“Fucking bitch! I’m-a fuckin’ kill you! Let me out!”
She looked at the fruit basket on the seat next to her.
—
Alice Vega had left Cap in a strange mood. He’d written another email to Brandon Haas’s brother and talked to his former landlady, who said he’d left no forwarding address but that he had left the bathroom filthy. Cap had quit soon afterward and found himself reading up on the Brandt girls. Disappeared from a car in a parking lot. Police were talking with witnesses who thought they may have seen the girls get into a car across the street from the mall, but the articles had no further detail.
He watched a few clips from the news; they were all variations on the same story; even the on-location anchorpeople looked the same in bland suits and product-sculpted hair. The mother had given a statement. She looked familiar to Cap even though he was sure they’d never met. She looked like folks around Denville, especially Black Creek, not a terrible neighborhood but one where you wouldn’t be surprised to see people doing the extended handshake of a drug deal on the sidewalk.
In the clip she wore pink lipstick and eyeshadow, as if she could attract more attention to the case by being brightly made-up. A white blouse that was too small, stretching at the buttons between her breasts.
“I just ask you to please call the police if you know anything about my girls,” she said, her voice shaking. “And if you got them, just drop them off where they can make a phone call and you can, you can go about your business.”
She paused and looked down. An older woman behind her put her hand on her shoulder.
The mother looked back up with tears spilling down her face, trailing lines of gray mascara, and said, “Bailey has asthma and needs her sprays.”
Cap hit Pause and closed his laptop. If I am not looking at it, it does not exist.
After a moment he opened the laptop again, this time typing “Alice Vega California” into Google.
A ton of hits, news items from three years ago popped up. The Sacramento Bee in California:
11-year-old Ethan Moreno of Modesto was found alive three weeks after he had been abducted, chained to a sink in a West Halsey home.
Central California–based bounty hunter Alice Vega discovered the boy and apprehended one of his captors, 27-year-old Quincy-Ray Day. Vega stands to collect the $100,000 reward from the FBI as well as an undisclosed sum from Moreno’s family.
He skimmed through other articles: how she found a teenage girl who’d run away from her rich parents to marry her boyfriend in Reno. A few more: just the mention of her name; she’d been brought in to assist police representing private clients in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, New York. Not a kid she couldn’t find.
Cap smiled, filled with an unnamable excitement. He couldn’t place the feeling, except he remembered once walking with his mother in Greenwich Village when she’d dropped her keys, and a short, dark-haired man picked them up and handed them to her. She thanked him and he nodded, kept on his way, and she stopped and faced Cap and said, suddenly breathless, “Was that Al Pacino? Did you see him, Maxie? Was that him? I think that was him.”
—
Nell got into the car with four backpacks and duffel bags and threw them into the backseat.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, stretching across to kiss him on the cheek.
Cap could feel sweat underneath her lip and heat coming off her forehead. He had an urge to take a deep breath. It reminded him of when she was little and would come out of the tub smelling like a wet cat.
“Good practice?” he said, pulling out of the lot.
She shrugged.
“Okay. Just drills and, like, one or two new plays, but we need more if we’re up against Valley.”
“You say Steves knows what he’s doing.”
“I think so. He doesn’t want anyone’s opinion though, you know. And he’s only, like, five years older than us.”
“Boys in their twenties like to think they’re grown-ups,” said Cap.
Nell said, “Huh,” then began to text.
“So, they still haven’t found those girls,” he said, tentative, watching her from the side.
She stopped texting.
“I know, it’s awful. They can’t find the dad either; he ran out on them when they were babies. So my question is, why would he want them now?”
She was engaged, gesturing as she spoke, holding her hands out to an invisible crowd. Cap felt guilty; the kid didn’t think he wanted to talk about it so she hadn’t said anything since he had turned off the TV on Saturday. But she’d been doing the due diligence in her head; it was like when Cap was working a case he couldn’t shake off the brain. You find yourself awake at three a.m.—was it because you had to pee or because your subconscious was giving you clues?
“And why would he take them from a Kmart parking lot? How would he know they were going to be there? Was he tailing them?”
“These are all valid questions,” said Cap.
“I don’t like the dad for this,” she said definitively. “Doesn’t add up.”
“Who do you like then?”
“I don’t know,” she said, exasperated. “I don’t have any real details, just the news and you know how they mess it all up.”
Cap nodded. They were quiet.
“I watched an interview with the mom,” he said.
“Was it the one where she said the younger one needs her asthma medication? Wasn’t that awful,” said Nell. Then, quietly, she repeated, “Awful.”
He watched her as she picked at the skin around a fingernail.
“So,” said Cap, trying to sound casual, “I met with this woman today; she’s working on the case.”
“What do you mean?” said Nell in her interrogation voice.
Cap coughed into his fist.
“A woman came to see me who’s working the case. She’s been hired by family—”
“The private investigator from California?” said Nell.
“Yeah, how’d you know that?”
“It was on TV, Dad. What did she say? Why’d she want to meet with you?”
“She asked for my help. She wants me to call in a favor.”
“What—” Nell started but Cap cut her off.
“She wants me to call in a favor with Em.”
“How does she know Em?”
“She doesn’t know Em. She figured that I had a favor coming to me, and she wants me to call it in so I can get the witness statements.”
“Why doesn’t she get them from the department?”
“You think Junior would give an inch here?”
He stopped at a red light, feeling an old wave of frustration and gripping the wheel.
“Asshole,” said Nell, stewing. “Did you call Em?”
“No,” said Cap. “No, I didn’t call Em. I’m not calling Em. I’m not getting involved in this. And watch your language please.”
“What?” said Nell, turning in her seat to face him. “Why not?”
“It’s a police investigation. And I have my own cases to work.”
As he said it, he heard the words differently. It was always like this with Nell: he’d already justified a thing in his head, but when he said it aloud, it got stripped down. There was the paltry sheath of it removed; all that was left was the truth.