They were in a neighborhood called Mapleton, on a block where the houses were all narrow clapboards that appeared to be leaning slightly to the left or right. Cap parked across the street from Jamie’s ex-boyfriend’s last known address. The house was a sallow color with brown trim, and there was a window with a curtain drawn on the ground floor, a light on inside.
“Somebody’s home,” said Cap.
They got out of the car and crossed the street. Cap could hear music inside, classic rock, Allman Brothers or something, what Nell would call “old white guy music.” Cap pressed his thumb on the scuffed doorbell button and heard no sound. He and Vega glanced at each other, and he knocked. There was movement inside, footsteps.
“You’ll talk first, I assume?” said Cap. It had been a long time since he’d discussed tactics with a partner.
Vega nodded.
“And you won’t necessarily throw boiling water on his crotch and stuff him in the trunk?”
“Sure,” said Vega.
The peephole darkened.
Then, “Yeah?”
“We’re looking for Alex Chaney,” said Vega to the peephole.
“Who’s looking?”
“Name’s Alice Vega and Max Caplan.”
“You cops?”
“No. Private investigators. This is about two missing girls. You’ve seen it on TV.”
There was a pause. Vega wiggled the fingers on one hand. Then there were locks being unlocked, and Cap got ready. It was a familiar feeling, watching a closed door, waiting to see what was on the other side, but it was rarely good, especially in the middle of the night in a shit part of town.
The door opened an inch; there was a stripe of a man, not big, a white face with black stubble and a bloodshot eye.
“Mr. Chaney?” said Vega.
“Yeah,” he said, looking at both of them up and down. “This about Jamie Brandt’s kids, I don’t know anything about it.”
“I’m sure you don’t. Look, we’re not police. We’re not here to interrogate you or search your property. We’ve been retained by Ms. Brandt’s family. We’re questioning everyone who knows Ms. Brandt and her daughters.”
Chaney looked up at the sky and hesitated.
“A little late,” he said.
“Honestly, Mr. Chaney, we don’t have a lot of time. Every hour that goes by these girls get farther away from us,” said Vega. “We only need about five minutes of your time.”
Another pause. Chaney scratched at his scalp like a cat with a rash. Cap could see Vega’s hand moving again, impatient.
“Yeah, okay,” Chaney said finally. “Long as it doesn’t take too long. I’m about to go to sleep.”
Cap doubted that very much but smiled like a gentleman and followed Chaney in when he opened the door wide.
The room was spare, a futon and a ratty tan couch, a cardboard box between them like a coffee table. There was a huge flat-screen television on a small stand against one wall, and the lockup show about America’s prisons on the screen.
Jamie was right about the homeless person thing. Chaney was like a stick figure in paper doll clothes, with long stringy hair to his shoulders. He picked up a lit cigarette from an ashtray on the cardboard box and brought it to his mouth, inhaled and made a face like it hurt his teeth.
“Do you wanna sit?” he said.
“We’re good,” said Vega. “When’s the last time you saw Jamie Brandt?”
“Month ago maybe, couple of months. Ran into her.”
“When’s the last time you saw her daughters?”
Chaney thought about it. He looked at the floor and blew smoke out in an O.
“Shit, I don’t know. A year ago? When me and Jamie broke up.”
Vega let a few seconds pass before she said anything else, and Cap remembered this feeling. Getting the distinct impression they were being lied to.
“When was that exactly?” Vega said.
“A year ago February. Around Valentine’s Day. Pretty rough.”
He looked imploringly at Vega as if she would understand, being a woman and all.
“And you saw the girls around that time.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone you remember, any friend or acquaintance of Jamie’s stand out to you as someone who had an interest in the girls?”
“No, I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head.
“And when’s the last time you saw the girls?”
Chaney paused, then said, “Uh, year ago.”
Vega paused, and Cap turned to glare at her. Talk quickly right now, he thought. He’ll crack but you have to press. You can’t give him too much time to think. But she wasn’t talking. She just stared at Chaney like he was a Rorschach blot. Cap began to doubt—she was a brawler but maybe interrogation wasn’t her thing.
“So end of March, then?” said Cap.
Chaney and Vega looked at him. He avoided turning to see Vega’s face.
“No, Valentine’s Day, right?” said Chaney.
“You tell us. Did you see them the day you broke up with Ms. Brandt? Or before or after?”
“I don’t really remember when, you know, it was around then.”
“March,” said Cap.
“Yeah,” said Chaney, a light sheet of sweat forming on his forehead. Then he shut his eyes hard. “No, man, February.”
“You were close to them, the girls?”
“No, I mean, sure, they’re good kids, but I wasn’t like a dad to them.”
“Either one of them in particular, Kylie or Bailey?”
Chaney put his hand to his head like he had an ice headache. Okay, thought Cap. Brake.
“Which one were you closer to?”
“Kylie, I guess.”
“You used to bring her cannolis.”
“Yeah, Jamie tell you that?”
Cap nodded. “You had a friendship.”
“Yeah, I brought her stuff like that. She was a good kid. Real funny. One of those kids with a grown-up sense of humor.”
Cap believed him. They were all quiet. Chaney got nervous.
“I don’t know anything about them missing,” he said. He turned around and put out his cigarette in the ashtray. Stamp stamp stamp.
“No one said you did, Mr. Chaney,” said Cap.
“I think those people are degenerates, all right? The ones who mess around with kids. Fucking degenerate motherfuckers.”
He looked at Cap and Vega defiantly, waiting for them to challenge his position on child molesters.
“Can I use your restroom?” said Vega.
“Huh?” said Chaney.
“Restroom.”
“Yeah, down the hall, your right.”
Cap and Vega locked eyes for only a second. He could read nothing in her face, but was it because she was feeling nothing, or she wanted Chaney to see nothing, he could not say. Then she was gone.
“Was Kylie upset that you and Ms. Brandt broke up?” Cap asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” Chaney said.
He had a wistful look. Now this is the truth, Cap thought.
“Yeah, she was sad about it,” he continued.
“What made you think that?” said Cap.
“You know, she was just sad about it. The way kids get sad about things.”
“So when exactly did you see her get sad about it? Was she there when Ms. Brandt broke it off with you?”
Chaney’s eyes shrank in his face.
“No, no,” he said, tripping over the words.
“Was it afterward then? Did you see her after?”
“Yeah, must have been.”
“So then it was less than a year ago when you saw her last. Was it eight months ago, six? Four?”
Chaney shook his head and scratched at his neck.
“No, I don’t know. I just know she was bummed out about me and Jamie.”
“How would you know that, Mr. Chaney, if you hadn’t seen her after you broke up with Ms. Brandt?”
Cap was calm. The situation didn’t need much effort. Press a pen slowly into a water balloon and wait for it to burst.
Vega quickly, quietly, opened Chaney’s medicine cabinet and examined the clusters of bottles on the shelves. NyQuil, Advil, Aleve. She took a ballpoint pen from the inside pocket of her jacket and used it to strip back the beige shower curtain. There was nothing in the bathtub except a brown ring and ashy spots on the floor.
She opened the door to the bathroom slowly and stepped into the hallway, heard Chaney chattering and Caplan’s low tones.
Down the hall was a door with a light on inside. Vega squinted her eyes, saw shadows moving around in the crack under the door. Something was in the room. Here comes Little Bad, said Perry in her head. Vega slid her boots off and walked in her socks on the carpet down the hall. She pulled the doorknob toward her and tried to turn it. Locked. Vega leaned her head back and heard Chaney and Caplan still, Chaney’s voice starting to rise.
She took from her wallet a Costco rewards card that never had belonged to her but that was long and flexible, with beveled laminated edges, and slid it directly in between the wall and the door, right above the doorknob.
She left it there, padded back to the bathroom, flushed the toilet and turned the water on in the sink. Then quickly back to the door with the light and the shadows, held the card tightly between her fingertips, wedged it next to the lock and jimmied it.
The door popped opened, and a black cat with white toes jumped off a table and ran out, sliding against Vega’s shins on the way. Vega was about to lean down and grab the thing by the back of the neck but then she saw what was on the table in the room and thought, Let the girl run.
Cap saw the cat first. It lingered in the doorway for a moment and then curled around the frame into the room.
Chaney was saying: “I don’t have a fucking BlackBerry, okay? I don’t keep track of shit—”
Then he saw the cat and stared at it, froze and pointed to the hallway.
Cap held his hands out, didn’t know what the big deal was with the cat except that it managed to look fed in a druggie’s house.
“Where—” Chaney started to say.
Then Vega came in, taking big strides, and threw something at Chaney’s head. It hit him and bounced to the floor, sounding like a maraca. Cap finally got a good look at it—a sizable prescription pill bottle.
“What the fuck?!” Chaney said, crouching in shock.
Cap looked at Vega expectantly but said nothing. Vega picked the bottle up and showed it to Cap, then shoved it in Chaney’s face and pulled him down to the futon by the shoulder.
“He’s not just a junkie,” she said. “He’s a dealer. He’s got a room back there with six boxes of pills.”
“That’s trespassing!” said Chaney to Cap.
“You let us in, Mr. Chaney,” said Cap.
“The fuck you care I got oxy—you said you weren’t cops.”
“We’re not,” said Cap. “But we can call them right now and draw them a little map to your back room.”
“When’s the last time you saw either Kylie or Bailey Brandt?” Vega said, standing over him, very close.
Chaney panted and wiped his mouth.
“Okay,” said Chaney. He ran his fingers through his hair. “I saw Kylie about a month ago. She took a bus here after school. When Jamie and I ran into each other she was in the car and saw me.”
“Why did she come to see you?” said Cap.
Chaney sighed.
“She’s a kid. She said she missed me and wanted me and Jamie to get back together. It’s just ’cause they don’t have a father, you know?”
He looked up at Vega, then at Cap.
“Look, when I heard about it, that someone took them, it broke my heart, okay? They were real cute kids.”
“You got a little scared too, right?” said Cap. “Thought people might come around and ask you questions.”
“I don’t want any trouble.”
“What did you do when Kylie showed up at your door?” said Cap.
“I took her to her grandparents’ place. Drove her myself.”
“And you didn’t think to call Jamie Brandt and let her know her child was here?” said Vega.
Chaney shook out his shoulders.
“Kylie begged me not to tell. And no one knew she was gone. The old man watches her in the afternoon. She made up some story to tell him. And I…”
Chaney paused.
“I had clients here. People get freaked out they see a kid.”
“Makes them less likely to buy illegally obtained opiates,” said Cap.
He shook his head again.
“I didn’t have anything to do with those girls disappearing. Not a fucking thing.”
Cap kept the stern look on his face for Chaney’s sake, glanced at Vega, whose wide, steady eyes confirmed what he already thought, that this asshole was telling them the truth.
Then Cap said, more softly, “Do you remember what you talked about in the car? Did she tell you anything that stands out?”
Chaney leaned back on the couch and stared at the ceiling for a moment.
“You know, we already had all the drama back here, so I wasn’t going to give her any more shit about running away. She told me she finally decided she wanted to be an actress. Like she’s been thinking about this a long time, right? She’s finally decided on a career.”
He thought about it and laughed. Cap smiled too. How serious they could get.
“I asked her if she told her mom that, and she said no, that it was a secret and she was only telling certain people.”
Chaney paused. He put his hands behind his head as he thought of something.
“She was telling me she and a girlfriend, they had this little club—what she call it? ‘Secrets Club’ or something. They wrote down their secrets together in diaries.”
“You remember the friend’s name?” said Cap.
“Nah, man, it was a month ago. It was like a boy’s name though, I remember that. I asked if it was a boy. She said no and looked at me like I’m crazy.”
He nodded at Cap.
“You know the way a girl looks at you like you’re crazy?”
Cap nodded. Because he knew.
In the car Vega was silent, glanced at Cap’s face in profile. She could tell he was trying not to yawn, his lips pinched closed, eyes watering. As soon as they got to the stoplight on the corner of Chaney’s block, and Vega was sure there was no way Chaney could see them through his busted curtains, she spoke.
“We said I was going to talk,” she said quietly.
“What?” said Cap.
She didn’t say it again because she knew he had heard her the first time. It was a bossman thing. They made you say it twice so then you sounded like you were complaining. Even if they weren’t doing it consciously.
He sighed.
“I thought I would jump in. With guys like that you have to keep the pressure on and not give them time to think up a lie.”
Vega didn’t answer. At the next stoplight, she watched him yawn into his fist toward the window, knew she had about one full second.
She reached over, pushed the shift to Park and turned the engine off, let the key dangle.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Cap said, looking in his mirrors, disoriented.
“I know guys like that too,” she said, raising her voice just a little. “This is my case, and you’re the special guest star. So when we say I talk first, I fucking talk first.”
“Hey, you know what,” said Cap, starting the car. “You’re used to working alone, I get it. But you have to trust me a little bit. I saw an opening, and I took it. And we still got him to talk. Both of us fishing, you on recon and…gentle assault.”
“Trust doesn’t matter,” she said. “We just have to agree.”
“Fine, then let’s agree on who talks first, but if an opportunity presents itself, the other one should take it.”
“Sure,” said Vega.
“Great,” said Cap.
They drove in silence until Cap pulled up at the inn.
“He would’ve talked eventually. Chaney,” he said, “I had him. You didn’t have to come in like that.”
He sounded a little hurt about it. Jesus, thought Vega, now we have the ego.
“You know what the problem with that is?” said Vega.
He shook his head.
“Eventually.”
Cap looked surprised, almost in a pleasant way.
“Have a good night, Vega,” he said.
She didn’t answer him, got out of the car, went inside.
After three hours of sleep she woke up with boys’ names that could be girls’ names playing on repeat in her head. Dylan, Sam, Shane, Aidan, Peyton, Morgan.
Standing on her hands, she took slow breaths in and out through the nose. Her head started to get quiet, the only noise the heating unit humming in the corner. Cloudy paint splotches swam on her lids.
And there they were. The Brandt girls in white dresses with black velvet bands around their waists. Kylie to the left, Bailey to right, facing Vega. Vega didn’t believe in psychic visions or premonitions, but her mind wandered during the handstand, projected hazy filmstrips. It was pleasant in an autopilot sort of way, as long as it wasn’t a memory. So stay, thought Vega. Stay right where you are.
The girls inspected her like she was a painting in a museum. Then Kylie said, unexpectedly loud: “Better check your email.”
Vega’s eyes opened with a jolt, and she brought her legs down. She sat on the floor and raised her head too quickly, felt the heat leave her head and rush to her chest. After a few seconds she stood and went to her laptop, flipped it open and clicked her email. There was a new message, a Gmail address she didn’t recognize. No subject. It was a single line:
FIND NOLAN MARSH AND YOU WILL FIND THE BRANDT SISTERS