“I got this email this morning.”
Jamie looked at the screen. Cap watched her eyes go wide.
“What is this? Who is this from?”
“We’re trying to find out,” said Vega. “Nolan Marsh is a missing adult, disappeared three years ago.”
“Does he have them? Do you think he has the girls?” Jamie said to Vega.
“We don’t know if there’s a connection, but we’re going to speak to his mother soon and ask her about it.”
“It’s very possibly a false lead, Jamie. The police told you about these?” said Cap.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sickos who just want attention, stuff like that.”
“Exactly. On the surface this doesn’t sound too promising, but we’ll still check it out. We just wanted to ask you first.”
“Okay.”
She took an aggressive sip of her coffee, set the mug on the table with a clink.
“Thanks,” she said. “That it for now?”
“Something else,” said Vega. “Does Kylie have a girlfriend with a boy’s name? I have her class list, but it doesn’t show gender.”
“Yeah, it’s Cole. Cole Linsom. Parents are a couple of snobs, but Cole’s a sweet thing. Real polite. The police already talked to her though. All of Kylie’s friends.”
“Linsom,” said Vega, writing it down on a small chit. “We need to speak with her.”
“Why? You think she knows something?” said Jamie, fresh paranoia in her voice.
Before Vega could say a word, Cap said, “We’re not sure, but we need to clarify a couple of things, make sure Kylie didn’t mention anything to her about someone she was going to meet at the mall.”
“Okay, yeah,” said Jamie. “I can…uh, call her mom. She sent me an email, I think. Said if there’s anything she can do.”
“That would be great,” said Cap. “Should we take you back to your folks’ place?”
“Yeah. Could I use your bathroom first?”
“Out the door on your right.”
Jamie picked up her purse and left, closing the office door behind her.
“Why didn’t you let me tell her about Chaney?” said Vega, writing another note.
“We tell her about Chaney, she gets upset about Chaney. She calls him, shows up at his house—Why didn’t you tell me you saw Kylie? and so on. Then we have her off the rails, which we don’t need, right? We need her focused.”
Vega looked at him and didn’t speak for a moment. Cap felt slightly disarmed.
“I tell my clients everything,” she said. “No one can help us more than the client.”
“And usually I would agree with you. But you have to go case by case.”
“I told her last night we’d tell her everything we knew. Now I’m lying.”
“You never lie, Ms. Vega?” Cap said, mostly out of curiosity.
“Not to clients.”
The toilet flushed; there wasn’t much time. Cap leaned in.
“This is your investigation so you run it however you want. But my opinion: we hold back on Chaney now, tell her later when we need to. Now we drop her off at home, let her get her day in order,” he said quietly. “We don’t need to push her further down, right? The more time that passes, she’s going to get there on her own.”
Vega’s face didn’t move, her eyes still on him. Jamie came back in, on the phone.
“I’m coming. They’re driving me….Jesus, Mom, I’m coming, shut up, okay?” She hung up and put her phone in her purse, then looked up at them. She was awake now, scared and sick all over again. “Can we go?”
Cap glanced at Vega and tried to read her, but she was a stone.
“Yes,” she said, nodding up at Cap as if they’d already discussed it: “Your car, right?”
“Right.”
Cap took another quick sip of coffee and grabbed the jacket off the back of his desk chair. Brand-new day, and here we go.
—
Every fucking one looked the same, thought Vega, as Cap parked on a wet dirt road. All the houses here looked like they’d suffered a few winters without maintenance; they all had water stains on the siding near the ground, the gutters on the roofs over the garages twisted dripping glum puddles into the driveways. The homes varied by style, either row house or ranch style or A-frame, but they were all old, all depressing in their disrepair. Her house in the Sacramento Valley was nothing special, two small bedrooms and a narrow kitchen, arched doorways and bright blue tiles in the bathroom. Spanish eclectic, the realtor had called it. It didn’t evoke any emotion in her in particular; she didn’t miss it when she was gone, had no feelings either way about sleeping in her own bed or taking a bath in her tub the way other people seemed to, but this place, Denville, made her miss the heat in the air when she left the screens open on the windows in her kitchen, and the squat peeling palm tree in the backyard.
She watched Cap pocket his keys, listened to him ask her something and thought, Except his place. Something about it she liked; something made her want to sit in his living room in the summertime and feel a warm breeze blow through.
“So? What do you think?” Cap said again, squinting through the windshield at the house.
“About what?” said Vega.
Cap glanced sideways at her, a smile creeping onto his mouth. He knew she hadn’t been listening and was amused.
“We go straight to Cole Linsom’s house after. Unless we get a break.”
“Sure.”
“And you talk first,” said Cap.
They got out of the car and walked the short distance up the road. The house had a little land around it, overgrown grass and shrubs and a few trees framing the property. It was raining lightly, speckling the grass, tapping the roof of the porch as Vega and Cap stepped up. Cap knocked on the wooden pane of the screen door; it rattled under his fist.
They waited a couple of minutes, and then a woman opened the door behind the screen. She was thin, with curly red hair and no eyebrows. She also had a plastic tube running across her face with a prong in each nostril, the tube running to a nylon bag she wore on her shoulder, and which contained, Vega suspected, a portable canister of oxygen. Vega felt just for a moment like she’d been punched in the nose, all the bones in her face radiating heat. And it came to her: cannula. That’s what the tube was called, a nasal cannula. Just one word in the lexicon of the sick and dying, one stone in an endless riverbed.
“Hello, Ms. Marsh?” said Vega. “I’m Alice Vega; this is Max Caplan—we spoke on the phone?”
Maryann Marsh opened the screen and smiled, a weak, crooked line.
“Hello, come in,” she said.
She seemed to struggle with holding both doors open until Cap stepped in and pushed them to the wall. Vega followed him inside, wiped her shoes on the gray mat by the door like he did.
The house was dark inside and smelled old, like water had been spilled on the carpet a long time ago. There were tables and sideboards against every wall with no space in between, and on top of them, knickknacks and pictures and ashtrays with hardly a spot of bare surface showing.