by Wendy Heard
I started the coffeemaker, leaned against the counter, and opened Google, intending to see if Nico had done something bad on Coronado Island. Before I could search for anything, my eyes landed on a San Diego news Google card that read “Another Deadly Prank: Connection to Death at Gala? Police Investigating.”
There it was. My whole body felt cold.
I opened the article. The picture had to have been taken within the last half hour, at sunrise, of Coronado Bridge. It was an aerial shot by helicopter or drone, and it showed a section of the bridge where a black net had been stretched between two of the enormous concrete columns. A capsized fishing boat was tangled in the net, swarmed by smaller Coast Guard motorboats. On the exterior of the bridge, above the net, FISHING FOR PEOPLE was spray painted in fire-engine red.
Nico’s words came back to me like he was whispering them in my ear. Part Four: Fishing for People. The ocean takes back what is hers.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered.
Last year, when Nico had first become interested in environmentally themed installation pieces, he’d floated the concept of disrupting commercial fishing by catching the boats in the nets they used for fish (and sometimes dolphins, whales, and sharks). When he added it as a title to one of the installations in the series, I’d thought it was great. Badass, actually.
I hadn’t understood. Not really. I’d never understood how far he’d go.
I scrolled through the article, which detailed exactly what I could already imagine: The net was installed at night, it was black, and a boat drove right into it as it left for its usual predawn fishing excursion. My eyes froze on a paragraph a third of the way down.
“Reports on this are unclear, but it seems that one of the perpetrators of the stunt either fell, jumped, or was pushed off the bridge in order to get the boat to steer in the right direction. The boat, which had changed course to maneuver through the bridge from a different angle, made a sharp left to help this person, at which point it became tangled in the net and capsized. All four crew members and the unknown person who fell from the bridge are dead.”
Who fell off the bridge?
God, please let it not be Mick, please God, I prayed, scanning through the article. They didn’t have any names listed.
First Lily. Now either Mick or David.
Please don’t be Mick.
So was I wishing for it to be David?
I realized I wasn’t even considering the possibility that it had been Nico.
Heart pounding, I did a frantic search for Coronado Bridge and fishing for people and anything else I could think of, but there was only the same information rephrased on twenty different news sites.
I tried googling Micaela Young. If it was Mick who’d fallen off the bridge, maybe they’d have something in the news with her listed by name. What I found instead was a whole string of articles that had come out last night from high-profile newspapers like the LA Times, the Guardian, and every other online magazine in between. Apparently Mick was officially listed as a missing person now. I clicked on the LA Times link, my chest shaky and afraid.
“Subject of Celebrated Photograph Missing After Deadly Gala,” the headline read.
“Fuck,” I heard myself whimper. Oh God. I was in so much trouble.
The police were investigating this blind; their facts were all wrong, and I was the only one who could help them.
The fire didn’t matter anymore. This was enough. People were dead. The police needed to know.
I ran upstairs to my mom’s room. I knocked on her door. “Mom? Are you up?”
“Veronica?” Her voice was groggy.
I opened the door. “Mom. Can you get up? Something’s happening.”
* * *
My mom got dressed fast, her face closed down with fury.
“You’ve known this whole time?” She yanked a pair of jeans on over her underwear. “You knew it was Nico doing all those things and you helped him and you didn’t say a goddamn thing?”
I nodded.
“Get dressed. We’re going to the police station, we’re talking to Salcedo, but then you and I are having a different conversation.”
“I know.” I left her and went to my room. I threw on a pair of jeans and an old T-shirt. I brushed my hair out, brushed my teeth, and returned to my mom’s room.
“Get me a coffee to go,” she ordered. “And start the car. Pull up directions to the central police station. I think it’s on Imperial.” Her voice dripped with disgust.
I went downstairs, tears spilling onto my cheeks. I pushed them aside. I deserved all of it.
I made her coffee, searched for the police station on Google Maps, got her keys out of her purse, and opened the front door.
I stopped.
On the sidewalk in front of our house, a group of people were milling around. When they saw me, they lifted professionalgrade cameras to their eyes and started yelling things at me.
“Do you know where Micaela is?”
“How do you feel, with your girlfriend missing?”
“Do you think she’s been kidnapped by the same people who attacked Congressman Osgood?”
Their voices swelled up in a chorus, and I stumbled back through the front door. I kicked it shut in front of me. My chest was heaving.
“What’s wrong?” My mom was trotting down the stairs.
“There are reporters out there.”
“Reporters?” She scowled. She pushed past me and pulled the front door open. They started shouting questions again. She looked back and forth between me and them. “You dug your hole,” she told me. She snatched the coffee and keys. “Come on, girl. Out we go.”
I followed her, trying to ignore the questions and the clicks of their cameras. In the car, my mom turned the key in the ignition violently and shifted into reverse. “They better get off my property,” she muttered. She honked her horn. They still blocked her in. She rolled down her window. “Move your asses!” she yelled, beginning to back up. They stepped aside, and she rocketed out of the driveway.
The drive through the bright, clean summer morning to the police station was silent. I wondered if Mick was dead. Bright sun and death. Palm trees and fear.
She parked in the police station lot, and I followed her inside. She found someone at a desk and said, “I’m looking for Detective Salcedo. He knows us.”
We were told to wait, and I contemplated the toes of my checkered Vans while she seethed.
Salcedo only kept us waiting a few minutes. He trotted out from a back hallway and said, “Claudia, Veronica. What can I do for you?”
His face was unshaven, and it occurred to me that he must not have slept much. My mom said, “Can we speak with you? Veronica’s just told me some things I think you need to hear.”
He led us past desks and people waiting in line, into a small room with a table and a couple of chairs. He shut the door behind us and sat in a chair, gesturing that we should sit across from him. “How can I help you?”
My mom waved her hand at me. “Go on, then. Tell him what you told me.”
I looked down at my hands in my lap. “I know more about the whole thing than I told you.”
“Aha!” To my mom, he said, “Teenagers.” To me, he said, “Go ahead, honey.”
I scowled at the honey. “My best friend, Nico. He’s—” I felt like such a traitor despite everything. “He’s the guy who’s been doing all the stuff to the congressman. He’s an artist. He does what he calls disruptive installation art. Kind of like a fine art Banksy. It was his crew that did the install—that did the thing at the gala. And it was his crew last night that did the Fishing for People. Lily works with him. She’s a street artist. He has two other people with him.” I looked up at him, and then at my mom. I hadn’t told her this yet. “One of the people with him is named David. And the other one is Mick.”
“Are you kidding me?” my mom cried. “They’re searching for her, thinking she’s a missing person, and this whole time she’s with Nico?”
>
“Mom, stop, let me finish. One of them died last night; I saw it on the news. They were on Coronado Bridge doing another install. I need to know if that person is Mick. Please,” I begged Salcedo.
Salcedo sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s Nico’s full name?”
“Nico Varalica.” I spelled it for him. “I think Nico might be short for Nicolas. Obviously.”
“Is that Italian?”
“No, I think his family is Croatian. I’ve never met them. They’re not close.”
“Age?”
“Nineteen.”
“You know for a fact that Mick has been hanging out with your friend Nico since the gala?”
I nodded.
“How do you know?”
“I followed them,” I mumbled.
“You did what?” my mom shrieked. “When?”
“Yesterday, when I had your car.”
Her rage was mounting. I could count down the seconds until she started yelling at me. Three, two, one—
Salcedo cut her off. “Sorry, Claudia. I’ll let you have her back when we’re done. Veronica, the person who fell or was pushed off the bridge was not Mick. It was a young man. Do you know who that could have been? We don’t have any ID.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed, the relief flooding my body like a drug. I put my face in my hands. “It was David, then.”
“Or Nico,” my mom said.
“It wasn’t Nico,” I told her.
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
Salcedo interrupted. “It was a tall Caucasian man with blond hair and a beard.”
“David,” I confirmed, disgusted with myself for the relief I felt. How was David’s life worth less than hers? He was a sweet guy, straightforward, kind, gentle.
But then … what was Mick’s role in all this? With Nico? Was she with him willingly, or had he, like, made her help him? The idea of him forcing her to help was appealing. I hadn’t considered it before now.
Salcedo leaned forward across the table, his face molded into a reassuring expression. “You said you followed them yesterday. Tell me more about that.”
“I followed them from Nico’s warehouse to Coronado Bridge. My mom called me to come home, so I left, and that’s when I saw you.”
“Do you have the address of the warehouse?”
I pulled it up on my Uber history and showed it to him. He typed it into his phone. I said, “If you’re going there, I should go with you. It’s complicated; there’s a weird side door that’s always locked, and the people who live there aren’t exactly the kind that will be helpful to police. I have a key.”
“We can’t break in, even if you have a key,” he cautioned. “Someone has to let us inside.”
“That’s fine. They know me.”
He considered for a moment, then stood. “Let’s go.”
My mom stood too. He looked back and forth between us and said, “I’m going to ask you a favor, Claudia. Can I take Veronica without you?”
My mom frowned. “Why?”
“Honestly? Because I want to ask her some more questions in the car, and I want to make sure she’s not filtering out stuff she doesn’t want her mom knowing about.”
My mom seemed to consider that.
“It’s informal, off the record, and as a witness only.”
My mom nodded. To me she said, “Don’t try and protect Nico or Mick. Just tell Salcedo whatever he needs to know.”
He excused himself to talk to some other cops and arrange backup.
“I feel like I don’t even know you,” she said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
MICK
Nico takes a hard left turn, sending me sprawling across the floor onto a pile of cardboard. The refrigerated compartment gets colder and colder as the vent spews tornados of freezing air down onto me.
There has to be a failsafe, some sort of mechanism to keep people from getting locked in here. I’ve seen those in walk-in coolers in restaurants I’ve worked in, a little white button you can press. I search the door, the walls, but there’s nothing like that. I’m shivering so hard my teeth are chattering.
The van slows, bumping along an uneven surface, and then stops. I press my ear to the door, straining to hear what’s going on. Faintly, I catch the familiar sound of the creaky warehouse door rolling up.
The van moves forward again, and then I feel him put on the parking brake and hear the rolling metal slide down.
We’re inside.
I can figure this out. I can make a plan. I’m strong and fast. The second he opens that door, I have to launch out, attack his face, make a run for it. I know the layout of this warehouse. It’s a maze of boxes and equipment, and beyond that is the front hallway with the exit out onto the alley. It will just take me a minute to reach the exit, and then I’ll sprint onto the street and get help from the first person I see. He’ll expect me to be timid and afraid. He’s probably getting me cold on purpose to weaken me so it’ll be easier to …
To do what?
A million stories about girls getting raped and murdered fly through my brain. He wouldn’t, would he? If he wanted to do those things to me, he could have attacked me in my sleep while I was crashing on his couch.
And then his voice drifts in, faint above the roar of the fan. “How you doin’ in there, gorgeous?”
I can’t breathe. My chest is tight. My heart is an earthquake. I’m dying to be out of here, but at the same time, I’m praying, Don’t open it, don’t open it.
The fan drones on and on, and now my entire insides are shivering. It’s getting colder in here by the minute. It’s way colder than a refrigerator; it’s as cold as a freezer.
Oh my God.
He’s not going to take me out of the van to kill me. This is it. This is him killing me. He’s freezing me to death. This isn’t a refrigerator van; it’s a freezer van.
Why? Why?
It doesn’t matter why. I have to get out. Panic and claustrophobia swoop through me. My hands are numb; my face feels like I’ve been injected with Novocain.
I have to think. I have to be a lot smarter than I have been. I have to get Nico to open the door.
What can I use to bargain with him? Do I have anything he wants?
No, nothing. There’s nothing I have, nothing I know—
That’s not true, actually.
It’s a revelation: the roll of film. He doesn’t know I gave it to Veronica.
I’m thinking fast, playing a mental game of chess. It’s a bad idea. Nico seems like he’d be great at chess. But here goes.
I press my hands to the door. “Nico? Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you, pretty girl,” is his muffled reply.
“Are you punishing me for what I did? I’m so sorry. I didn’t think you’d find out.”
Silence.
I pretend to start crying. “I’m sorry!” I scream. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry! What more do I have to do? I’m sure the police won’t find it. If you let me out, I can try to fix it!”
That should get him nice and curious. He’s still quiet. I call, “I can probably get it back. I bet I can. If you just give me a chance, I’ll get it back for you. Please.”
“Get what back?” His voice is low and close. He’s just on the other side.
I almost jump up and down. It’s working! I take a deep breath and say, “Wait, what?”
“Get what back, Mick?”
God, his voice is scary. My heart is pounding, my body shivering with cold sweat. I say, “I’m so confused. If that’s not what you’re mad at me about, why would you lock me in here?”
“Get what back?”
“Wait, what?” Open the door.
His voice rises, loud against my ear. “What do you need to get back, Mick?”
I pretend to dissolve into incoherent sobbing. “Please,” I blubber. “I can’t. It’s so cold. Please, I’ll get it back. Please just let me out. Please,
Nico, please…” I try to sound hysterical.
He roars with frustration and pounds the door with his fists. I jump back away from it. I hear him rattling the knob, keys jangling. I have one second to prepare. My heart stops beating. My muscles coil, ready to spring. Fight or flight.
The door swings open. His furious face is just below eye level. “What did you do—” he begins, but I round off and kick him in the face. He stumbles backward. I leap out of the van and sprint into the maze of boxes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
VERONICA
Salcedo let me sit in the front seat on the way to Nico’s warehouse. He acted like this was a huge honor, him allowing me to sit next to him unhandcuffed. “You have major trust issues,” I muttered, buckling my seat belt, and he chuckled as he pulled out of the parking lot.
“Hazard of the trade. So, Veronica. How close are you with Nico? Is he your boyfriend?”
I wrinkled my nose at his profile. “No. But seriously? That’s what you thought I wouldn’t tell you in front of my mom?”
“It seemed like the easiest question to start with.” He glanced in the rearview mirror, checking on the squad car that followed us.
I said, “Well, skip to the harder ones.”
“The harder questions, like whether you know if your friend Nico killed this Lily?”
I inhaled sharply. “Of course not!”
“Lily didn’t die in the fall,” Salcedo said casually, turning right onto the freeway ramp. “She was murdered.”
I stared at his profile. “Define murdered.”
“Do you know what it means to garrote someone?”
“No.”
“It’s like strangling someone with wire. She was dead before she hit the ground.”
The image was so visual and visceral, Lily getting strangled with wire, that I thought I was going to throw up. I put a hand to my mouth.
Getting strangled. Passive voice. As if it was something happening to her. No, it was done by someone.
Like he was reading my mind, Salcedo asked, “Do you think your friend Nico could kill someone this way?”
“No. Jesus Christ, no!” My mind was like a hurricane. Lily, dead like that. David, dead from the fall. Mick, with Nico now. The urgency I felt to get to her and make sure she was safe had tripled. I kept my eyes on the windshield. “Get off at the next exit,” I said after a few minutes. “Turn right. Then left. There. It’s that warehouse on the corner.”
