It was called Bethlehem Hill, this area, but it felt pretty flat to Vega. Cap told her this was the Bethlehem Coal Mine before it closed in the ’70s. When it was operational, the runoff would flow into the creek and powder the water black, and there you had it, Black Creek. Cap said some towns turned their old mines into museums, gave tours and sold chips of anthracite on key chains, but Beth Coal had been abandoned and trashed after an underground fire was set by an arsonist around 1980. The surrounding roads caved and looked like they’d been suctioned with a giant vacuum from below. Every once in a while there’d be an item on the ballot to clean it all up, but there was always somewhere else to put the money.
The streets within a couple miles’ radius consisted of mostly commercial properties, mini-malls and offices spread out about a hundred feet from one another. The building they were looking for was only two floors, a dusty block of brick sticking up like a rotten tooth.
Cap parked on the street. There was one other parked car, a beige compact under a carport behind the brick building. The sun was almost down.
“Apartment two,” said Vega, reading from her phone.
“Gotta be up there,” said Cap, pointing to the second floor.
Evan Marsh’s apartment was above an eye doctor’s office, a monument-style sign in front that read BETHLEHEM EYE ASSOCIATES, along with the logo of an eye, wide open with lashes. The office was closed.
Vega followed Cap to the stairs, metal and rattling under their feet. On the landing, Cap knocked hard on the door, and they waited. Vega put her ear to the door and heard nothing. She leaned over the railing to look through a small window and could see a part of a living room—a recliner and beanbag chair. She looked at Cap and shook her head.
She eyed the gold-finish doorknob and stretched the bottom of her shirt over the fingers on one hand. It was locked but cheap, clicking back and forth. Cap glared at her, vaguely disapproving.
“Okay, now, we can wait in my car,” he said.
“That’s got to be his car over there,” she said, reaching above each ear and pulling out two thick bobby pins.
“You’re probably right,” said Cap, peering over the railing. “And it’s beige.”
“We’re friends with the cops now, right?” she said.
She turned her head around to see his face—tired and put-upon. It made her imagine him waiting for her outside a dressing room. In another kind of life wherein she didn’t order her clothes online and would drag a man shopping. And in which Cap was the man. The whole fantasy was so weird it made her smile, and that made him smile, contagious like a yawn. The lines around his eyes softened up.
“Right,” he said.
She extended one of the pins, bent the other, and stuck them both in the lock. She felt around for the driver pins inside, turned the plug, and the door snapped open.
“We’re doing this now,” Cap said.
Vega went first into the living room, saw the recliner and the beanbag she’d seen from the window. Also a television, shaggy carpet, an outdated light fixture hanging from the ceiling on a garland chain. The space was not big, and there was a musty smell in the air—body odor, dust.
She sensed a familiar element shifting—something chemical, like a change in altitude. Early decay: she knew what it was even before she saw the body.
There was Evan Marsh, the boy from this morning, now smaller and whiter and lying on the ground faceup, legs buckled, with his forehead blown open. Vega stepped back without thinking about it, almost into Cap, but stopped right before she hit him. It was a few seconds before she spoke.
“I’ll check the other rooms,” she said.
“You want company?”
She shook her head and drew the Springfield, kept it pointed at the floor, stepped lightly toward a partly open door. It was a bedroom, sparsely decorated: a mattress without a box spring, an uneven set of gray blinds over the window. She pushed open the sliding door of the closet with her foot and there were three shirts on hangers.
She went into the bathroom, flipped the light switch with the nose of her gun. It was dim and dirty. There were two fat prescription bottles without labels on the sink. Frosted shower door slid open. The Zippo with the skull and an ashtray full of butts on the edge of the tub. Vega hovered over it, leaned down and picked up the lighter with two fingertips, careful not to touch the tile. She held it up for a second, then slid it into her back pocket.
She came back out and saw Cap squatting over the body, stretching his neck around, examining the head.
“All clear?” he said, without looking up.
She nodded and let her eyes follow the blood sprays and clumps of pulp. The biggest spatter was on the cabinets above the kitchen counter; it was streaked and had dripped onto the counter below, into coffee cups, over the edge and down to the floor in thin lines. Bullet hole in the cabinet door.
She stayed there for only a second and then went to the body, kneeled opposite Cap.
Evan Marsh’s eyes were open, the lids either gone completely or mashed into the scramble that had been his skull, brain and hair a clotted mess. A halo of blood had spread underneath his head, dried into the threads of the carpet.
Vega thought of another body in another cheap room. It was in some Inland Empire meth den with plastic tablecloths tacked over the windows, mice darting across the countertops, the stench of meat and milk left in ninety-degree heat. She’d shoved the butt of her Browning into some punk’s chest and shot another one in the foot, left them both scuttling around on the floor moaning and yelling. Into a back room where she found her skip, a nineteen-year-old black kid named Zion, lying on a bed with his limbs stretched out so far they looked gummy, fingers extended like they were webbed, eyes and mouth open in shock. Dead.
It was the first time she had felt bad for a skip, on account of him being so young and so freshly dead. Could have been because he wasn’t alive to call her a cracker dyke, which would have eroded her sympathy a bit. But it was easier to pistol-whip and cuff them that way. She had kneeled and stared at him for a few minutes first, and then placed her head on his chest, ostensibly to listen for a heartbeat but really, truthfully, to narrow the gap between him and her, or was it the gap between life and death? Whatever it was it hadn’t worked, because Zion was dead and gone, and now so was Evan Marsh.
“Fuck,” she said, quiet and pissed.
“Yeah,” said Cap. “Happened a few hours ago. Blood’s separating.”
Vega looked where Cap was pointing, the blood on the cheeks was dried, yellow and thin at the edges of the splotches. She was confident she knew the details but wanted to be sure.
She slid a hand under Evan Marsh’s shoulder, felt the still weight of it, and then Cap’s hand clamped down on her wrist.
“Don’t,” he said.
It sounded like a warning. His eyes searched her face.
“Let go now,” said Vega, which also sounded like a warning.
Neither moved. She had her right hand free and knew Cap favored his right side, so she would need only a second, or less than that, to shove her palm into his nose. His fingers were hot on her skin.
He let her go.
“We have to wait for the ME,” he said.
Vega clenched her teeth and felt a pressure in her ears. She held her hands up to them.
“Fuck that, Caplan.”
“You’d like to know what happened here, right?” said Cap. “Then we call Junior and Em. We wait for the ME and we find out.”
“How long does that take? You really think your boys and the coroner are going to get to the bottom of this one quick? With all their spare time and powers of deductive reasoning?” she said.
“If you fuck with this crime scene, you contaminate a hair or a print that could lead us to the killer, and—”
Vega sat back on her haunches and shook her head.
“—and it could, it could bring us the girls. If Evan Marsh has some connection to the girls, which we have yet to figure out.”
“If we wait we’re losing more time.”
“Wait for what? What are you going to find out by moving this body around right now?”
“The entry wound.”
Cap smirked.
“So you got a forensics lab back at the bed-and-breakfast, you’re gonna analyze some residue and bullet-casing striation?”
“Stop it,” said Vega calmly, and she stood up.
“Stop what?”
“Stop being a dick.”
“This is me,” he said, and he stood up too. “I have some experience here too. Maybe you think it can’t stack up to all your street guerrilla bullshit, but I’ve seen a lot of bodies and a lot of evidence get trashed because of sloppy police work.”
“Good thing we’re not police,” said Vega.
That almost made him laugh but he stopped himself.
“What do you need to know exactly that you can’t guess?” he said, holding his hand over the body like he was in a séance. He walked to the door. “Okay, so the shooter is either invited in or the door is unlocked—no forced entry. Victim’s standing at the counter when shot from behind, six to twelve inches, I’d say. Vic flops forward, bounces back to the ground. Bullet’s probably in the wall behind the cabinet. You got anything else?”
“Shooter was invited in. Victim knew him,” said Vega quietly.
“How do we know that?”
Vega pointed to the counter.
“Two coffee cups. Can of Folgers.”
Cap sighed. “Yeah, looks like he was going to make the guy coffee.”
Cap put his hands on hips and stared down at the body. Vega watched his face change as he thought of something disappointing, swept his open hand over his mouth.
“Oh shit, Vega. Maryann Marsh. Fucking Maryann Marsh,” he said.
This seemed to exhaust him; he slumped where he stood.
“Yeah, I know,” said Vega.
“Okay, okay,” Cap muttered, like he was talking to himself. “Okay, Vega, look. You want to put your hands all over the stiff first, go for it. You want to drag your feet through this place, muddy up the fibers, do it. Can we please just give the ME a shot here after, see what he can pull?”
Vega wondered if this was how he got women to sleep with him, disarming them by giving in to them on one thing and asking for something else at the same time.
So she made him wait for a few fat seconds before she said yes.
An hour later there were six cops on the scene, two paramedics and the ME, a guy named Baker who had been smoking for forty years and looked like it, his skin a mess of pale folds. Baker and the cops seemed glad to see Cap, their faces expectant, surprised. They looked at Vega like she was a spiky tropical fruit, some exotic unknown thing. They had started to comb the room, splitting it into a grid of squares, Baker kneeling over the body making a disappointed hound dog face.
Cap and Vega waited on the landing outside, watched as the cops dusted and bagged. One of them, Torres, a young guy in a wrinkled uniform, took pictures with a digital camera.
“Any idea why they’re not questioning us?” said Vega, leaning against the railing.
Cap’s gaze went to the road, to a tan sedan pulling in next to the ambulance and the cruisers. Cap nodded to it.
“I have an idea.”
The car door opened. It was Ralz.
“Hey, Ralz,” said Cap. “We going for a ride?”
Then they were in the goddamn cruiser. In the backseat behind the filmy polycarbonate partition like a couple of drug dealers.
Ralz drove them and didn’t speak, kept glancing at Vega in the rearview.
“Junior does this. This is his thing,” Cap said to her.
“Wasting time during an investigation?”
“He gets angry, asserts himself, calms down. Happens very quickly.”
Cap looked out the side window into traffic. He patted his knee with his hand; Vega watched the fingers curl. She glared at Ralz’s face through the partition. Maybe 180 pounds but mostly muscle. Dead-eyed and stoic, which seemed to be his signature look. He would win in a fight between the two of them with his eyes closed, one hand tied behind his back, without breaking a sweat, and all the rest. Unless she had one or two seconds on him.
Perry would have said that if someone crosses you on the wrong day, you grab the nearest pint glass and shove it in their teeth. Don’t stew in your juices, don’t let anything sink in. Don’t wait, don’t bide your time, don’t save your breath, don’t sleep on it. You don’t have the weight, kid, but you got the fire, so burn the motherfuckers to the bone.
The wind had picked up, blowing leaves and trash in spirals in the street outside of the station. As they pulled up, Cap saw Junior standing on the front steps like an angry dad. Hands on his hips and everything. Em and some other cops filtered out behind him.
Ralz opened the doors for Vega, then Cap.
“What the fuck!” Junior yelled to him.
“Hey, Junior,” said Cap, checking the impulse to grin.
He came down the stairs and stood in front of Cap and Vega, pink in the face and sweating through the blond fuzz on his upper lip. He pointed a thin finger at Cap’s chest.
“You got some bad fucking luck, Cap, you know that?”
“I’m pretty keenly aware of it, yes.”
“This is cute, asshole?” said Junior, hushed. “You think turning up at a murder scene with your girlfriend after I told her to stay out of my town is funny?”
Cap felt a prickly numbness on the back of his head, something sour in his throat. His mild amusement at Junior’s pissy little face started to shift.
“You want to give us shit or you want our statements?” said Cap, dry mouthed.
“Wow, Cap, how about both?” said Junior, snotty. “The two of you can sit in the box until you scrape some lawyer off the bottom of your shoe, and then I’ll have you arrested for obstruction anyway. Then you can add gross misdemeanor to your list of fuckups….”
He kept talking. Cap watched a drop of foam form in the corner of Junior’s mouth, and couldn’t hear him anymore. Cap looked down at his hands, front and back. Shaking.
He remembered times like this before. A lot when he was younger, so skinny and scared he couldn’t do anything about it, in high school in Sheepshead Bay when those goddamn gangster Russian kids jumped him and beat him with an umbrella. Then later, when he was a cop, when he wasn’t skinny or scared anymore, some punk they had in for armed robbery kept calling him a Jesus killer and talked about how Hitler was A-OK in his book. And then he saw the picture of Jules on Cap’s desk and said, “Your wife looks like she likes gettin’ raped.” Cap had to go in the bathroom so he wouldn’t slam the kid’s face into the desk edge. Then fights with Jules, the time she said so incredibly fucking coldly, “The worst part about you, Max, is that you don’t even know why you’re angry at me anymore—you’re just too lazy to figure it out.” So he threw the beer bottle at the door and it cracked into a few unsatisfying pieces and dented the old damp wood.
Stop, Junior, please stop.
Cap made himself step back.
“What’s the problem, Cap?” said Junior, a smirk spilling across his face. “You think you might hit me?”
Then came Vega. Before Cap could answer or think or move, she put herself between him and Junior, chin angled up. Junior almost looked charmed.
“You got a thing to say, sweetie?”
Cap could sense her body filling up with some kind of current, the warmth from her back on his chest. For a second he thought he could feel her heart beat.
“I know guys like you,” she said with an air of discovery. “You’re the kind of guy has to beg girls to let you screw them.”
Junior coughed out a laugh now.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “You missed your calling, California. Should have been a shrink.”
“You beg your wife to marry you too?”
Junior talked over her, said, “That’s enough, now.”
Vega did not think that was enough; she kept talking fast and low in his face.
“She’s so active, Hollows,” said Vega. “So much time at the gym.”
Junior was caught off guard and speechless for a second, and Cap saw just the smallest hint of painful recognition in his eyes.
“Miss Vega, every word you say digs you a deeper hole. It’s a little pathetic,” said Junior, still calm.
“I saw her Facebook page—not the one with your kids and your dog and all that shit. I’m talking about the good one, GymBabe80?”
“Watch your mouth,” Junior snapped.
Cap realized, finally, where she was going. Ralz pawed at the ground a little next to Cap, and the air in their little circle turned to glass that was about to break.
“She really likes spin class, right? A lot of nice pictures of her, but not one of you or the family. That’s a little funny, huh?” said Vega, whispering now. Then she grew thoughtful and almost humble: “Now, I don’t know a lot about social media. What does it mean when you have a ton of ‘likes’ from guys?”
“Watch your fucking mouth, I said,” said Junior, pointing a finger in her face.
Vega leaned into the finger and said, “They seem to know her really well.”
Cap kept his eyes on Ralz, who looked unsure as to how to proceed. He could almost see the hamster wheel in Ralz’s brain rattling around as he ran through the options.
“Detective Ralz, please place Miss Vega under arrest right now,” said Junior, his voice a little hoarse.
“What for?” Cap said. “Talking trash about your wife? You’d have to arrest half of Denville.”
Cap was just gambling now; he’d never heard anything about Junior’s wife, but saw that Junior was sure as shit uncomfortable talking about her, and that made Cap very happy. Junior glared at him.
Vega shrugged, her shoulders rising and dropping casually.
“You’re right, doesn’t matter,” she said to Junior, cheery and conciliatory. “Probably doesn’t mean a thing.”
Junior’s shoulders came down a fraction of an inch at the prospect of her backing off. He even looked like he might turn around and go back to being his regular shithead self.
But then Vega snapped in a loud, clear voice, “My guess is they clicked ‘like’ because there’s no ‘I fucked her’ button.”
And that was it. Junior lunged, grabbing for the collar of Vega’s jacket, and suddenly Cap felt all his limbs loosen and an old blind confidence fill him up, and he stretched his arm out to bat Junior away, but couldn’t get there before Ralz landed a punch on his jaw, smashing Cap’s lower lip between his teeth.
He hadn’t been hit in a few years and was unprepared for it, lost his balance and stumbled sideways onto the ground.
Cap sat up, saw Em standing with Ralz in a headlock, Ralz’s face red, both of them tumbling backward with the momentum, and Cap was so dazed he started laughing. When he stopped there was a buzzing in his ear, like a bug was deep in there. He shut his eyes and heard his name over and over through the static. Caplan, Caplan, Caplan.
He opened his eyes. The noise cleared. Traynor, the chief of police, stood above him.
“Caplan, you need a medic?”
Cap shook his head, tasted the blood on his tongue, and stood up carefully. All at once he felt the various points of pain on his body—shoulders, coccyx, jaw. He pressed his palm against his chin, trying to adjust it. He knew in an hour it would swell, in four it would bruise.
Then he looked around. They were all staring at him, frozen. The chief, right in front of him, fit and attentive. Here were Ralz and Em behind him, both sweaty and no longer attached to each other. Here was a slightly hefty guy in a blue suit and a burgundy tie, alert, clear eyes—must be the Fed. Here was Junior, panting and dazed. Here were a few cops, some in shirtsleeves and some in uniform, some Cap knew, a couple young ones he didn’t, on the steps and on the ground.
And there was Vega, standing next to the chief, loose strands of hair waving like spiderweb filaments, her fair skin punctuated by red blots on her cheeks and forehead, chest rising and falling in measured surges.
They were all watching Cap. Cap looked back at Traynor.
“What’s going on here, Caplan?” he said.
Cap knew there was rage in there, contained and primed. Cap thought that back when Traynor was a drinker he must have been a bastard; he’d heard stories about him showing up for work with black eyes and bloody knuckles, blowing .12 on the Breathalyzer at eight in the morning before coffee. But now he was wide-awake, chewing the end of his mustache, waiting for an answer.
Cap didn’t plan, just started talking.
“I’m working for the Brandt family, Chief, with Alice Vega, over there. We think there’s a connection between the kidnapping and the dead kid we just found, and we’d like to tell you about it.”
Traynor glanced at Vega, then back to Cap.
“Get inside.”
“He can’t enter the premises,” said Junior, pointing at Cap. “It’s in the terms of his agreement.”
“What terms?” said Traynor.
“My resignation,” said Cap.
Traynor thought about it for only a second.
“Was the condition negotiated on behalf of the family or the department?”
“Department,” said Cap.
“Good,” said Traynor. “Consider the condition suspended for the length of this investigation.”
“Chief, legally speaking it might not—” Junior began.
“You get yourself a JD, Hollows, in your spare fucking time?”
Junior stepped back and appeared to shrink in volume.
“Then we worry about it later. Let’s go,” the chief said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
He turned and headed toward the steps, striding, and everyone else was quick to follow, jumping to attention like they were already late. Vega held her hand down to Cap. He took it, feeling her soft cold skin, and she pulled him up. She let go, said nothing, straightened her jacket out and clapped her hands together once softly like they were chalkboard erasers she’d just finished cleaning.