BENJAMIN LAY IN bed, unable to sleep, watching the video feed from the security cameras at their house in Los Angeles. The light from his phone gave the rumpled hotel blankets a cool digital glow. The cameras had been installed right before they left on the cruise. Their old security system had been a glass break alarm with a loud robotic voice, and it had started to malfunction, going off when no glass had broken, scaring the shit out of him in the middle of the night. He would leap out of bed and stumble downstairs in his underwear, his heart racing. After it happened twice, he bought a wooden baseball bat and kept it under his side of the bed.
“Are you really going to club someone with that?” Liv had asked.
“I just want to have something,” he said. “I hate being empty-handed.”
“Maybe we should get rid of the alarm.”
Liv had grown up in a small Colorado town with unlocked doors. When the alarm went off, she rolled over and went back to sleep. Benjamin had grown up in Manhattan in the last days of getting mugged for your pocket money on the way home from school. It made your brain different. The next time the alarm went off he’d prowled the house with the bat and stayed awake until morning. Then he’d ordered a new alarm system with cameras.
The feed went straight to a server, so he could see their quiet house in real time from six angles on his phone. Nothing was happening. The street and the backyard and the covered pool were empty and quiet. His heart rate jumped once, when a skunk scurried past the lemon tree by the front door. And meanwhile his kids were missing, on the least adventurous vacation possible, in a supposedly safe country. He was convinced, now, that if he’d been the one at the beach, their kids would still be here. Liv’s nervous system was not trained for real fear.
They’d tried having sex, which might have been reassuring, but it had gone horribly wrong. Liv had ended up crying, and Benjamin had felt guilty and weird. Now she’d taken an Ambien, and was comatose next to him. One of them needed to stay clearheaded, in case some news came in the night. But at 2:00 A.M. it was tempting to take something. He refreshed the video feed on his phone. The back door in Los Angeles, the empty street, the lemon tree, no skunk. He thought about jerking off.
“That light,” Liv muttered. “It’s so bright.”
So she wasn’t comatose. He turned off the screen and put the phone on his chest.
The clock radio on the bedside table glowed red—2:27—and a faint line seeped under the door from the hotel hallway. They were past the first forty-eight hours now, in which crimes were usually solved. They were almost at sixty-four hours. He had been obsessively googling kidnapping statistics and knew the chances were grim.
Liv’s breathing was regular again, and Benjamin picked up his phone. He had heard the guide’s full name on that first night, but he couldn’t remember it now. He searched online, starting with the cruise line website, and then with the zip-line company. Pedro wasn’t there, but Benjamin followed a link to another ecotourism website. There he found a photo of a grinning asshole in sunglasses, giving a double thumbs-up. Pedro Navares.
Next he searched Facebook and Twitter, and there were lots of accounts with that name, but none of the profile photos seemed to be the right one. He searched Instagram, and one unlocked account looked promising, the bio in Spanish, the tiny photo possibly of Pedro. The posts were of sunsets, beaches, pints of beer. A young man enjoying his life; nothing incriminating. But what had Benjamin expected to find? Photos of the children? Pedro didn’t have the children. He was just the closest person to blame.
Benjamin had asked his wife about Nora wandering off with Pedro. She said they’d been looking for birds. Nora had told her so, and she believed it. But Liv seemed mildly evasive, and then changed the subject.
Finally he fell asleep, and had a dream. He was standing with his arms around Liv at a party, looking at Nora standing behind her. Nora was facing away from him, and her hair was put up in some complicated way, with twists at the nape of her neck. He realized that his mind must be creating each of those strands of hair, because he was in a dream. He was creating every person at the party. He took Liv by the hand and said, “Let’s go find the kids.” They left the house and went outside. They needed to get in a car and go, but there were no cars in the driveway. He knew he should be able to create a car in the driveway with his mind, because this was a dream, but no car appeared.
There was a knock at the door. Benjamin leaped out of bed. He experienced a stab of regret: He could have just flown, in the dream, to the children. But now he was awake, and the children were gone. He felt crushed. It was as if they’d been taken away all over again. Liv, beneath the covers, murmured a protest. The clock radio said 5:01. Benjamin went to the door and answered it in his T-shirt and boxers.
The tall detective was standing outside in the hall with a male cop a foot shorter than she was. Benjamin was afraid of what they were going to say.
“I’m Detective Rivera,” she said. “We met before. This is Officer Arnal. Will you please come answer some more questions?”
“Did you find anything?” he asked.
“If you come with us, we can talk about it.”
“Do you want my wife to come?”
“Just you,” Arnal said. His tone was mildly threatening. Benjamin thought he must hate being the little guy with the towering female partner.
“Wait—are you arresting me?”
“No,” Detective Rivera said.
“What if I don’t want to go?”
“You want to find your children?” Arnal said.
“Shit,” Benjamin said, rubbing his eyes. It was hard to think clearly. He was still half in the dream. Did they have important information? Should he ask for a lawyer? “Let me get my clothes.”
He closed the door without latching it, so they wouldn’t think he was locking them out.
“Is everything okay?” Liv mumbled from the bed.
“Yeah,” he said, pulling on his pants. “I’ll be right back.”
He found his wallet and phone, and started a text to Kenji Kirby. He kept hitting the wrong letters with his thumbs. Finally he got it sent: Police picking me up,
no explanation.
Then he went out and closed the door behind him. The two cops flanked him down the hall. This felt like a perp walk, but why? What did they think? They rode the empty elevator down to the lobby and he got into the back of their car, in the predawn darkness. No reporters were camped out this early, and he was grateful for that.
Then he was in an interrogation room at the police station, just like in a movie. Detective Rivera and her partner sat across from him.
“So what’s going on?” he asked.
“You told me when I first interviewed you that you had never been arrested,” she said.
“Right.”
“But you were. For assaulting a police officer in 1996.”
He frowned. “Wait—what does that have to do with my kids?”
“So it’s true?”
“No! I mean, the arrest is true. But I didn’t assault anyone. And they said it would be expunged from my record.”
“Why were you arrested?”
Benjamin sighed. “I thought you really had something.”
“We have to follow everything,” she said. “We need to understand why you lied.”
“I didn’t lie!”
“We could send you home,” Arnal said.
“Are you fucking kidding me? While my kids are missing?”