by Louisa Luna
“You sure?” she said. “Be sure.”
“Hey, fuck you, bitch. Nothing wrong with my faculties. I heard you and I answered you, and unless you or a real actual cop is gonna charge me with something, I have somewhere to be.”
Brandt crossed his arms and waited for the insults to sink in. Vega just leaned back in her chair. She stretched her arms up, kept the fingers laced, palms up. Just like a yoga instructor would tell her. And then she yawned.
—
Cap and Junior stood on the other side of the glass. Junior was moving around, nervous, not sold.
“So she’s tired? That’s the plan?”
Cap watched Vega yawn, having never seen it happen before. There was no way she was tired. She didn’t get tired. Or she was just young enough to fight it off.
“Just wait,” he said to Junior.
But to Vega in his head he said, You got a plan, right, girl?
—
She let her hands drop to her sides, rolled her head from side to side, hearing little cracks from the cartilage in her neck.
“So you’re sure you don’t know where the girls are?” she said again, almost friendly, almost cute.
Brandt stared at her, shoving his confusion into a corner to make room for the agitation.
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been fucking saying for fucking two hours since I got picked up. Now charge me, or I leave through that door, right there, right now,” he said, pointing to the door in question.
Vega turned around to look at the door like she’d forgotten where it was.
“Right,” she said. She exhaled in a whistle. “Okay, then, I guess you’re free to go.”
—
“I’m going in,” said Junior, at the end of whatever frail cord he’d been hanging by.
“Wait,” said Cap gently. “Just give her a minute.”
He watched her expression, totally foreign to him, this one a little flaky, flirty. Another brand-new Vega in front of him, unwrapped from her box, new clothes, new face, new pose.
—
Brandt didn’t move.
“And you all are just gonna let me walk outta here, unmolested?”
“Well, sure. You’re not under arrest, right?” said Vega.
“Right,” said Brandt.
They watched each other for another minute, Brandt still confused and angry about it, Vega weirdly cheery. Finally she took out her phone and started thumbing the screen. Brandt stood up slowly and grabbed his own phone from the table.
“Sorry we wasted your time, Kevin,” said Vega, smiling distractedly.
“Yeah, whatever, fuck off,” Brandt said as an afterthought.
He grunted an unintelligible thing and headed for the door, behind Vega.
“Oh, hold on,” she said, tapping her screen, not turning to look at him. “Quick question. You know a guy named Antoine Sutton?”
Brandt paused, his hand on the door handle.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, flustered.
“You sure?” she said, turning her head just a little bit over her shoulder.
“Yes, I’m fucking sure. Don’t know anyone named Antoine St-st—” He struggled to remember the last name.
“Sutton.”
“Sutton, yeah, don’t know him. Is that it, goddammit?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Vega said. Then she tapped the screen once and lifted her phone to her ear, making a call. “I guess he has a nickname though—some people call him Rascal?”
Brandt turned back to face her, dropped his phone to the floor, looked like he’d been rabbit-punched.
“Oh, you know him?” she said, genuinely curious to know. “I’m calling him right now. You want to talk to him?”
Brandt jumped for her, but she stood and hiked her jacket up to show him the gun.
“You owe him some money, right? Like ten K or something? All for what, poker and blackjack and horses.”
“Give me the phone, you bitch. Give me the fucking phone.”
Vega moved to the other side of the table, pushed her jacket back, rested her hand on the grip of the Springfield.
“It’s ringing,” she said, excited.
Brandt had begun wheezing, gripping handfuls of dirty wheat-colored hair.
“Please,” he whispered.
“Is this Rascal?” said Vega, suddenly calm and unamused. “You’re looking for a guy named Kevin Brandt, right? That cocksucker is standing right in front of me.”
“Please!”
“Hold on a second.” Vega lifted the phone away from her ear and tapped the screen with her thumb. “He’s on mute. Do you know where the girls are?”
“No, I swear,” said Brandt. “I haven’t seen them in eight years.”
“Do you know someone named Evan Marsh?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head to show her how serious he was about it.
“No one has contacted you within the last week about their whereabouts and you’ve observed nothing out of the ordinary that you can recall.”
“No, I swear. I promise.”
“Don’t promise,” said Vega, disgusted. “What are you, a fucking cub scout?”
Brandt gripped the end of the table and rubbed his nose, eyes, trying not to cry.
Vega touched her phone screen and began to speak.
“Sorry about that. Wrong guy. If I find him, I’ll call you.”
She hung up, put away her phone and gun. Brandt began to take choppy breaths through his mouth, still gripping the table’s edge.
“Okay, so listen,” said Vega. “You don’t need a lawyer. Tell the detectives everything they want to know and stay close for a few days. You step on a crack, I call Rascal.”
Brandt continued to gasp.
“Say you understand me,” said Vega, now annoyed.
“I understand you.”
“Great,” she said. “Have a seat.”
She turned to face the mirror, knowing it was Hollows and Caplan back there. She hoped she was looking at Caplan when she nodded, not at Hollows or into the space between them, but it was hard to tell. From this side, all she could see was her own face, unrecognizable in the room’s yellow light.
—
Kevin Brandt looked like a different guy when he came out of the room with Vega. Suddenly his clothes seemed ill-fitting, his skin pallid.
“You need anything else from Brandt?” said Vega, as if he weren’t next to her.
“We’ll get his contact information. We can arrange for you to stay at a motel the next few nights, Mr. Brandt. That all right?” said Junior.
Brandt nodded, said nothing.
“Detective Ralz can take care of that for you.”
Ralz led Brandt away quietly, and Cap couldn’t help smiling.
“Rascal?”
“That’s the man’s name,” Vega said, not smiling exactly, but her eyes suggesting that she might start soon.
Then she looked at her phone, and everything in her face hardened up.
“What?” said Cap.
“It’s Gail White,” said Vega. “She called me three, four times.”
Vega pressed the phone to her ear while she kept her eyes on Cap. He thought about how you never knew you were going to get good news before you heard it, but bad news you could always sense coming; you didn’t even have to guess.
—
Cap and Vega drove to Jamie Brandt’s parents’ house, where there were four news vans parked but none of their lights on and no correspondents or producers outside. Vega glanced at the numbers on the vans, everyone local, no cable. That meant word hadn’t got out yet, or there was just bigger news at the moment, which was possible.
Cap parked across the street, and they walked across quickly. Vega heard a van door slide open as she and Cap hit the driveway, past the line the reporters could cross.
“Miss Vega, any break in the case?” a man called to her.
Vega thought of bones and glass, and the front door opened, Maggie behind it.
“She’s be
en up there an hour,” she said.
“That them?” Gail called from the other room.
“Yeah, that’s them,” said Maggie, annoyed. “Who else you expecting?”
Vega and Cap came into the kitchen, where Gail stood wearing a down coat, the back door open.
“You’re the one she asked for, missy,” she said to Vega sourly. “Arlen put a ladder out, but she don’t want anyone up there.”
Arlen White appeared, coming in through the back door, out of breath. He cast his thumb over his shoulder behind him, pointing outside.
“Did she talk about hurting herself?” said Cap.
Gail shook her head at him.
“No, sir, she just took a bottle of Smirnoff with her.”
Cap caught Vega’s eye, and she nodded at him. Got it.
Everyone stood around for a second, not moving.
“Well, go on, then, if you’re gonna go,” said Gail to Vega.
Vega went out the kitchen door, through the garage to the outside, along the back of the house. The house next to the Whites’ was only a few yards away, a chain fence dividing the property. There was hardly any light at all, no moon that she could see, only a dim sconced bulb above the back door.
An extension ladder was propped up against the house, next to one of the living room windows. Vega climbed it.
“Better be you, Alice,” Jamie said before Vega reached the top.
“It’s me.”
Vega stepped off the top rung and onto the roof, where it tilted at a small angle around the perimeter. Jamie sat in the middle, where it was flat, with her knees to her chest, holding the vodka to her side.
Vega approached her but didn’t get too close, stood next to her facing what she was facing, which was the street, a patch of woods, a satellite from one of the vans.
“We have a new lead,” said Vega. “A guy named John McKie—do you know that name?”
Jamie tried to shake her head, but it was like there was a delay between her head and her neck.
“What about Dena Macht?”
“Nah,” Jamie said. “I never heard of ’em. Who are they?”
Vega told her and couldn’t tell if Jamie was listening. She was drunk, and her head kept tipping forward and snapping back up as she almost fell asleep and caught herself.
“Also I met your ex-husband,” said Vega.
Jamie registered this, turned to look at Vega and laughed.
“Yeah? He didn’t know anything, right?”
“Right,” said Vega. “You should talk to your lawyer—the government will garnish his wages for child support, but he might go to jail before that.”
Jamie nodded mechanically.
“I don’t even care,” she said. “Money, no money, jail, no jail.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, like she was at the beach. “This guy I read about killed himself by cutting his wrists and then jumping off a building.”
“You can’t kill yourself, Jamie,” said Vega. “Your girls are going to need you.”
“Oh, come the fuck on,” said Jamie, turning on Vega, lips dark with lipstick or just chapped from being bit. “This is what I wanted-a ask you. What are the odds of them being alive, now, really? You do this for a living. I’ve read a bunch of shit online.”
She did not finish her thought, just peered straight ahead, into the woods.
“What I do,” said Vega, “has nothing to do with odds.”
Jamie rolled her eyes and took a swig from the bottle.
“That’s some Fast and Furious shit right there,” she said, pointing at Vega. Then she mimicked her: “What I do has nothing to do with odds, baby.”
Jamie started hiccupping, a wet indigestive sound. She pressed her fingers to her lips.
“You going to be sick?” said Vega.
Jamie didn’t respond, just put her head down and shuddered her shoulders.
“Jamie?”
Vega moved a little closer, tried to see her face, but the streetlight wasn’t bright enough.
Jamie still didn’t look up, and now the bottle dropped from her hands and hit the roof dully, rolled toward the edge. Vega ran to her just as Jamie went limp, and Vega caught her before she tipped fully over.
“Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.”
Vega said her name over and over, but Jamie couldn’t hear her; she was in another place now, foam bubbling out of her mouth and lying in Vega’s arms, still warm.
—
At the hospital, Cap paced in the waiting room while Jamie had her stomach pumped. Cap had seen the process a few times as a cop, and every time he thought about the accuracy of the term because it was like something you would do to a septic tank to flush it out—stick in a tube and apply suction until everything comes up and out.
Jamie’s parents had been taken into the Resus area with her; Cap and Vega were left in the waiting room, while Maggie filled out forms with the triage nurse. Vega stood typing on her phone with her thumb, leaning against the wall. She had a streak of Jamie’s vomit across her shirt. She hadn’t looked Cap in the eye since right before she’d gone to the roof. He had an urge to tell her it wasn’t her fault, none of it was, but he couldn’t figure out a way to do it that wasn’t patronizing.
His phone buzzed with a text. Nell.
“U OK? It’s late even for u.”
Cap typed, “I’m OK. Jamie swallowed a bunch of pills with half a bottle vodka. At ER.”
He watched the three dots flash at the bottom of the screen and pictured Nell’s face.
“Terrible!” she wrote back. “Will she be OK?”
“Hopefully,” texted Cap. “Usually 4-hour window good.”
He paused, then added, “Go to bed!”
She sent back a rolling eye face, and Cap smiled. He tried to find a face that implied fatherly worry without being pushy, but there was really nothing in that department. Just heart eyes.
Then Arlen White emerged from the back, looking stunned. He turned a flat wool hat around in his hands like a wheel. Maggie, Cap, and Vega gathered around him.
“Arlen, what is it?” said Maggie, a plea in her voice.
Arlen coughed into his elbow, then said, “She’s gonna be all right. They took everything out of her. They’re gonna keep her overnight at least.”
“Oh, thank God,” Maggie said, and she pressed her clasped hands to her chest, as if she were going to start praying right then.
“That’s good news,” Cap said to him.
Arlen smiled very faintly, then turned to Vega and said, “Ma’am?”
“Yes,” answered Vega.
He stopped turning the hat and said, “Been gone a week now.”
Vega exhaled a small breath and said, “Yes.”
Arlen nodded. Then he addressed all of them: “You can go. Gail wants to stay, ’course.”
Maggie asked if he was sure, and he said, yes, he was, and that was all. He turned and went back through the swinging double doors to where his wife sat next to a cot that held his daughter, knocked out from the trauma to her insides.
The three of them left the ER in silence and made their way to the parking lot where Maggie said good night but didn’t make a move to leave.
“You okay, Miss Shambley?” said Cap.
Maggie nodded, distracted. Then she said quietly, her eyes cast down, “How many of the eighteen people took more than a week to find, Miss Vega?”
Vega’s nose crinkled up as she paused. Cap knew she didn’t have to think about it, that she knew how long it had taken her to find every one of the eighteen, because she thought about them all the time when she wasn’t working a new case, because she kept living and reliving the old cases over and over; that she probably dreamed about them the way a starving man dreamed about food.
“Three,” said Vega.
Maggie put her hand to her cheek like she was checking herself for a temperature.
“And out of those three, one of them was dead, and one was alive but,” she said, tapping her head, “dead.”
/> Vega nodded.
“Right,” said Maggie solemnly. Then again, “Right. You’ll let me know how your lead goes?”
“Yes, of course,” said Vega.
“I’ll send you a text in the morning,” Maggie said. “Tell you how Jamie’s doing.”
“That would be great,” said Cap, wanting to make everything easier for everyone.
Then they all said good night and got into their cars. Cap headed for the inn and drove a few blocks before saying anything.
“Alive but dead,” he said. “What did she mean?”
Vega rolled her shoulders one at a time, stretching. Then she spoke.
“It was a girl in the Valley, near L.A. Christy Poloñez. Twelve years old. Her uncle kidnapped her, put her in a basement, filmed her with three men at a time, four men at a time. Knocked her teeth out so she could give them a smoother ride. She’d been down there two weeks when I found her, real out of it, but I thought it was the drugs they’d given her. Her parents were so happy she was alive that they didn’t care at first that she wasn’t talking in sentences.
“Then they did a press conference. They wanted to thank the city, the police…me.”
Vega paused, rubbed her hands on her pants legs as if she were wiping something off.
“So the press is asking, ‘Christy, how does it feel to be back home?’ and Christy’s just smiling. Smiling, smiling, smiling like a drunk. And everyone’s happy and laughing and being encouraging, you know, because this is a good story for everyone. Everyone likes to see the kids come home. And Christy’s looking at the cameras and starts taking her clothes off, because in her brain, now, and forever, when she sees a camera, that’s what she’s supposed to do.”
Vega stopped, and Cap could tell there was more, but that she was deciding whether or not to tell him.
“What happened to her?” he asked.
Vega sighed.
“Her mother covered her up and took her away. Last I heard they were homeschooling her because she couldn’t function in a regular school. That’s what happens, Caplan, when they’re gone more than a week, two weeks.” She pointed to her head. “Train goes off the tracks.”
“Not unequivocally,” said Cap. “Every case is different.”
She stared out the passenger window now, removing herself from the conversation.
“Vega, everyone’s had a shitty night. They’re all just hitting an emotional wall. We’ve both seen this before,” he said.