Pretty Wanted (23 page)

“But it says ‘sparrow in morning,’” Tre said. “That makes me think it’s not people but a thing. Maybe Sparrow is the name of their plan, like Operation Sparrow?”

An interesting idea. It sounded like something out of the military. But I could go with it. I started to read the rest of the poems out loud, over and over, including the one I nabbed from Granger.

Crow and broadbill spied

the lark. The nest has fallen.

But nestling fledges.

“The nest has fallen,” Tre repeated back to me. “Whose nest? The lark’s?”

That gave me a chill as I remembered the explosion.
Leslie.
Was she the Lark? Was Bailey reporting back to Granger to tell him what happened in Oregon?

But nestling fledges.

That was me.

“He’s warning him that I’m around,” I concluded. “Because they still think I’m
Leslie’s
daughter.”

“So Granger doesn’t know, either, then?”

“I don’t know.” I looked at the words in the date book again. “Bluebonnet must be Brianna.”

Tre picked up where I left off. “Dove is David Granger and Crow is Chet. Broadbill is . . .”

“Bailey,” I finished.

Now we could fill in the rest. “Sparrow in morning. They robbed the bank in the morning.” This fit with the newspaper reports we’d seen.

“Brianna and David migrate . . .” Tre said. “So if we go by these poems, they were definitely all in it together. But then somewhere along the line, your mom must have changed her mind.”

“Where were they going, though? Migrate to where? And to do what?”

He flipped the page in the book and then held the whole thing up to the light. “There’s an imprint of numbers here. Like someone wrote them on a different page in the book and they transferred.”

He held them up to the light and took out his phone to take a photo.

“What are you doing?”

“Reading them. I learned this trick on TV. The photo captures the shadows around the imprints.”

“Whatever it takes,” I said.

He murmured as he looked at the screen and traced his finger over the numbers. “38 dot 5498. And 90 dot 2926.”

“More code?” I asked. “Or a combination of some kind? For a safe or something?”

He shrugged. “Or an account where they planned to store the money?”

Ugh.
These numbers could be anything. “Now what?”

“Now . . . we have to match them up to something. Unless you think they’re meaningless.”

I didn’t. Nothing was meaningless at this point. “Google it,” I said. “You never know.”

Tre typed the numbers into his phone. Within a few seconds a slow smile spread across his face. “Well, look at that,” he said, looking up from his screen. “They’re map coordinates. According to the trusty internet, it’s the location of Cliff Cave Park. Just south of the city.”

“We need to go there,” I said, understanding all at once. “There’s something hidden in the park.”

Cliff Cave Park was a good twenty miles away. We agreed that we didn’t have much time, and we couldn’t risk a cab, and there was no public transportation to the park. In this extreme situation, stealing another car was our best bet.

“You sure this isn’t another boundary we’re stepping over?” I asked Tre, not wanting to push him beyond his comfort zone.

“Forget the boundaries thing, okay, Willa?” he said, eyeing up a junker with mismatched door panels on the side of the street with five tickets in the windshield. At least some of it looked like a Subaru, circa 1990. “Besides, I think we’d be doing this guy a
favor
if we take this piece of garbage off his hands.”

The street was relatively quiet—it was now well beyond lunch hour. But still, it wasn’t a place I would
choose
to steal a car. If I had my druthers, I probably wouldn’t choose to be trying to solve my mom’s murder or rescue my boyfriend from kidnappers, either.

Choice, then, was kind of a moot point.

We had no tools at our disposal, not even a wire hanger to pick the lock. So Tre went low tech: He quickly pulled down his jacket sleeve and wrapped it in his fist. With a punch, he shattered the glass.

“Wow, it worked,” he said as he reached through and opened the door.

“You didn’t think it would?” I was surprised he was surprised.

“Let’s just put it this way, back in the day, my buddy did the breaking in. I was mostly the driver. And I never saw anyone try it this way. Get in.”

Huh. You lived and you learned and you could still be caught off guard by the people who pretended to be experts. All this time I thought he had firsthand experience. He bent down, cursing under his breath, quickly removed the ignition cover and reconfigured the wires. I’d say it was two minutes, tops, until the car started.

“Next you’re going to say you can’t believe you wired the car,” I said. “Don’t even front.”

“No, no. This
is
my specialty.”

On the way down, I talked out loud as Tre drove, trying to be heard over the air noisily and freezingly rushing in through the hole in the window. I wanted to get us up to speed and sort through our unanswered questions.

“So Bailey and Chet came after me and Leslie, following us to Oregon, and then reported back to Granger.” And then there was the worst part of it, the fact that my probable dad was the killer. “If Granger was the head guy and called the shots, then he was the one who murdered my mom and had them try to kill Leslie.”

“And they think Leslie died in the explosion,” Tre said. “Which solved that problem. Except it didn’t.”

“But why would Granger do it?” Well, it was becoming obvious, at least partially. I answered my own question. “He’s been trying to cover it all up for the sake of his career. Because if anyone knew he was ever involved in robbing a bank, let alone killing someone, the election would go right down the tubes. He’d be ruined.”

“It makes sense,” Tre said.

“It makes perfect sense.” The question was what we’d do with this new information. And what we’d find in this park. I had no idea what we were looking for, but I knew there was something important there.

I watched cars zoom past us out the window as I went back to the poems, mentally reviewing them.
Feathers
. What could feathers be? Money, like feathering the nest? Did they hide the money here and move it? Or had they planned to?

“This is the exit, right?” Tre said, pointing to the sign for Exit 2/Telegraph Road. About a mile later, we were at a green-and-white marker announcing the entrance.

The park ran along the Mississippi River and there were recreational trails, for biking and running and that kind of thing. Like everywhere else, the paths were covered in snow. Only here it was pristine and untrampled, because how many people went hiking in the winter? Only crazy people like us.

Doubts flickered. So we were here. How were we supposed to find anything in a five-hundred-plus-acre span of woods?

I pointed to the woods on either side of the parking lot. “Should we just start to walk and map ourselves as we go?” We didn’t have much time.

Tre shook his head, registering the unlikelihood of us finding anything. “Let’s do this for an hour, and if we don’t find anything, we turn ourselves in. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said, a little relieved to know we had a plan B.

He set his phone to satellite map so we could read the coordinates. We set out into the forest, our feet crunching on the snow and the dead leaves below it. In the distance, I could hear river water churning. The Mississippi was always close by, it seemed. I thought of Leslie, and how much she would enjoy hiking here. I hoped she was okay.

I hoped
Aidan
was okay. Oh God. Every minute that passed was another minute he was in danger.
Please let him be safe
.
Please please please.

I watched a hawk circle beyond the reaches of trees, its wings dipping through the air. Feathers. They were what allowed birds to move from one place to another.

I knew then.

We were looking for a car.

“Go to the right now,” Tre said. “Stay straight.”

The woods seemed to slant at an incline and there were sinkholes here and there where water had naturally eaten away at the stony terrain. I walked quickly, pulled along by my sudden conviction.

We found the car about ten minutes later, buried under snow and sheltered by a large rock formation. I wouldn’t have seen it if the tailpipe hadn’t been peeking out, if I hadn’t known that we were looking for something in this exact spot. But there it was. And it was no coincidence.

We ran toward the rock, almost tripping over the debris on the ground.

The car was pretty well preserved for being half buried for fifteen years. There was no license plate.

“Take a picture,” I said to Tre.

“You think this is it?”

I nodded, sure as I could be about anything.

I ran my hand along the frozen metal of the car door and noted the bashed-in armature at the front. This car had definitely hit something. A sickening sense of foreboding came over me. I withdrew my hand, quick as if I’d touched a flame.

My mom had driven this car. Danny said he’d seen her behind the wheel.

That last poem: Chet was going to wait. My mom was going to hold the money, or deposit it somewhere. I wiped snow with the inside of my arm to access the passenger side. I could see that the glove compartment was left ajar. That wasn’t an accident, either.

She was supposed to leave the money here. So why did she take it?

“The hit-and-run,” I said, sliding the last pieces together like a puzzle. “That ruined the plan. That was why she changed her mind. They robbed the bank, and my mom nearly killed someone during the getaway. It was too risky. So after they’d hidden the car like they were supposed to, she decided she wanted out.”

My heart sank with the certain weight of it. I’d thought she was like me, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, but that was giving her too much credit. She was all wrong. If this was who she was, I didn’t want to be anything like her.

“She took it?”

I nodded. “After the accident, she came back here and took all the money, all five million dollars, for herself—that’s why Granger killed her. And that’s why they were after Leslie.” “Well, she was trying to meet the victim, wasn’t she? At the end? Maybe it’s not as bad as you think,” Tre said, trying to be comforting.

It was, though. I didn’t want to pretend anymore. “For all we know she was going to bribe him. Or do something to silence him . . .” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter—she never got there. But she did this. I know she did.”

He didn’t say anything, just finished taking photos with his phone, photos of the car and the details of its location.

We considered cutting out a piece of the remaining upholstery for any possible DNA, but Tre said we shouldn’t tamper with the evidence. “The cops will want it intact.”

Besides, we were running out of time. We finally had the information we needed and we had to use it. Quickly.

“Twice in one day? I must be dreaming.”

I ignored him. “Listen, we don’t have much time but we’ve pieced the story together now, and if you’ll just hear me out, you’ll see that it makes sense.”

I could practically hear him frowning through the receiver. “Go on,” he allowed.

“Granger and Chet and my mom—maybe Bailey, too—were involved in something we think was called Welfare for All. Ever heard of it?”

“Enlighten me.”

“It was a local political activist group back in the nineties. Granger was the front man.”

“So they were a bunch of Ralph Nader–type hippies.”

“Not quite. They robbed the bank. First Federal? It’s in your file on Chet.”

“Which you stole from me,” he said pointedly.

I ignored this and kept going. “The cops were right back then, that Chet was involved, but they didn’t have enough evidence. They were going to use that money for future plans—I don’t know what they were but it had something to do with their cause.”

“Which was?”

I couldn’t answer that. It was a big hole, I had to admit. But it didn’t mean we were wrong. We just didn’t have the whole story yet.

“So you don’t even know?”

“All I know is that they were all trying to change things—they didn’t like the direction the city government was taking with gambling—and the robbery was going to help somehow.” As I said it out loud, I wondered if the whole thing was a front for Granger’s own slimy scheme. Maybe he was just going to take the money for himself. He was convincing enough to get people to do something like that. I’d seen it firsthand. “But something went wrong. My mom was driving a getaway car and hit someone. Then she left the group, not wanting to be found out, and took the money. That’s why she moved away and changed her name. She stopped seeing Granger, too.”

“So what’s this have to do with him?”

“See, they were together. He’s probably my father.”

“David Granger. Is your father.” He sounded skeptical.

“I think so. If you look at the dates, she was pregnant with me when she got out. Maybe she was worried about me and Leslie, that something would happen to us if the truth ever emerged. But either way, she didn’t want to get caught. Only Granger wasn’t letting her go. He stalked her. My mom’s friend remembers seeing him one night at the restaurant where they worked and my mom was avoiding him.”

“So you think he came back and killed her for revenge?”

“That, and the money.”

Corbin was silent on his end.

“I have her date book, her writings, and there are references to Operation Sparrow, which is the robbery, plus a love poem about Granger. I have a note to Granger that ties him into this. We’re standing right here with the car, the hit-and-run vehicle—it’s in pretty good condition. If you can figure out the model, maybe you can run some kind of registration or car rental records. I know it will be connected back to one of them.”

“But do we have anything actually tying Granger to the scene of either crime? Physical evidence?”

“DNA was never run on the case. I’m willing to bet if you dusted the car you could get DNA for both of them.”

“Assuming that DNA is still viable. What about the murder? We’d need evidence for that, too.”