by Louisa Luna
“People still do that?” said Vega.
“Sure,” said Witton. “Still a little controversial but some people swear by it, say it’s better than pills for severe depression. But that’s with a max voltage of 450. A burn like this, I’d say closer to a thousand.”
“At what point does a person die?” asked Vega.
“Depends on the current,” said Witton. “You get a thousand volts going through your heart, you probably get arrhythmia.”
“So,” said Cap. “What makes us think Jane One is a victim of trigger-happy electroshock and not, say, a curling iron?”
Witton glanced at Mia, who nodded. Then Mia folded the sheet down to reveal Jane 1’s head. The thing about it was that the top of her skull had been removed, sawed off, from the hairline up, and the brain was exposed, brown and wet, a white acrylic board behind it at an angle, propping it up. Cap felt all the blood travel out of his own head. He wiggled his fingers and toes and reminded himself to breathe.
“You better get him an Altoid,” said Vega, who did not look much better herself, pale as flour and leaning against the doors of a freestanding steel cabinet.
Mia nodded enthusiastically and produced a tin from inside her lab coat.
“I don’t think there are enough in there,” said Cap, a deep tonal ringing in his ears.
Mia and Witton chuckled good-naturedly, as if he were joking. Cap took two mints and shoved them into his mouth, sucked on them aggressively with whatever saliva was available, which was not much. Mia then passed the tin to Vega.
“I’ll be brief. This is the prefrontal cortex,” said Witton, pointing to the front of the brain, closest to the line of the severed forehead.
Don’t look at the saw on the table, Cap told himself.
“It looks pretty normal except for some discoloration here,” he continued, pointing to a small whitish strip of the organ near the left side of the head, where the burn was. “Now, there’s really no way to diagnostically determine this, but it could be as a result of a unilateral high-voltage current; the brain could be a little…”
He hesitated, glanced at Mia, seemed unsure of the protocol.
“Cooked?” said Vega.
“Maybe,” said Witton, a note of relief in his voice.
“So you’re telling us,” said Cap, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “That someone hooked this girl up to an energy source like a Christmas tree as a means of torture?”
“We can’t say anything about the means,” said Mia.
“Right,” said Witton. “It was a high voltage beyond any therapeutic boundary, even in the old days.”
“You tell Otero about this?” Vega said.
Mia, leaning over the brain, looked up at Vega without moving.
“Not yet,” she said. “It’s your case, right? I wanted to tell you first.”
Vega breathed into the crook of her elbow and stared at Cap over her sleeve. Cap’s eyes watered, either from the formalin or from the effort it took not to vomit or, once again, from marveling at all the shit people did to hurt each other.
* * *
—
They were quiet for a long time in the car. It was evening, still warm, and they were driving to meet Otero on-site at one of the tunnels. They still had the taste of mint in their mouths, their lips still wet from licking them to stave off the nausea. The windows were down, and they could not seem to get enough air. Cap tilted his head out, let the wind mess up his hair.
Vega did the same at stoplights, not just for the air but to hear the noise also—car horns, music from other open windows, engines, sirens.
Cap longed to see his daughter, to check the light in her eyes. The older she got, the more afraid he became; he had always assumed it would go the other way, that once she’d stopped stubbing her pinkie toe on every damn thing and scraping up her elbows and knees on the soccer field, it would get better; she would get stronger, and he would worry less and sleep sounder. But it seemed to be moving in the opposite direction: the older she got the more he worried. Maybe it was because someone had actually put a gun to her head, but maybe it was the natural course. Maybe the kids were just fine in their cardboard box armor and cheap acrylic Halloween costumes, and the adults were the ones who needed protecting, no matter what they had in their holsters.
“Could we stop for a minute?” he asked Vega.
She looked at him sideways, suspect.
“I just have to talk to Nell real quick.”
Vega nodded and pulled off the freeway at the next exit, into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven.
“Thanks, be right back,” said Cap, getting out of the car.
He shrugged his shoulders forward and back to get his shirt unstuck from his skin, pulled at the legs of his pants to do the same, and texted sloppily with his thumb: “Calling 1 min.”
He didn’t quite wait the whole minute and tapped Nell’s name on the Recents. She picked up right away.
“Dad,” she said. No question mark, all business. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Bug,” he lied, forcing levity into his voice. “Just checking in. What’re you up to?”
“Oh, just at Carrie’s,” she said.
Cap heard laughter in the background and what sounded like singing.
“Shut up, you guys!” Nell called.
Then more laughter and a door shutting.
“I’m going upstairs. Nick is singing,” she said, laughing. “He actually sounds just like Rihanna. It’s uncanny.”
Cap grinned. He loved Nell happy with her friends. Good kids with reasonable parents. No binge drinking and unprotected sex, or if they did, Nell was smart enough to excuse herself.
“So what’s wrong?” Nell said again, as if she hadn’t asked before.
“Nothing, nothing,” repeated Cap like a parrot.
“Dad, come on. You wouldn’t say ‘nothing’ twice. The second ‘nothing’ is trying to convince me it’s really nothing. Which means it’s not nothing.”
Cap sighed. He leaned against a disconnected phone box and let his eyes wander over the dimly lit parking lot.
“Just wanted to hear your voice,” he said finally. “See how things are going.”
“Uh-huh,” said Nell skeptically. “You saw a dead kid, didn’t you?”
Cap sighed once more.
“Yeah. Yeah, I did,” he confessed.
“You want to tell me about it?”
To tell the truth, he did. There had never been many secrets between him and Nell, but since the Brandt case, there were next to none. So he told her everything but, in the interest of time, stuck to the highlights.
“So you think they tortured her with some crude form of electroshock?” said Nell.
“Yeah, that’s what we’re thinking.”
“Ugh, that’s horrific,” said Nell. “It was only on the first girl, Jane One?”
“That’s right,” said Cap, grinning at the thought of Nell already working out theories.
“So maybe they didn’t have time to get to Jane Two?”
“Maybe.”
Nell paused, and Cap heard her breathing accelerate. Walking upstairs.
“So they turn them into sex dolls, basically? Insert birth control, fry their brains?”
“Yeah,” said Cap, grasping it more and more as Nell kept talking.
“But then they kill them?” Nell said. “Why? Why wouldn’t they keep them, you know, working? Wouldn’t it be more lucrative?”
“Yeah, it would,” Cap said thoughtfully.
He watched Vega get out of the car and go into the 7-Eleven. She nodded at him, stern expression. Thinking of another thing.
Nell sighed, exasperated.
“Something doesn’t fit,” she announced.
“Well, yeah,” Cap said, laughing a lit
tle bit. “We’ve only been talking it out for five minutes. We still have to get all the pieces in front of us.” He kicked at the foot of the phone box pillar absentmindedly, had an urge to talk about less vile things. Chitchat, like normal people. “So how’s your mom?”
“Oh, she’s fine. She’s happy I’m there. She’s, like, really into knitting now—it’s weird.”
“Knitting,” said Cap, trying to picture Jules, the feminist-literature scholar, knitting like a pilgrim wife in a rocking chair.
“Yeah, I actually think she does it to relax, like a meditation. All she knows how to make so far is scarves, though. There are scarves everywhere.”
Nell began to laugh, her lovely spontaneous rambunctious laugh, and then Cap did as well—not in a mean-spirited way, he wouldn’t dare, but only at the absurdity of it, picturing the floor of Jules’s sleek condo covered entirely with an ocean of dowdy scarves.
Then Nell said, “She said something nice about you the other day.”
Cap perked up with an unexpected hopefulness. He had no intention of reconciling with his ex-wife but still desired her approval and care from afar, or perhaps only wished to avoid her deliberate disapproval and ill will.
“Yeah? What did she say?” he asked, fantasizing it was something along the lines of “You know, I forgive your dad for putting you in the middle of that whole hostage situation a couple of years back.”
“She said you’ve lost weight,” said Nell.
“I’ve lost weight?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it? That’s the nice thing?”
“Yeah, that’s a very nice thing for her to say, Dad,” said Nell. “For her to say that about you—it’s like the Nobel Peace Prize level of nice.”
Cap laughed and rested his forehead on his fist.
“I guess I gotta start somewhere,” he said.
They spoke for a few more minutes, and then Nell had to go, beckoned by her friends, promising to call in a couple of days.
Cap hung up and stretched his arms behind him, cracked his neck from one side to the other, and went to the car to wait for his partner.
* * *
—
Vega browsed the brightly lit aisles of the 7-Eleven, smelling bubble gum and coffee, mustard and burnt cheese. She ended up at the register, in front of the magazine rack. Recipes, arts and crafts, cars and bikes and tech, reality show stars without makeup in parking lots.
Then, behind the register and the man working there, another rack of magazines wrapped in plastic with clear strips at the tops revealing the titles, the rest of the covers opaque white.
“Can I get a Barely Legal?” said Vega to the counterman.
He was Middle Eastern and older, some white hair threaded through the black. He didn’t react in any particular way to Vega’s request, grabbing the magazine and placing it between them on the counter.
“Can I also get Hustler, Ruff Stuff, Club…”
The counterman picked out and dropped each one with a light slap and still portrayed no reaction, not even a seen-it-all weariness.
Vega spotted a magazine behind the others; all that was visible was a woman’s face next to a horse’s.
“And a Mount.”
At that, the counterman raised an eyebrow, impressed.
Vega paid and refused a bag, carried the magazines to the car and got inside.
“So Nell had a good question,” said Cap, who’d been texting. Then he noticed the magazines. “Hey, what’s with all the porn?”
He was a little too seasoned to be embarrassed or aroused, especially considering Vega’s expression, which was all business. She tore open the plastic on the Barely Legal and began flipping through the glossy pages as if she were searching for something very specific.
Vega examined the photos, her eyes skimming each one briefly before turning to the next.
“We looking for something in particular?” said Cap.
“Yes and no,” said Vega. “I’m just trying to get in their heads a little bit.”
“Who—the killer’s?” said Cap for clarity. “Vega, a guy who’s into porn is not necessarily the same guy who tortures girls.”
“Right,” said Vega. “But the johns might, the guys who rent the girls from the guy who tortures girls. They might be into porn.”
“Sure,” said Cap. “That’s a little more realistic.”
“So I could just have the Bastard scan for men in the area with the most traffic for this particular topic,” she said, holding out the Barely Legal.
Cap laughed.
“Are you kidding? Vega, it’ll melt his server. Besides, now I don’t have any stats to back this up, but I’d bet that some guys, some guys,” he repeated to emphasize the “some.” “They look at this stuff and then don’t need to go any further. Privacy of their own homes, no one gets hurt.”
“So really it’s providing a public service, said Vega flatly.
“I didn’t say that,” said Cap. “For example, this,” he said, picking up Mount. “I’m not sure this is helping anyone.”
Vega turned back to her magazine. Cap unwrapped Mount and opened it.
“Thought so,” he said, holding the page open so Vega could see. “Just naked ladies next to horses. Washing them, et cetera.”
Cap could tell that Vega was focusing neither on what he was saying nor on what was in front of her though she continued to page through. Typically he let her be in such moments, like earlier when she’d been high, but she wasn’t high now, and he thought, What if everything she isn’t saying is a good theory that just needs a little water and air? She had a tendency to announce what she was thinking only when it was fully formed, the opposite of what Cap had been used to as a cop, pitching whatever waltzed into his head. Even if it didn’t bear out in the end, he gave it words and a shape, and sometimes it fit.
“What are you thinking?” he said softly.
Vega turned her head toward him with her chin tucked down near her shoulder so he could only see her face at a three-quarter angle. It felt rather intimate, much as his inquiry and tone had sounded to her.
“I’m thinking about motivations,” she said. “How men pretty much have a triangle. Sex, drugs, money,” she said, drawing a triangle in the air with her finger. “Every man who commits a criminal act does it in service to one or more of those three things.”
Then she thought about it a moment more, mentally scanning the lineup of skips and snatchers she’d come across, and added, “Most men, actually, do everything because of them.”
Cap eyed her invisible triangle somewhat suspiciously.
“I don’t disagree,” he said. “You gonna tell me what motivates women?”
Vega thought. She watched her blanched reflection in the windshield for clues and remembered the anguished face of the Brandt girls’ mother.
“Love,” said Vega finally. “Women are motivated by love. All of them.”
Cap looked at his own long reflection in the windshield, thought better of asking Vega, “You too?” and instead said, “Goddammit, you’re right.”
Vega handed Cap the rest of the magazines and buckled her seatbelt. It was getting too dark for her to wear sunglasses but she propped them on top of her head anyway, just in case the sun snuck back up before it was supposed to.
* * *
—
The air was colder in the desert. Cap felt his jaw clench with the chill and buttoned his jacket. He thought the landscape was beautiful, the sky looking like it was draped out of some rich blue fabric, the stars having been punched through with a sharp pencil point. There were cactuses around them and short, fat palm trees and brushy shrubs, and the rhythmic clicks and low chirps of hidden wildlife.
It would have been one of the most strange and peaceful places Cap had ever been were it not for the mass of thirty or
so men and women in various law enforcement uniforms and their equipment gathered on one side of the two-lane road, giant spotlights on cranes and tripods casting bright white beams on a singular patch of dirt.
He and Vega walked on the blacktop, following a line of smoking orange flares. She had texted Otero, who’d called and told her to meet him at the scene.
“What a circus,” said Cap under his breath as a figure approached them.
“Ms. Vega,” said Otero, shaking her hand.
“Hi, Commander. This is Max Caplan, my partner.”
Cap shook hands with him, both of them offering brief, pleasant smiles.
“This one, we just found,” said Otero, gesturing to the scene behind him. He turned and began to walk back to it, waving Cap and Vega along with him. “We had people patrolling this stretch less than a week ago, and there was nothing there, and now…”
He paused as they all went from the side of the road onto the sand, which was much firmer under Cap’s feet than he would have expected. Everyone was busy: a cluster of DEA agents stood around a tablet talking and pointing; cops, plainclothed and uniformed, stretched out concentric circles of crime scene string (for the life of him Cap could not conceive of what evidence they could possibly lift from sand but he held his tongue) in front of an opening three feet by three feet, coming out of the ground like a periscope. Also, most noticeably, there were six cops in full riot gear, Kevlar on their chests, AR-15s on their arms.
“We’re pretty sure it’s either the Perez cartel or Eduardo Montalvo,” Otero said with confidence.
Cap nodded as if he knew the names but assumed Vega did.
Otero continued: “As I said, the tunnel’s only been operational a week, max, so we feel we’re in a good position, that not too much product’s been moved.”
Cap examined Vega’s face for clues. She leaned her head to the side, looking over Otero’s shoulder so she could see the tunnel’s opening.
“So what makes you think it’s definitely drugs coming through and not something else?” she asked, sounding inoffensive.
Otero showed a slight flinch in his eyes.