“Gosh, what will I do with my time? Actually live my own life?” I asked, trying to sound deadpan, but probably only sounding as sore as I felt. “Can we do this now?” I leaned over him and jiggled the mouse to wake up the computer. He turned and poised his fingers over the keyboard.

“So tell me what I’m doing exactly,” he said.

“I need you to look up a license plate with the letters VP. If we can find out who owns that truck, maybe we can find Luna.”

“We’re back to ‘we’ now.”

“Well, we were a ‘we’ the night she got away, which I would tell you, if you’d let me. I know you’re the police, but I have an interest in finding her, too.”

“Obviously. She shot at you.”

“Right. And . . . she’s done a lot more since then.”

He was quiet for a minute. He leaned back in his chair; it squeaked under his weight. “Okay,” he finally said, sitting forward and pulling up a database. “VP?”

“Right.”

He did some more typing and then leaned back again. “There is no plate that’s just VP. You sure there weren’t numbers with it? Maybe more letters?”

I eased down on the corner of his desk. Candy cane and mustard. That was it. Candy cane and mustard. V and P. Nothing else. “That’s not possible,” I whispered.

“You sure it was a California plate?”

California. A radiant gold word with peach highlights. I hadn’t realized I’d seen that—I was in too much of a panic—but now that I thought about it, it was there. The radiant gold with peach highlights, framing the V and P.

“Yes. It was definitely a California plate. Look again.”

He turned his palms up near the keyboard. “I don’t need to. It’s right here. You must have seen it wrong.”

I shook my head, disbelieving. Had I been seeing what I expected to see? Had my synesthesia gotten jumbled up, mixing the photo of the man with the VP belt buckle I’d found in my dad’s desk with Luna’s getaway car? It was possible. My synesthesia had steered me wrong before. But I had started to trust it—to really trust it—and it had been working for me. Was there nothing I could trust?