“
”Not this time,“ he says. ”There’s a separate encryption program hiding whatever’s on this drive. It looks like military-grade stuff. Where did you get this?“
I should have known Marko would take precautions. What did Paul tell me? In Sarajevo, Marko became the consummate survivor. ”You don’t need to know that. Can you hack it or not?“
”Maybe.“
”How long?“
”Maybe an hour, maybe a year. If I took it home-“
”You can’t take it home.“
”Then I guess I’ll see what I can do.“
”We’ll be back in a couple of hours.“
”Can I order room service?“ Lucien asks with a smile. ”I missed supper.“
”Get whatever you want.“
The smile turns beatific. ”I hope they have a wine list.“
Riding north on Highway 61 in the passenger seat of Mia’s Honda Accord, I’m scrunched underneath a St. Stephen’s letter blanket that Mia pulled from her trunk-to facilitate my ”being shady,“ as she calls it. For the past forty-five minutes, I’ve been living a scene out of a screwball comedy from the 1960s, updated with touches from 1970s car-chase movies. After Mia read the doggerel verse taped to the ticket window of the old theater, we joined a convoy of jacked-up pickup trucks, handed-down family sedans, and high-end foreign sports coupes. These vehicles charged from place to place to find and unravel successive clues, dodging in and out of traffic and smashing beer bottles against road signs. My heart nearly stopped when I saw one high school boy leap from the bed of one pickup truck to another at seventy miles per hour.
Dave Matthews is playing softly on Mia’s CD player. She drives with one hand, while the other sends and receives text messages on her cell phone in an Olympic-caliber display of manual dexterity. Using the LED penlight on my key ring, I’ve been reviewing Kate’s ”hook-ups“ lists in her journal, and asking Mia to give me a time line on the names. Mia has laughed at some names and dropped her jaw at others. One made her curse and tense in her seat. The story behind this was simple enough.
”Kate stole my boyfriend in ninth grade,“ she told me. ”Chris Anthony. It was just after she got back from England. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but she did it behind my back. They saw each other for like six weeks before someone told me. When I confronted Kate, she wouldn’t even discuss it. She acted like I was a total loser. Beneath her notice. I know that sounds trivial, but it hurt. We didn’t speak for over a year.“
”Is that the root of your competitiveness?“ I asked.
Mia kept her eyes doggedly on the road. ”Part of it, I guess. Doesn’t matter now, does it?“
Mia knew almost every name on Kate’s hook-ups lists, and the picture that emerged from her time analysis was that Kate had been promiscuous during junior high and the early part of high school-before she began having intercourse-but beginning in the summer before the eleventh grade, she’d dated Steve Sayers exclusively. Two of the names Mia didn’t know had notations beside them indicating they had occurred while Kate was living in England. Only two names seemed remotely worth checking out as people Kate might have ”cheated on“ Drew to see, and thereby become the object of jealousy that led to murder.
Mia got her shocks from Kate’s ”rejected“ and ”rejected by“ lists. The fact that Kate had tried to seduce a girl named Laurel Goodrich made Mia gasp. The adults on Kate’s list didn’t surprise her, though. She agreed with Kate’s assessment of Mr. Dawson, the religion teacher, as a ”perv.“ The rejected ”Dr. Davenport“ turned out to be a psychologist who had commuted to Natchez for part of one year. The ”Dr. Lewis“ who had apparently rebuffed Kate’s advances was her longtime psychiatrist, who practiced in New Orleans. ”Mr. Marbury“ was a gymnastics coach who had worked with the cheerleaders for two summers. Mia seemed quite happy that he’d refused Kate’s attentions. When I read Wade Anders’s name from the list, Mia wrinkled her brow and turned to me.
”Kate says Coach Anders came on to her? Not the other way around?“
”Well, he’s under the ‘rejected’ column.“
”Huh.“
”What do you think about Coach Anders?“
”Wade’s okay. He’s never hit on me.“
”He told me a lot of girls have come on to him in his office.“
Mia nodded. ”Some girls think he’s hot-or they did before he gained that weight, anyway.“ She laughed softly. ”He did say something about my butt once.“
”What?“
”No way.“
”Come on.“
I grabbed the wheel to keep us on the road. ”Meaning?“
”You know…a butt like a black chick.“
I laughed at Mia’s expression of mixed embarrassment and amusement. ”
”You tell me.“
