Laura glanced at Nate; he was scribbling something down, so she took the initiative of asking the next question. “Do you know if she kept a list of her students at all?”
“Oh, God,” Vicky said, shaking her head. It was more of a helpless gesture than a denial. “Suzie was never into that kind of organizational stuff. She hated making people stick to schedules and promises, said it made them quit too early. But if she did have a list, I guess it would be on her laptop.”
“Could we take a look at that laptop?” Laura asked, seizing onto this very real possibility of a lead.
“Yes, it’s… oh, it’s over there somewhere, I think,” Vicky said, gesturing vaguely behind Laura.
Laura turned, shifting in her seat and then getting up to examine a side table. It was littered with all kinds of things – unopened mail, newspapers from a few days ago, takeout menus. But there was the silver edge of something poking out, and Laura carefully lifted everything to reveal a slim laptop covered in stickers bearing the logo of the community center.
“Was there anything notable you can think of in the last days, weeks, or even months?” Nate asked. “Anything strange? A change in Suzie’s mood or behavior? Someone suspicious that she might have told you about?”
“Nothing like that,” Vicky said, shaking her head as Laura sat back down beside her. She opened the lid of the laptop, and it turned on; she was glad it still had battery life. “I’ve been racking my brains all night, I really have. I just can’t think of anything.”
Laura’s relief at seeing the machine turn on was thwarted by the sight of a login screen. A smiling face in the center of it – Suzanna’s, she recognized – proved that it was her laptop, but the password box was ominously empty.
“Do you know the password?” Laura asked, holding the screen so that Vicky could see it. She reached out to pull it closer to her, belying her short-sightedness, and their hands brushed as she did so. Laura felt a small pulse in her temple, a jolt of pain that was hardly big enough to be registered, but it was there.
“No, sorry,” Vicky said, but Laura could already feel herself fading –
She was watching Vicky on a hillside somewhere, green scrub around her feet. She had a little more weight on her bones, her hair longer and better cut. There was color back in her cheeks. She was clutching a large vase against her chest.
Not a vase – an urn.
“Alright, sister,” she said out loud, though Laura could see no one else around in the vision. “I know this place meant so much to you. I hope you’ll be happy here, up in the hills. Watching it all go on below you.”
She opened the lid of the urn and then turned, assessing the wind. Her hair blew gently into her face as she lined herself up in the right direction and then tipped the urn, letting ash flow out into the breeze to scatter across the hillside.
“There you go,” Vicky said, her voice brittle but still bright. “I hope you appreciate this, you silly, wonderful woman. I could get arrested if they come out here in time to catch me. I’d better get off and leave you to it.”
She turned, and that was when Laura saw it spread out below her, unfamiliar from this angle but still recognizable. The tops of huge white letters propped up on metal stilts.
The Hollywood sign.
Laura blinked as the vision left her. She moved the laptop back to her own lap, a motion started before the vision took over and easily completed when it disappeared. Neither of them would have noticed anything more than perhaps a slow blink as she navigated the vision.
She looked down at the keyboard. It was old and worn, a shiny spot right in the center of the space bar where a couple of thumbs no doubt often rested. But there were other keys worn down, too. All of the vowels had a good amount of shine on them, which was normal enough. But for the ‘H’ key, and the ‘D’, and especially the ‘W’ – that was much more unusual.
She typed in ‘Hollywood’ to the password bar, and th
e screen cleared.
“I’m in,” she said, surprising even herself.
“How did you get that?” Vicky asked, her voice holding utter astonishment and disbelief.
“It’s what you just told me,” Laura said quickly. “I looked at which keys showed the most wear and tear and put two and two together. Hollywood. The password was her favorite place.”
She glanced up unwillingly, and saw Nate looking right at her.
Frowning.
“That was a lucky guess,” Vicky exclaimed.
“Very lucky,” Laura agreed, bending her head back to the screen. There were a number of documents saved to the desktop, placed in what looked like a haphazard order. One of them was a spreadsheet named ‘CC’ and Laura tilted her head in consideration.
CC for Community Center?
“Let’s take a look at this,” she said, double clicking the file to open it. If it wasn’t easy to find, they could bring it back to the precinct, ask the Captain to put one of his tech experts on it – if he had one – and then…