Finding Forever (25 page)

James Bond. When Brooklyn's phone jingled alive with the old-school
007
theme song, it meant only one person calling. She stuffed in her earbuds.

“What's up, Holds?”

“Bad news,” Holden said.

“Hit me. Things can't get much worse.”

“It's Simone Witten.”

“And?”

“She's a convicted felon.”

“You kidding me?” Brooklyn squeezed her phone like a stress ball.

“Actually, I should say that Simone
White
is a felon. White is her legal name. Witten is just an alias.”

Brooklyn stomped on her bedroom's floor. “You. Are. Kidding.”

“It's for real. I cross-referenced her name in a tracking database and found both names connected to her residential address. Then I did a Lexis search under Simone White and found she has two convictions in California. One for felony shoplifting, and the other for armed robbery. I just emailed you the court docs.”

“Wow. But now everything makes total sense!”

“That she's a liar?”

“No. I mean, yeah. I didn't ever really get why Simone didn't go to the cops. She claimed it was due to the drugs in the house. But Simone came to me because she already has two strikes against her.”

“Strikes?'”

“The three-strikes law,” Brooklyn explained with forced patience. “In California, when a person commits three serious
felonies, they can be automatically sentenced to twenty-five years in a state prison. My dad loved that law because it's meant to scare the crap out of criminals. And since she already admitted to me she had drugs on her that night, she probably freaked out about getting her third strike.”

Brooklyn couldn't help but think about her dad, Detective Kit Brant. Most aspiring cops majored in criminal justice, but her dad had also double-majored in psychology because he believed solving crimes began with understanding the criminal mind. Though always quick to point out “you can't arrest someone for having a thought,” her father psychologically profiled every suspect for possible motivations or factors that may have driven them to commit a crime. Brooklyn was now determined to do the same.

“So now what?” Holden asked.

“I break the story that Taylor's assistant is a convicted felon.”

“But I thought
Taylor
was the story. Does anyone really care about Simone?”

“If they don't now, they certainly will after this.
Deadline Diaries
needs to compete on this Taylor story, Holden. It may not be the biggest angle on the story, but it's something to show my readers that I am on top of it while I try to figure out exactly what is going on.” She sighed. “Plus, think about Taylor. The poor girl could be . . .”

“You think someone killed her?”

“I don't know. But maybe breaking this story will smoke out another source. We have to try.”

“Brooklyn, maybe we should just file a report with the cops.”

“No. I don't trust them. I think they were in on it.” Brooklyn began tapping on her keyboard. “First, I have to get a comment from Simone. It might force her to cough up more information.”

“The cops are behind Taylor's disappearance? That doesn't make sense. Simone said they didn't look like the cops when they—”

“Simone, exactly. The one who has already lied to us.”

Brooklyn hadn't even hung up on Holden when she began writing up the story in her blogging program.

HEADLINE:

DD EXCLUSIVE: TAYLOR PRINCE ASSISTANT CONVICTED FELON, RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT TAYLOR'S LIFE BEFORE ALLEGED MENTAL BREAKDOWN

BODY TEXT:

Deadline Diaries
has exclusively learned that actress Taylor Prince's longtime personal assistant and confidante, Simone Witten, 20, is, in fact, a convicted felon who has been arrested for shoplifting and armed robbery. In court documents obtained exclusively by
Deadline Diaries
, we've learned her legal name is Simone White, and she was convicted of stealing $10,000 worth of merchandise from a downtown Los Angeles clothing store, as well as serving as an accomplice to an armed robbery of an L.A.-area convenience store. Both arrests occurred prior to Simone becoming Prince's assistant. It's not yet known whether Prince knew of Witten's troubled past.

News of Witten's criminal background could possibly shed light on Prince's private life leading up to her alleged mental breakdown and reported
stint in rehab
following her sixteenth birthday party last week. (
Deadline Diaries
has not yet confirmed reports of Taylor's rehab.)

When contacted for comment on our story, Witten told
Deadline Diaries
: XXXXXX

After Brooklyn clicked Save, she immediately texted Simone so she could fill in the “XXXXXX.”

                      
hey, Ms. WHITE = running a DD story on ya: 1) ur a convicted felon 2) ‘Witten' is an alias and ur name is WHITE. what comment, if any, do you have, Ms. WHITE?

Brooklyn realized that, legally speaking, she could run the story without a comment since she already had an official court document to back up her reporting. But out of fairness and professional ethics as a journalist, she felt she owed it to Simone to give her a chance to comment.

Brooklyn didn't want to be yet another cheesy, sell-out celeb “news” site. Several brand marketing people had approached her about writing “sponsored posts” for different products—from cell phones to zit cream to backpacks—where they would pay her $200 a mention. But she had always said no. She wanted to maintain integrity.

Whenever she was frustrated by not having a fully staffed news organization at her disposal, she recalled “The Talk,” the one-on-one meeting with the school counselor that frayed the nerves of every Twin Oaks junior. It was the meeting where college dreams could be crushed or inspired.

“I get that my grades aren't that awesome, but who wouldn't want a world-famous investigative blogger attending their journalism school?” Brooklyn had asked Mr. Watts.

“Well, Columbia University,” Mr. Watts replied. “And Northwestern. And USC. You're applying to all the best schools, and all will require a higher GPA and higher SAT scores.”

“How high?” Brooklyn asked.

Mr. Watts gazed over his glasses at her academic report. Then he looked up. “Brooklyn, I must be honest with you. The fact is that you have a lot of work ahead of you in order to get into an elite institution. Your GPA is currently at 3.7 but must
come up to 4.0 to be taken seriously. On the plus side, your SAT scores show great promise. You have a 720 on Writing and a 707 on the Critical Reading, which are both competitive. But your math . . .”

Brooklyn swallowed whatever saliva remained in her mouth.

“A 580 is just not going to cut it,” he said. “You need closer to 700. Much closer.”

“But most professional journalists don't even use math, and when they do, they probably just use a calculator.”

“Perhaps. But these are the rules.”

“But you said extracurricular activities, like my blog, are considered as factors for admission. Couldn't
Deadline Diaries
somehow make up for my math scores?”

“It would be a factor in their admissions decision. But I've never seen a student with your numbers get into any of those schools, even with excellent additional materials.”

“Even a Pulitzer?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Did any of those high school students ever win a Pulitzer?”

“If you're referring to the Pulitzer Prize, for the world's best journalism, then no, they did not. It would be a first for a high school student to even be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, let alone win one.”

That was six months ago. Now, just a month away from becoming a senior and a few months from taking another SAT, the reality remained that Brooklyn wasn't much of a test taker, especially when it came to math. No matter how many tutoring sessions she did, solving equations of most any kind proved frustrating. She would somehow want to see the “fours” in every problem, a mental tic that created yet another problem-within-a-problem. In trig, whenever she saw y = 3x, she would immediately think, obsessively, that x = 4. Thus, y = 3(4) = 12. But when her teacher informed her that, say, x = 7,
she would have to divide the subsequent answer by 4 after solving the original problem. Just because . . . well, she had to.

As she waited for Simone to respond to her text, Brooklyn went back to reporting out the other angles of the Taylor Prince story. The list of things she didn't know was a lot longer than the list of things she did know. Besides Simone being a felon with a fake name, she had yet to confirm the most important angle. Had Taylor really been admitted to rehab for drug problems or was the
STARSTALK
story yet another fine example of their tabloid fiction? And since it was widely known in celebrity journalism circles that the majority of
STARSTALK
's stories were fed to them by police sources, could the cops somehow be complicit in a conspiracy?

Hunches. That's all they were.

Several times, Brooklyn had called the number she found in Arizona for Taylor's mom, but the phone just rang out before assaulting her ears with a busy signal. And Taylor's publicist, manager, and agent had not returned any of her emails or calls. Even her usual go-to source for celebrity sightings—Twitter and Instagram—had nothing to report on Taylor's whereabouts.

Brooklyn knew that the stories most worth pursuing were the hardest to break. Like her math scores, she would just have to dig deeper to overcome the challenge.

Batman had Robin. Woodward paired up with Bernstein. Ramona had Beezus. And Brooklyn had Holden.

                      
Hey, Holdy. Wanna come over tonite?

                      
MUST brainstorm, need a reporting plan.

                      
You in?

Sure. C u in a bit