The Janes

by Louisa Luna

  It was a series of five texts from Otero, all the same message: “STOP INVESTIGATION NOW.”

  Vega showed it to Cap, both of them standing back from the phone as if it would detonate. Vega looked at McTiernan, who shot a quick glance in her direction from where he sat.

  “The hell,” muttered Cap.

  But before he could finish his thought or Vega could concur, they watched McTiernan twist around toward the door as a plainclothes officer came through it. Vega turned to their door, didn’t get to a count of one before it opened.

  10

  cap, vega, and mCtiernan were all brought to another room that Cap thought looked like a nice place for a board meeting. There was a long table in the shape of a surfboard surrounded by twenty or so wheeled ergonomic chairs. Commander Otero stood near the entrance, looking just a little anxious, Cap thought. A slightly short, slightly chunky guy with pursed lips tapped notes on his phone screen. Cap figured he was Mackey, Boyce’s partner, since Vega had described Boyce as being a Ken doll type, and this man was not that.

  Otero made quiet, strained introductions. The man with the phone was in fact Mackey. Otero gestured to the chairs and asked them all to sit, which they did, Vega in the middle between McTiernan and Cap. Otero was on their side of the table as well but swiveled his chair so that he faced them.

  “We appreciate all of your work here, all three of you,” he began. “Ms. Vega, you move even faster and with more precision than your reputation had suggested. I’ve had a chance to circle back with Agent Mackey about the recon you’ve done and what you’ve turned up so far. I’m pleased to let you know that we will no longer require your services on this case.”

  Cap felt a smile, mostly born of confusion, come to his lips, and he covered his mouth with his hand and rubbed his face to hide it. Vega didn’t move. McTiernan was visibly shocked, turning to look at Vega, then Cap, then Mackey, then back to Otero.

  “Detective McTiernan,” said Otero. “You’ve also done good solid work this week. You can consider the case closed for now.”

  “Commander,” said McTiernan. “I’m literally in the middle of an interrogation with a subject related to the case. Right now. Literally.”

  “I’m aware of that, and when we wrap this meeting up, you can give me a quick debrief.”

  “Commander—” McTiernan said again.

  “Detective,” said Otero sternly, holding up a fatherly hand. Not now, son, said the hand. He brought his attention back to Vega. “If you have any materials you’d like to share before you and Mr. Caplan leave, you’re welcome to do so. Otherwise, we’d like to thank you for your assistance.”

  Cap didn’t move, could see the fingers on Vega’s right hand fan out, like she was about to play the piano.

  “So which is it?” she said quietly. “Is the case closed or do you no longer require my services?”

  Otero smiled politely.

  “I can’t go into detail,” he said. “But some new evidence has come to light that requires us to hand the case over to Agents Mackey and Boyce,” he said, gesturing to Mackey across the table. “To answer your question, it’s both things—for the SDPD and for you, the case is closed, and we therefore no longer require your services.”

  Cap watched the tremor in Vega’s fingers as she touched each tip to her thumbnail. She looked at Mackey, still intent on texting, and breathed deeply. Cap knew she was waiting them out with her silence, and he knew better than to fill up the space with chatter. McTiernan, however, was still agitated.

  “I don’t understand,” he said plainly. “We still don’t know who killed the Janes, right?” When he didn’t receive a response, he continued: “And we still don’t know if there are other girls out there, and where they are? Because of Vega we have a through line, Commander—Guerra gave us a name: Ben Davis. Coyote Ben. All we have to do is track this guy.” When Otero didn’t immediately answer, he addressed Mackey directly: “There’s no point in shutting us down when we can help you, right?”

  “Detective,” said Mackey, finally breaking away from the phone. “Like the commander said, we appreciate it. But we need to take it from here. We’re hoping we can count on you to keep all the details of the case confidential.”

  “Yeah, of course,” said McTiernan, just missing the “duh.”

  “You understand how this can turn in a second,” Mackey continued, speaking to all of them ostensibly, but looking in Vega’s direction. “Something pops up, we need to move fast and take care of it.” Then he turned back to McTiernan and smiled. “Does that address your question, Detective…”

  Mackey let the end of the question hang, struggling to remember McTiernan’s name.

  “McTiernan,” said Cap, pissed off now. Pissed at Otero for not standing up for his people and pissed at Mackey for being so goddamn tone-deaf. “M-C-T-I-E-R-N-A-N,” he spelled. “Starts with an ‘M,’ like Mackey, so you should be able to remember that.”

  Mackey paused, a light flashing through his eyes as he regarded Cap.

  “Thank you, Mr. Caplan. I think I will.”

  His phone lit up with an incoming text, and he glanced at it.

  “Great,” said Cap, feeling his heart rate rise. He could almost hear Nell telling him, Dad, calm down, think of your blood pressure. “I know I’m not from here, but I was a cop for fifteen years, and usually we wanted continuity, like a chain of custody in a case. You lose us, you’re losing the connections we’ve established so far—” Cap counted on his fingers. “The witness relationships, evidence, game plan.” He paused. “Opinions. Are you at all interested in what we think, or are you too busy staring at your fucking phone?”

  Cap slapped his palm on the table, and Mackey jumped in his chair and finally looked up. Cap noticed Vega’s hands were still, and that had a somewhat pacifying effect on him. He pulled his hand from the table and leaned back in his chair, tugged the bottom flaps of his jacket down to straighten them.

  “Mr. Caplan,” said Otero, level as the Mona Lisa, “as I’ve said, we remain interested in all of the intelligence you’ve gathered. You may feel free to fax it to me at a later time.”

  “To fax it to you?” Cap said, in a state of shock.

  “Offline,” said Vega to him, though he knew she was fully aware everyone could hear her. “They want to keep it offline.”

  “That’s correct,” said Otero. “To maintain confidentiality and reduce the chance the information will be compromised.”

  Cap was really all done. For reasons he could not identify, the mention of a fax put him right over the edge. He stood up and pointed at the commander.

  “Now you want to get a fax like an out-of-date cop shop instead of all your ridiculous tech bullshit? Sure thing, Commander, I’ll be sure to send you a fax, whenever the hell I come across a fax machine.”

  He had not planned this and wasn’t a hundred percent sure Vega would just follow him out the door, but he couldn’t turn back now, and was also genuinely enraged at what seemed like a bureaucratic bottleneck.

  “Good luck,” he said in passing to McTiernan and placed a hand on his shoulder before leaving the room.

  In the hallway it took him only a second to realize Vega was right behind him, hurrying to keep up.

  “Sorry, Vega.”

  “Don’t apologize, that all worked really well,” she said as she pushed through the door to the stairwell.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Blowing up like that,” she said under her breath, as they skipped down the stairs quickly. “Now they think we’re done.”

  They walked through the lobby and out the front door without speaking, down the front steps into the parking lot. Cap squinted at the sun off the windshields, making the air blurry in the heat.

  “Aren’t we?” he said. “Done?”

  Vega slipped her sunglasses on, pulled her key from her p
ocket.

  “I don’t think so. Do you?”

  Cap stopped walking.

  “No. But we just sort of got fired. Or laid off, it felt like,” he said.

  Vega stopped walking now and turned to face him.

  “Sort of,” she said. “They’re not interested in anything we found out, I don’t think. I think they’re just interested in Devin Lara, and as soon as he came up, they shut it down.” She peered over Cap’s shoulder toward the station. “I’m not really sure why, don’t think I care too much. There can’t be that many Ben Davises that fit the description of the cash dropper. I’ll put the Bastard on it, and we go from there.”

  Cap felt the afternoon sun start to hit him, full assault on the back of the neck and head, sweat forming on his upper back.

  “You were good in there,” said Vega.

  “I was merely reacting to the waves of bullshit.”

  “You got us out clean.”

  Cap couldn’t see her eyes behind the glasses, but he imagined them soft and bright.

  “You see, Caplan?” she added. “You’re so good you don’t even know how good you are.”

  Cap resisted the urge to reach out and hook his arm around her waist. Instead he blushed and shrugged, fifteen years old inside.

  * * *

  —

  A couple of hours later they sat in Vega’s hotel room, scrolling through driver’s licenses on the laptop. Cap ate a sandwich, Vega a banana. It was not difficult to find him. Of the seven Ben Davises with a California zip code south of Los Angeles (five Benjamins, one Benton, one just Ben), Vega and Cap narrowed their suspects to only two viable candidates: a thirty-three-year-old and a twenty-six-year-old.

  After some preliminary googling and emails exchanged with the Bastard, Vega found the thirty-three-year-old Davis all over social media, posing alternately with a wife and kid in some pictures and in a football jersey tailgating in a parking lot in others. Vega guessed this was probably not their guy, or if it was, he had a fairly comprehensive cover—multiple posts and tweets about what adorable things his kids did and how cutting-edge his job as an IT specialist was.

  Though the resolution of the bus station video was poor, Vega and Cap could still tell that the IT specialist family man was likely not the cash dropper.

  The twenty-six-year-old’s picture showed he was light-complected, with blue eyes and short-cropped blond hair.

  “Says he’s five ten,” said Cap, staring at the laptop screen.

  Vega clicked the play button on the video app, and they watched the bus station footage again. She paused it when the cash dropper turned toward the camera, though they couldn’t get a true look at his face with the poor quality.

  “Could be him,” said Vega.

  He proved harder to find. He did not show up on social media, nor could the Bastard track any issued checks from any of the national payroll companies. Vega typed in his address on the map app.

  “Looks like apartments in San Marcos,” she said.

  “His residence as of three years ago,” Cap said, reading the issue date on the license. “He could be anywhere now.”

  “But he could be there,” said Vega, pointing to the screen. She tossed the banana peel into the trash, said, “Feel like a drive?”

  * * *

  —

  Benchmark Apartments was an unimpressive cluster of buildings surrounding a pool that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a while, small brown leaves and grass clippings floating on the surface of the water. The apartment number listed on the license was 3-204, so Vega and Cap walked around and found Building 3 of four, then went up the external stairs to the second floor and found the door. Knocked and rang the buzzer. No answer.

  “How long you want to wait?” said Cap, leaning over the railing and peering down at the pool.

  “Not long,” said Vega, pulling a small leather pouch from the inside pocket of her jacket.

  It took Cap a second to realize what it was. Then he said, “What—no more bobby pins?”

  Vega unzipped the pouch.

  “This is what I carry when I don’t have to go through airport security,” she said.

  She removed a long steel pick the size of a pencil, and another almost identical except with a small hook at the top. She zipped up the pouch and slid it back into her pocket. Then she approached the door holding both tools in one hand like chopsticks.

  “Hey, Vega?” said Cap. “Could we maybe, possibly, get through a case without breaking and entering?”

  Vega stuck the hooked pick into the bolt lock upside down and began to wiggle it. Cap sighed.

  “There are probably security cameras somewhere,” he said, looking up to the corners of the hallway.

  “Maybe,” said Vega, sticking the second pick into the eye of the lock. “If there are, they’re probably shit.” She turned to him while she spoke, like she was sensing the inner workings of the lock by feel alone.

  Cap sighed again to express his general disapproval but resigned himself to the position of lookout, leaning over the railing again and scanning the area around the pool and parking lot for people. He saw a couple here and there but they didn’t seem to notice him.

  “Really hope this doesn’t end up like it did the last time we did this,” he said ruefully.

  “What—with a dead guy?” said Vega.

  The bolt clicked and snapped. Vega pulled the sleeve of her jacket over her hand and turned the knob. She pushed the door open and stepped into the apartment. Cap sighed again and added a bonus grumble but followed her in, then gingerly shut the door behind them.

  “See? No dead guy,” said Vega.

  “So far,” said Cap.

  They both looked around the room from where they stood. It appeared to be the ordinary apartment of a basic bro. A little furniture, piles of clothes, bottles, Styrofoam take-out containers. No books. Strong, sweet scent—food-related garbage mixed with spicy incense.

  “I’m going to check the other rooms,” said Vega.

  “Yeah,” said Cap. “We know what we’re looking for?” he called to her, after she’d disappeared down a hallway.

  She didn’t answer but he knew what it was already: anything. Anything that might be something. Notes scribbled on scraps of paper, drops of blood or saliva, clothes that didn’t belong to the occupant or items that didn’t belong, period. But it was hard to tell what was out of place in such a dump.

  Cap took a pen from his pocket and pushed around some of the food boxes on the low table in the living room, fruit flies swirling above it. Then he went to the kitchen, which consisted basically of a counter, oven, and refrigerator. On the counter was a pair of shorts, a half-drunk bottle of Muscle Milk, and some scattered change.

  Vega emerged from the hallway with a black laptop under her arm.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Theft, breaking and entering,” said Cap, pointing to the laptop.

  Vega pointed at Cap and added, “Whining.”

  “We’re not working with your pal Otero anymore,” said Cap. “He might not be as cool with us just plowing through suspects’ apartments, warrantless.”

  “First of all, we’re not cops,” she started.

  Cap finished her sentence, annoyed: “So we don’t need a warrant. Right. But then we’re plain old citizens engaging in some criminal activity.”

  Vega reached into her pocket and pulled something out of it—a small article of clothing. She tossed it to Cap.

  “That’s us,” she said. “Plain old citizens.”

  Cap unfolded what she’d thrown him. It was a burgundy ski hat with yellow concentric circles printed on it, the top like a target. Just like the hat the cash dropper wore in the bus station video. Cap felt the thick-knit threads in his fingers. Damn and damn.

  “Coming?” said Vega at
the door.

  Cap sighed once more, really loud this time, then followed her to wherever was next.

  11

  the water in the hotel shower was controlled by one chrome knob that had a thin, etched line delineating hot and cold, so Vega moved it back and forth like a tuner on an old radio until she got the right temperature, a little colder than lukewarm, and let the water fall. After five minutes or so her skin reacted with prickly bumps, the tip of her nose and ears cold. She stayed in for another few minutes until she was thoroughly chilled, and then she turned the arrow on the knob further toward the blue C. When she could no longer feel the tips of her toes and fingers, she turned the water off and got out, wrapped a towel around herself, and felt her skin start to itch with the rush of warmth. She pulled her hair back into a rope and wrung the water out.

  She left the bathroom and got cold again, the air conditioner humming steadily under the window. She saw her phone lighting up on the dresser and grabbed it, saw three texts from JPat.

  “WTF.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Calling you.”

  She glanced at her missed calls and didn’t see his name, and then the phone started vibrating and ringing. It was him. She answered.

  “Vega?” he said, sounding surprised.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  He was quiet for a second and then said, in an exasperated burst, “Where are you?”

  “El Centro,” she said. “For a job.”

  “Wh—” he said, unable to get a whole word out. “When? Since when?”

  “A few days ago,” she said, taking her Bluetooth earbuds out of the case.

  “You could have told me that. I’ve been, like, texting you, and you missed class and two privates.”

  Vega stuck the buds into her ears and held the phone in her lap, started to read her emails.