Turning Angel

  I set my portfolio on the coffee table. It still contains Kate’s private journal and Marko Bakic’s flash drive. My plan is to have Mia try to put a time line to the list of men and boys in Kate’s “hook-ups” lists, but only after Lucien leaves.

  “Can we order tea or something?” Mia asks.

  “Order whatever you want. Drew’s paying for it.”

  She picks up the hotel phone and dials room service. She starts to order, then stops in midsentence and pulls her cell phone from her jeans pocket. It must have vibrated. She asks the room service clerk to hold on, then checks a text message. Her mouth opens in surprise.

  “What?” I ask.

  She puts her finger to her lips, then she pulls me into the next room.

  “No arguing in front of the children?” Lucien calls.

  Mia holds up her phone and shows me the blue LCD screen. It reads: Rave 2nite. Square 1 tracetown movie theater. Heard marko coming with KAs from ole miss and killer d.j. from memphis. Leaving now with stacey.

  “What’s Square 1?”

  “That’s where the first clue will be.”

  I recall Sonny’s description of the complicated security precautions that precede a rave. Kids are prompted by various riddles or poems to drive from place to place until they’re sure no one is following them. Then they’re told the location of the drug party.

  “What do you think?” Mia asks, her eyes sparkling. “You want to go?”

  I glance back toward the other room, but what I see in my mind is the LCD screen. Heard marko coming…“Yes. I want to go.”

  Mia grins. “Yeah!”

  “What about Lucien?”

  “He sleeps at school, not at home. For five hundred bucks, he’ll come back later.”

  “I heard that,” Lucien croons.

  “Well?” I ask, walking back into the main room of the suite. “Can you come back later?”

  Lucien slaps the Enter key, then stands and steps away from the keyboard. “No need. Job’s done.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He smiles, revealing small white teeth. “I don’t kid about work.”

  “I gave you two drives.”

  “That was the second one. View them at your leisure. No password, no problems, and yes, I take cash.”

  I take out my wallet and remove five one-hundred-dollar bills. “I’d like you to look at one other drive, Lucien.”

  “No problem. It’ll cost extra, though.”

  “I pay for results.” I open the portfolio on the coffee table and remove the flash drive I stole from Marko’s garage apartment. This one’s a Sony, not a Lexar, but Lucien seems unconcerned.

  “We really need to go,” Mia says.

  “What’s the hurry?” asks Lucien.

  I give Mia a pointed look. “This is important.”

  Lucien takes the drive and slides it into the USB port. Mia stands on tiptoe and whispers in my ear, “The clue won’t be there long. If we’re late, we’ll miss the party. And Marko.”

  “We really need this. And Lucien’s fast.”

  “Not this time,” he says. “There’s a separate encryption program hiding whatever’s on this drive. It looks like military-grade stuff. Where did you get this?”

  I should have known Marko would take precautions. What did Paul tell me? In Sarajevo, Marko became the consummate survivor. “You don’t need to know that. Can you hack it or not?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe an hour, maybe a year. If I took it home—”

  “You can’t take it home.”

  “Then I guess I’ll see what I can do.”

  “We’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  “Can I order room service?” Lucien asks with a smile. “I missed supper.”

  “Get whatever you want.”

  The smile turns beatific. “I hope they have a wine list.”

  Riding north on Highway 61 in the passenger seat of Mia’s Honda Accord, I’m scrunched underneath a St. Stephen’s letter blanket that Mia pulled from her trunk—to facilitate my “being shady,” as she calls it. For the past forty-five minutes, I’ve been living a scene out of a screwball comedy from the 1960s, updated with touches from 1970s car-chase movies. After Mia read the doggerel verse taped to the ticket window of the old theater, we joined a convoy of jacked-up pickup trucks, handed-down family sedans, and high-end foreign sports coupes. These vehicles charged from place to place to find and unravel successive clues, dodging in and out of traffic and smashing beer bottles against road signs. My heart nearly stopped when I saw one high school boy leap from the bed of one pickup truck to another at seventy miles per hour.

  Dave Matthews is playing softly on Mia’s CD player. She drives with one hand, while the other sends and receives text messages on her cell phone in an Olympic-caliber display of manual dexterity. Using the LED penlight on my key ring, I’ve been reviewing Kate’s “hook-ups” lists in her journal, and asking Mia to give me a time line on the names. Mia has laughed at some names and dropped her jaw at others. One made her curse and tense in her seat. The story behind this was simple enough.

  “Kate stole my boyfriend in ninth grade,” she told me. “Chris Anthony. It was just after she got back from England. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but she did it behind my back. They saw each other for like six weeks before someone told me. When I confronted Kate, she wouldn’t even discuss it. She acted like I was a total loser. Beneath her notice. I know that sounds trivial, but it hurt. We didn’t speak for over a year.”

  “Is that the root of your competitiveness?” I asked.

  Mia kept her eyes doggedly on the road. “Part of it, I guess. Doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  Mia knew almost every name on Kate’s hook-ups lists, and the picture that emerged from her time analysis was that Kate had been promiscuous during junior high and the early part of high school—before she began having intercourse—but beginning in the summer before the eleventh grade, she’d dated Steve Sayers exclusively. Two of the names Mia didn’t know had notations beside them indicating they had occurred while Kate was living in England. Only two names seemed remotely worth checking out as people Kate might have “cheated on” Drew to see, and thereby become the object of jealousy that led to murder.

  Mia got her shocks from Kate’s “rejected” and “rejected by” lists. The fact that Kate had tried to seduce a girl named Laurel Goodrich made Mia gasp. The adults on Kate’s list didn’t surprise her, though. She agreed with Kate’s assessment of Mr. Dawson, the religion teacher, as a “perv.” The rejected “Dr. Davenport” turned out to be a psychologist who had commuted to Natchez for part of one year. The “Dr. Lewis” who had apparently rebuffed Kate’s advances was her longtime psychiatrist, who practiced in New Orleans. “Mr. Marbury” was a gymnastics coach who had worked with the cheerleaders for two summers. Mia seemed quite happy that he’d refused Kate’s attentions. When I read Wade Anders’s name from the list, Mia wrinkled her brow and turned to me.

  “Kate says Coach Anders came on to her? Not the other way around?”

  “Well, he’s under the ‘rejected’ column.”

  “Huh.”

  “What do you think about Coach Anders?”

  “Wade’s okay. He’s never hit on me.”

  “He told me a lot of girls have come on to him in his office.”

  Mia nodded. “Some girls think he’s hot—or they did before he gained that weight, anyway.” She laughed softly. “He did say something about my butt once.”

  “What?”

  “No way.”

  “Come on.”

  “God.” She bowed her head as though mortified. “He said I had a ghetto bootie.”

  I grabbed the wheel to keep us on the road. “Meaning?”

  “You know…a butt like a black chick.”

  I laughed at Mia’s expression of mixed embarrassment and amusement. “Do you have one?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Ye
ah, you kind of do.”

  She burst out laughing.

  “It is a good one, though, I’ll admit that.”

  “It better be,” she said. “I work on it enough.”

  Now that we’ve covered the hook-ups lists, I’m reviewing the other entries in the journal, looking for things Mia might be able to clarify. Her cell phone has chirped a hundred times with text messages, but this time when she checks the phone, she pumps her hand in triumph. “Got it!”

  “What?”

  “The last square. The party.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Oakfield.”

  I can’t believe it. I figured the rave would happen in the middle of nowhere. Oakfield is an eighty-acre antebellum estate north of town, the site of one of the most beautiful Italianate mansions in the Natchez area. “That’s a three-million-dollar house.”

  Mia glances at me. “Is it?”

  “Easily.”

  “Janie Moffitt’s grandparents own it. They’re out of town.”

  “How many kids do you think will be there?” I figure I’ve already seen forty to fifty en route to the party.

  “There were a couple of hundred at the lake party. And with the terrible stuff that’s been happening, I have a feeling everybody will come to this one. X gives you that sense of total empathy, you know? Oneness with everybody. I think that’s what everyone’s looking for right now. Some way to share what they’re feeling.”

  “If I weren’t here, would you take Ecstasy tonight?”

  Mia glances over at me. “I might take some anyway.”

  The convoy turns left on Airport Road, which leads into the northwest part of the county. When I was in high school, we held a lot of informal parties under a tin-roofed pavilion near the airport. There was little danger of discovery, since the Natchez airport didn’t have commercial service (and still doesn’t). But Oakfield is truly high cotton. In California the estate would cost forty million dollars. The convoy slows, then turns onto the narrow lane that leads to the mansion.

  “Get down,” Mia says. “I see the gate.”

  The Accord slows to a stop, then creeps forward. From my nearly fetal position, I spy the head of a lion mounted on a tall stone gatepost. Mia jerks the blanket over my head and shoves me toward the floor with surprising strength.

  “Mia!” yells a male voice. “S’up?”

  “You’re up, Jamie.”

  “You all by yourself?”

  “As always.”

  “It’s a crime, man.”

  “Do I get in?”

  “Hell, yeah. I want to dance with you. Be careful, though. It’s wild down there.”

  Mia starts to drive off, but Jamie calls, “Hold up!”

  She skids to a stop on gravel.

  “I almost forgot,” Jamie says, giggling. “Don’t forget this.”

  It sounds as though something is changing hands at the window.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Mia says, and then she drives on.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  She shoves something under the blanket. “There you go, baby.”

  I click on my penlight and see a yellow-and-white pacifier in her hand. From my years in Houston, I know the significance of the pacifier. MDMA—or “X”—makes abusers grind their teeth. Ravers use pacifiers to prevent sore jaws the morning after, and also to prevent damage to their teeth.

  “Wow,” Mia says almost reverently.

  “What is it?”

  “Look outside. But be careful.”

  I raise my head above the door frame. The rolling hills of Oakfield are flickering under multicolored spotlights. Tents of various sizes have been set up around the estate, and pounding techno rock rolls down from the mansion atop the hill on our left. Sixty yards ahead, a huge crowd of teenagers dances in front of a lighted stage. Pickup trucks and four-wheelers race over the hills in all directions, ramping into the air while kids in the beds behind scream and laugh.

  “Is this how these things usually go?” I ask.

  Raucous male laughter followed by a female screech pierces my right ear. As I turn, three naked girls sprint toward Mia’s car, chased by two shirtless boys in blue jeans. One of the boys is spraying beer at the girls from a large bottle, while the other shoots at them with a battery-powered water gun. The first girl slams headlong into Mia’s right fender, then spins and darts across her headlight beams into the darkness on the other side of the road. A second girl follows, but the third falls laughing to the ground. The two boys fall beside or on top of her.

  “No,” Mia says softly. “This is not the usual thing.” She starts forward again, bringing us closer to the dancing throng. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want to talk to Marko. Will the kids freak out if I get out and walk around this party?”

  “They won’t freak, but it’ll get around that there’s somebody old here. They’ll probably ask you to leave.”

  “Park in the dark, then. But put me where I can see the main action.”

  She turns off the long driveway into a pit of blackness on the left. The Accord bumps up and down, then stops. “You want me to hunt for Marko?” she asks.

  “If you’re up for it.”

  “What if I find him? Do I just tell him you want to talk to him?”

  Actually, I haven’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t know.”

  “Does he know you?”

  “He knows me. But if you can get him over this way without letting him know what’s up, that would be good.”

  Mia studies me in the dashboard lights. “You mean pretend that I want to hook up with him.”

  “If that’s not too scary, I guess so. I’ll take over as soon as I see you. You could ring my cell to give me a heads-up. One ring and I’ll see your ID.”

  “Okay,” she says finally. “But I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Nobody’s seen Marko for two days.” She reaches for her door handle.

  I take her right wrist and squeeze it. “Thanks, Mia.”

  “No problem,” she says, but she’s not smiling.

  And then she is gone.

  Someone is knocking on my door. I grab for the Browning in my jacket pocket, trying to remember where I am.

  “Are you going to shoot me?” Mia asks, sliding into the driver’s seat. The smell of alcohol wafts through the car. “You fell asleep, didn’t you?”

  “I guess so. Sorry.”

  I didn’t tell her I was carrying a gun tonight, but she did give my coat a second look back at the hotel. It’s close to seventy degrees outside. “What about Marko?”

  “I couldn’t find him.”

  “Has anyone seen him?”

  “A lot of people saw him earlier. He was apparently up onstage with the DJ, dancing and talking to the crowd. He dedicated a song to Kate and Chris.”

  “But nobody knows where he is?”

  “No. He might be in one of the tents, but I’m not going in there for you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m just not.”

  “What’s going on inside them? Drugs? What?”

  Mia gives me a hard look. “The kind of sex I’m not into, probably.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to go. I just wanted to know.”

  She leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. She sounds a little out of breath.

  “Did you take any Ecstasy?” I ask.

  “No. I was kidding before. I don’t do drugs. I had a couple of vodka shots, just talking to people.”

  “What’s the general state of the crowd?”

  “Up by the stage it’s mellow. Everybody’s hugging and holding hands. Out on the edges it’s out of control. The rednecks in the trucks are doing crystal meth. I saw a fight down by one of the ponds. Some of the girls are really drunk. Incomprehensible. That’s who winds up in the tents.”

  I roll down my window to let the breeze blow across my face. “Do anybody’s parents have any idea what’s going on out here?”

  “I don’t think so. But they mi
ght by next week. I saw flashbulbs going off in one tent. You get naked out here, you’ll wind up on the Internet for sure.”

  “Shit.”

  Mia leans forward and pulls her hair into a ponytail, then puts an elastic band around it. “What do you want to do now?”

  “Let’s get back to the hotel and see what’s on Kate’s flash drives. We’re not doing Drew any good out here.”

  She nods and starts the car.

  “Hang on,” I tell her, opening my door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “It’s a long ride back.”

  “Oh. Don’t wander off.”

  I walk a few yards down the hill, away from the car. As I unzip my pants, a truck rolls slowly up the drive. To escape its beams, I walk farther down the hill, toward a tall oak with low, spreading branches. After the truck’s headlights sweep past, I open my fly and begin urinating. I’m nearly done when a strangely musical voice seems to fall from the sky.

  “My little bird likes what she sees.”

  I jump backward and nearly piss on my leg. High-pitched laughter echoes through the dark.

  “Who’s there?” I ask anxiously.

  “Up here,” says the voice.

  I look up. Lying in the bow of a horizontal oak limb is a shirtless teenager who looks a lot like Marko Bakic. Seated beside him, her bare legs hanging down in the air, is a girl who looks no older than fifteen. Alicia Reynolds. She’s shirtless, too, her breasts barely covered by a push-up bra. The white ring of a pacifier dangles from her puckered mouth.

  “You can finish,” she says, giggling around the pacifier. “I’ve already seen it, anyway.”

  The shirtless boy grins like the Cheshire Cat. “Mr. Cage, right?”

  The East European accent is unmistakable. It’s Marko, all right. I take a step forward and look up at him. “Hello, Marko.”

  “What brings you out here tonight, man? You looking to get high?”

  “I came to see you, actually.”

  The smile doesn’t waver. “Yeah?”

  “How can he just stop peeing like that?” asks the girl. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Go get yourself another drink,” Marko tells her, never taking his eyes off me.

  “I don’t want another drink.”

  “Get lost, then. You can take this with you.”