The Good Lie by A.R. Torre

CHAPTER 13

I sat at my desk and took my time with the first few pages of Gabe’s file, examining the photos and screenshots taken from his social media accounts. From the looks of things, he seemed to be a nice guy. No rude responses or asshole posts. According to the file, he had no known enemies, though I was curious how hard the detectives looked at motives, given that his disappearance was casebook BH. Attractive senior. Rich family. Everything going right in his life until one day, when Robert’s son was . . .

Gone.

Gabe had disappeared on a Wednesday. He’d left school around four, according to the CCTV feed by the exit gate of his expensive private school. The camera had captured video of his classic 1969 Mustang, which had pulled left without a turn signal and dropped out of view. The next sighting of the lean soccer star had been at an In-N-Out drive-through, where he’d ordered a Double-Double combo with a large 7UP.

At that point, it was unclear where he went. His Mustang was found in a back parking lot of the Beverly Center mall, in an area not covered by cameras. Its interior was useless, covered in prints from hundreds of different individuals. It was, as one detective noted, probably easier to figure out who hadn’t been in his car than who had. There was no blood inside the Mustang, and the keys were left under the front seat.

Cell triangulations bounced all over the map, and his phone was finally discovered in the back of a stranger’s pickup truck, the driver unaware of its presence.

Gabe had—like five teenage boys before him—just vanished into the city.

I settled back in my chair and pulled out my center drawer, retrieving the bag of gummy bears I kept there. I pulled a green one away from the others.

I didn’t know a lot about Gabe’s disappearance. While I had read practically every news article posted, by that point, the media was starting to tire of the deaths. They were all so similar. Good-looking, smart, athletic, and rich. And, one after another, they were dead. By the time Gabe vanished, Los Angelenos had all become a little calloused at what they knew would inevitably turn up: a naked and mutilated body.

As a city, they stopped caring because they were emotionally exhausted from the mourning. They started to look the other way, grew blind to missing-person posters and bored with the huge rewards and tearful pleas from the families.

I sucked on a red gummy bear. The city and media may have grown bored, but I never had. I’d devoured everything about the murders.

Settling back in my chair, I turned the page, surprised to find that its focus was on Gabe’s family. His mother had died seven years earlier, and I hunched forward, ignoring the chime of the coffee maker. In watching the news reports, I had missed his motherless status. I thought of Robert, sans wedding ring, mentions of his late wife fleeting and detail-free. This felt like a major fact to skip over, especially given her cause of death. Gunshot wound. I stared at the words on the police report, blinking at it just in case my eyes were lying.

Well, that was interesting.