Rachel Simmons lived in her parents’ garage in Black Creek; it was a large room with one small window near the ceiling facing out onto a balding lawn. She sat in between Cap and Vega and squinted at Vega’s phone, at the picture of Sonny Thomas that Jamie had sent.
In the picture Sonny was wearing a floppy beanie with a ball on top and an oversized T-shirt. He was leaning to the side hugging Kylie.
“Um, I don’t know,” said Rachel. “I mean, I was in the parking lot, you know? This all happened across the highway.”
Vega tapped on Sonny’s face to zoom. Cap thought he looked like a TV show’s idea of a teenager: unthreateningly handsome, check; mild acne, check; nearly imperceptible smirk, check.
“Yeah, I really didn’t see his face,” said Rachel.
“But it’s possible this was him,” said Vega.
“I guess so,” she said.
“Is there anything else you can remember,” said Vega, “Anything that stands out at all?”
Rachel picked a piece of lint off her jeans with her long fingernail, painted blue.
“I was far away,” she said, turning her head from Vega to Cap. “I’m real sorry, I just got one little look.”
She frowned, her face framed by frizzy blond hair, her eyes big and shaky, and Cap could do nothing but believe her.
Carl Crain kept them on the porch.
He was a big man with a belly and a buzz cut. He closed the screen door behind him and was panting, like he’d been rushing.
“Kids are getting ready for school,” he said by way of explanation.
“That’s fine,” said Vega. “We only need a minute of your time.”
He smiled at her awkwardly and then looked past her to Cap and said, “I saw on the news they got him. They got the guy who took those girls.”
Women get hellos, Vega thought. Men get business.
“Not quite,” said Cap. “They’ve only brought someone in for questioning.”
“Do you recognize this boy?” said Vega, and she held up her phone to Carl Crain’s face.
He peered over the phone and said to Cap, “Is this him? Is this the kid?”
Vega turned around to look at Cap too,
“Yes, he’s the one the police have brought in,” said Cap reluctantly.
“I know I was across the street,” said Carl, “but this is him.”
“Your statement says he was wearing a hat that covered his face,” said Vega.
Carl looked at her sideways, confused, either by her asking questions about the case or by her speaking words at all.
He responded to Cap, as if Cap had asked him the question. “Yeah, but he was tall and skinny like that. You know, long armed. You think they’re going to bring me in to do a lineup?”
He put his hands on his hips and cleared his throat, as if he were preparing to identify someone in a lineup at that moment. He rocked back and forth on his feet.
“Possibly,” Cap answered him, over Vega’s head. “They have all your contact information, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” said Carl, as if his contact information were a great source of pride.
“I’m sure they’ll be in touch,” said Cap.
Vega said nothing, stood between them like a dumb little ghost.
As soon as they got in the car, Cap started the engine and said, “Look, some guys around here only want to talk to other guys about anything substantive. I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is.”
“Sure,” said Vega. “You do a decent impression of one of those guys.”
Now she had offended him. He took his hands off the wheel and turned to her.
“No, hey, give me a small break, Vega. I was trying to get information and move to the next thing.”
“Then let’s move to the next thing. My lead.”
“All yours.”
“You don’t have to be so fucking supportive,” said Vega. “You can just let me work.”
Cap shrugged. “Fine.”
They didn’t speak until they got to the last witness on the list. A woman named Alyssa Moser let them in but was anxious about it. She wore a chunky wool sweater with a large spiral pattern on it. Her face was covered with freckles like a girl, though Cap put her age at about fifty.
“I keep going back in time in my head, wishing I’d turned around and seen something that could help you,” she said. “You have to understand, my uncle isn’t well. We told the police. I don’t know what you could get by interviewing him again.”
“He seemed to remember a few things when he gave his statement,” said Vega, not combatively.
“Good days, bad days,” she said, looking sad. “He used to be so funny is all,” she added, as if to explain her sadness.
“He said the suspect looked like Harry?” said Vega.
Alyssa gave them a wounded smile.
“Harry was my cousin. Uncle Roy’s son. He died in Vietnam in 1970.”
“I’m sorry,” Cap and Vega said at the same time.
“He gets confused. He keeps thinking he sees people who’ve died—his parents, my aunt who passed four years ago,” said Alyssa.
“What about Harry?” said Vega. “Does he think he sees Harry?”
“Sure, sometimes.”
“Do you have any pictures of him?” asked Vega.
“Who?” said Alyssa, confused.
“Your cousin, Harry.”
“Yes, sure, just one moment.”
She left the room, and Cap looked to Vega. His look said, So what’s the point of this now?
Alyssa Moser came back with a photo in a chipped gold frame.
“This is him and me,” she said, smiling. “He was five years older than me, and I just loved him to pieces.”
Cap and Vega came to her side and examined the picture.
It had that muted color of photos from the ’60s, like the film was developed in murky water. There was a little girl, twelve or thirteen, wearing a headband and a denim dress, smiling with a mouthful of braces at the camera. She leaned against a boy who looked like a man, tall and burly with a healthy head of hair and a respectable mustache.
“This is Harry?” said Vega.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Alyssa said. “ ’Course when he went to Vietnam they cut his hair and everything.”
“He was a big guy?” said Cap.
“Oh, yeah. Over six foot.”
She paused, eyes dulled in thought.
“He was six-two when he shipped out, and he was six-three when they shipped him back,” she said. “Weird to think he grew an inch over there.”
“He looks husky too,” said Cap.
“Made it to State for wrestling. All he would eat was bananas and peanut butter so he could bulk up.”
They looked back down at the picture, at Harry Eldridge’s honest smile.
“Roy Eldridge is the definition of an unreliable witness,” said Cap in the car, determined to shred the morning’s work to dust.
“I understand, but stack it up. Two witnesses claim Kylie hugged a skinny teenage boy, slight in build.”
“The current suspect fits that profile,” said Cap, sounding bored.
“Sure. But one witness describes a totally different body type.”
“The witness has dementia.”
“Stack it up. Let’s just not forget it; that’s all I’m saying,” said Vega.
Cap looked at her sideways. She could see the doubt in his face.
“What do you want to do?” she said, tapping her hands on the dash, conciliatory.
“We should’ve talked to the kid first. He should’ve been on the fucking list,” said Cap through his teeth.
“He wasn’t on the fucking list. Get over it. What do you want to do?”
Cap rolled his head to the right. Vega heard a snap.
“I don’t think Jamie’s good for us right now,” he said. “Her kids have been gone for eighty hours. She’s cracking. She’s going to rip apart the first person who takes her off the leash.”
“She wants to think the kid did it.”
“Maybe the kid did do it,” said Cap, raising his voice. “Maybe he killed them and dumped the bodies in the Beth Hill mine, and we’ve been chasing bullshit for the past two days.”
“We have to go back to Jamie.”
“Are you listening to anything I’m saying?” said Cap. “Jamie is useless.”
“We can get more detail about Sonny Thomas; we can tell her about the three witness descriptions and Nolan Marsh and see if anything pops. She might be the only person other than the kidnapper who knows where the girls are, and all we have to do is sift through the mud in her head a little bit.”
Vega paused and watched Cap rock side to side, settling in his seat, think it over. He had a little conversation with himself, sighing theatrically and moving his lips, and when he started to shake his head at nothing in particular she knew she had him beat.
They climbed the exterior stairs of Jamie’s complex to the second floor, brown boxes of apartments stacked up like kids’ building blocks. Cap saw spiderwebs stringing from the corners of the stucco ceilings to the doorways, graffiti tags here and there. Vega was silent and stoic, and it pissed him off, made him think maybe there was less going on behind the mask as opposed to more. That maybe she wasn’t a natural after all, just some delinquent who’d gotten lucky.
They heard a muted series of thumps coming from inside; it reminded him of when he and Jules couldn’t afford a drum set; Nell would practice on couch cushions and pillows. Then there was the shimmery crack of glass breaking. Cap bounded for the door.
“Jamie?” he said loudly. “Jamie, it’s Max Caplan.”
“It’s open!” she shouted.
Cap opened it, and they came into the living room—a small space with a mismatched couch and chairs, a large tube TV balanced precariously on an oblong table. To the right, the room opened up into a galley kitchen—a counter covered with stacks of glasses and plates, and some cabinets, all open. Jamie was on her hands and knees, holding two semicircles of glass, a thin ribbon of blood spreading on her hand. She stood and went to the sink, dropped the glass pieces with a crash, looking disgusted. She crossed in front of Cap and Vega and nodded at them.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, weird and calm. “You can help me look.”
Her hand fluttered to her hair, pushing strands out of her face, smearing red on her forehead.
“Jamie,” Cap said evenly. “You’re bleeding.”
She looked at her hand, distracted, then shook her head.
“Look for what?” said Vega.
Jamie ripped a paper towel off a roll on the kitchen counter and wrapped it around her palm.
“Anything,” she said. “You found her diary in a goddamn tree. Who knows what else she has here. There’s got to be something somewhere, something about Sonny, something…”
Cap looked at her face, could tell she was thinking, calculating, but there was chaos in it. Like she’d just gotten a concussion and was trying to do trigonometry.
“The police have been through here already, Jamie,” said Cap.
“So what, you think they don’t need help now? Isn’t that what the fuck you two are for?” she said, chewing her thumbnail. “I already kicked Darrell outta here because he’s totally frigging useless. I already been through their room. You can start in the bathroom if you want.”
She stopped talking then, just went to the couch and started lifting up cushions, brushing coins to the carpet.
Vega nodded at Cap, nudging him to the other room. Cap was thankful. Maybe Vega could get through to her, do a woman-to-woman thing. Because she was so naturally sensitive. Cap shrugged it off and went into the next room, glad to have a break.
Kylie and Bailey’s room was sacked, the twin beds pulled apart, blankets and sheets in twisted piles on the floor, a white dresser with chipped edges, drawers open and vines of brightly colored little girls’ clothes spilling over the sides. Cap saw a pair of pink leggings. He remembered Nell wearing a lot of leggings when she was eight, nine years old. He wanted to smell them but felt like it would be disrespectful somehow, so he only touched them, lightly between his thumb and forefinger. They were unbelievably soft. The knees on them were worn, thready. They must be Bailey’s, he thought, still running, skinning knees.
“Fuck,” he heard Jamie say from the other room. “Oh fuck. Fuck, motherfucker, oh fuck, fuck, fuck!”
The fucks started low and throaty, then they rose to alarm quickly until they were screams.
Cap ran into the living room. Jamie was on the floor in front of the TV, DVDs scattered around her. Vega was closer and leaned down to her, grabbed her shoulders.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
Jamie looked up at them, her face all black lines, electric, furious. She held up a DVD. Pirates of the Caribbean.
“This fucking movie.” She spat out the words like they were tobacco she’d been chewing. “Guy in it named Will Turner, she’s seen it a million times. That’s WT. It’s not Sonny Thomas. It’s not anyone.”
Cap’s forehead tingled and burned. He put a hand up to it, felt the breath kicked out of his chest. Then his instinct came back and he saw Jamie for what she was: an unstable element, a cut wire spraying sparks.
She slapped her hands over her eyes. She must have liked the way that felt because she did it again. Then she started hitting her face like her hands were flyswatters, first in a pitter-patter way, then harder until she knocked the heel of her hand into her nose and blood leaked from it.
Cap jumped from where he stood to stop it, but Vega was closer and quicker. She clamped her arms around Jamie from behind and pulled her to a standing position.
“Let me go!” Jamie yelled.
She thrashed and twisted against Vega, who’d pinned Jamie’s arms to her body. They were about the same height, Jamie and Vega, but Jamie’s fury was nothing next to Vega’s discipline.
“Call her mother,” said Vega to Cap.
“Lemme go, bitch,” Jamie screamed.
Cap could see into the cave of her mouth, black and bottomless, as her eyes grew to globes, and he reached for his phone.
She was in the bathroom vomiting when her mother arrived. Vega pressed a wet towel to the back of Jamie’s neck and heard Gail White yelling at Cap. Jamie was weak, had gone for too many hours straight on pills and beer and coffee, and now her insides were kicking up like mud off tires.
Gail burst into the bathroom, Cap behind her.
“All right, get the hell outta here,” she said to Vega.
Vega stood back. Gail pushed her out of the way and knelt behind Jamie, whose head was lolling around on the toilet seat.
“A lot of fuckin’ good you’re doing, all of you,” snapped Gail. “Just get out now, go!”
Cap and Vega backed up and left. They walked through the scraps in the living room, and then Vega saw something.
“I’m calling Em,” Cap announced, heading for the open door.
Vega stepped around DVDs like they were bombs and picked one up, examined the back of it. She stared at it and followed Cap without looking up. She heard him speak.
“Where is he…? Okay, WT is a dead end. Jamie Brandt thinks it’s from a movie….”
Vega walked behind Cap, out the door, down the complex stairs and to his car. She ran her thumb over the front of the DVD and opened the case.
“Just have him call me if he wants to talk. Or he can talk to Jamie, but she’s sick right now…like sick, vomiting….”
They got into Cap’s car. Vega reached to the backseat and brought out her laptop, set it on her thighs.
“I’m saying you have no more leads; he’s a character from a goddamn movie….”
Cap’s voice rose; he massaged the bridge of his nose. Vega slid the DVD into the laptop and turned down the sound.
“Sure. Fifteen minutes,” he said, and hung up.
He bounced his fist on the top of the wheel. “Em wants to meet at the diner. We have no reason to hide anything from him at this point. We all have shit.”
Vega pressed Fast-Forward on the movie, watched the picture jump and split.
“Yeah. Okay.”
Cap hung up and put his hands through his hair. He started the car.
“The hell are you doing?”
Vega didn’t answer him. She had stopped the fast-forward and was now watching the movie in real time. She pressed Pause.
“Is this him?” she said, pointing to an actor on the screen. “Is this Will Turner?”
“I think so,” said Cap, leaning over. “Yeah, it’s not Johnny Depp; it’s the kid.”
Cap put his seat belt on and began to pull the car out onto the road.
“What are you doing?” he said, more slowly.
She stared at the kid’s face, the movie star, at his dark eyes generously spaced apart, delicate features, smooth skin. It had been hard to tell from the DVD case, but now, watching him move and speak, it was clear. She tapped her fingernail on the screen.
“This kid looks exactly like Evan Marsh.”
EM WAS WAITING FOR THEM IN THE SAME BOOTH. He tapped a quarter on the table and hopped in his seat when he saw them. Vega slid in first, her laptop under her arm, Cap next to her.
“What’s going on, Em?”
Em showed them what he was holding—not a quarter. A flash drive.
“That for us?” Vega said, opening the laptop.
“Junior released Sonny Thomas an hour ago because they got nothing on him,” said Em.
“Yeah, no shit,” said Cap, nodding to the laptop screen where the movie was frozen on the young actor’s face. “Because that is Kylie’s dream date. A fictional character in a goddamn movie.”
Em handed the flash drive to Vega, and she plugged it in. He stared at the screen.
“I don’t think I get it,” he said.
“The character’s name is Will Turner. We all thought Kylie was writing about Wilson Thomas, but instead it’s a guy who doesn’t exist.”
“Shit,” said Em. “It’s this guy? What’s his name, Rodrigo something?”
Another video screen opened, the blurry chevrons of a security camera. Retail floor, a row of computers on a counter with one user, seated, back toward the camera.
“You got the Kinko’s footage,” said Vega.
Em pulled a finger gun on her and winked.
“Give the lady a stuffed banana.”
Cap leaned in for a closer look. The figure in the video stood up. Tall, thin, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled down over the top half of his face. Bottom half a mess of static fuzz. He walked out of the frame.
Vega pressed Pause.
“Could be Evan Marsh,” she said.
“Related to Nolan?” said Em.
Vega nodded. “His brother.”
“The guy working the register doesn’t remember him,” Em added. “We’re trying to lift prints.”
“You want to lift prints at a Kinko’s?” Cap said, incredulous. “You’re going to get sludge from those keyboards.”
“Not impossible,” said Vega.
Cap stared at her, at her hair swept back into a neat ponytail at the base, two or three wisps draped across her cheek, as if she’d planned it that way. It enraged Cap suddenly, her arbitrariness. Some things neat and some things messy. Maybe there was no method here. He suddenly felt duped.
Vega looked away from Cap and across to Em now, suddenly on the same side.
“Can we think about this critically for a second?” Cap said to both of them. “Where would Evan Marsh and Kylie Brandt meet? Where would they be in the same place at the same time?”
“I don’t know,” said Em, shrugging. “Maybe the supermarket.”
“That Giant’s clear across town. Jamie Brandt would shop at the Walmart in Black Creek.”
“We can figure it out later,” said Vega.
“No, let’s figure it out now,” said Cap. “I’m not chasing the invisible fucking man, here.”
“Maybe…” said Em. “Maybe that’s not the right question.”
Cap and Vega turned to him.
“Oh yeah?” said Cap, laughing a little bit. “All right, Stephen Hawking. You tell me. What’s the right question?”
Em scratched his chin and shifted his gaze to Vega. She raised her eyebrows. Go for it, kid. Knock yourself out. Em coughed, nervous.
“So maybe there’s a room,” he said. “Evan Marsh and Kylie Brandt are in it together. I can’t tell you where it is, and I can’t tell you how they got there.” He pointed to the laptop screen. “Kylie loves this movie, loves this movie star, and meets a guy who looks just like him. Right?”
Vega grabbed the line.
“She’s a flirt, romantic, a boundary tester,” she said. “She’s pissed at her mom, she’s pretending she’s a princess, she’s pretending she’s in a movie. Evan Marsh is nice to her. Maybe he flirts with her, makes her feel special. Maybe he’s teasing her. Maybe he’s stoned. He lights a cigarette and she sees a skull on his Zippo, just like the one the hero wears on a necklace in her favorite movie. She believes in signs, fate, love at first sight. All that shit a happy little girl believes in.
“Maybe he gets something from her—an email, a phone number, a way to communicate, tells her he’ll see her soon but doesn’t know where or when exactly. Then he trails her from home, picks up her and her sister from a mall when Mom’s shopping.”
“Why?” said Cap. “Is he a pedophile? Any history of that?”
“Not that we are aware of,” said Vega.
“So what would be the motive here? What would make a twenty-one-, twenty-two-year-old kid who’s not a pedophile kidnap two girls? Risk jail time. With a mother who’s dying.”
Cap had flashes of Maryann Marsh, her filmy eyes and drawn lips as she looked at the picture of her missing son.
“His mother,” said Vega.
“What’s the story with the mother?” said Em.
“She’s dying,” said Vega. “Evan told me his mother didn’t mind having cancer because it’s the last thing Nolan gave her. He was a smoker.”
“Oh, shit,” said Em, covering his mouth. “That is some rough shit.”
“Yes,” said Vega.
“I bet he was pissed the police didn’t do more,” Em suggested.
“How’d you know?” said Vega.
Em threw his hands up.
“Missing adult? Ralz probably just checked the box. File the report. Move on. We have some staffing issues,” Em explained. “In that we are understaffed.”
Cap asked, “How pissed?”
“Hard to say,” said Vega.
“Desperate?”
She nodded.
“Maybe.”
“His brother goes missing, Mom gets sick, kid’s life falls apart,” narrated Cap.
“He stops going to school, gets into some drugs,” added Vega.
Em picked up: “Somewhere, he meets Kylie Brandt.”
Cap continued, “And he has an idea. Take the girl—”
“Or girls,” said Vega. “Write an email to the police as ransom. Only instead of money, he wants them to find his brother.”
“Then he sends us the email,” said Cap, “because the police aren’t doing anything. Probably on a healthy dose of oxy to get rid of the anxiety.”
“But he’s not a criminal, right?” asked Em. “He’s just some druggie who made a shit-ton of bad decisions.”
Vega nodded at him. “I would think so.”
“If he has the girls, all we have to do is pull a thread,” said Cap.
Vega’s phone buzzed. She looked.
“That your guy?” said Cap.
“I got a home address. You know Sisilia Street?”
“Yeah,” said Cap.
He studied Em across the table. He hadn’t aged much since that night the kid had died, since he had run to get Cap in the break room looking like a chunky pre-teen nerd who’d just got spooked from playing the Bloody Mary game in the mirror. No gray hair, no wrinkles, still with the sweat rings under the arms, but there was something different now. Cap couldn’t put his finger on it, but if he had to guess it might have been the maturity of experience, knowing what was instinct and what was optimism.
“I’ll go back to work,” Em offered. “Try to get the original report on Nolan Marsh, see if we have anything on Evan.”
“Good,” said Cap.
“Thanks, Emerson,” said Vega.
Em grinned and gave them two thumbs-up.