“You have any idea who sent that email?” he said.
Vega watched his eyes. Big and brown, she couldn’t even separate the pupil in the low light. His hair was brown too, his skin smooth. Unlike his brother, who looked to be too big for his body in the pictures, Evan Marsh was in his midtwenties but looked about seventeen, young and lean like a greyhound.
“Not yet,” said Vega. “Do you?”
He laughed through his nose. “No. Nobody’s talked about my brother for three years except me and my mom. The police got the same message?”
“We think so.”
“And they didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “Not a surprise.”
Vega saw the tension in his lips, pushing his chin forward in frustration. She knew if there was something he wasn’t telling her, she could find it out, just by passing the tip of the blade over the wound that was already wide open.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I been in some small towns with some goddamn incompetent police departments, but this one is up there. They couldn’t find their assholes with a mirror and flashlight.”
Marsh smiled with half his mouth and nodded to the parking lot.
“You wanna walk?”
“Sure.”
As they walked out, Marsh took out a cigarette and lit it with a Zippo, silver with a cast metal skull on the face. He offered the pack to Vega, and she took one, let him light it for her.
“I don’t smoke around my mom,” he said. “Only started when Nolan disappeared.”
“I’m sure it was a stressful time,” said Vega.
“You do this for a living, right? Find people who are missing?”
Vega nodded.
“So you’ve seen all of this before—parents who can’t find their kids?”
“I’ve seen it. Every one’s different though.”
Marsh brushed the rain off his hair.
“What do you think the email means?” said Vega.
“I don’t have any idea. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“You’re right about that. But let’s say you had to guess. Let’s say your brother and the Brandt girls are connected in some way. What way do you think that might be?”
Marsh frowned, shrugged.
“I don’t know. I was kinda hoping you would. You’re the professional, right?”
“Yeah. But you’d be surprised how much you might already know, just instinctually. I mean, you can’t be any more off base than the cops, right?”
Marsh smiled again.
“So you just want my gut?”
“Yeah. Your gut.”
“Maybe the same guy who took those girls took my brother, and someone, like a third party, knows about it and sent the email,” Marsh said, looking down, almost embarrassed.
“Hey, it’s possible,” said Vega, encouraging him. “So are they all in the same place—Nolan and the Brandt girls?”
“No, no way,” said Marsh. He stopped walking. “My brother’s dead. I know that. My mother knows that.” He took a long drag from his cigarette, shook his head and shut his eyes hard for a second. “She tell you that she’s sick?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“She seem upset about it to you?”
Vega watched him. Finger flicking the cigarette at his side.
“Actually no, she didn’t.”
“You think some people are just at peace with a death sentence, right?”
Vega thought about the cannula again, the way it scraped the insides of the nostrils.
“I don’t know.”
Marsh shook his head more slowly for dramatic effect, like that would make Vega listen closely.
“She doesn’t like the pain,” he said. “She’s got a lot of aches, says her bones hurt, hurts to cough and breathe. Her mind’s pretty sharp though, but she forgets to take the pills that will shrink the cancer cells. Get it?”
Vega got it but wanted him to explain it to her. She shrugged dumbly.
“She doesn’t mind the cancer because it’s the last thing he gave her.”
Vega was glad it was raining, and that it was cold, that the water was getting into her socks and wetting the back of her neck and starting to chill her skin. Then it was easier to play the trick on herself. She’d started it a long time ago, on a humid day in South Carolina doing side lunges, the nail on her pinkie toe peeling off. Count the grass blades, smell the cigar smoke. This is not your body, she thought. This is not your pain. When a two-hundred-pound beast of a Mexican with a tattoo on his bald head that read BEBE AMO MAMA threw her across a table in a bar she thought it as she hit the floor: Focus on the sticky-sweet smell of tequila on the boards against your cheek. This is not your body. You don’t feel a thing. Right before she reached for the Springfield.
And she did it again, right now, looking into Evan Marsh’s angry young face, feeling cool drops slide into her bra, let herself shudder. Marsh’s hair was dark and soft, glued to his forehead in wet curls. His eyes were big and round and liquid. This is not you.
“I’m sorry,” said Vega.
“I know,” he said. “So what do you think, Alice? It’s Alice, right?”
His eyes went over her, down to the waist and back up to the face.
“Right.”
“What do you think, you know, in-stinct-ually?”
He drew the word out and managed to make it sound inappropriate.
Some part of Vega wondered what he was getting at. Are we flirting now? she thought. Well, okay, then, Evan Marsh, I will be whoever you goddamn well want me to be.
“I think it’s probably random, someone with an odd sense of humor. That doesn’t mean I won’t look into it.”
“I appreciate it. You know, for my mom.”
He wiped the water off his face and his hand lingered there, over his cheek. Vega looked at his hand and saw a series of fresh scratches, vertical on his forearm. He dropped his hand to his side, and she grabbed him by the wrist. He didn’t pull it back. His skin was warm.
“You have a cat?” she said, turning his hand up, showing him the scratches.
“Roommate’s got two,” he said.
He let his knuckles rest on her wrist, held her eyes. She let go and smiled, tried to picture herself younger and lighter.
“How are you not freezing out here?” she said.
He looked back over his shoulder at the loading dock.
“Hard labor, Alice,” he said. “It’s a bitch.”
“I thought you said your shift hadn’t started yet.”
Evan flinched only a little bit, smiled and started backing up, toward the loading dock. He held his arms out and called, “Guess I’m just warm-blooded.”
—
Cap leaned against his car and watched two kids, a boy and girl, probably four years old or so, turn dizzy spirals on a small steel merry-go-round. One of their mothers sat on a bench texting on her phone and smoking. She seemed young, and it momentarily concerned Cap, made him think, Why aren’t her eyes on the kids?
A blue midsize sedan pulled up across the street, and Junior Hollows stepped out, nodded to Cap and jogged over.
“Twice in twenty-four hours,” he said. “That’s twice as many times as I’ve seen you in the past three years.”
Cap shrugged.
“Unusual twenty-four hours.”
“What’s this about, Cap? You want to explain to me what you have to do with my case?”
“I’m working it.”