“Harry was my cousin. Uncle Roy’s son. He died in Vietnam in 1970.”
“I’m sorry,” Cap and Vega said at the same time.
“He gets confused. He keeps thinking he sees people who’ve died—his parents, my aunt who passed four years ago,” said Alyssa.
“What about Harry?” said Vega. “Does he think he sees Harry?”
“Sure, sometimes.”
“Do you have any pictures of him?” asked Vega.
“Who?” said Alyssa, confused.
“Your cousin, Harry.”
“Yes, sure, just one moment.”
She left the room, and Cap looked to Vega. His look said, So what’s the point of this now?
Alyssa Moser came back with a photo in a chipped gold frame.
“This is him and me,” she said, smiling. “He was five years older than me, and I just loved him to pieces.”
Cap and Vega came to her side and examined the picture.
It had that muted color of photos from the ’60s, like the film was developed in murky water. There was a little girl, twelve or thirteen, wearing a headband and a denim dress, smiling with a mouthful of braces at the camera. She leaned against a boy who looked like a man, tall and burly with a healthy head of hair and a respectable mustache.
“This is Harry?” said Vega.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Alyssa said. “?’Course when he went to Vietnam they cut his hair and everything.”
“He was a big guy?” said Cap.
“Oh, yeah. Over six foot.”
She paused, eyes dulled in thought.
“He was six-two when he shipped out, and he was six-three when they shipped him back,” she said. “Weird to think he grew an inch over there.”
“He looks husky too,” said Cap.
“Made it to State for wrestling. All he would eat was bananas and peanut butter so he could bulk up.”
They looked back down at the picture, at Harry Eldridge’s honest smile.
—
“Roy Eldridge is the definition of an unreliable witness,” said Cap in the car, determined to shred the morning’s work to dust.
“I understand, but stack it up. Two witnesses claim Kylie hugged a skinny teenage boy, slight in build.”
“The current suspect fits that profile,” said Cap, sounding bored.
“Sure. But one witness describes a totally different body type.”
“The witness has dementia.”
“Stack it up. Let’s just not forget it; that’s all I’m saying,” said Vega.
Cap looked at her sideways. She could see the doubt in his face.
“What do you want to do?” she said, tapping her hands on the dash, conciliatory.
“We should’ve talked to the kid first. He should’ve been on the fucking list,” said Cap through his teeth.
“He wasn’t on the fucking list. Get over it. What do you want to do?”
Cap rolled his head to the right. Vega heard a snap.
“I don’t think Jamie’s good for us right now,” he said. “Her kids have been gone for eighty hours. She’s cracking. She’s going to rip apart the first person who takes her off the leash.”
“She wants to think the kid did it.”
“Maybe the kid did do it,” said Cap, raising his voice. “Maybe he killed them and dumped the bodies in the Beth Hill mine, and we’ve been chasing bullshit for the past two days.”
“We have to go back to Jamie.”
“Are you listening to anything I’m saying?” said Cap. “Jamie is useless.”
“We can get more detail about Sonny Thomas; we can tell her about the three witness descriptions and Nolan Marsh and see if anything pops. She might be the only person other than the kidnapper who knows where the girls are, and all we have to do is sift through the mud in her head a little bit.”
Vega paused and watched Cap rock side to side, settling in his seat, think it over. He had a little conversation with himself, sighing theatrically and moving his lips, and when he started to shake his head at nothing in particular she knew she had him beat.
—
They climbed the exterior stairs of Jamie’s complex to the second floor, brown boxes of apartments stacked up like kids’ building blocks. Cap saw spiderwebs stringing from the corners of the stucco ceilings to the doorways, graffiti tags here and there. Vega was silent and stoic, and it pissed him off, made him think maybe there was less going on behind the mask as opposed to more. That maybe she wasn’t a natural after all, just some delinquent who’d gotten lucky.
They heard a muted series of thumps coming from inside; it reminded him of when he and Jules couldn’t afford a drum set; Nell would practice on couch cushions and pillows. Then there was the shimmery crack of glass breaking. Cap bounded for the door.
“Jamie?” he said loudly. “Jamie, it’s Max Caplan.”
“It’s open!” she shouted.
Cap opened it, and they came into the living room—a small space with a mismatched couch and chairs, a large tube TV balanced precariously on an oblong table. To the right, the room opened up into a galley kitchen—a counter covered with stacks of glasses and plates, and some cabinets, all open. Jamie was on her hands and knees, holding two semicircles of glass, a thin ribbon of blood spreading on her hand. She stood and went to the sink, dropped the glass pieces with a crash, looking disgusted. She crossed in front of Cap and Vega and nodded at them.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, weird and calm. “You can help me look.”
Her hand fluttered to her hair, pushing strands out of her face, smearing red on her forehead.
“Jamie,” Cap said evenly. “You’re bleeding.”
She looked at her hand, distracted, then shook her head.
“Look for what?” said Vega.
Jamie ripped a paper towel off a roll on the kitchen counter and wrapped it around her palm.
“Anything,” she said. “You found her diary in a goddamn tree. Who knows what else she has here. There’s got to be something somewhere, something about Sonny, something…”
Cap looked at her face, could tell she was thinking, calculating, but there was chaos in it. Like she’d just gotten a concussion and was trying to do trigonometry.
“The police have been through here already, Jamie,” said Cap.
“So what, you think they don’t need help now? Isn’t that what the fuck you two are for?” she said, chewing her thumbnail. “I already kicked Darrell outta here because he’s totally frigging useless. I already been through their room. You can start in the bathroom if you want.”
She stopped talking then, just went to the couch and started lifting up cushions, brushing coins to the carpet.