Vega slid down in her seat, watched as the two men inched closer to each other while they spoke. A little shoot-out. She could see Cap smiling and nodding, too quick and eager.
Vega’s phone buzzed. It was another email from the Bastard with a video attachment. The subject was “haystack.” The text in the body read, “this would be the needle.”
—
“Any reason you happen to be in the neighborhood now?” said Junior, smug. “Anything I need to know about?”
“Wait a second, now, let me think about that,” said Cap. “Almost had something for you there but then I remembered…I don’t work for you anymore.”
He hadn’t realized it, but he’d taken a step forward. Junior must have as well, because there suddenly wasn’t a lot of space between them.
Junior laughed again.
“Seriously, you still crack me up, man. I mean it.”
Then he backed off, turned around and started walking away. He pointed at Cap over his shoulder and said, “Good to see you, Cap. Stay in touch.”
“Yeah. See you soon,” said Cap.
He watched Junior go up the stairs to the station and thought about a word to mutter. “Fuckface,” or “dickhead,” or “asshole,” or other words composed of “fuck,” “dick,” and “ass” that Junior’s personality just naturally evoked. In the end he said nothing because it made him feel petty to mutter words alone in a parking lot after a conversation had ended.
He crossed the street to his car and saw Vega moving from the driver’s seat to the passenger side, staring at her phone. It crossed his mind that the seat would be warm from her body.
“That was fun,” he said, getting in.
“Is your friend amenable?”
“I don’t know. We were sort of interrupted.”
Cap stared at the building.
“What did he say? What was the head shaking?”
“They’re disorganized, which I could have told you. They’re overwhelmed, overworked. Junior won’t admit they’re overwhelmed and overworked because he’s a cocky son-of-a-bitch who thinks he’s in a James Patterson book.”
“Did he say anything specific about the witness statements?”
“There’s not a lot, but it’s all varying reports—different colors, different makes of cars. Someone said Kylie hugged a man across the street from the mall.”
Vega stared forward at the car parked in front of them. PHILADELPHIA EAGLES #1 FAN said the license plate rim.
“Watch this,” she said, leaning over and holding out her phone.
It was another video. She pressed Play, and Cap watched.
It was two little boys eating ice cream.
“This is Dylan and Michael-John and we’re all here stopping for ice cream on the way to Uncle Drex and Aunt Bert’s,” said a woman’s voice, the woman holding the camera, Cap thought.
Either Dylan or Michael-John held up his spoon.
“I have cookie batter,” he said. “With M&M’s and Snickers.”
The other boy was littler and just kept shoveling in the ice cream like it would be taken away from him soon. He had chocolate smeared across his mouth and cheek.
The first boy kept talking about ice cream and answered his mother’s questions about how excited he was to see his aunt and uncle. Cap began to recognize the store, the parking lot.
“And we have Bitty-Love too,” said the mother, turning the camera phone to a baby in a car seat next to her. “Just a little taste,” she said, her arm extending from behind the camera to feed the baby white ice cream from a plastic spoon.
The baby smiled and kicked and made a sweet seal bark. Cap smiled.
There was ambient noise too, other voices off screen that Cap couldn’t make out.
The mother kept feeding and tickling the baby and asking questions, and on the screen the baby started to sink to the lower right corner, because the mother was trying to talk to the boys opposite her and feed the baby with her other hand, Cap thought. The upper left portion of the screen grew, most of it capturing the parking lot outside.
And then there they were, Kylie and Bailey Brandt, on the screen, outside the store, facing each other, talking. Cap leaned in closer to Vega and her phone. He rubbed his hand over his mouth and chin.
Bailey pointed toward the lot. Let’s go back to the car. Kylie still held a small tasting spoon from the store in her hand; she licked the back of it, which Cap thought seemed a strangely adult thing to do. Then Kylie stopped and took a few steps past Bailey, looking at something in the opposite direction, something across the street. Bailey’s mouth still moved. Let’s go back to the car. Mom will be angry.
Kylie waved to someone, cutting a big swath through the air with her raised hand, and then she smiled. It was really more of a grin, like there had been a joke. Bailey stood behind her, tentative.
Then the phone was placed down on the table and went dark.
“Where’d you get that?” said Cap.
“My guy found it. This lady put it on Facebook, called it ‘Ice Cream in Denville.’?”
“That was quite a smile,” said Cap.
“Someone she knows,” said Vega.
“Not just that,” said Cap. “Someone she’s glad to see.”
Cap thought of it, Kylie’s black smile, hovering in space like the Cheshire cat’s. Jules read that one to Nell when she was little. Cap would stand at the door. Please would you tell me why your cat grins like that?
Vega handed Cap his keys and said, “You ready to meet Jamie Brandt?”
—
For as long as he had lived there, Cap always had many shitty things to say about Denville, but he actually thought it was a beautiful place at night. Beat-up streets with potholes became quaint in the dark, porch lights on to disguise the chipped paint and scratched siding on the houses. The expanding suburb developments looked better too; instead of cheap overgrown children’s toys they had an almost English countryside look to them out of daylight. Not that Cap had ever been to the English countryside, but he’d seen plenty of movies.
Schultz’s Bar was in Black Creek. The neighborhood was full of apartment complexes and single-level homes built in the ’60s, brown and yellow exteriors with shag carpet and faux wrought-iron arches inside. When Cap and Jules had been shopping around for houses back in the beginning, they’d looked at one or two there, and driving away Jules had said, “If I have to live in a house like that, I will hang myself.” Cap had said, “I will buy the rope.” Then of course they’d laughed with the relief of their agreement on the subject. Ha. Suicide.
Cap had been to Schultz’s once or twice. It looked like a hundred other bars, a black box from the outside with a single rectangular window, like an aquarium, but instead of fish there was a Yuengling sign. He and Vega parked on the street and went inside.
There were a few people scattered around, a group of men hooked around the corner of the bar, a couple making out at a table next to the bathroom, two women at the jukebox. And there was Jamie Brandt, Cap recognized her from TV, sitting at the far end of the bar with her head down. He and Vega made their way to her. Vega stopped when she was about a foot away, as if Jamie were a dog on the street.