Two Girls Down

by Louisa Luna

  “I’m sorry, you think we might be able to finish this tomorrow?” said Toby, so excruciatingly polite it made Cap a little angry. Why aren’t they indignant, vengeful, filled with rage?

  “It’s getting late,” he said, placing a hand on his wife’s shoulder.

  She blinked in gentle surprise.

  “Yes, of course,” said Cap. “I apologize for the delay here. Captain Hollows and I just wanted to cover one more base with you and then that’s it—we really can’t stress enough how helpful you’ve been.”

  They smiled. Toby remained standing behind his wife.

  “Captain Hollows,” Cap said, nodding to him.

  “You know, I have to tell you, I’ve been over the file—your file—a few times,” Junior said to them, “and I just didn’t recognize you folks.”

  His regional accent seemed to get thicker as he spoke, and Cap thought he better watch it and not get too hometown PA. People can sense when they’re being patronized.

  “You both look like a million bucks, honestly,” said Junior.

  Toby smiled and fiddled with his glasses. Erica looked down, not exactly smiling but like she was thinking about it.

  “Why…” Junior began, then stopped.

  He waited until they both looked at him, second-guessing themselves—had he already asked the question and we didn’t hear it? Asshole had a good strategy, thought Cap.

  Then he finished his question: “…do you look so good?”

  The McKennas’ smiles dissipated. They glanced at each other, then at Cap and Junior.

  “Pardon?” said Toby, still no trace of impatience.

  “You folks have been through arguably the worst thing two people can go through only two years ago, and you look like you just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalogue.”

  Junior paused.

  “And you didn’t used to look like that. I’ve seen the photos in your file.”

  Erica wiggled her nose like the witch from the old TV show. But this wasn’t a spell; it was a precursor to crying. She touched the corner of one eye with the pad of her manicured ring finger. And that’s what put the anger, or at least irritation, in Toby McKenna—his wife upset. He stared at them with his brow lowered, his teeth in an underbite.

  “The police have a problem with people improving themselves?” he said.

  “No, Mr. McKenna,” said Cap. “We just want to know where you got the money for all of it. Cosmetic enhancements and a fleet of luxury sedans.”

  Cap knew it could play either way—either they break and there are more tears and jumbled confessions, or they’re angry, really genuinely angry, and Toby would take off his glasses and blazer and show Cap and Junior what he learned in Ultimate Fitness class.

  “It’s not anybody’s business,” said Toby. “How we make money.”

  “That would be true with the average couple,” said Junior. “But you two aren’t average, because of what happened to your daughter.”

  “So together these two un-average things have become a set,” Cap picked up. “As things that are possibly connected.”

  Toby rubbed his chin, then his cheek, wiping off a smudge he couldn’t quite locate.

  “I don’t know what you think is the truth,” he said. “But you’re wrong.”

  “Then why don’t you tell us the truth,” said Cap softly, trying not to sound too desperate. “Please.”

  Toby shook his head then, but it seemed to be in response to something he was telling himself.

  He opened his mouth to speak but Erica cut him off.

  “They are connected,” she said, as if they were all so dense and she felt sorry for them. “Just not the way you think.”

  —

  Vega pulled off for gas at a rest stop. After she filled the tank she parked in the lot and read the latest emails from the Bastard, along with a pdf of Colin Cahill’s bank statements from the past two years. The Bastard had circled a number—$150,000 deposited almost two years to the day since Ashley disappeared.

  Vega opened a chat with the Bastard.

  “Can you track the accounts that wired the money to Cahill and the McKennas?” she wrote.

  He wrote back: “They’re both burner accounts. Like a burner cell. Use them once then toss.”

  “So no names,” Vega typed back.

  “No. Offshore through Panama. Not unusual. I can get into the bank for current accounts, but not for ones that don’t exist anymore.”

  “No way to tell if both accounts belong to same user?” wrote Vega.

  “Not really. Can keep looking.”

  “Give it thirty more minutes, then drop it.”

  She signed off, closed her laptop and slid it to the passenger seat, where it flipped Stacy’s shoebox to the floor. The top was off, pictures and papers fanned out on the black liner mat. Vega sighed and started the car. Just drive, she thought. Pick them up when you get to Denville. She squinted at them, could barely make out the images of little girls twirling pirouettes. She had the uncanny feeling she could not leave them there.

  What do you believe now? she scolded herself. That Ashley Cahill’s soul is in those pictures and you’re disrespecting it by leaving images of her on the floor of a rental car?

  She didn’t quite say yes, but the answer wasn’t no either.

  She leaned down sideways, could feel all the muscles in her left hip stretch as she scooped up the box and pictures, grabbed the last one left on the floor, the edge under her fingernails, and glanced at it before dropping it in the box. Ashley at the barre, two other girls behind her, holding it with their left hands, right arms extended, their faces serious and shiny, reflecting the light.

  They were in the right side of the frame. In the left, slightly backgrounded, was an upright piano, and the piano player in a three-quarter profile. A fair-haired woman with a strong jawline, delicate long fingers over the keys, concentrating on the sheet music, as if the girls weren’t even there.

  Vega brought the picture closer to her eyes. It was printed on paper, a thick stock but matte and a little pixelated. Maybe if she had the file on her laptop or her phone she’d be able to see it more clearly, to make out every high-resolution detail of the piano player’s face, but she didn’t need to. Because she knew who it was, even with the dulled color of whatever secondhand laser printer had produced it; she knew exactly who it was.

  —

  Cap felt his phone buzz, over and over on his hip in his pants pocket. He reached for the power button and pushed it with his thumb. His teeth chattered from the sugar, the sweat a cold glaze on his forehead. He didn’t feel nervous. But Erica McKenna was about to tell them something, and his body was preparing for it, like pulling the rip cord on a toy race car.

  “This is the truth,” Erica said.

  She removed her glasses and set them in her lap, tapped the bridge of her nose.

  “That year, the year after Sydney—”

  She paused, stretched her neck and closed her eyes, like she was working out a crick. Then she continued quickly, as if she’d thought about it many times, “Was the worst year any person could have. If you told us we’d have to go through it again, we’d say we want death instead. And we’d pick the worst kind of death too—whatever they do in the Middle East where they bury you and throw rocks at your head? We’d take that over living through that first year again. Do you understand?” she said to Cap.

  He nodded.

  “So a year ago, a hundred fifty thousand dollars shows up in our checking account. Toby says it must be a bank mistake; we should go down to our branch and tell them. But I said, let’s wait a couple of days. You know why I said that?”

  She was pleased about asking them, like a teacher who can’t wait to tell the kids the answer to a question that seems difficult but is really very obvious. She knows they’ll all slap their foreheads and make googly eyes. How could we have missed that?

  “Because the night before I had a talk with God. And I was real angry about things. I told Him I
was done with Him and done with Toby and the kids and done with this whole…”

  She sneered as she searched for the words.

  “Stupid little life, and He could fucking have it back.”

  She took a breath, her mouth relaxing.

  “And next morning, I wake up, Toby tells me about the money. And I think, maybe that’s all He could do right now to make it up to us, but it’s a decent start.”

  She rested a second, folded the glasses in her lap. She was crying, that is, tears were leaking from her eyes, but she was making no sounds. She didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  “I’m not dumb,” she said firmly. “I know God didn’t send the wire from heaven. He just pulled some strings is all.”

  “No one thinks you’re dumb,” said Cap. “But I have to ask—did you consider that whoever sent this money could have something to do with Sydney?”

  “Yeah. Sure we considered it. Then we un-considered it. Who gives a reverse ransom?” she said, aggravated.

  “Who knows,” said Cap. “We have to ask these questions, even if they don’t make sense.”

  “So you didn’t feel any responsibility at all to report the money to anyone?” said Junior, a little too harshly.

  “Hey—” Erica said, pointing at him, ready for a fight.

  Toby reached over and took his wife’s hand, held it.

  “Listen,” he said, quieter than anyone had been so far. “We have two other kids. Our boy just now stopped having night terrors. He has regular nightmares, but at least he doesn’t get out of his bed and scream. Our daughter still draws Sydney in family pictures.”

  Now he removed his glasses, pulled out a tail of his shirt and wiped the lenses.

  “When we got the money, we said, Okay, a little justice after nothing. We’re still looking for Syd,” he said. “We still take the tips; once a week we talk to the police and the FBI agent who ran the case. But we have other kids. We have to keep living. It’s like you can still survive without an arm, right, or a lung? And that’s what we’re doing; it’ll never be as good as it was, but we have to keep going because we don’t want to lose anything else.”

  He was crying now, tears rushing to the tip of his nose and dripping off the edge until he pinched it.

  “Are we in trouble?”

  “We didn’t steal that money, Toby,” Erica snapped. Then to herself, “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Toby brought the heels of his hands to his eyes and sobbed into them. Erica stared at Cap and Junior disgustedly. Like a teacher again, except the one who keeps you after school, pissed and disappointed.

  Just look at what you did.

  —

  Vega was five miles from Denville. She gave up trying to get Cap on the phone, figured she was going to see him soon enough. At every stoplight, she sent emails to the Bastard, opened up tab after tab on the Internet, reading. Professional biographies, a wedding announcement. LinkedIn, Facebook, the Patriot-News, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Houses bought and sold.

  The Bastard was churning out social media intel as fast as he could type and double-click, but the next layer—the bank statements, the credit reports, the property deeds—would take him some time, an hour or two, which might as well have been days to Vega’s mind.

  Houses bought and sold.

  She pulled over and searched her Recents on her phone, pressed a contact, let it ring. Maggie Shambley picked up after four.

  “Hello? Miss Vega?” she said, her voice heavy with sleep. “What’s happening?”

  “Hi, sorry to wake you, nothing new yet, but do you know if there’s a kind of master list of residential properties, who buys and sells, like a chain of custody? Is that public information?”

  “Um,” said Maggie, gathering thoughts. Vega pictured her sitting up in bed, putting on a pair of glasses. “Well, when someone applies for a license to alter a property, or a place is up for foreclosure, usually anyone could access that information. But just buying, selling, no; you have to be a licensed broker or representative of the buyer/seller to be able to search a guide like that.”

  “But there is a database like that, with houses bought and sold and the owners’ names?” Vega said, watching her breath form short, cold puffs.

  “Sure, hon, there’s quite a few.”

  “Can you search by the buyer’s name?”

  “Yeah, you can search by name, city, whatever you want. Miss Vega, does this have something to do with the girls?” Maggie said.

  “I think it does, ma’am,” said Vega. “Can you look up a name for me right now?”

  Maggie said yes, put Vega on mute while she started up her laptop and logged in to her account.

  “Okay. What’s the name?”

  Vega told her.

  She listened to Maggie type, the definitive tap of the Enter key. She stopped typing as she read.

  “Looks like they really like to buy and sell houses,” she said finally. “Three in seven years.”

  Vega thanked her and hung up, put the car in Drive as her thoughts spun thread after thread. Then she pulled out and punched the gas, houses blurring past, all their garage and porch lights on and their million tragedies inside.

  —

  Cap walked out with Junior at a quarter after two, leaving the skeleton crew behind, Em in charge, pounding Red Bulls and watching video footage from the strip mall. Traynor and the Fed and the Fed’s boss had gone to their home and hotel to sleep. Only five news vans were still outside, reporters leaning against the doors and in camping chairs, cameramen half-asleep with their gear propped on their shoulders.

  “Hey Cap, any news?” one of them called.

  “Captain Hollows, how about an update?”

  “Nothing now, guys,” said Junior, waving like a politician. “Just getting a couple hours’ sleep.”

  They fired off a few more questions, to which Junior said, “Tomorrow, guys, tomorrow.”

  “What time you coming in?” said Cap as they reached the lot.

  Junior looked at his watch, yawning.

  “Seven, I guess. We got the Feds on the burner account. In the morning we can go have a chat with Ashley Cahill’s father.”

  Cap nodded and they said good night, and Cap was starting to walk away when he heard Junior call his name. Cap turned, saw that the captain wore a queer expression, like he had drunk a beer too fast and was trying not to burp.

  “You’re really fucking good at this,” Junior said to him.

  It was earnest and humbled, the burp face. Cap put that in his mental photo album of Junior’s unreadable facial expressions. Cap thought of a million gay jokes he could make. Actually just a couple, along the lines of Hey, you want to buy me a drink since you’re getting so emotional, you know, the way gay guys do?

  But he didn’t. Instead he said, “So are you, Junior.”

  Junior nodded, and then they both got in their cars and took off, and Cap headed for home. He was a block away when he realized he hadn’t turned his phone back on since talking to the McKennas. He said, “Shit,” pulled his phone out and pressed the power button, sorted through the mess of his thoughts while the white apple glowed.

  Erica McKenna was right, ultimately; who the hell would give a reverse ransom? If not an outright payment for a human being’s life, which Cap was sure it wasn’t, then why else? A sociopath would never pay out money as retribution. He would feel like he deserved those girls.

  So maybe the person who took Ashley Cahill and Sydney McKenna, and maybe the person who still had Kylie, the moneyman, maybe he knew he had done the wrong thing and felt bad about it. The only thing stronger than love or hate or fear was guilt.

  His phone vibrated repeatedly, and Cap watched while the screen filled with texts and missed calls, all from Vega. The texts were all the same message: “Call me.”

  He tapped the phone icon next to her name and then the speaker, and Vega picked up before the first ring went through.

  “Where are you?” she said, her lips
brushing the mike of her earpiece.

  “Just left the station,” said Cap. “What’s going on?”

  “Pull over.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Pull over. Let me talk,” she said, urgent.

  Cap pulled over.

  “Okay, I’m parked. What is it?”

  “There’s a picture Stacy Gibbons gave me. Ashley in ballet class. The piano player.”

  Vega paused her telegram-speak.

  “What, Vega? What about the piano player?”

  Vega let out a small, cool breath.

  “I think it’s Lindsay Linsom. Cole Linsom’s mother,” she said.

  “What? Really? From Tuesday?”

  “Yes. And I just had Maggie Shambley search a database of home buyers and sellers—the Linsoms have moved three times in the past seven years. Two years ago they lived in Harrisburg. Two years before that—”

  “Lebanon,” said Cap.

  “Yes,” said Vega. “You need to call the McKennas and ask if they remember the piano player from Sydney’s class.”

  “Okay,” said Cap. He pressed his hand to his forehead, felt like he’d been hit in the face. “What’s the narrative here, Vega?”

  “Somehow the Linsoms meet Evan Marsh, pay him to lure Kylie, he gets cold feet…”

  Cap continued: “One or both of them go to his apartment. They argue.” Cap paused. “They kill him.”

  “Yes. Also they moved into their current house two years ago after selling their house in Hershey, which is halfway between—”

  “Harrisburg and Lebanon,” said Cap.

  “Linsom is a partner at a law firm in Harrisburg. So he makes money.”

  “He could be the moneyman,” said Cap.

  He looked at his face in the rearview, tired and ghoulishly white. A fun house spook.

  “So Lindsay Linsom plays piano for ballet classes, finds the girls, they kidnap them…where are they?” Cap said. “I mean, physically. Where are they? Where is Kylie?”

  Vega didn’t answer. In the silence Cap stared at the empty street, the stout houses and shops with skeletal trees lining the streets, firmly stuck in winter. Across the street a Domino’s Pizza, Fine Wine & Spirits. He stared at the Wine & Spirits sign. Wine.