Chapter 18
I
t's Monday morning and not only does Bethanie not show up early, she isn't at school by first bell. When she hasn't found me by second period or even sent a text to tell me what's up, I'm beyond mad. And when no one has seen her by lunch, I'm beyond worried. The only good thing about worrying over Bethanie is that it keeps me from being sick over losing Marco. I managed to not see him the first half of the day. And because I'm so stressed wondering if she's dead or alive, I can't even focus on school, so I'm going off campus during lunch to find Miss Bethanie. She'd better be alive because I plan to set her straight about standing me up. If I'm lucky, I'll avoid Marco after lunch, too, since we don't have any Monday classes in the same hall. I know I'll have to deal with seeing him eventually since we both have another year and a half at Langdon, but I can only handle one crisis at a time.
The address Bethanie gave me for Cole's place is just a few miles from school and I figure if I can get down the hill and reach the crosstown bus in time, I should be able to get there, curse out Bethanie, and if she's still willing to give me a ride back to school after I tell her exactly what I think about her and her boyfriend, I might only miss the first half of fifth period. While I run to make the bus, I dial Bethanie's number one more time to see if I was wrong about the new development that has me so worried. No, I hear the same message for the third time:
this number is no longer in service.
By the time I get off the bus in front of Cole's building, I've had enough time to go from mad worried, to just plain mad, to making deals with God that if Bethanie is okay, I promise not to curse her out, at least not until tomorrow. I'm relieved to find it's actually an apartment building, though it looks a little run-down for
GQ
Cole. Even though Bethanie said he's just here temporarily, it's hard to imagine Cole staying one night. At least it's a real place. The whole bus ride over, I kept imagining the address was a fake and would lead me to a 7-Eleven. Bethanie would probably expect me to check it out online to make sure she wasn't scamming me, which makes me wonder now why I hadn't. Thinking about Marco definitely has me off my game, but now he's Angelique's worry, not mine. As soon as she reminds him why he dropped her in the first place, she'll be the one up late at night crying and wishing she had a chocolate shake to drown her sorrow.
When I get off the elevator and make my way to Cole's place, I find the door open to an empty apartment, except for a cleaning crew. I check my notes again, glad I didn't rely on memory this time because I must have written down the wrong apartment number. No, it matches the one on the door. So that means I must have the wrong street address, or the wrong street. I definitely got something very, very wrong.
Just then a woman comes out of what must be the bedroom.
“Make sure you clean the refrigerator,” she tells the cleaning crew. “Take whatever you want. He must have just gone shopping, because it's full. Who are you?”
“I'm looking for a friend, but I must have the wrong apartment.”
“Was it the guy who just moved out? Because if it is, maybe you can tell me how to find him. He didn't tell me where to send his deposit.”
“Was his name Cole?” I ask, hoping it wasn't, because if it was it would mean I have absolutely no idea where Bethanie is.
“That's it.”
“Did he live alone?”
“Thought you said you were a friend.”
“I'm really looking for someone else, a girl. Cole was, is her boyfriend.”
“Oh yeah. There was a girl here when he asked me to come by and get the rent.”
“How'd she look?”
“What do you mean, how'd she look? She was pretty, about your age. I thought maybe a bit too young for him, but what do I know. In my day, college boys wouldn't be caught with a high school girl, and of course, all we wanted to catch was a college boy,” she says, laughing like we have a private joke. She's getting lost in memories of ancient times when I'm just trying to find out where Bethanie and Cole are.
“I mean, did she look sad or worried or something?”
“Look, I don't want trouble around here 'cause I run a nice building. Were they into something bad?”
“No, nothing like that. It's just they were having a few problems. She was thinking about breaking up with him.”
“Didn't look that way to me. She looked as happy as I'd have been when I was her age and landed a nice-looking college boy like that, and one with some money, too.”
“Do you know where he went to college?”
“Seems like your
friend
didn't tell you too much about him, did she? I just assumed from his age that he was a college boy, but now that I think about it, I don't think I ever saw him go to school.”
“Do you know where he worked?”
“He didn't, unless he worked the graveyard shift. Nearly every night, he left around ten o'clock, didn't come back until dawn. I figured he had a girl somewhere. Not that I was watching him,” she says, then points to the floor. “I'm in the apartment below, and I'm a light sleeper.”
“What makes you think he had money? If he had money, he'd probably stay somewhere else. No offense.”
“Some taken. I rent month to month. The fact he didn't have a job but paid me three months rent ahead of time, plus a month deposit, all in cash, was a clue. Most folks barely want to pay me for one month.”
She must have a higher regard for her building than I do.
“Four months of whatever you charge for rent at this place, even in cash, doesn't make a guy rich,” I say. “Sounds more like a guy who doesn't want to be found.”
“Maybe, but you can always tell a man with money, even one who's just barely a man. You probably don't know that since you're just a girl yet.”
“School me, then.”
“Maybe you ain't such a girl after all,” she says, giving me a once-over. “Sound more like a cop.”
“In this school uniform?”
This seems to allay her concern that she might be talking to a fifteen-year-old police officer.
“He drove a real nice car.”
“That was her car, not his.”
“Were you here? No, I didn't think so.”
She walks to a window and gestures for me to follow.
“That there is her car.”
She points at what looks to be Bethanie's car in the parking lot below. I feel sick, but manage to suppress the nausea that always comes when I'm really scared.
“He drove one of those expensive sporty cars. You remember that boy's car, Roland?”
“Yeah, it was a Porscheâsilver 911 GT3 with a rear spoiler,” says the guy who'd been pushing a carpet cleaner when I first arrived.
“Roland's got a keen eye. Just wish he'd use it on the job. You missed a spot there.”
I look down at the carpet and the missed spot.
“Does that look like blood to you?” I ask.
“Could be, now you mention it,” Roland says.
“Like I said, looked to me like those kids were in love, and you're making trouble where there is none, little girl. I don't let bad elements lease my place.”
“I'm sure it's nothing,” I say, not believing myself for a second.
“I think they had even been on a picnic, which isn't something a fighting couple would do.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Not that I'm nosy or anything, just wanted to get a good look at his fancy car. Saw he had picnic-type things in the backseatâa little cooler, a blanket.”
Well, that doesn't give me much to work with.
“Can I take a look around the apartment?”
“Sure, but there's nothing to see.”
She's right. I walk through all the rooms and find nothing to tell me anything about Bethanie's stay here or where they might be now.
The rental agent, still standing by the window when I return to the living room, asks, “About that depositâdo you know where I can find him?”
“I wish I did. When did he leave?”
“Saturday morning. Told me I could keep the third month's rent even though he was here less than two. Didn't say anything about what to do with the deposit. Must have been in a hurry because he left a refrigerator full of food.”
“He must not have been in too much of a hurry,” I add. “He had time to pack everything.”
Since my most recent employment was in the moving business, I know exactly what it takes to move an apartment this size. He must have planned to leave at least a day out, or maybe from the moment he out-of-the blue asked Bethanie to stay with him for the weekend.
“You really must not be that close a friend,” she says, looking skeptical again. “He didn't have much of anything to pack. He rented a bed, table, two chairs. I had to call the rental company to have it moved out. But he left some money for my trouble. Says it all right here in this note.”
“Can I see it?”
“Nothing in it but instructions to call the rental company,” she says, handing me the note.
She's right. There's nothing here that might give me a clue what the hell is up with Cole. At the end of the note, he apologizes for inconveniencing the leasing agent. A serial killer wouldn't do that, would he? I hand the note back to her.
“Keep it,” she says. “What I need is his forwarding address.”
“So do I.”
“Well, if I can't find him, I guess I can't give him his deposit, right? When you hear from him, tell him not to accuse me of keeping his money.”
Â
Of course I don't go back to school, but go home to think through everything and wait out the rest of the school day until I can go to Bethanie's house. I'm still hoping that she's somehow lost phone coverage, decided to spend another day with Cole wherever he is, before going home tonight where she'll pick up on her original plan of saying she went to school from my house this morning. I wonder who she got to call Langdon and lie to Smythe. Probably Cole. Everything about him is a big fat lie. I check messages, praying Bethanie has left one of them, but it's only Lana saying she's missing a case file and asking me to check around her desk to see if she left it somewhere.
I find the file in the trash can beside her desk. It must have fallen off the tower of folders, papers, and notebooks. Considering she's in a business where details are everything, and she's very good at it, Lana is kind of messy. Okay, very messyâI barely found the desk. I try to decide if I should call Lana and let her know I found it, which would give it away that I'm home an hour early, or if that even matters, because if Bethanie is somewhere with Cole Whoever-He-Is, me skipping school is the least of my worries. In fact, it's probably time I come clean with Lana because this whole thing is starting to feel way out of my league.
I take a look in the file hoping it's related to her big Atlanta case, but it's something about a carjacking in Denver. While I'm dialing Lana's number at the police department, I notice the corner of a photo stuck in the sliver of space between her desk and filing cabinet. When I rescue the photo from the Bermuda Triangle that is Lana's desk, I find a shot of three men standing on a sidewalk, talking. I'm about to put it on top of a stack of paper when a guy in the background of the photo catches my eye. To the left of the three men and almost clipped out of the picture is a car with its driver's door open, a younger man either getting in or out, I can't really tell. All the photographer got of him is his head above the car door. But that's enough for me because even though he is slightly out of focus, I'm pretty sure the driver is Cole. Maybe that other photo I saw in Atlanta didn't lie to me after all.
I hang up the phone and look through the mess on Lana's desk for other pictures, hoping for some clue of why Cole would be in one of Lana's photos, but there are none, so I study this one a little closer. The car he's getting out ofâit's silver. There's an icon on the hood and it's in focus because the other three men in the photo are standing near the front of the car, but it's too small to make it out. I grab my phone and take a picture of the photo so I can blow it up on my laptop.
Scoreâthe car is a silver Porsche, which is what Roland from the apartment cleaning crew said Cole was driving. Even if he wasn't the target of the photographer and was just a bystander, he couldn't be an innocent one. That's just too much coincidence. Maybe I was right about Cole being the missing suspect.
But Lana definitely said he was a middle-aged guy. If Cole was the suspect, the photographer would have him in focus, and those other guys would be in the background. Why would he be anywhere near Lana's investigation, even if he wasn't an actual target? He did say he's from some town outside Atlanta. I suppose he could have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I've been there a few times myself. Except Cole is making a serious habit of itâat the bodega, then at Bethanie's car when the thug was waiting for her, now in this photo. According to him, he hasn't been in Atlanta in a long time, but there he is getting out of a car on Peachtree Street in Midtown. I know the restaurant those guys are standing in front of. The back of the photo is dated six weeks ago. I don't know why he'd be in this photo, or why he'd lie about not being in Atlanta recently, but I get the feeling it isn't because he's just some gold digger.