Pretty Wanted (4 page)

Blueberry Hill was right where it was supposed to be, an azure marquee out front with light-up figures of a man and woman dancing on its uppermost edge. It looked like a relic from another time. Maybe some things
didn’t
change, not even after fifteen years.

We walked in through the front door, but the place didn’t seem to be open to customers just yet. Inside were wooden booths, surrounded by old records and funky displays of PEZ Dispensers and Simpsons figurines. Opposite them was an old, elaborately carved bar capped with taxidermied animals, a giant swordfish. A huge 1950s jukebox glowed yellow and red from the adjoining room.

A portly guy with a goatee and a stained apron approached us. “Can I help you with something?”

“We’re looking for anyone who remembers a woman named Brianna Siebert. She worked here in 1997?”

“Hang on,” he said. “You’ll want to talk to Rich, the manager.”

He disappeared behind a swinging door. We stood by the bar and looked up at the television while we waited. A sports program recapping a Rams game was replaced by a man with a long, sun-pinkened face and blond hair that was thinning on top. He was handsome, in an older-politician sort of way.

“I’m State Senator David Granger. I’ve lived in St. Louis my whole life. I’ve dedicated my career to making this city a better place. But some people have sent our jobs overseas and now our state is hurting. I know what it’s like to watch your friends and families struggle while someone else makes the big decisions. That’s why I’m running for U.S. Senate: to bring back the American dream. And you can help me.”

Your typical political ad. I tuned out the TV as I was more interested in looking at all of the memorabilia around me. This was quite a place.

When I turned back at the screen, pictures flashed of the man shaking hands with factory workers, cutting ribbons, posing with his arm around senior citizens.

On top of the images were the words
DAVID GRANGER FOR U.S. SENATE. VOTE IN THE RUNOFF DECEMBER
12.

The guy who had to be Rich came out from the back room. He was taller and more slender than the first guy, and he wore a red baseball cap over his gray hair.

“I’m so sick of hearing about this runoff. I just want Granger to win already. Hermann’s a joker.” He flicked his chin in our direction. “You kids were asking about someone?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Brianna Siebert. We think she probably worked here in 1997.”

Rich nodded, tucking his hands in his armpits. “I was a server back then. The name doesn’t sound familiar, though.”

I sucked in a breath, feeling my hopes falter. So he didn’t know her. Then who would? “Did anyone else you know work here at that time?”

He shook his head. “I’m old. Most people, they come here as Wash U students, stay for a few years to supplement their books or beer allowance, and move on. Sorry. Wish I could help you out.”

“Do you mind if we look around a little bit? Is there an employee room or anything?” Not that I expected there would be any trace of her from fifteen years ago. At the very least I could see more of what she might have seen. Maybe it would fill out the picture of her a little bit more.

“Sure, the break room’s right back here.” Rich led us through the swinging doors through another doorway.

Not very inspiring. I looked around at the row of small lockers, a white fridge, and a table with a few dinky chairs. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find, but there was nothing much here.

I turned toward the door. That’s when I noticed a series of photos on the front wall, documenting what looked like an annual softball game, each dated with a little plaque. I scanned through them and found 1997 on the second row. There were twenty-five or so people lined up, all wearing Blueberry Hill T-shirts with their first names embroidered on the front pocket.

I studied the image, going face to face. It took me a moment, but I found her. She was resting her head on the shoulder of the woman next to her, smiling broadly, giving the camera a thumbs-up. Her hair was pulled back and she had a baseball cap on, but there was no mistaking it—she looked exactly like the newspaper image we’d seen yesterday.

“Aidan!” I cried. “I think this is her.”

“It does look like her. But her shirt says Angie,” he pointed out.

Rich closed in on where we were standing and looked over our shoulders. “Oh, Angie Chambers. She was the one who was killed.”

I felt air drain from my chest. Why was she using another name? “So you remember her? Her name was Angie? Not Brianna?”

“I never knew her. I think I started a couple months after that all went down. But it was tragic. Everyone knew about the murder. Now that you mention it, I do remember the cops saying she’d been living under some kind of alias.”

She’d changed her name. Just like Leslie had. Why? My mind was going in a million directions.

“And who’s this?” I pointed to the woman next to her, squinting to make out the name on her shirt. “Toni?”

“Yeah, I knew Toni. Those two were pretty tight, supposedly. I think Toni was a student at Wash U.”

A friend. Toni. A student at Wash U. I committed the information to my mental contacts list. I motioned to Aidan that I was ready to leave. “Thanks so much for your help,” I said.

“Like I said, it was a while ago.” Rich shrugged.

“This is something, though,” I said. It wasn’t much, but it was the first real piece of information I had about the mysterious Brianna Siebert aka Angie Chambers aka my mother.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

FOUR

THANKS TO RICH
, we had a next step: finding Toni Whateverherlastnamewas.

We needed access to another computer. As we walked around and looked for one, I pulled my hat lower and scanned the people on the street, waiting for buses, walking strollers, slumped on benches. Did anyone recognize us? I couldn’t be sure. Was this how someone like Sam Beasley felt? Fame was kinda like a fabric softener sheet no one told you was clinging to your ass.

“You think maybe Toni knows more about Chet?” Aidan asked. “Especially if he was your mom’s boyfriend?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “I don’t know if I buy that my mom could have been involved with a criminal.”

“Hey, I’m with
you
, aren’t I? And vice versa?” He gave me a lopsided grin.

It wasn’t the same thing and he knew it. “He’s just such a creeper. And dangerous. Who could be attracted to that guy?”

He shrugged. “You never know what he was like fifteen years ago. People change over time. Maybe he was better looking and nicer back then. Or who knows what she was really like? Maybe she had issues.”

I tipped my head in concession. It was possible. If you considered all of the information I had so far, it was even probable.

Still, I knew I was biased, but I couldn’t imagine that anyone related to me could be an evil person and especially not Chet-level evil. “There must be other possibilities. I mean, we still don’t know what the relationship was.”

“Something went wrong. We know that. She changed her name, right? Maybe she got mixed up in bad stuff without realizing it, whether it was romantic or not.” Aidan stared up at the gray sky as he thought through potential scenarios, playing detective. “Maybe he used her to hide the money in her house or something. She found out what he was doing and questioned him about it and he killed her.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “But she changed her name before she was killed. If we’re going on the theory that she changed her name because she knew she was in danger and was trying to escape him and his shady money, that wouldn’t explain why the money was in her house that night.” That led me to the other possibility, which neither of us was saying out loud: that she was fully culpable, that she knew exactly what Chet was doing and had even participated in it in some way. People changed their names when they were avoiding the law all the time. Hadn’t my sister done that very thing? She’d changed my name, too, from Maggie Siebert to Willa Fox.

This was all beside the point, though. “Look, like I said before: We’re not here to solve the case. I want to know who she was.”

As we crossed the street, Aidan’s face grew taut with seriousness. “I’m not sure we can separate out who she was from what happened.”

Maybe he was right, but I didn’t need him to protect me from it, either. “Can you just help me find a computer?”

He held up his hands. “As you wish.”

I’d led us toward the Washington University campus. We were now walking through the gate and moving along a tree-lined path. The wide lawns on either side were frost tinged and covered with patches of snow.

“Why don’t we try one of these buildings?” I pointed to an arrangement of brick-fronted buildings around a clock tower ahead of us.

His eyes widened. “That looks like dorms. You’re suggesting we use the computer in there?”

“Unless you have a better idea,” I said, feeling the giddy spark I always felt when I was about to pull a maneuver. Of course, breaking in was wrong—I knew that—but we had a purpose. As long as I could say that to myself, I could justify what we were doing. Unlike the apartment building, this situation called for Sly Foxing.

He grinned, accepting the challenge. “All right. Let’s see your magic.”

We circled around the building, doing our reconnaissance, looking for doors, peering through windows. We could see that the front entrance was flanked by a desk with a receptionist-type person. Even if it was a student, and it probably was, we couldn’t take a risk going in that way. The windows were tightly sealed, I could tell without trying. There were fire escapes leading to the second floor, but that seemed a little too dramatic for the circumstances.

Finally, we traversed a parking lot and came around to a back door by the loading dock. A row of bikes was chained up to a rack and I instantly felt a pang. I still missed my poor vintage bike that I’d abandoned back in Paradise Valley during a scuffle with the cops. Tre had rescued it and kept it waiting for me, but even so, bikes were a painful memory of how this all started and what I’d had to leave behind.

“That’s a magstripe device,” Aidan said, pointing to a black card reader mounted outside the door. “Old school. I can’t believe they don’t use RFID here yet. We can try to crack the programming code and reprogram the magnetic stripe, or we can break the wiring on the reader—”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said, nodding toward the two girls coming down the pathway behind us.

I was thinking of one of Tre’s lessons, which was that in a lot of cases human error was the simplest way in. Besides, we didn’t have time for Aidan’s schemes, not when two human-shaped keys were right in front of us.

The girls were deep in conversation: “So, you know, the other night at Jasper’s? How he totally blew me off when Lara was there?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he did it again yesterday in the dining hall.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“I know.”

I removed my sunglasses and hat, and Aidan did, too, as we stepped right up behind them. Girl A removed her ID card and swiped it through the scanner. Girl B opened the door, barely looking over her shoulder as she held it open for us.

In we went, like it was our business to be in the dorm building, which was basically a maze of white-painted concrete walls. To our left was a deserted laundry room. We ducked in there and let the girls get some distance ahead of us.

“If you were a computer, where would you be?”

Before he’d gotten kicked out of Valley Prep, Aidan was a typical college-bound senior. “Everywhere,” he said.

That didn’t exactly help. My pulse was speeding, skittering along as I led us toward the stairwell.

I had to remind myself that it was only trespassing. Not nearly as dangerous as breaking into a house, stealing money from the bitchy girls at school . . . or ripping off the FBI, for that matter. This was Pee Wee League. The worst that could happen was someone yelling at us. But then, of course, that would give them time to recognize us, which would actually be pretty bad.

I held my breath as we opened a door to the first-floor hall and thought of everything I’d learned from Tre.
Act like you know.

There were a few storage rooms, a mail room, and then a small room that was left undecorated, except for a long table and—booyah!—three Macs. Only there was another card reader by the door. We peered in through the little window and saw that two guys were sitting in the corner, working on their laptops.

I knocked gently on the door. One of the guys, the taller one with long stoner sideburns, got up and let us in.

“Thanks,” Aidan said. “We forgot our cards.”

The guys nodded. We were in. Simple as that.

We each settled down at a station and I got to Googling: Toni Washington University alum . . .

I would have preferred better, more specific search terms, but this was all I had to work with. Business profiles came up, a Twitter account, something called Prison Inmates Online. The last one definitely sparked my interest. But most of these women were much older or much younger. If Toni’d been a student or recently graduated when she knew my mom, that would mean she was still in her late thirties or early forties now.

I Googled the alumni directory, but that was password protected. Of course. She was probably in there.

C’mon, Toni baby. Work with me.

Another search: Toni Washington University alum 1990s St. Louis . . .

I pulled up a page about a fifteenth college reunion with a comment from someone named TCumberland.

Hey, guys, can’t wait to see you! It’s been way too long. Toni (Patterson)

This was something. Toni Cumberland. That must be her married name. The date added up, too. I searched Toni Patterson and confirmed that she’d graduated from the university in 1996. So she wasn’t a student when she worked at Blueberry Hill, but close.

Aidan, meanwhile, was typing furiously, slamming on the enter key, and typing more.