Evan Marsh moved like he had a pain in his shoulders or his neck. Vega stood just outside the loading dock of a supermarket called Giant, light rain landing in her hair, the temperature dropping. Marsh met her eyes and sped up, jumped off the dock and around the fork of a manual pallet jack with boxes stacked on top.
“Hey, Alice?” he said.
“Vega, yeah. Evan Marsh?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Do you have a minute to speak?”
They shook hands, and Marsh said, “Yeah, my shift hasn’t started yet. So you talked to my mom?”
“Yes, earlier today.”
“You have any idea who sent that email?” he said.
Vega watched his eyes. Big and brown, she couldn’t even separate the pupil in the low light. His hair was brown too, his skin smooth. Unlike his brother, who looked to be too big for his body in the pictures, Evan Marsh was in his midtwenties but looked about seventeen, young and lean like a greyhound.
“Not yet,” said Vega. “Do you?”
He laughed through his nose. “No. Nobody’s talked about my brother for three years except me and my mom. The police got the same message?”
“We think so.”
“And they didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “Not a surprise.”
Vega saw the tension in his lips, pushing his chin forward in frustration. She knew if there was something he wasn’t telling her, she could find it out, just by passing the tip of the blade over the wound that was already wide open.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I been in some small towns with some goddamn incompetent police departments, but this one is up there. They couldn’t find their assholes with a mirror and flashlight.”
Marsh smiled with half his mouth and nodded to the parking lot.
“You wanna walk?”
“Sure.”
As they walked out, Marsh took out a cigarette and lit it with a Zippo, silver with a cast metal skull on the face. He offered the pack to Vega, and she took one, let him light it for her.
“I don’t smoke around my mom,” he said. “Only started when Nolan disappeared.”
“I’m sure it was a stressful time,” said Vega.
“You do this for a living, right? Find people who are missing?”
Vega nodded.
“So you’ve seen all of this before—parents who can’t find their kids?”
“I’ve seen it. Every one’s different though.”
Marsh brushed the rain off his hair.
“What do you think the email means?” said Vega.
“I don’t have any idea. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“You’re right about that. But let’s say you had to guess. Let’s say your brother and the Brandt girls are connected in some way. What way do you think that might be?”
Marsh frowned, shrugged.
“I don’t know. I was kinda hoping you would. You’re the professional, right?”
“Yeah. But you’d be surprised how much you might already know, just instinctually. I mean, you can’t be any more off base than the cops, right?”
Marsh smiled again.
“So you just want my gut?”
“Yeah. Your gut.”
“Maybe the same guy who took those girls took my brother, and someone, like a third party, knows about it and sent the email,” Marsh said, looking down, almost embarrassed.
“Hey, it’s possible,” said Vega, encouraging him. “So are they all in the same place—Nolan and the Brandt girls?”
“No, no way,” said Marsh. He stopped walking. “My brother’s dead. I know that. My mother knows that.” He took a long drag from his cigarette, shook his head and shut his eyes hard for a second. “She tell you that she’s sick?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“She seem upset about it to you?”
Vega watched him. Finger flicking the cigarette at his side.
“Actually no, she didn’t.”
“You think some people are just at peace with a death sentence, right?”
Vega thought about the cannula again, the way it scraped the insides of the nostrils.
“I don’t know.”
Marsh shook his head more slowly for dramatic effect, like that would make Vega listen closely.
“She doesn’t like the pain,” he said. “She’s got a lot of aches, says her bones hurt, hurts to cough and breathe. Her mind’s pretty sharp though, but she forgets to take the pills that will shrink the cancer cells. Get it?”
Vega got it but wanted him to explain it to her. She shrugged dumbly.
“She doesn’t mind the cancer because it’s the last thing he gave her.”
Vega was glad it was raining, and that it was cold, that the water was getting into her socks and wetting the back of her neck and starting to chill her skin. Then it was easier to play the trick on herself. She’d started it a long time ago, on a humid day in South Carolina doing side lunges, the nail on her pinkie toe peeling off. Count the grass blades, smell the cigar smoke. This is not your body, she thought. This is not your pain. When a two-hundred-pound beast of a Mexican with a tattoo on his bald head that read BEBE AMO MAMA threw her across a table in a bar she thought it as she hit the floor: Focus on the sticky-sweet smell of tequila on the boards against your cheek. This is not your body. You don’t feel a thing. Right before she reached for the Springfield.
And she did it again, right now, looking into Evan Marsh’s angry young face, feeling cool drops slide into her bra, let herself shudder. Marsh’s hair was dark and soft, glued to his forehead in wet curls. His eyes were big and round and liquid. This is not you.
“I’m sorry,” said Vega.
“I know,” he said. “So what do you think, Alice? It’s Alice, right?”
His eyes went over her, down to the waist and back up to the face.
“Right.”
“What do you think, you know, in-stinct-ually?”
He drew the word out and managed to make it sound inappropriate.
Some part of Vega wondered what he was getting at. Are we flirting now? she thought. Well, okay, then, Evan Marsh, I will be whoever you goddamn well want me to be.
“I think it’s probably random, someone with an odd sense of humor. That doesn’t mean I won’t look into it.”
“I appreciate it. You know, for my mom.”
He wiped the water off his face and his hand lingered there, over his cheek. Vega looked at his hand and saw a series of fresh scratches, vertical on his forearm. He dropped his hand to his side, and she grabbed him by the wrist. He didn’t pull it back. His skin was warm.
“You have a cat?” she said, turning his hand up, showing him the scratches.
“Roommate’s got two,” he said.
He let his knuckles rest on her wrist, held her eyes. She let go and smiled, tried to picture herself younger and lighter.
“How are you not freezing out here?” she said.
He looked back over his shoulder at the loading dock.
“Hard labor, Alice,” he said. “It’s a bitch.”
“I thought you said your shift hadn’t started yet.”
Evan flinched only a little bit, smiled and started backing up, toward the loading dock. He held his arms out and called, “Guess I’m just warm-blooded.”
Cap leaned against his car and watched two kids, a boy and girl, probably four years old or so, turn dizzy spirals on a small steel merry-go-round. One of their mothers sat on a bench texting on her phone and smoking. She seemed young, and it momentarily concerned Cap, made him think, Why aren’t her eyes on the kids?
A blue midsize sedan pulled up across the street, and Junior Hollows stepped out, nodded to Cap and jogged over.
“Twice in twenty-four hours,” he said. “That’s twice as many times as I’ve seen you in the past three years.”
Cap shrugged.
“Unusual twenty-four hours.”
“What’s this about, Cap? You want to explain to me what you have to do with my case?”
“I’m working it.”
“You’re working it? From your rec room?” Junior said, amused.
“Alice Vega hired me. I’m working with her.”
Junior’s smile dissipated, and for a rare moment Cap could see the age lines around his mouth, ironed creases in a napkin.
“You really think that’s a good idea?” said Junior.
“Yeah, I do. The more hands the better.”
Junior laughed and shook his head, weary.
“Would you ever say that as a cop? Would you ever have wanted PIs up in your shit? Come on, Cap.”
“If they could help my investigation, yes, yeah I would.”
“And how can you and Alice Vega help me exactly?”
“I have Kylie Brandt’s diary.”
Junior’s eyes got a little bigger; then he tried to look cool about it.
“Kylie Brandt didn’t have a diary.”
“Says who.”
“Her mother.”
“In what universe are you operating where girls don’t keep secrets from their mothers?”
“We’ve been through Jamie Brandt’s apartment,” said Junior. “It’s the size of a shoebox. We didn’t find a diary.”
“Kylie didn’t keep it at the apartment. It was at a friend’s house.”
“The friend gave it to you?”
“Yes.”
Junior shrugged with cynicism.
“What makes you think the friend didn’t make it up, for the attention?”
“Jamie Brandt’s ex-boyfriend says Kylie told him about it. That’s how we found it.”
Cap watched Junior process it.
“You have it here,” Junior said, nodding to Cap’s car.
“Yeah. Also you got an email recently about Nolan Marsh?”
Junior shook his head no, a reflex.
“I know,” said Cap, fatigued by the exchange. “You don’t know what I’m talking about. Okay. Let’s say the DPD received an email about a guy named Nolan Marsh. Alice Vega got the same email.”
Junior stopped shaking his head, just listened.
“She had it traced to the Kinko’s on North Haven. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but maybe you want to send someone over there.”
They both stood there; Cap let his eyes drift to the kids on the merry-go-round, the boy dragging his foot along the ground, slowing it down.
“All right, Cap,” said Junior. “What do you want for all this? For the diary.”
“Just the open exchange of information. You don’t want to work with us, fine. But at least we can all have the same facts. Like witness statements, for example.”
“I have to check with Traynor,” said Junior. Then came a big sigh. “You know he likes it clean.”
Cap nodded. He knew Junior wasn’t necessarily lying. The chief of police liked detail and transparency. He kept a twenty-year medallion from Alcoholics Anonymous in a frame next to the picture of his kids. The files in his file cabinet were alphabetized and color-coded, the Post-its stacked in towers from large to small on his desk. Cap knew for a fact there was a canister of Lysol wipes in his bottom right drawer. The only thing worse than telling Nell and Jules about his resignation was facing Chief Traynor, who was under the impression it really had been Cap who had let the junkie kid die.
“Caplan, I didn’t think you had these kinds of fuckups in your blood,” he’d said.
It hurt Cap like a sunburn.
Light rain had started to fall. Junior wiped drops from the hair that hung over his forehead.
“Fine,” said Cap.
He went into his car and grabbed the book from the seat, shielded it under his jacket from the rain. Junior eyed it and his lips twitched, like he was hungry and just a little too far from the dessert cart. Cap enjoyed the moment of cruelty, let his hand linger on the book before handing it over. Junior slid it under his coat.
“Thanks,” he said, blinking from the rain. He ran his hand over his face and shook it out. “I’m glad you called. It was the right thing.”
Cap stared at Junior, thought maybe it was not at all the right thing.
Then they heard screaming. It was the little boy from inside the playground. He’d fallen off the merry-go-round and hit the rubber playground mat headfirst.
“Goddammit,” Cap said.
He ran into the playground as the mother got up from the bench and went to the boy, not in a rush.
“Hey!” he shouted to the mother. He could feel his ears getting hot.
She turned to Cap as she leaned over the boy and helped him stand up. Cap put her age at twenty-one or twenty-two; she had the face of a girl.
“Listen, ma’am, there are three entrances to this playground. One of them leads to a street where people frequently run the stop sign, and either of these kids could have run out there at any time. And I’ve been standing here a full fifteen minutes, a strange man just watching your children play, and you haven’t looked up from Candy Crush. Just watch the goddamn kids. That is your only priority.”
Cap’s hands started to shake so he stuffed them into his pants pockets.
The mother sneered and said, “Hey, mind your own fucking business, aright? He’s fine.”
Cap and the boy stared at each other for a minute, the boy with a couple of tears on his pink cheeks, both of them breathing heavy.
“Is he lying?” Vega asked as Cap drove them down a four-lane state highway.
“He could be,” said Cap. “He’s a liar, generally.”
“No one lies all the time unless there’s a compulsion.”
“I don’t think that’s the case. He just lies to cover his ass like the rest of us,” said Cap.
Vega’s eyes wandered to the signs of small businesses flashing past: AKA COPIER SERVICE, PERSONAL APPEARANCES HAIR SALON, ROUTE 61 BAR AND GRILL.
“You don’t,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Well, Vega, I can’t really imagine the situation where you’d need to cover your ass for any reason.”
“Then you have a limited imagination, Caplan,” she said, turning to him. “So what’s the takeaway?”
“He might help us, and he might not. Traynor, the chief, might help us, might not….”
“So we keep going our own way,” said Vega.
“Yeah. What was Marsh’s brother like?”
“Strange. He’s hiding something, but I don’t know what. I asked him to imagine why he thought someone would send that email, and he had a theory.”
“What was it?”
“That his brother and the Brandt girls were taken by the same person.”
“So who’s the sender of the email?”
“Next-door neighbor, guilty accomplice, doesn’t matter. Point of it is, he’d thought about it, while his mother was completely hard-pressed for an idea.”
“So…” said Cap, taking the exit for Raven Run. “You think that’s suspicious.”
“He also was a little out of it, running his words together,” she said, remembering. Without thinking she touched her lips and said, “Warm.”
“Huh?” said Cap.
“He was really warm. We were outside in the rain a good ten minutes, temperature’s probably forty degrees. He had short sleeves and was warm.”
“Drugs?”
“Seems most likely,” she said.
She thought for a moment and turned her body to face Cap.
“How much trouble you think it would be to find out what happened to Nolan Marsh?” she said.
Cap blew air through his lips in an O.
“Three-year-old cold case, missing vulnerable adult with no viable leads?”
“We don’t know we have no viable leads.”
“Look, Ralz may be Junior’s errand boy, but he knows what he’s doing. If he couldn’t find Nolan three years ago, chances are it’s a lost cause.”
Vega reared back like she’d been pushed.
“Tell that to his mother.”
“Hey,” said Cap. “I don’t like it, but I know that’s how it is. You do too,” he said quietly.
“So what if it is related to the girls? Then it’s not just an exercise.”
“No evidence either way,” said Cap.
Then, suddenly, he looked discouraged.
“But we have to explore every branch of the tree,” he muttered.
“Explore every branch of the tree?” said Vega. “Did you see that on a motivational poster?”
Cap glanced back and forth between her and the road.
“I’m sorry, Vega, are you making a joke at my expense? Do you actually have a sense of humor?”
She ignored him, tapped her knuckles against the window, said, “I think we have to put both cases side by side and see what the connection is. Nobody writes an email like that without a motive.”
“Fine,” said Cap. “When we’re in bed with Junior and Traynor and Ralz we can ask for the file on Nolan. Until then can we focus on WT?”
“Sure. Can you think about more than one thing at once?”
She was honestly not trying to be difficult.
Cap seemed to know that and said, “Why, sure.”
The very corner of his mouth turned up, and Vega thought if that corner ate all its vegetables, one day it could grow into a real smile.
They found Jamie Brandt in front of a Kmart talking to a blond woman in a windbreaker with a Fox 29 logo on the back. There was a man loading equipment into the back of a van, and a small group of people handing out flyers. The sun was just about down.
A tall, older woman who Cap thought had a slight hunchback came up to them.
“So,” she said to Vega, indignant. “Any news?”
“Not yet,” said Vega, who seemed to know her. “We need to talk to Jamie.”
“Who’s the we?” the woman said, nodding to Cap.
“Max Caplan,” said Cap.
“This is Jamie’s mother, Gail White,” said Vega to Cap. Then she turned to Gail and added, “I’ve hired him as a consultant. He’s a former police officer.”
“Good thing you’re a former,” said Gail. “Talk about a bunch of ignorants. Your IQ probably went up fifty points when you walked out the door.”
Cap couldn’t help smiling. He liked Gail White.
“I’ll get her for you. She just did an interview with Hallie Summers from Fox in Philly. She’s just trying to make her cry again, asking her the same dumbass questions.”
Gail seemed to be one of those people who said things without expecting or needing a response. She left then and went to Jamie, who saw Vega and Cap and started to run, saying something in haste to the woman from the news.
“What is it, anything?” she said.
She was puffy eyed and her skin was dry, flaking around her temples and her mouth. Her hair was wet from the rain—she didn’t have an umbrella and didn’t seem to notice. Cap knew the hours were stacking up on her, and soon she would take the slow turn from despair to mourning.
“No,” said Cap. “But we have to check something with you. Will you step over to my car?”
“Yeah, Maggie made these,” she said, handing them soggy flyers.
On each were the most recent school photos of Kylie and Bailey, their stats and the word “MISSING” at the bottom of the page.
“Kylie did have a diary. She kept it at Cole’s house,” said Cap.
“What, really? Where…where is it?” she said, panicky, stretching her neck so she could look into Cap’s car.
“We gave it to the police, but we have pictures.”
Cap held his umbrella over the women as Vega showed Jamie her phone, the image of the last page of the diary. Jamie squinted. Her breath sped up.
“That’s her writing. That’s how she does letters.”
“Good,” said Cap. “Do you know who WT is?”
“No,” she said. “Maybe a boy in her class?”
“We checked the class list,” said Vega. “Only one ‘W’—Wesley McPherson. No WT.”
“Anyone come to mind? William, Walker, Wayne?”
Jamie pressed her hand to her forehead, as if she were applying a compress.
“No, I can’t think of anyone,” she said. “Fuck, why can’t I think of anyone?”
“It might not be an obvious person. We’ll check everyone in the school, every class, teachers.”
“The police are following their leads too.”
“You think this WT had something to do with it?” said Jamie.
“It’s an idea. She wrote some notes about him in the diary too.”
Vega scrolled so Jamie could see the initials.
“Shit,” she said. “Who the fuck is he?”
Cap’s phone buzzed, and he handed the umbrella to Vega and stepped away. He saw Em’s name come up, and he picked up.
“Em.”
“Hey, Cap, can you meet?” said Em under his breath.
“Yeah, when?”
“Fifteen minutes, the luncheonette?”
“Yeah. Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Got something for you.”
Cap heard something different in his voice. When Em had first started at the department, he’d been all cocky frat boy, maybe a little too enthusiastic when pinning and cuffing a suspect, calling the rest of the guys bitches when they went home early from drinking after a second shift. If they needed someone to sit on an amped-up PCP freak, they’d send Em, who didn’t care if he got black eyes and chipped teeth before holidays. Then he got his girlfriend pregnant. Then she was his wife and she got pregnant again, the second time with twins. Then Em was tamed because it was simple, Cap knew, because he had the fear, because he had three kids and a wife and a whole life he could fuck up.
But just now he heard it—the old Em, the one who made a prank call to Junior and pretended to be a hooker.
“Oh yeah?” said Cap, smiling into the phone. “Can I have a hint?”
“It’s bigger than a breadbox.”
“Great. See you soon.”
Cap hung up and looked back to the women. Jamie stared at the image of her daughter’s phantom handwriting on the phone; Vega met Cap’s eyes and saw something there. She sniffed, a fox sniffing out a jackrabbit.
Vega ran a napkin over a smear of ketchup left on the table by the previous customer. She sat next to Cap in a booth, and Wiley Emerson was opposite them, breathing heavily and perspiring. Rain streaked up the window next to them.
“Here you go,” said Em, sliding a white envelope across the table toward Cap.
Vega placed her palm gently on top of it, intercepting it, and picked it up, opened the flap. Cap raised his hands in surrender. All you.
“I didn’t include the ones that didn’t see anything, or from the Kmart or anything. These are just the people from the parking lot.”
“Three,” said Vega.
“That’s it. It was a slow day over there, I guess.”
“Are they consistent?” asked Cap.
“More or less. One of the witnesses is an eighty-something man; some of his stuff doesn’t make sense, but there’s a type there. You’ll see it—Caucasian male teenager, baseball hat and sweatshirt.”
“Car?” said Vega.
“Tan, white, beige compact.”
“Three witnesses, three colors,” she said.
“Yeah, no one saw plates.”
“No one ever sees plates,” said Cap.
“So they couldn’t see his face,” said Vega. “Because of the hat.”
“None of them got a good look, no.”
“Who took the statements?” said Cap.
“Ralz and Harrison.”
“The word’s getting out?”
“Every cop in Pennsylvania has the description, but they can’t pull over every tan, white, or beige vehicle on the street.”
Cap nodded.
Em tapped all his fingers on the table and bounced back and forth on the seat a little bit.
“I better get back. I told Junior I needed some coffee that didn’t taste like cat shit.”
“Thanks for doing this,” Cap said. “What changed your mind?”
Em exhaled loudly and said, “I’m just thinking about it. Went home to my kids, you know. Jake’s the same age as the little Brandt girl, and I was like, what the fuck am I doing? Why not, why fuckin’ not? Let’s get this thing by the fuckin’ nuts, right?” he said, looking at Cap. Then, to Vega, “Excuse me.”
“Talk about nuts all you want,” she said. “Did Traynor bring in a Fed?”
“Yeah, his name’s Cartwright. He just came in this morning and been locked up with the chief.”
Cap nodded, said, “Look, I shared some information with Junior earlier. We might all be working together real soon.”
“Good. That’s good, right?”
“Right. Thanks, Em.”
Em grinned, looking a little dopey. He turned to Vega, waiting on something, like he’d asked her a question that she hadn’t answered yet.
She stared back, unsure of what he wanted. She glanced at Cap, who made some eye rolls in Em’s direction.
“Oh, thanks,” she said.
“My pleasure,” said Em. “I’m gonna go. Nice to meet you, Miss Vega,” he said, standing up from the booth. “Talk soon, Cap.”
Then he headed for the door. He grabbed a toothpick from a dispenser on the counter on the way out and stuck it in his mouth like a cowboy.
Vega watched him out the window for a second longer as he walked through the parking lot, while she handed the envelope to Cap. Please thank you, please thank you, please thank you, she thought, because it helped to practice.
A half hour later they were at Cap’s house, their notes and the statements spread out on the kitchen table. Cap put on a pot of coffee and then winced and shook a finger at Vega.
“I don’t have tea,” he said.
“I’m fine,” said Vega, looking over the pages.
“So three people,” said Cap. “Rachel Simmons, twenty-three, getting into her car after returning a Blu-ray player at Best Buy, notices the girls crossing the street, sees one of them hug a boy, presumably the driver, wearing a white baseball hat and light-colored sweatshirt. Girls get into the car, which she thinks is tan. Doesn’t think anything’s strange about it, thinks the girl and boy must be boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Carl Crain,” said Vega. “Forty-five, loading baseball equipment into the back of his truck with his son. He sees the girls cross the highway and thinks, Where’re their parents? Then sees the bigger one hug a Caucasian male dressed in a gray sweatshirt and white baseball hat. They get into the car and drive away. Son doesn’t see anything.”
“And Roy Eldridge, eighty-seven, as he’s being driven by his niece out of the mall parking lot onto the highway, sees a boy hug a girl. Then he says two girls get in the car with Harry. Ralz asks who Harry is. The niece says Harry is Eldridge’s son; Eldridge is old and confused. Thinks the boy in the baseball hat is his son.”
“Or looks like his son. And the niece didn’t see the boy or the girls.”
“Right.”
“It doesn’t say anything about what Harry looks like,” said Vega, staring straight ahead.
“No, but the niece wouldn’t necessarily know that. May not be relevant either. Eldridge is almost ninety and prone to bouts of”—Cap looked back at the statement and read—“ ‘disorientation and aphasia.’ ”
“We could still check. All of them, see if their memory’s been jogged at all since they talked to Ralz.” She took a deep breath and tapped her fingers on the table. “Maybe he didn’t write everything down either.”
“It’s a possibility,” said Cap, his phone buzzing in his pocket. “They were probably rushing trying to talk to everyone at the mall who might have seen something. That’s a lot of statements to take and only two police.”
Cap looked at his phone. A text from Nell: “Have you seen the news??? Break in your case. Turn on 6.”
“What is it?” said Vega.
“Nell. My daughter. Says there’s a break in the case.”
Cap went to the living room and dug the remote out from the couch, turned on the TV, and stood there with his arms folded. There was footage of a boy, a teenager, long-limbed and lanky, being led out of a cruiser, a sweatshirt pulled up over his face, and up the steps of the station. Cap recognized most of the cops standing on the steps, waving off the press like mosquitoes. Ralz guided the boy through the front doors.
“—brought in for questioning this evening,” said the anchorwoman. “The police are releasing no information about the underage suspect except to say they have reason to believe he may know the whereabouts of Kylie and Bailey Brandt.”
The image cut back to the anchorpeople with their moderately concerned expressions and moderately detached commentary.
The woman said, “Kylie and Bailey Brandt were last seen at the Ridgewood Mall on Sterling Road East and Highway 61 last Saturday morning. If you have any information regarding their whereabouts, please call your local authorities. Scott?”
Scott had a downcast sort of look and said thoughtfully, “Terrible.” Then, a pause. “A Reading man pleaded guilty to two counts of homicide this morning—”
Cap muted it. He turned to Vega, who had the phone pressed to her ear.
“Who are you calling?”
“Jamie Brandt.” Vega’s eyes focused as she listened to a voice on the other end. “Why?” she said into the phone. Then she pulled it from her head and tapped it, held it out in front of her.
“That’s Sonny Thomas,” said Jamie’s voice, sharp and strained on the speaker.
“The boy who lives in your apartment complex,” said Vega.
“Jamie, it’s Max Caplan. Why would the police want him? Did you tell them anything about Sonny you maybe forgot to tell us?” Cap said, feeling his heart rate speed up.
Something about it wasn’t right, he knew, but it was useless to try to pin it down now.
“What’s ‘Sonny’ short for?” said Vega, staring at Cap.
“What?” said Jamie, distracted, her mother’s voice in the background.
“Sonny,” said Cap. “The name, is it short for something?”
“Son-of-a-bitch,” said Jamie, realizing. “It’s Wilson. Wilson Thomas.”
Jamie said she had to go and hung up on them.
“Why did we cross him off our list again?” said Cap, agitated.
“Jamie didn’t think he was a viable candidate.”
He shook his head to some internal rhythm.
“You have a lot of experience letting your clients call the shots?” he said with an edge.
“Only when their arguments make sense,” said Vega. “How would a fifteen-year-old who lived a few doors down from the Brandts coordinate the abduction, stash the girls somewhere, and then keep showing up at home, business as usual?”
“It’s possible,” said Cap.
“Not probable,” said Vega.
“The kidnapper is someone who’s not probable,” said Cap. “Otherwise it would be obvious who he is.”
“Did Em call you back yet?”
Cap glanced at his phone.
“No.”
“Then we can’t do anything. Junior’s going to want Sonny alone in a room before his mother can get a lawyer to him—he’s not going to call in the witnesses until tomorrow midday at the earliest. Let’s talk to them first.”
Vega watched Cap as he chewed on his lips. He looked at his watch.
“We can’t knock on their doors now,” he said.
“Probably not,” said Vega. “But we can call, set it up for first thing before they go to work.”
Cap bit his lip and nodded mechanically, all his pissiness replaced by fatigue.
“I’ll call them,” said Vega, closing her laptop, tucking it under her arm. “I’ll be here at seven. I’ll park across the street, so your neighbor can walk his cat.”
She saw the first curl of a smile on him before she left, before he had a chance to say anything, probably either “Thanks” or “Okay,” muttered into the empty space of his living room.
She held her breath, all of her abdominal muscles hugging the organs, stretching her legs up to the ceiling. Fingers out—they’re duck feet, they’re oven mitts. The idea was that it should be all parts working equally, but that was for Indian gurus and vegan socialites. Vega’s was circus yoga, a magic trick, and it always felt like there was one thing pushing harder than anything else. Today it was her forearms. Vega knew it was her body making the selection (her core was weak from riding around in a car for so many hours, shoulders stiff from pulling Brandon Haas across the parking lot), but a skittering bug in her brain told her it was for a reason. The forearms are active because you will need them more today.
Then her phone began to hum on the table, moved toward the edge like it was drawn by a magnet. Vega felt a strange predatory affection for it: Come here, little thing. Come closer.