“You want to lift prints at a Kinko’s?” Cap said, incredulous. “You’re going to get sludge from those keyboards.”
“Not impossible,” said Vega.
Cap stared at her, at her hair swept back into a neat ponytail at the base, two or three wisps draped across her cheek, as if she’d planned it that way. It enraged Cap suddenly, her arbitrariness. Some things neat and some things messy. Maybe there was no method here. He suddenly felt duped.
Vega looked away from Cap and across to Em now, suddenly on the same side.
“Can we think about this critically for a second?” Cap said to both of them. “Where would Evan Marsh and Kylie Brandt meet? Where would they be in the same place at the same time?”
“I don’t know,” said Em, shrugging. “Maybe the supermarket.”
“That Giant’s clear across town. Jamie Brandt would shop at the Walmart in Black Creek.”
“We can figure it out later,” said Vega.
“No, let’s figure it out now,” said Cap. “I’m not chasing the invisible fucking man, here.”
“Maybe…” said Em. “Maybe that’s not the right question.”
Cap and Vega turned to him.
“Oh yeah?” said Cap, laughing a little bit. “All right, Stephen Hawking. You tell me. What’s the right question?”
Em scratched his chin and shifted his gaze to Vega. She raised her eyebrows. Go for it, kid. Knock yourself out. Em coughed, nervous.
“So maybe there’s a room,” he said. “Evan Marsh and Kylie Brandt are in it together. I can’t tell you where it is, and I can’t tell you how they got there.” He pointed to the laptop screen. “Kylie loves this movie, loves this movie star, and meets a guy who looks just like him. Right?”
Vega grabbed the line.
“She’s a flirt, romantic, a boundary tester,” she said. “She’s pissed at her mom, she’s pretending she’s a princess, she’s pretending she’s in a movie. Evan Marsh is nice to her. Maybe he flirts with her, makes her feel special. Maybe he’s teasing her. Maybe he’s stoned. He lights a cigarette and she sees a skull on his Zippo, just like the one the hero wears on a necklace in her favorite movie. She believes in signs, fate, love at first sight. All that shit a happy little girl believes in.
“Maybe he gets something from her—an email, a phone number, a way to communicate, tells her he’ll see her soon but doesn’t know where or when exactly. Then he trails her from home, picks up her and her sister from a mall when Mom’s shopping.”
“Why?” said Cap. “Is he a pedophile? Any history of that?”
“Not that we are aware of,” said Vega.
“So what would be the motive here? What would make a twenty-one-, twenty-two-year-old kid who’s not a pedophile kidnap two girls? Risk jail time. With a mother who’s dying.”
Cap had flashes of Maryann Marsh, her filmy eyes and drawn lips as she looked at the picture of her missing son.
“His mother,” said Vega.
“What’s the story with the mother?” said Em.
“She’s dying,” said Vega. “Evan told me his mother didn’t mind having cancer because it’s the last thing Nolan gave her. He was a smoker.”
“Oh, shit,” said Em, covering his mouth. “That is some rough shit.”
“Yes,” said Vega.
“I bet he was pissed the police didn’t do more,” Em suggested.
“How’d you know?” said Vega.
Em threw his hands up.
“Missing adult? Ralz probably just checked the box. File the report. Move on. We have some staffing issues,” Em explained. “In that we are understaffed.”
Cap asked, “How pissed?”
“Hard to say,” said Vega.
“Desperate?”
She nodded.
“Maybe.”
“His brother goes missing, Mom gets sick, kid’s life falls apart,” narrated Cap.
“He stops going to school, gets into some drugs,” added Vega.
Em picked up: “Somewhere, he meets Kylie Brandt.”
Cap continued, “And he has an idea. Take the girl—”
“Or girls,” said Vega. “Write an email to the police as ransom. Only instead of money, he wants them to find his brother.”
“Then he sends us the email,” said Cap, “because the police aren’t doing anything. Probably on a healthy dose of oxy to get rid of the anxiety.”
“But he’s not a criminal, right?” asked Em. “He’s just some druggie who made a shit-ton of bad decisions.”
Vega nodded at him. “I would think so.”
“If he has the girls, all we have to do is pull a thread,” said Cap.
Vega’s phone buzzed. She looked.
“That your guy?” said Cap.
“I got a home address. You know Sisilia Street?”
“Yeah,” said Cap.
He studied Em across the table. He hadn’t aged much since that night the kid had died, since he had run to get Cap in the break room looking like a chunky pre-teen nerd who’d just got spooked from playing the Bloody Mary game in the mirror. No gray hair, no wrinkles, still with the sweat rings under the arms, but there was something different now. Cap couldn’t put his finger on it, but if he had to guess it might have been the maturity of experience, knowing what was instinct and what was optimism.
“I’ll go back to work,” Em offered. “Try to get the original report on Nolan Marsh, see if we have anything on Evan.”
“Good,” said Cap.
“Thanks, Emerson,” said Vega.
Em grinned and gave them two thumbs-up.
9
It was called Bethlehem Hill, this area, but it felt pretty flat to Vega. Cap told her this was the Bethlehem Coal Mine before it closed in the ’70s. When it was operational, the runoff would flow into the creek and powder the water black, and there you had it, Black Creek. Cap said some towns turned their old mines into museums, gave tours and sold chips of anthracite on key chains, but Beth Coal had been abandoned and trashed after an underground fire was set by an arsonist around 1980. The surrounding roads caved and looked like they’d been suctioned with a giant vacuum from below. Every once in a while there’d be an item on the ballot to clean it all up, but there was always somewhere else to put the money.
The streets within a couple miles’ radius consisted of mostly commercial properties, mini-malls and offices spread out about a hundred feet from one another. The building they were looking for was only two floors, a dusty block of brick sticking up like a rotten tooth.
Cap parked on the street. There was one other parked car, a beige compact under a carport behind the brick building. The sun was almost down.
“Apartment two,” said Vega, reading from her phone.
“Gotta be up there,” said Cap, pointing to the second floor.
Evan Marsh’s apartment was above an eye doctor’s office, a monument-style sign in front that read BETHLEHEM EYE ASSOCIATES, along with the logo of an eye, wide open with lashes. The office was closed.
Vega followed Cap to the stairs, metal and rattling under their feet. On the landing, Cap knocked hard on the door, and they waited. Vega put her ear to the door and heard nothing. She leaned over the railing to look through a small window and could see a part of a living room—a recliner and beanbag chair. She looked at Cap and shook her head.