“You’re working it? From your rec room?” Junior said, amused.
“Alice Vega hired me. I’m working with her.”
Junior’s smile dissipated, and for a rare moment Cap could see the age lines around his mouth, ironed creases in a napkin.
“You really think that’s a good idea?” said Junior.
“Yeah, I do. The more hands the better.”
Junior laughed and shook his head, weary.
“Would you ever say that as a cop? Would you ever have wanted PIs up in your shit? Come on, Cap.”
“If they could help my investigation, yes, yeah I would.”
“And how can you and Alice Vega help me exactly?”
“I have Kylie Brandt’s diary.”
Junior’s eyes got a little bigger; then he tried to look cool about it.
“Kylie Brandt didn’t have a diary.”
“Says who.”
“Her mother.”
“In what universe are you operating where girls don’t keep secrets from their mothers?”
“We’ve been through Jamie Brandt’s apartment,” said Junior. “It’s the size of a shoebox. We didn’t find a diary.”
“Kylie didn’t keep it at the apartment. It was at a friend’s house.”
“The friend gave it to you?”
“Yes.”
Junior shrugged with cynicism.
“What makes you think the friend didn’t make it up, for the attention?”
“Jamie Brandt’s ex-boyfriend says Kylie told him about it. That’s how we found it.”
Cap watched Junior process it.
“You have it here,” Junior said, nodding to Cap’s car.
“Yeah. Also you got an email recently about Nolan Marsh?”
Junior shook his head no, a reflex.
“I know,” said Cap, fatigued by the exchange. “You don’t know what I’m talking about. Okay. Let’s say the DPD received an email about a guy named Nolan Marsh. Alice Vega got the same email.”
Junior stopped shaking his head, just listened.
“She had it traced to the Kinko’s on North Haven. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but maybe you want to send someone over there.”
They both stood there; Cap let his eyes drift to the kids on the merry-go-round, the boy dragging his foot along the ground, slowing it down.
“All right, Cap,” said Junior. “What do you want for all this? For the diary.”
“Just the open exchange of information. You don’t want to work with us, fine. But at least we can all have the same facts. Like witness statements, for example.”
“I have to check with Traynor,” said Junior. Then came a big sigh. “You know he likes it clean.”
Cap nodded. He knew Junior wasn’t necessarily lying. The chief of police liked detail and transparency. He kept a twenty-year medallion from Alcoholics Anonymous in a frame next to the picture of his kids. The files in his file cabinet were alphabetized and color-coded, the Post-its stacked in towers from large to small on his desk. Cap knew for a fact there was a canister of Lysol wipes in his bottom right drawer. The only thing worse than telling Nell and Jules about his resignation was facing Chief Traynor, who was under the impression it really had been Cap who had let the junkie kid die.
“Caplan, I didn’t think you had these kinds of fuckups in your blood,” he’d said.
It hurt Cap like a sunburn.
Light rain had started to fall. Junior wiped drops from the hair that hung over his forehead.
“Fine,” said Cap.
He went into his car and grabbed the book from the seat, shielded it under his jacket from the rain. Junior eyed it and his lips twitched, like he was hungry and just a little too far from the dessert cart. Cap enjoyed the moment of cruelty, let his hand linger on the book before handing it over. Junior slid it under his coat.
“Thanks,” he said, blinking from the rain. He ran his hand over his face and shook it out. “I’m glad you called. It was the right thing.”
Cap stared at Junior, thought maybe it was not at all the right thing.
Then they heard screaming. It was the little boy from inside the playground. He’d fallen off the merry-go-round and hit the rubber playground mat headfirst.
“Goddammit,” Cap said.
He ran into the playground as the mother got up from the bench and went to the boy, not in a rush.
“Hey!” he shouted to the mother. He could feel his ears getting hot.
She turned to Cap as she leaned over the boy and helped him stand up. Cap put her age at twenty-one or twenty-two; she had the face of a girl.
“Listen, ma’am, there are three entrances to this playground. One of them leads to a street where people frequently run the stop sign, and either of these kids could have run out there at any time. And I’ve been standing here a full fifteen minutes, a strange man just watching your children play, and you haven’t looked up from Candy Crush. Just watch the goddamn kids. That is your only priority.”
Cap’s hands started to shake so he stuffed them into his pants pockets.
The mother sneered and said, “Hey, mind your own fucking business, aright? He’s fine.”
Cap and the boy stared at each other for a minute, the boy with a couple of tears on his pink cheeks, both of them breathing heavy.
—
“Is he lying?” Vega asked as Cap drove them down a four-lane state highway.
“He could be,” said Cap. “He’s a liar, generally.”
“No one lies all the time unless there’s a compulsion.”
“I don’t think that’s the case. He just lies to cover his ass like the rest of us,” said Cap.
Vega’s eyes wandered to the signs of small businesses flashing past: AKA COPIER SERVICE, PERSONAL APPEARANCES HAIR SALON, ROUTE 61 BAR AND GRILL.
“You don’t,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Well, Vega, I can’t really imagine the situation where you’d need to cover your ass for any reason.”
“Then you have a limited imagination, Caplan,” she said, turning to him. “So what’s the takeaway?”
“He might help us, and he might not. Traynor, the chief, might help us, might not….”
“So we keep going our own way,” said Vega.
“Yeah. What was Marsh’s brother like?”
“Strange. He’s hiding something, but I don’t know what. I asked him to imagine why he thought someone would send that email, and he had a theory.”
“What was it?”
“That his brother and the Brandt girls were taken by the same person.”
“So who’s the sender of the email?”
“Next-door neighbor, guilty accomplice, doesn’t matter. Point of it is, he’d thought about it, while his mother was completely hard-pressed for an idea.”
“So…” said Cap, taking the exit for Raven Run. “You think that’s suspicious.”
“He also was a little out of it, running his words together,” she said, remembering. Without thinking she touched her lips and said, “Warm.”
“Huh?” said Cap.
“He was really warm. We were outside in the rain a good ten minutes, temperature’s probably forty degrees. He had short sleeves and was warm.”
“Drugs?”
“Seems most likely,” she said.
She thought for a moment and turned her body to face Cap.
“How much trouble you think it would be to find out what happened to Nolan Marsh?” she said.
Cap blew air through his lips in an O.
“Three-year-old cold case, missing vulnerable adult with no viable leads?”