Ninth Key by Meg Cabot

by his name. Maybe he’d come then.”
    “Okay.” Adam pulled up his chinos. “What’s his name?”
    “Um,” I said. “Spike.”
    “Spike.” Adam looked heavenward. “A cat called Spike. This I can’t wait to see. Here, Spike. Here, Spikey, Spikey, Spikey…”
    “Hey, you guys.” CeeCee came toward us waving her laptop in the air.
    I’d enlisted CeeCee’s help as well as Adam’s, only with a project of a different nature. All of my new friends, I’d discovered, had different talents and abilities. Adam’s lay primarily in the fact that he owned a car, but CeeCee’s strengths lay in her superlative research skills…and what’s more, in the fact that she actually
liked
looking stuff up. I’d asked her to look up what she could on Thaddeus Beaumont Senior, and she’d obliged. She’d been sitting in the car cruising the Net with the help of the remote modem she’d gotten for her birth-day — have I mentioned that everyone in Carmel, with the exception of myself, is way rich? — while Adam and I looked for Tim’s cat.
    “Hey,” CeeCee said. “Get a load of this.” She skimmed something she’d downloaded. “I ran the name Thaddeus Beaumont through a search engine, and came up with dozens of hits. Thaddeus Beaumont is listed as CEO, partner, or investor in over thirty land development projects — most of which, by the way, are commercial ventures, like cineplexes, strip malls, or health clubs — on the Monterey peninsula alone.”
    “What does that mean?” Adam asked.
    “It means that if you add up the number of acres owned by companies that list Thaddeus Beaumont as either an investor or a partner, he becomes roughly the largest land owner in northern California.”
    “Wow,” I said. I was thinking about the prom. I bet a guy who owned that much land could afford to rent his son a stretch limo for the night. Dorky, I know, but I’d always wanted to ride in one.
    “But he doesn’t really own all that land,” Adam pointed out. “The companies do.”
    “Exactly,” CeeCee said.
    “Exactly what do you mean by ‘exactly’?”
    “Well,” CeeCee said, “just that it might explain why it is that the guy hasn’t been hauled into court for suspicion of murder.”
    “Murder?” Suddenly, I forgot all about the prom. “What about a murder?”
    “
A
murder?” CeeCee spun her laptop around so that we could see the screen. “We’re talking multiple murders. Although technically, the victims have all been listed only as missing.”
    “What are you
talking
about?”
    “Well, after I made a list of all of the companies affiliated with Thaddeus Beaumont, I entered each company name into that same search engine and came up with a couple of pretty disturbing things. Look here.” CeeCee had pulled up a map of the Carmel Valley. She highlighted the areas she was talking about as she mentioned them. “See this property here? Hotel and spa. See how close it is to the water? That was a no-building zone. Too much erosion. But RedCo — that’s the name of the corporation that bought the land, RedCo, get it? — used some pull down at city hall and got a permit anyway. Still, this one environmentalist warned RedCo that any building they put up there would not only be dangerously unstable, but would endanger the seal population that hangs out on the beach below it. Well, check this out.”
    CeeCee’s fingers flew over her keyboard. A second later, a picture of a weird-looking guy with a goatee filled the screen, along with what looked like a newspaper story. “The environmentalist who was making such a fuss over the seals disappeared four years ago, and no one has seen him since.”
    I squinted at the computer screen. It was hard to see in the strong sunlight. “What do you mean, disappeared?” I asked. “Like, he died?”
    “Maybe. Nobody knows. His body was never found if he was killed,” CeeCee said. “But check this out.” Her fingers did some quick rat-tat-tatting. “Another