The Janes

by Louisa Luna

  He said the “okay”s in English. Then he looked at Vega and said, “I was stupid.” Then angrier and louder: “I am stupid.”

  Here was something Vega knew: It didn’t matter if someone told you you weren’t to blame, even if the person telling you was the one you’d done the thing to; if you thought it was your fault, it was always going to be your fault. Anything else was just white noise. So Vega took a sizable step closer to Rodrigo and told him the only thing she thought would cut through the mess of static in his head:

  “I’ll find him.”

  He shrugged aggressively, as if he were trying to shake off what he was feeling. He glared at Vega, unpersuaded by her conviction and unapologetic about showing it.

  * * *

  —

  A couple of hours later, after McTiernan had taken Rodrigo back to the apartment he shared with six other busboys and barbacks, they returned to the hotel. McTiernan stood with Cap and Vega on the landing outside Vega’s room. It was dark and a little cold. Mosquitoes buzzed around their ears and ankles; Cap could hear a wave of cricket chatter over the traffic from the freeway.

  “This is some intense shit,” said McTiernan. “I worked Missing Persons six years. There’s something different happening here.”

  “We think so, too,” said Vega.

  She looked at Cap, and he knew what it meant. It was time to ask McTiernan how willing he was.

  “Thanks for bringing us Rodrigo,” said Cap. “I mean, we got an ID, right? We never thought we’d get that.”

  “Just happy I could help,” McTiernan said, looking tired and proud.

  “We are, too,” said Cap. “Which is why I gotta ask you, why’d you come to us and not your boss?”

  The guise of pride washed out of McTiernan’s face quick.

  “You know I’ve been a cop,” Cap continued. “I ran up against the brass, and when they shitcanned me, they couldn’t take my pension away fast enough.”

  McTiernan shook his head and seemed beat down. He opened his mouth a couple of times to start speaking but then stopped. Finally he was able to put some words together.

  “Otero’s always been straight up,” he said. “But the DEA comes in swinging their dicks and he backs off.”

  Vega interjected: “Is it any DEA, or Boyce and Mackey?”

  McTiernan thought.

  “He’s worked with them before. But that meeting today was jacked. I’ve never seen him take the backseat like that in his house.”

  “So you’d say that behavior was uncharacteristic of him?” said Cap. “You have to understand, we just met him. Maybe this is what he does.”

  “No,” said McTiernan emphatically. “Otero’s a baller. He covers his team, hundred percent transparency.”

  Cap shrugged, said, “This is not the guy we’ve seen.”

  “I wanted to follow you guys out of there today. So when Rodrigo came through, I don’t know, I didn’t think about it too much. Just called you,” he said to Vega. “I knew Otero would pass it to Boyce and Mackey. Something’s…” He shook his head. “Something ain’t right.”

  “How far do you want to go?” said Vega. “You can step out now. We can cover for you if anyone ever asks, say Rodrigo got to us on his own.”

  “I don’t know,” said McTiernan. Again, quieter: “I don’t know.” He pinched at his forehead.

  “Why don’t you let us know tomorrow?” said Vega. “No hard feelings if it’s not your thing.”

  Cap believed her when she said this. To her, they had already gotten the biggest get McTiernan could offer, and he could now be jettisoned. Cap, however, thought McTiernan seemed like more than a good soldier, and more than a little resourceful.

  “It’s not that it’s not my thing,” said McTiernan quickly, as if he didn’t want to offend her. “I did this all on the fly…”

  “And anything else is planned,” Vega continued. “With intent, yes?”

  McTiernan appeared to absorb everything Vega had said all at once, the rules he’d already broken and the ones he was considering breaking, porous crab shells under his feet on a beach.

  “Yes,” he said.

  They agreed to speak tomorrow. They said good night and goodbye, and he left. Vega leaned over the railing of the hotel walkway and watched McTiernan get into his car, while Cap hung back against Vega’s room door as if he were guarding it.

  Vega turned around to face him and hiked her elbows on the railing, stared at Cap intently.

  “What about you, A. Vega?” said Cap.

  “What do you mean?” she said, knowing what he meant.

  Cap shrugged. “We could get out, too. You thought about it. What do you owe anyone now?”

  He wasn’t exactly teasing her, but he was a little unclear himself. Breaking into Ben Davis’s apartment was an afterthought to Vega, a why-not. Now it was something else.

  Vega threw her glance over her shoulder, into the air.

  “Jane is a Maricel” was all she said.

  “That didn’t slow you down before, the anonymity,” said Cap.

  Vega pushed off the railing and looked at Cap like he was missing something, said, “She was a Maricel yesterday, too.”

  * * *

  —

  Vega set up her laptop next to Ben Davis’s on the table in her hotel room. She sent the Bastard an IM and waited for a response, glancing between screens, a password prompt on Davis’s. Cap stood behind her with his arms folded.

  “How long will it take to get in there?” he said.

  “Getting in isn’t the problem,” Vega said, clicking around Ben Davis’s screen. “The Bastard can cut through most of that stuff in five minutes. It might take us a little longer to find anything worth finding.”

  A chat window from the Bastard popped up in the corner of Vega’s PC screen. Vega typed: “Need to get into a non-network laptop. Right in front of me, prompting for password.” Vega paused while the Bastard wrote back. “The Bastard is typing” read the screen. Then came the response: “Press these keys together and I’ll walk U thru.” Vega did as she was instructed and the screen on Ben Davis’s machine went dark with just a blinking cursor at the top.

  “You know what you’re doing there?” said Cap.

  “Nope,” said Vega. “But he does.”

  The Bastard sent through lines of code, and Vega began to type them, letter for letter, onto Davis’s laptop.

  “I think we’re just overriding the password right now.”

  Finally the Bastard sent through “Hit Return,” and Vega did. Lines of code burst onto the screen, one after another like busy centipedes. Then the screen went black again, and then brightened up to a screen saver image of a galaxy, purple and blue.

  “We’re in?” said Cap, still unsure, bending his neck down to see the screen.

  “Yeah,” said Vega, her eyes scanning the desktop.

  There wasn’t much on the desktop, and the usual apps on the dock below. Vega double-clicked on the Internet and looked at the history. Yahoo! Mail log-in page. Vega clicked. Ben Davis had clicked the Remember Me box, leaving his email address intact on the page. Davis93129. Now all they needed was the password.

  “Should we try the same as his general log-in?” suggested Cap.

  “Probably not,” said Vega. “I don’t think he’s dumb enough to make all his passwords the same word with a different number or exclamation point at the end.”

  Cap was silent and scratched his head. Vega stopped typing for a second and looked up at him.

  “Caplan, tell me your passwords aren’t the same word with a different number or exclamation point at the end.”

  Cap smiled sheepishly.

  She continued: “And please don’t tell me it’s some variation of Nell’s name.”

  Cap rested his hands on his hips.

 
“That bad, huh?” he said.

  “Terrible,” said Vega. “You’re just asking someone like the Bastard to hack your bank account to pieces and trash your credit score. And buy a bunch of game consoles on your Amazon Prime.”

  Cap nodded to the laptops.

  “So how’re we going to find Davis’s?”

  “Let’s see,” said Vega.

  She typed to the Bastard, “We need a password to a Yahoo account from the laptop. Can we bring up everything typed in the last 12 hours?”

  “Better do twenty-four,” said Cap, reading over her shoulder. “The food in his apartment had been there awhile.”

  “Good, Caplan, good,” said Vega, deleting the 12.

  The Bastard sent more instructions. Vega held down the three keys and brought the screen to black again, the cursor blinking at the top like a hazard light. The Bastard sent more code, and Vega typed it in, hitting Return at the end.

  About twenty lines of text popped up. Vega scanned them all quickly, read a phrase: “too late for pickup.” Then a message came through on the dialogue box from the Bastard: “Look for a single word w/ letters/numbers/punc. Something that looks like a pword.”

  Vega scrolled down the screen and saw a word by itself on a line: “FResno49.” She pressed Esc, and the screen reverted. Then she typed “FResno49” into the Password line and clicked Next.

  Davis’s in-box opened up.

  “Are we in?” said Cap.

  “We’re in,” said Vega, skimming the subject lines.

  Another message popped up from the Bastard: “U need help?”

  Vega typed: “I’ll take a look around first. Will let you know. Thx.”

  The chat box closed.

  “Here,” said Vega, handing Davis’s laptop to Cap. “Start fishing in his hard drive, Word documents, PDFs, anything that could be anything. I’ll log on to his email on my laptop.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Ms. Vega,” said Cap. “Mind if I make some of that crappy hotel coffee in the pot over here?”

  “All yours.”

  Cap made the coffee, and soon the smell filled the room. He sat in the chair opposite from Vega and put his feet on the table, the laptop on his lap.

  “Okay, now don’t laugh,” he said, pulling a slim case from his jacket hanging over the back of the chair.

  Vega shook her head, indicating she would not. Cap opened the case and took out a pair of reading glasses, put them on his face. Vega thought he looked like a high school science teacher.

  She opened up Davis’s email and began to sift. There was a lot of spam. She skimmed the senders’ names and found one from Becky Davis which read “Party starts at noon on Sunday! Can you bring beer of your choice and ice?? Thanks! Love, Mom.” Everyone has a mom, thought Vega.

  She continued to comb through, making occasional notes. Cap finished his coffee and also made notes. Around eleven Cap began to yawn, and Vega stretched her arms up, linking her fingers.

  “You find anything?” Cap asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Vega. “Nothing on fire, but it feels like I’m not very far in.”

  “Me, too,” said Cap, rolling his head side to side. “He’s got a lot of random documents, lists of frequent flyer miles and stuff like that—”

  “Most people do,” Vega added.

  “Music, photos…” Cap listed.

  “Anyone you recognize in the pictures?”

  “You mean Maricel Villareal or Jane One with the burn mark? No,” he said. “A lot of bros. High school, maybe? At the beach, at a football game. Maybe he was the yearbook editor, who knows.”

  “Keep looking,” said Vega.

  “Yeah.”

  They went back to work. About an hour later, Cap got up to use the bathroom and, when he returned, picked up Davis’s laptop and sat on the bed closest to the door. Vega looked sideways at him.

  “I have to get out of that chair,” he said. “Old folks like me need to rest the bones.”

  “If you sit on the bed you’re going to fall asleep,” said Vega.

  “I won’t,” he assured her. “Seriously, that chair is made of toothpicks. I’m going to need an osteopath in the morning.”

  Vega shrugged. You do you. Cap sat on the bed and kept the laptop on his lap, went back to work. She saw a familiar name embedded in an email address in the From line: SMiller. She clicked on the message.

  “The doctor from the clinic,” she said to Cap. “His name was Scott Miller, right?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Why?”

  “An S. Miller sent an email to Davis, about six months ago.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “ ‘Have you thought about what we discussed?’ ” she read.

  “That’s it?”

  Vega read it again silently.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  Cap scratched the back of his head and yawned.

  “If that’s the doctor, what do we think that means?” he said.

  “Not sure yet,” she said. “Stack it up and save it for later.”

  Vega kept scrolling and skimming. She became aware of muscles in her back tightening, a result of so much driving and sitting in the chair for so long. She felt the left side of her neck, the trapezius muscle, throb and realized she’d been tilting her head at a strange angle for some hours. Also a knot beneath her shoulder blade, the tightness running through to her right pec above her breast from leaning over and writing on the pad. She stretched her arms across her body one by one in front of her and glanced back at Cap. He was lying on his side.

  “I’m a hundred percent awake,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “Sure,” said Vega. “Anything?”

  “Odds and ends,” he said, looking over what he’d written down.

  “Me, too.”

  Back to the screen, further into Davis’s emails. A girlfriend, an ex-girlfriend, fratty buddies, mom. Vega’s eyes began to sting around 1:00 a.m. She shut them hard and blinked rapidly. She kept clicking, reading, scratching down notes that had no link except for their apparent truncated writing styles. Then, around two, she saw a familiar name in the From line. She clicked on it and read, “Thank you for registering with Lincoln Investments! Please use this code to set your password…”

  “Caplan,” she said, her tongue sticking a little to her teeth, mouth dry.

  When he didn’t respond, she turned and saw that he was a hundred percent asleep, head resting on his arm, his glasses crooked, the laptop still open. She stood and went over to him, closed the laptop quietly and moved it to the table between the two beds.

  Then, gently pinching each of the earpieces with her thumbs and forefingers, she pulled the glasses off his face, folded them, and placed them on top of the laptop. She watched him for a minute. A thought came and went about lying down next to him.

  Instead she turned off the lights, brushed her teeth, changed into a tank top and shorts, and got into the bed across from Cap. She knew she wouldn’t sleep much but thought her muscles needed to go through the motions anyway. She was not restless but felt awake. She lay on her back and turned her head. Seeing Cap sleeping there cast a calm over her. She tried to match his breathing, slow and even.

  Then she wasn’t exactly dreaming, which made sense because she had no recollection of falling asleep. But Maricel and Jane 1, the burn victim, sat on the edge of the bed where Vega slept, alive. They whispered to each other in Spanish, and Vega could just make out what they were saying.

  “My head still hurts,” said Jane 1, pointing to the incision just below her hairline.

  “Take this,” said Maricel, handing her something small and white.

  Jane 1 examined it—it was a white ball.

  “Open it,” ordered Maricel.

  Jane 1 opened it. It was the note that read “ALICE VEGA.�
��

  “Now swallow it,” said Maricel. “I did.”

  Jane 1 looked skeptically at her friend. But then she crumpled the paper back into a ball and popped it in her mouth anyway and swallowed.

  Vega could feel the edges of the paper cutting her throat and woke up, coughing.

  12

  the first thing cap heard was a fan blowing in bursts, as if someone were toggling the switch between levels—1, 2, 1, 2. Before he opened his eyes he remembered where he was. Hotel. California. Like the song. But some things were off. He wasn’t under the bedspread or the sheet, and he was fully clothed, his jacket next to him. He cocked his head around, putting pieces together. Then he saw her: Vega standing on her hands in the middle of the room.

  It was the same as when he’d seen her through the window, except now he was right here. The intermittent fan sounds were actually her breaths—loud, then soft, through her nose. He did his best to not make any noise, partially so he wouldn’t disturb her morning ritual, and also so he could keep watching her.

  Cap didn’t think he was aroused; it was more observational, nearly scientific, witnessing Alice Vega in her natural state, previously unseen by human eyes. He thought of the few times he’d tried yoga, only because Jules loved it, that and Pilates, the latter of which always seemed to him like a particularly Zero Dark Thirty way of working out with all the equipment and everything. He’d never gotten very far with any of it, could never stretch or balance enough and always felt more drained afterward than invigorated.

  And though he’d never imagined Vega as the yoga type, she didn’t seem to have a problem with stretch or balance. Or strength. She wore a tank top and shorts, just like when he’d glimpsed her before, and he could not spot a bite of fat on her, nothing gathered around the waist or thighs.

  He propped himself up on his elbows and watched her for ten minutes or so, and she showed no signs of coming down. Until about three more minutes passed and then she did. One leg at a time; then the way she moved her back, Cap didn’t really understand it—it really did look as if her spine were partitioned, vertebra by vertebra, each rolling up, ending with her neck and finally her head.