Cap sat with Jamie in Junior’s office. As she listened to him, ruddy splotches appeared on her cheeks and forehead, tears spilling loosely from her sealed eyes. She rubbed them with her fingertips.
“Jamie, we’re getting all the security video we can and canvassing the strip mall near the ballet studio,” Cap said. “Do you remember anyone who stood out? A delivery person or a salesman maybe?”
“No, it was just a strip mall, and it was just her ballet class. I don’t remember a delivery guy,” whispered Jamie, coughing. She smacked her forehead with her palm gently. “Part of me feels like I got Bailey; there’s no way I’m gonna get Kylie too, right?—that’s just too much luck.”
Cap knew he should speak, but he couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound patronizing.
“I just,” Jamie started, “I just think I could handle anything….I think I could live with just Bailey if I had to, I just, I just…” She kept braking on the “just.” No new tears were coming; her eyes were small and dry, her face wet like a stone. “I just couldn’t handle it if they cut her up. You know, her body parts. I’ve thought about this a lot. Then I’d do the overdose right. Bailey could live with my folks.”
She touched her hair dreamily, still gazing past Cap as she thought about it. Cap stood up and saw confetti in the corners of his eyes, held the edge of the table with one hand, queasy.
“Wait here. I’ll be right back,” he said.
Jamie nodded, still spacey.
Cap jogged out of the office, down one floor to the break room, fed dollars into the vending machine. Two packs of peanut M&M’s dropped to the tray, and Cap grabbed them and ran back upstairs to Jamie. She was still staring blankly ahead, resting her head on her fists, stacked on top of each other.
“Here,” said Cap, setting the candy on the desk in front of her.
She raised her head and looked at the yellow bag like it was a rock from the moon.
“Have you eaten any solid food yet?” Cap said, ripping open his own bag.
“Yeah, I had some toast and soup.”
“Try a couple,” he said. “They’ll give you a little energy.”
He tilted his head back and poured some of the candy into his mouth and started crunching. Then the syrupy sweetness of mass-produced chocolate hit him, and he accidentally made a little grunting noise.
“You really like M&M’s,” said Jamie, opening her bag with two hands.
“The cheap sugar’s the only thing that keeps me going when I’m this tired,” he said. “Might help you too.”
“Kylie doesn’t love anything like she loves sugar,” she said. “I tell people that and they’re all, duh, she’s a kid, but it’s different. I have two kids, and Bailey loves ice cream and cake and Twizzlers as much as the next, but Kylie…”
She paused, shook her head, stared at the bag of candy in her hand.
“Go on,” said Cap.
“I still have to stop her from sucking on ketchup packets when we get hot dogs. She puts them in her pocket. It’s like a drug problem.”
She set the bag down on Junior’s desk.
“Do you think…they actually lured her with candy, like the stuff they used to tell us when we were kids?”
Cap swallowed and the candy went down rough—a collection of unchewed peanuts.
“This sounds a little more organized than that,” he said. “Which is good for us actually. Random’s usually harder to figure out.”
Jamie nodded. She picked out one M&M, bright unreal blue, and ate it. She closed her eyes and held it in her mouth for a good long time.
In the big blue conference room, Vega connected her laptop to a projector, and the image, split into four, appeared on the beige screen: the parking lot of the strip mall on Church Street; the western entrance where the ballet studio was visible, in between a shoe store and a juice bar; the eastern entrance; and the rear parking lot for trucks making deliveries.
The Fed and Traynor stood and stared, watching footage in black-and-white, people coming and going.
“How’d your guy get this so quickly?” said the Fed.
“He has a talent,” said Vega.
“Maybe he should come work for us,” said the Fed, glancing back at his boss, who sat and drew delicate slashes with his fingertip on his tablet.
“He’s an independent contractor,” said Vega. “How far you want to go back—six months?”
“Six months?” said Cap. “Come on.”
“Let’s start with one,” said Traynor. “Emerson?”
Em sat near the head of the table chugging an energy drink, surrounded by three officers still in their blues from their previous shifts.
“Yes, sir, we’ll each take a screen. Looking for a white male who shows up more than once, probably near or around the ballet studio.”
“Anything that stands out, anyone who looks familiar,” said Cap.
“The ballet instructor remember anything?” said Traynor, nodding to the Fed.
“We talked to her for about an hour,” said the Fed. “There’s a guy who works for Moreland—came in to measure mirrors a while back. She said she didn’t like the way he looked at her and some of the older girls.”
“Was Kylie one of the older girls?” said Cap.
“No. Oldest was twelve. But that may not make a material difference to a pedophile,” said the Fed. “Our man at Moreland is going through his records, trying to find the guy he sent to measure their mirrors—he’ll send it as soon as he has it.”
“Does he need someone to help him along?” said Junior, annoyed.
“I’m sure he’s capable, Captain,” said Traynor.
“There’s only nominal information in the McKenna and Cahill files about the ballet classes, so we should get the parents in here.”
“The McKennas are on their way now. Anything from neighboring businesses?” asked Traynor.
The Fed shook his head.
“Everyone’s got a story. You ask people enough questions, they start to think the UPS guy looks suspicious.”
“Vega?” said Traynor.
“Pastor was with Marsh at Alex Chaney’s the day Kylie was there. He didn’t realize it was Kylie—in his memory she only stood out because she was a little girl in a roomful of dopers. He thought she was Chaney’s kid sister or something,” she said, glancing at the video feed. “He remembers she told Marsh she wanted to be a movie star. And he asked her how old she was and where she went to school.”
“So he gives her his number?” said Cap. “That doesn’t seem plausible.”
Vega shrugged.
“Who cares,” she said softly, as if it were just the two of them in the room. “He knew enough about her to find her. Name, school. Denville.”
“We’ve got people canvassing the strip mall on Church,” said Traynor, charting maps in his head. “Detectives and lieutenants calling the parents of the kids in the ballet class. Let’s get prepared for the mirror man.”
“We can do the interview,” said Vega.
“No,” said Traynor definitively.
Vega stared at him, surprised, and Cap stiffened up, ready to fight. Really, Chief? she thought. Now we’re taking our dicks out?
Traynor swabbed at the air with his hands like they were windshield wipers, erasing it.
“It’ll take some time to get him IDed and in the house. Let’s put it to use. Sydney McKenna’s parents should be here soon. Cap, Vega—why don’t one of you talk to them?” he said.
“What about Ashley Cahill’s parents?” said Cap.
“They’re divorced. Father lives in Philly, but the mother still lives in Lebanon, right outside, so we’ll talk to her first and then if we need to, go to the father. I want all of this face-to-face.”
Vega got it. People thought more when you were in the room with them. They had better memories, consciences. And you could see their eyes.
Traynor continued: “Apparently Mom can’t leave the house, says she’s ill. Didn’t sound so stable when I spoke with her.”
Vega remembered lying in her bed in junior high and high school, falling asleep listening to Eminem or Black Flag on headphones, and then waking up long after the CD ended. How she’d hear her mother making her rounds around the house, checking doors and windows, murmuring the mantra of her neuroses: “Safe, safe, safe.”
“I’ll go, I’ll see Ashley Cahill’s mother,” she said then, so firm, so assured, you’d think she’d made the decision years ago.
Cap’s phone hummed and jumped with texts on the desk in front of him. He was in Traynor’s office alone. Messages were stacking up, flashing at the top of the screen from people he knew and sort of knew, friends he hadn’t talked to in a few years, and also his parents in Florida, his cousins, of course Nell, and even one from Jules, who usually only contacted him about logistics.
The texts said things like this:
“Buddy you are on CNN!!!”
“I just saw you on the news you look old”
“Please call me dad is so proud he says xoxo mom”
“U and Alice are on every network! Any closer to finding kylie?…”
“Cap, be careful.”
That last one was from Jules, and Cap smiled at her use of punctuation, even in a text. Formal and academic, except with his name. When they’d been married she called him Max, but after the split, on the rare days she actually used his name to address him, he was Cap. It sounded casual enough coming from anyone else, and from her it meant exactly that. She was anyone else now. Still, he stared at her text and felt something resembling joy.
He wrote back a restrained “Trying. Thx for checking in.”
Then he wrote to Nell, “Don’t stay up too lateral,” the autocorrect button popping up.
“I wolfs :)” came back.
Then the door opened, and it was Junior, with a couple behind him.
“Max Caplan, Toby and Erica McKenna.”
Cap shook their hands. They were both young and attractive, tan and brunette. The man, Toby, was tall with a full head of thick hair and glasses, his wife petite with a perfectly oval face. They all sat in a small circle of chairs Cap had arranged because he hadn’t felt comfortable sitting behind the chief’s desk.
“Thank you for coming,” said Cap. “Especially so late.”
“Happy to do it,” said Toby McKenna, his voice deep.
With the small circle frames on his glasses, Cap thought he was a twin for Clark Kent.
“I realize this can’t be easy.”
Neither responded to that. Both smiled politely, looked at their hands and each other. Even unnerved, their faces retained their clean beauty.
There were plenty of young parents in and around Denville—Cap found it to be a function of the suburbs. People had bigger houses, more rooms than they did in cities, so they filled them up with kids. This was not what he had experienced growing up in Sheepshead Bay. When Cap was four or five and begged his mother for a little brother, she’d said, “Where we gonna put him, Maxie? The bathtub?” He grew up with pots and pans stacked on top of one another in cupboards that could never quite close, the fan of handles jutting from the doors. Later he found out his mother’d had her tubes tied when he was a year old. We don’t have the money, and he’s just about perfect, his mother had said to his father. Why tempt fate?
But around here, you had kids and you had them young and you had a few. Even knowing that, though, Cap thought the McKennas looked awfully young to have an oldest child who was twelve years old. He put their age at about thirty, so of course it was possible that they’d had kids in high school or right after, but there was something off-center about them; he couldn’t quite pin it down.
He remembered from the file that Toby McKenna had been driving for a livery car service in Harrisburg at the time of the abduction. But Cap didn’t read that now. Not from the brown leather shoes with a black rubber outsole, tan blazer, Clark Kent build, and glasses with designer frames.
“Mr. McKenna, can I ask, are you still working for the black car service—what was the name again?” he said.
“No, not Elite Fleet, not anymore,” said McKenna, adjusting his glasses shyly, humbly dapper, Cap couldn’t help but think. “We opened, me and Erica were able to open our own service a year ago in Middletown—a few cars, a few drivers. Catering to high-end clients.”
He said it quickly, made Cap think it was something he didn’t want to dwell on.
“I see,” Cap said, smiling, friendly. “Going well I hope? Always tricky with a small business. Believe me, I know.”
“Yes, it’s going okay,” said McKenna, quick again.
“We’ve been very lucky,” added Erica McKenna. “Right place at the right time.”
She smiled then, and Cap saw a twinge cross her face. For a moment it looked as if she might cry.
“I’m pleased to hear it,” Cap said. “If anyone deserves it, it’s you folks.”
They both nodded, looked down and away. Shutting the door on pain or hiding something. Or both.
“So,” Cap said. “I’ll get right to it here so you can go back to your lives and your family.”
He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, clasping his hands to show them: this is a conversation, not an interrogation.
“We have reason to believe that Kylie Brandt’s kidnapper had some kind of connection to her through her ballet class initially. Ashley Cahill in Lebanon also took ballet, and I understand Sydney did as well, that right?”
“Yes,” said Erica. Her husband nodded.
“I guess what we just need to know here is if you remember anything strange surrounding the ballet class in particular. Did you take her to ballet generally, Mrs. McKenna?”
“Yes,” said Erica again.
“Great. Let’s start with the teacher—her name was in the file.” Cap reached behind them and grabbed the folder, opened it. “Nancy Topper?”
“Miss Nancy, they called her, all the girls.”
“Miss Nancy,” repeated Cap. “Anything seem off with her? Anything stand out?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Erica, glancing at McKenna. “Syd liked her well enough.”
“Okay,” said Cap. “Now can you recall anyone, anything that didn’t seem right at the class, or maybe where the class took place? At the”—he flipped through the pages of the file, searching for the name—“Junior Tiptoes Dance Studio?”
Erica shook her head, appeared confused.
“I’m sorry, like what?”
“Anything,” said Cap. Still they both looked at him with blank faces. “I apologize, I’ll be a little more specific. Do you remember anyone else, besides Miss Nancy, who was in and out of the studio and may have seen Sydney? A deliveryman, a salesman, someone who worked in a nearby business?”
Erica gripped the small purple handbag in her lap.
“No,” she said, sounding genuinely sad. “I’m sorry, I just don’t remember anyone like that.”
“The police asked us all these kinds of questions when she first disappeared,” added McKenna. “We made lists of all the people—all the parents of the other kids, names and numbers.”
“I understand,” said Cap, holding his hands up. “And again, I’m sorry to have to rehash this. It’s just that we can’t take anything as a coincidence right now, and three little girls who all took ballet—and the same equipment distributor serviced all three ballet studios—it’s something we noticed.”
Cap flipped through the pages in the folder and didn’t speak for a minute. He wanted to see if the McKennas might offer up anything else without his prompting. The thing about it was, he believed what they were saying, both of them, but he could not shake the feeling of a bad tooth decaying in the gums.
That’s when he saw the picture. It was a Christmas card showing the whole family—a glossy green strip with all of their smiling faces, the girls in green dresses, the boy made to wear a sweater vest, and McKenna and Erica, both at least twenty or thirty pounds heavier. Their tragedy explained the weight loss easily, but their faces were different too, Erica’s nose now smaller and turned up at the end while in the picture it was longer and thicker. McKenna’s eyes now wide without a wrinkle, while for that Christmas, tired and furrowed after undoubtedly driving a third-shift hack. In Cap’s experience it was seldom that parents looked better and healthier after losing a child, yet here the McKennas were, right in front of him, two years after their eight-year-old had vanished, looking like superheroes on their off day.
It was close to ten when Vega pulled into Laurel Acres Mobile Home Park Estates, which sounded to her like the result of a word jumble game. The GPS continued to announce she had reached her destination because the roads of the park were not registered on any map except its own internal directory. Now she was going from the notes on her phone, given to her by Hollows, who’d gotten them from Ashley Cahill’s mother.
The roads were paved, set out in a grid, two or three lots per block, all the homes raised on concrete foundations, built long and narrow. Most were in decent shape with fresh vinyl siding, flower boxes under perfectly square windows.
Vega found the street and then the number. There was no curb or driveway so she turned in and parked perpendicular to the house, next to an old hatchback. She got out, saw that the place looked the same as the others more or less, blue gray in color, dim lights on inside, a blue bulb over a screened porch.
She went up the steps, pulled back the screen door, and stood on the porch, a blank wiry mat under her feet. She pressed the doorbell and waited. Cool air blew through the screen and went right into her ears, a sharp little sting.
The woman who opened the door had milk-white hair pulled back in a ponytail, wore a sleeveless jersey dress with bare legs and feet underneath. Her eyes were such a dark brown they were almost black. She puckered her lips, chewing gum, Vega assumed.
She said, “You’re someone else.”
Vega paused, then said, “Alice Vega.”
“The guy I talked to said he’d send someone else, meaning not him.”
“Yes, Hollows, right?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“And you’re Stacy Gibbons?” said Vega.
“Yeah. Used to be Cahill. I’m her,” said Stacy, moving the gum to her molars, jaw clicking and clamping. “You can come in.”
Vega stepped inside, and Stacy moved behind her to shut and lock the door. Like the whole park, everything was laid out in neat squares here, the living room first with an L-shaped couch fit perfectly to one corner and its walls, leading into the square of the dining room with a square glass table. There was nothing on the table except an empty bowl in the middle. Vega glanced around and saw every table and surface was the same—no knickknacks, cups, magazines. Her eyes jumped to paintings on the wall—nondescript flowers in vases, a sailboat on a calm sea. They reminded her of pictures hanging in a hotel room.
“It came like this,” said Stacy, reading Vega’s mind. “Furniture and everything. My ex gave me the down payment so I’d stay away from him and his new wife.” She glanced around the room, then, and added, “It worked.”
She studied Vega quickly, head to feet and back up again. “The guy, Hollows, said there wasn’t anything new about Ashley. That this is about those other girls up in Denville.”
“That’s right,” said Vega.
Stacy did some short nods, continued to work the gum in her mouth, pursing and relaxing her lips.
“Okay, then. You can have a seat.”
Vega sat on one side of the L, Stacy on the other. The jersey dress hiked up a bit, revealing bald, bruised knees. Stacy didn’t make a move to cover herself, didn’t seem to notice. She tried to keep her hands in her lap but was having some trouble doing so, rubbing her thumbs between fingers like she was kneading a knot of dough in each hand.
“You think it’s the same guys, whoever took Ashley?” she said.
“Maybe,” said Vega. “I want to ask you a couple of questions about her ballet class. Kylie Brandt also took ballet. We’re thinking the kidnapper might have seen or gotten to know the girls that way.”
Stacy pressed her front teeth against her bottom lip; Vega could see her temples pulse.
“Like a stalker?” said Stacy. “Someone stalking ballet classes for kids?”
“Yes, maybe. Does anything come to mind?”
“No,” she said, right away. Shook her head and kept shaking it.
She had voluntarily removed herself from remembering, Vega knew. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the shelves.
“Do you have any pictures of her taking ballet, or a video of a performance maybe? Anything I could look at that might help me?” said Vega.
Stacy stopped shaking her head suddenly. “You mean something that might help me, don’t you?” she said, popping her jaw down.
“Maybe,” said Vega.
“You probably think I got rid of all of Ashley’s things, just because I don’t have pictures of her everywhere.”
Vega didn’t respond.
“You’re wrong,” Stacy said. “I have everything. Everything. I have her hair. I have her underwear. I just don’t have it out here. Because of this.”
She pointed to her jaw, clamping and unclamping, still. She opened her mouth, white teeth, a salmon-colored tongue. There was no gum. There had never been gum.
“I tried putting pictures of her up. I’d look at them and get muscle spasms or pass out. Gnawed my teeth down to stubs. Then I got a shit-ton of meds so I can operate in the world, but I still do this twenty-four seven, three sixty-five,” she said, tapping her jaw again.
They were quiet, the only sound the clicking of Stacy’s teeth. She had an aggressive spark just then; Vega thought she might jump up and bite her. She thought of what Cap would do and started talking. She thought of her mother.
“People pay me a ridiculous amount of money to find their kids,” she said. “They come to me and they’re out of their minds. So I find them, most of them. And the parents either live their own lives and hope that works out for their kids, or they live their lives for their kids, and the kids still grow up and fuck up, and the parents still worry about them until all their hair falls out….”
Stacy watched her, listening, moving her chin around in tiny circles fluidly, like she was hearing soft music.
“Or I don’t find the kids at all,” said Vega, quieter. “And you know what that’s like. And either way, anyway, you’ve got scraps. My mother never got more than four hours of sleep at a time because she was so amped up with worry that something would happen to me and my brother. It was like her religion. And then she died when she was forty-one.”
Vega’s injuries started a little marching band, throbs and beats, forehead, cheek, knees. Everything hurt, all her skin hot like it had been grazed by an oil fire.
“Was it suicide?” said Stacy.
“No. Cancer.”
Stacy nodded, but it wasn’t pity or sympathy—Vega had seen many of those nods, the glistening eyes and Halloween mask frowns. This nod was her seeing all the layers at once. Copy that.
Vega looked down at her hands through blurry eyes, and they appeared to be vibrating in her lap, shaking.
Stacy stood up from the couch.
“When Ashley was three or four she used to say, ‘I hate you, Mommy.’ Back then I’d get all out of shape about it—I’d yell at her and send her to her room and get all rankled—but now when I think of it, when I think of her face…”
Stacy cupped her hand in the air in front of her.
“I know she didn’t mean it. She was doing it just to see what I would do. I was like her lab rat. She was trying to figure us out. What makes us sad, what makes us happy. She figured it out too. Always the same answer.”
She lowered her hands to her sides, rubbing the fabric of her dress between her fingers.
“I’ll get the pictures,” she said.
She started to leave the room and then paused in the doorway, craned her head over her shoulder to speak.
“I don’t think your mother worrying about you gave her cancer.”
Then she left.
Vega wiped tears from her cheeks, forgetting about the raw skin, and twitched at the pain. Her breath was choppy, a washboard in her throat. She fumbled for her phone in her inside pocket and skimmed over about twenty texts. She tapped her brother’s name. His read, “Saw you on TV. Kick all kinds of Ass ;)”
Vega smiled, and that hurt her face too, and she wrote back, “Shut up.”
There was also one from her father, but she skipped it, went straight to Cap’s: “Can your guy get financials on Toby and Erica McKenna quick?”
“Probably. Why?” she typed back.
While she waited for his response, she sent an email to the Bastard, and then Cap’s text came back: “I think they have too much money and look too good.”
She was about to write him back when Stacy returned holding an orange shoebox. She sat on the couch and placed the box on the low table between them. She didn’t open it right away.
“This has pictures from ballet class, I think,” she said. “You can take them with you if you want.”
“Are you sure?” said Vega. “I can look at them here.”
“I can’t,” said Stacy. “Please take them. You can bring them back.”
She ground and snapped her teeth in the front now, incisors on incisors. Vega stared at them, glowing white.
“You have really nice teeth,” she said.
“I should,” Stacy said, a laugh crowding her throat. “They’re all crowns, every one of them. My ex paid for those too. I wear these mouthguards at night, used to just wear one up top, but I chewed through it like a dog. So now I wear top and bottom.”
She continued to talk about the mouthguards, how she put them in the dishwasher once and then her ex-husband paid for replacements, and she hadn’t felt silly because the dentist told her the mouthguards were silicon, so why shouldn’t you be able to put them in the dishwasher? It seemed to calm her, talking about the teeth, so Vega spaced out a little and tried to remember something from Ashley’s file.
“I’m sorry, what does your ex do for a living again?” she said.
“He’s a floor manager at a Game On, down in Philly.”
“He’s done that awhile?”
“Yeah, about ten years I guess.”
Vega leaned forward, tried to get deeper into the blackness of Stacy’s eyes, searching.
“You have a nice home,” she said. “And nice teeth. Does your ex make that much money at Game On—that’s sporting goods, I’m guessing?”
“Oh no way,” said Stacy, unoffended. “He had this aunt I never heard of, died and left him a wad of cash a couple years ago. And he felt guilty, you know. Only thing that worked out the last four years.”
Vega thought of the impalpable entity that was a wire transfer, imaginary money rattling through an imaginary pneumatic tube in the sky. Her phone buzzed and kept buzzing against her ribs as she watched Stacy’s mouth moving, showing off the crowns, flawless and counterfeit.
Cap paced, didn’t realize he was pacing, alone in Junior’s office. He was aware he was talking to himself aloud, but only with words here and there, fragments of thoughts, sometimes his tongue suctioning air off the backboard of his teeth.
Finally, Vega’s message came through. He read it once quickly, eyes jumping to the numbers. He tapped the screen to zoom, then realized he had to see the whole thing at once. He went around Junior’s desk and pressed the space bar and got a prompt for the log-in and password. Then to the door and stuck his head out, saw Junior at the end of the hall talking to Ralz and called to him.
Junior jogged to him.
“I need your password,” said Cap.
“Why?” said Junior, immediately defensive.
Cap stared at him.
“I’d like to download some pornography.”
“Mature.”
Junior came to the desk, typed in his password, and got out of the way. Cap found the email from Vega and blew it up on the screen.
“Take a look at this,” he said.
Junior looked.
“What is this, financial records?”
“Yeah. Sydney McKenna’s parents’ checking account.”
“Don’t you need a subpoena for that?”
“You do,” said Cap. “I don’t.”
Cap put his finger on the screen, said, “This is from a year ago, almost a year exactly after Sydney disappeared. Look at that.”
“A hundred fifty K,” said Junior. “Isn’t he a cabdriver?”
“He was. A year ago. Now they run their own car service.” Cap scrolled down the page and hit the screen lightly with his fist.
“Look at that,” he said slowly. “One week after the wire, forty goes to Lincoln Central in Harrisburg—that’s enough for a sedan outright and down payments on what, four or five others?”
He kept scrolling, looking for big numbers. He saw a cluster of them, and he and Junior both leaned in as close as they could without the figures blurring.
“Doctors,” said Junior.
“I will bet you my car those are plastic surgeons. He’s got new eyes; she’s got a new nose. You’ll find tanning salons on there too, personal trainers, gyms.”
Junior listened to all of it, said, “Your car’s a piece of shit.” Then he stood up straight, stretched his arms behind his back. “So you think they sold their kid so they could get cars and tans?”
“Not really,” said Cap. “But this is something. And they, themselves, it’s strange—like they had no problem being here, like they expected to be here.”
“Maybe they just want to help.”
“Yes, maybe. Or maybe they feel guilty about something. They haven’t asked how much longer they’ll be here, haven’t asked for a lawyer.”
“They’re still here?” said Junior. “It’s almost midnight.”
“I know—I was waiting for this from Vega’s guy,” Cap said, pointing at the screen.
Junior wiped his mouth a number of times.
“So potentially they’re just nice Christian folks who happened to experience a windfall, and we’re holding them hostage,” he said.
“They’re not under arrest,” said Cap. “And what if that money is related, in some way, to Sydney?”
Cap watched Junior ruminate. The ruminations of Junior, he thought. Alternately abashed and sniffing whatever blood may have leaked into the water.
“You want to talk to them with me?” Cap asked him.
Junior didn’t have to think about it anymore.
“Let’s go.”
Stacy handed the box to Vega at the door, pushed it against her body. Vega took it, and Stacy let it go and stepped back and away slowly like she was in space, floating, hands outstretched with gnarled knuckles, without her realizing it. Then she brought them down to her sides, gripping the skirt of her dress.
“You can bring them back whenever,” she said.
“Within the next few days, I promise.”
Vega thought she probably hadn’t said the words “I promise” since she was a kid, linking pinkies at recess. There was some heaviness to it she hadn’t expected as she watched Stacy drift back to her planet of squares and mouthguards.
“Whenever,” said Stacy.
They said goodbye, didn’t shake hands, and then Stacy shut the door and locked it while Vega stood there. She waited a minute in case Stacy came back out. She didn’t, so Vega left, got in the car and dropped the shoebox on the passenger seat, eager to no longer be holding it. She put her hands on the wheel and avoided looking at her own eyes in the rearview because, at this point, the emotions were so varied and numerous she was sure she’d be able to see them as swirling pinwheels in her irises. She was sure it would make her dizzy.
Then her phone buzzed, and she let her breath out, hadn’t realized she’d been storing it. Cap was calling; the relief from seeing his name almost made her laugh out loud. She put a bud in her ear and said hello.
“Hey,” he said. “Can you talk?”
“Yes,” she said, starting the car. “Just leaving Stacy Gibbons.”
“You get any breaks?” he asked, breath choppy, like he was walking.
“Nothing with ballet class. But her ex-husband, Ashley’s father, inherited a chunk of money from a dead aunt two years ago.”
“Really,” said Cap.
Vega could tell he had stopped walking.
“That’s what he told Stacy. What did my guy get on the McKennas? I didn’t have a chance to look.”
“A wire transfer—a hundred fifty K, a year ago. They’re still here—Junior and I are about to go in.”
“We’ve got to talk to Ashley’s father.”
“Not now,” said Cap. “He’s in Philly, and it’s late. You should come back. Can your guy track the account the money came from?”
“Probably. I bet the Fed and his boss could too.”
“They’re dealing with the equipment distributor,” said Cap. Then he paused. “What do you think?”
“Doesn’t fit,” said Vega, speeding on an empty county road. “None of these people strike me as the human trafficking type.”
“No,” said Cap. “So is it a better or worse story than that?”
“You asking me?”
“If you have the answer, sure.”
“I don’t have anything,” she said, and she could hear how tired she sounded in the words, her voice breaking on the last. “You should get in there. You’ll know in a minute if they’re hiding something.”
“Yes, I think we will,” said Cap, sounding distracted. “Look, drive safe but hurry.”
Vega nodded to herself in the mirror.
“Yeah, see you soon.”
She hung up, pulled out the earbud. She merged with a line of cars heading toward the on-ramp of the state route and thought about the money. A hundred fifty thousand plus probably another hundred fifty thousand makes an even three. No missing-persons situation was less shitty when money was involved. It only meant things were worse, not better. Big big big big big Bad, Vega either thought or said aloud; she wasn’t sure. One “big” for every zero.