Pretty Wanted (16 page)

I spread some of the pages on the bed, reread some of the parts I’d looked at before, like Chet’s record:

       
FBI No. 356B290D

       
4/17/1994 Criminal trespass, private home

       
St. Louis, MO

       
Arrest Precinct: 2nd.

       
Arrest Number: 9823

       
Prosecution Charge(s): CTTL, CTTP, SOL

       
Disposition/Sentence: Found guilty, issued a citation.

       
1/3/1997 Suspected Robbery, First Federal Bank

       
St. Louis, MO

       
Arrest Precinct: 2nd

       
Arrest Number: 781

       
Prosecution Charges: None; not enough evidence

       
10/22/1997 Suspected Murder, Brianna Siebert

       
St. Louis, MO

       
Suspect was questioned in his home. No arrests made. Case still open.

It killed me. How could they have let him go free? What was I missing? I thumbed through the rest of the papers, most of which I’d skipped through before, not even knowing what I was looking for. I scanned through the dates again.

“January third,” I said out loud. “The robbery was the same day as the hit-and-run.”

“That can’t be a coincidence,” Aidan said. “Do you think it was part of the plan somehow?”

I shrugged and kept flipping. That would be odd, but who knew?

In the middle of the stack, I found a transcript of Chet’s interrogation for the suspected robbery and pulled it out to examine it more closely. The first time I’d seen it on his rap sheet, the robbery seemed like an unrelated crime, but now I knew there was a good chance it was connected to the money Leslie had, which was definitely connected to the murder—somehow. I scanned down the page.

       
JANSON: What if I said we found your prints on the front door, the rope you used to tie up the clerks, and the safe?

       
TOMPKINS: What if I said you were lying?

       
JANSON: So you’re saying you were never at the bank? We have video footage of you there two weeks before the robbery and a few weeks before that. You weren’t casing the joint?

       
TOMPKINS: We were doing our banking. You know, deposits and withdrawals.

       
JANSON: Who’s “we,” Mr. Tompkins?

       
TOMPKINS: A friend and myself.

“This is interesting,” I murmured, showing the page to Aidan. “He kind of slipped up here and said ‘we.’”

“I would think most bank robbers have accomplices,” Aidan said. “It’s a pretty complicated feat to pull off. Does it say whether the other person was a man or woman?”

I shook my head, reading on. “It doesn’t. And he was right, even though he was bluffing. The cop was lying. There were no prints. They never had enough evidence to charge him.”

“So, hypothetically speaking, if he was the robber, who do you think this other person could be?” Tre said from across the room. He was sitting at the little desk, making doodles with the motel’s complimentary pad and paper.

“Bailey? My mom? Granger? Toni? I don’t know.” Everyone was suspect now. No one seemed innocent to me anymore. “All we know for sure is that my mom ended up with this money in her house somehow.”

“So Chet was using her to hide it and he killed her when she started asking too many questions,” Aidan said.

“Or she was his accomplice, they stole the money together, and they had some kind of blowup afterward,” Tre said.

“Or she was keeping it for herself,” I said, not wanting to admit it, but now that I’d heard about the hit-and-run, I was leaning in this direction. I could no longer think of my mom as someone innocently caught up in this situation. “Either way, Leslie took off with the money, and Chet couldn’t find it until we were on the news, and that’s when he came after us. I just don’t know what the Granger connection is.”

“Are we sure there is one?” Aidan said. “He could’ve been part of your mom’s personal past. Maybe he had nothing to do with the robbery or murder. Maybe by breaking up with him she was trying to keep him out of all that.”

“The dates don’t add up,” I said. “She definitely knew him around the time of that robbery. I was conceived around then, too. So if she was part of it back then, she was already exposing him to it. It was only after it all went down that she moved away and took on a new name.”

“You still don’t know he’s your dad. Did you ask Granger specifically about Chet?”

I nodded. “He acted like he didn’t know him, but he also denied everything else, so I don’t know how good his word is.”

“He’s gotta know more than he’s let on,” Aidan said. “I wish there was a way to talk to him again.”

“Even if there was, we don’t have much time there,” Tre pointed out. “The runoff election is in five days. Once that dude wins, and it sounds like he will, he’s gonna be surrounded by even more guards and people all the time. Access will be limited.”

“We could try to find some of the other witnesses. Or what about another source?” Aidan asked.

“Who?” I asked. “The police already interviewed those witnesses and came up with nothing. Who else is there?”

“Chet,” Aidan said.

The very idea of coming face-to-face with him again was sickening, but I followed Aidan’s line of thinking anyway. “And how would we find him?”

“I have his license plate number on my phone, remember?” Aidan said. I did: That day, which seemed like a million years ago, when we’d caught Chet running out of my house after he’d ransacked it, looking for the money. Aidan and I chased him through the back streets of Paradise Valley, to no avail. But I’d gotten the plate number, before Chet drove off, and typed it into Aidan’s Droid.

“Naw, man. No way are we going to mess with that guy. And no way are we going to go looking for the murderer. That’s not what we agreed on.” Tre looked from Aidan to me and back again, registering the earnestness on our faces. “You people are losing your damn minds.”

“I’m not saying we mess with him,” Aidan said. “I’m just saying we do a little more research.”

“Rule number one. You don’t show up at a murderer’s doorstep. You think that guy won’t kill you if he has the chance again? Look, you guys, I’ve been really flexible here. I’m trying to be cool. But this goes beyond. When I talked to Cherise last night, she said this whole thing is like a snowball rolling down a mountaintop, and I agree with her.”

Cherise said?
When did he talk to her? I felt the sting of insecurity and something worse than that. Jealousy.

Well, that cleared up any suspicions I had—they were definitely a thing.

Aidan and I didn’t say anything. Tre was right, even if we didn’t want to admit it.

“It’s been a long day. Let’s just hang back and not make any decisions now, okay?” Tre got up and stalked across the room, turning on the TV.

The blare of a commercial filled the room in the spaces where our conversation had been.

Aidan gave me a conspiratorial look. “Says him. We’ll talk about it again in the morning.”

I nodded. I
was
tired. We all were. For now I would have to let it drop.

Tre changed the channel to MSNBC.

“No news, please,” I croaked. I couldn’t take any more interviews with Glitterati, teachers, cops, or any other reminders of the very thin ice on which we were presently skating.

“Fine,” he said, cycling through the channels to a reality show about a movie star’s teenaged kids. They were fighting over which kind of car to buy for the one girl’s sixteenth birthday, a Maserati or a Ferrari. “How’s this?”

We were all drawn in, silently, to the stupid drama as the girl whined about what her dad had promised her and how the dealership only had the car in black when she wanted red, and now she was going to have to wait because it wouldn’t be ready in time for her birthday.

“Rich people problems,” Tre said.

The girls were obnoxious and the show was obviously staged but for a moment I was happy to be sucked into their phony world. I envied them, actually. They were superficial, sure, but they had no reason not to be. Reality—true reality—was for other people.

The girl and her best friend were trading insults over whose dress was cheaper looking when there was a knock.

That jarred us out of our TV-induced glaze.

“Front desk,” the voice behind the door said.

We looked at each other. They must have seen us sneaking in. Caught us on camera or something. Not knowing what to do, I dropped to the floor, rolled under the bed. Aidan jumped into the bathroom.

“Just a second,” Tre called.

I saw Tre stand up and slowly make his way to the door. I clenched the cold metal frame of the bed, hoping against hope that there were no cops out there.

“Hi.” It was a girl. Or a very young woman, in her early twenties at the most, with an auburn braid trailing over her shoulder, and a turquoise polo shirt with a name tag. A hotel employee? “Um, I know I said this was the best room I had for your budget, but I was looking over my register again.”

What the?

“I think, under the circumstances, that you might want some more space, in case any of your, um, associates show up,” she said.

Associates?
What was she talking about? Had she seen us on the security camera somehow?

“So I took the liberty of assigning you to a suite, on the third floor. Room 312. It will be much more comfortable. It sleeps three no problem.”

She must have. She must have seen us. But she was giving us a
better
room?

“That sounds great,” Tre said, his voice cracking the tiniest bit.

“I’ll just leave the key for you. You can move there at your earliest convenience,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“And by the way,” she said. “If you see the Sly Fox, tell her I said hi.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

TWELVE

IN THE MORNING
, Aidan tugged on my shirtsleeve, waking me. I’d zonked out in my clothes, and I was sprawled out on the bed on top of the covers.

In the swanky new room, there was a queen in our sleeping room and another pullout bed in the sitting area. Tre had slept there. Thanks to the kindness of our Sly Fox–fan desk manager we’d all had a comfy night.

I rubbed my face. “What time is it?” The drapes were drawn tight, sealing out the sky and it was impossible to tell whether it was morning or night.

“Noon, actually.”

What? How had we slept that long? But I knew how. It had been days since we’d had a good long sleep that wasn’t interrupted by people coming and going, or the need to clear out before we got caught, or straight-up anxiety.

“That guy is still in la-la land.” He pointed to the other room.

“How long have you been awake?” I asked. I knew that he’d laid down next to me.

“Since six.” He grimaced. “For some reason I woke up at the crack. But I did get a little work done. C’mon, I want to show you something.”

I followed Aidan out into the thickly carpeted hallway and down the mirrored elevator to the first floor. We stepped out into the lobby and eyed up the front desk. There was a guy there now but he didn’t seem to notice us—he was busy on his computer and in any case, we were mostly concealed by a brass luggage cart holding a tower of Louis Vuitton bags. Aidan wagged a finger for me to follow him to an adjacent door marked
STAFF ONLY
. I withheld my questions for the time being as we walked down another hallway and then stopped in front of a door with a card slot.

He inserted a key card until it blinked, opening the door.

“Our friend left early this morning but she gave me the key,” he explained.

It was an office room of some sort. “Are you sure this is okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, she said no one uses this room.”

I wondered idly what else Aidan discussed with the young female clerk. Was he flirting with her? Had he told her more about me or our mission? Had he given himself away to her like he had with the dudes at Wash U? I quickly tried to tamp down my sudden flare-up of jealousy and distrust. He’d gotten us a computer and that meant more information. He was trying to help me.

Inside was a desk with two computers and a fax machine. Aidan sat down and started typing. I knew what he was doing: plugging in Chet’s license plate number and running a search.

In the meantime, I made myself busy, Googling Granger. I couldn’t get the image of his fake smile, his mesmerizing eyes out of my head and I wanted to know more about this guy and his history. Who was he really?

There was his page, of course, plus some official-looking bios on the Missouri House of Representatives and Senate pages and a Wikipedia entry.

David Granger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Daniel Granger (born 1960 in Maryville, Missouri) is the Missouri state senator and a member of the Democratic Party. He defeated Republican incumbent Fred Wilson in the 2008 state senate election. He previously served a term in the Missouri House of Representatives as the Minority Caucus Whip.

Personal life and education

David Granger is a lifelong resident of Missouri, born and raised in Old North St. Louis by a single mother. After graduating from Clayton High School, he attended Washington University and graduated summa cum laude with a BA in political science in 1982. He gained early experience as a union organizer in the 1980s, working with neighborhood organizations in St. Louis before going on to law school. He received his law degree in 1998 from St. Louis University and is a partner at Lester, Granger, and Willis. He was married to Diana Robbins from 1999 to 2009 before her death from cancer. He has no children.