Two Girls Down

by Louisa Luna

  Cap put his seat belt on and began to pull the car out onto the road.

  “What are you doing?” he said, more slowly.

  She stared at the kid’s face, the movie star, at his dark eyes generously spaced apart, delicate features, smooth skin. It had been hard to tell from the DVD case, but now, watching him move and speak, it was clear. She tapped her fingernail on the screen.

  “This kid looks exactly like Evan Marsh.”

  ——————

  EM WAS WAITING FOR THEM IN THE SAME BOOTH. He tapped a quarter on the table and hopped in his seat when he saw them. Vega slid in first, her laptop under her arm, Cap next to her.

  “What’s going on, Em?”

  Em showed them what he was holding—not a quarter. A flash drive.

  “That for us?” Vega said, opening the laptop.

  “Junior released Sonny Thomas an hour ago because they got nothing on him,” said Em.

  “Yeah, no shit,” said Cap, nodding to the laptop screen where the movie was frozen on the young actor’s face. “Because that is Kylie’s dream date. A fictional character in a goddamn movie.”

  Em handed the flash drive to Vega, and she plugged it in. He stared at the screen.

  “I don’t think I get it,” he said.

  “The character’s name is Will Turner. We all thought Kylie was writing about Wilson Thomas, but instead it’s a guy who doesn’t exist.”

  “Shit,” said Em. “It’s this guy? What’s his name, Rodrigo something?”

  Another video screen opened, the blurry chevrons of a security camera. Retail floor, a row of computers on a counter with one user, seated, back toward the camera.

  “You got the Kinko’s footage,” said Vega.

  Em pulled a finger gun on her and winked.

  “Give the lady a stuffed banana.”

  Cap leaned in for a closer look. The figure in the video stood up. Tall, thin, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled down over the top half of his face. Bottom half a mess of static fuzz. He walked out of the frame.

  Vega pressed Pause.

  “Could be Evan Marsh,” she said.

  “Related to Nolan?” said Em.

  Vega nodded. “His brother.”

  “The guy working the register doesn’t remember him,” Em added. “We’re trying to lift prints.”

  “You want to lift prints at a Kinko’s?” Cap said, incredulous. “You’re going to get sludge from those keyboards.”

  “Not impossible,” said Vega.

  Cap stared at her, at her hair swept back into a neat ponytail at the base, two or three wisps draped across her cheek, as if she’d planned it that way. It enraged Cap suddenly, her arbitrariness. Some things neat and some things messy. Maybe there was no method here. He suddenly felt duped.

  Vega looked away from Cap and across to Em now, suddenly on the same side.

  “Can we think about this critically for a second?” Cap said to both of them. “Where would Evan Marsh and Kylie Brandt meet? Where would they be in the same place at the same time?”

  “I don’t know,” said Em, shrugging. “Maybe the supermarket.”

  “That Giant’s clear across town. Jamie Brandt would shop at the Walmart in Black Creek.”

  “We can figure it out later,” said Vega.

  “No, let’s figure it out now,” said Cap. “I’m not chasing the invisible fucking man, here.”

  “Maybe…” said Em. “Maybe that’s not the right question.”

  Cap and Vega turned to him.

  “Oh yeah?” said Cap, laughing a little bit. “All right, Stephen Hawking. You tell me. What’s the right question?”

  Em scratched his chin and shifted his gaze to Vega. She raised her eyebrows. Go for it, kid. Knock yourself out. Em coughed, nervous.

  “So maybe there’s a room,” he said. “Evan Marsh and Kylie Brandt are in it together. I can’t tell you where it is, and I can’t tell you how they got there.” He pointed to the laptop screen. “Kylie loves this movie, loves this movie star, and meets a guy who looks just like him. Right?”

  Vega grabbed the line.

  “She’s a flirt, romantic, a boundary tester,” she said. “She’s pissed at her mom, she’s pretending she’s a princess, she’s pretending she’s in a movie. Evan Marsh is nice to her. Maybe he flirts with her, makes her feel special. Maybe he’s teasing her. Maybe he’s stoned. He lights a cigarette and she sees a skull on his Zippo, just like the one the hero wears on a necklace in her favorite movie. She believes in signs, fate, love at first sight. All that shit a happy little girl believes in.

  “Maybe he gets something from her—an email, a phone number, a way to communicate, tells her he’ll see her soon but doesn’t know where or when exactly. Then he trails her from home, picks up her and her sister from a mall when Mom’s shopping.”

  “Why?” said Cap. “Is he a pedophile? Any history of that?”

  “Not that we are aware of,” said Vega.

  “So what would be the motive here? What would make a twenty-one-, twenty-two-year-old kid who’s not a pedophile kidnap two girls? Risk jail time. With a mother who’s dying.”

  Cap had flashes of Maryann Marsh, her filmy eyes and drawn lips as she looked at the picture of her missing son.

  “His mother,” said Vega.

  “What’s the story with the mother?” said Em.

  “She’s dying,” said Vega. “Evan told me his mother didn’t mind having cancer because it’s the last thing Nolan gave her. He was a smoker.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Em, covering his mouth. “That is some rough shit.”

  “Yes,” said Vega.

  “I bet he was pissed the police didn’t do more,” Em suggested.

  “How’d you know?” said Vega.

  Em threw his hands up.

  “Missing adult? Ralz probably just checked the box. File the report. Move on. We have some staffing issues,” Em explained. “In that we are understaffed.”

  Cap asked, “How pissed?”

  “Hard to say,” said Vega.

  “Desperate?”

  She nodded.

  “Maybe.”

  “His brother goes missing, Mom gets sick, kid’s life falls apart,” narrated Cap.

  “He stops going to school, gets into some drugs,” added Vega.

  Em picked up: “Somewhere, he meets Kylie Brandt.”

  Cap continued, “And he has an idea. Take the girl—”

  “Or girls,” said Vega. “Write an email to the police as ransom. Only instead of money, he wants them to find his brother.”

  “Then he sends us the email,” said Cap, “because the police aren’t doing anything. Probably on a healthy dose of oxy to get rid of the anxiety.”

  “But he’s not a criminal, right?” asked Em. “He’s just some druggie who made a shit-ton of bad decisions.”

  Vega nodded at him. “I would think so.”

  “If he has the girls, all we have to do is pull a thread,” said Cap.

  Vega’s phone buzzed. She looked.

  “That your guy?” said Cap.

  “I got a home address. You know Sisilia Street?”

  “Yeah,” said Cap.

  He studied Em across the table. He hadn’t aged much since that night the kid had died, since he had run to get Cap in the break room looking like a chunky pre-teen nerd who’d just got spooked from playing the Bloody Mary game in the mirror. No gray hair, no wrinkles, still with the sweat rings under the arms, but there was something different now. Cap couldn’t put his finger on it, but if he had to guess it might have been the maturity of experience, knowing what was instinct and what was optimism.

  “I’ll go back to work,” Em offered. “Try to get the original report on Nolan Marsh, see if we have anything on Evan.”

  “Good,” said Cap.

  “Thanks, Emerson,” said Vega.

  Em grinned and gave them two thumbs-up.

  9

  It was called Bethlehem Hill, this area, but it fe
lt pretty flat to Vega. Cap told her this was the Bethlehem Coal Mine before it closed in the ’70s. When it was operational, the runoff would flow into the creek and powder the water black, and there you had it, Black Creek. Cap said some towns turned their old mines into museums, gave tours and sold chips of anthracite on key chains, but Beth Coal had been abandoned and trashed after an underground fire was set by an arsonist around 1980. The surrounding roads caved and looked like they’d been suctioned with a giant vacuum from below. Every once in a while there’d be an item on the ballot to clean it all up, but there was always somewhere else to put the money.

  The streets within a couple miles’ radius consisted of mostly commercial properties, mini-malls and offices spread out about a hundred feet from one another. The building they were looking for was only two floors, a dusty block of brick sticking up like a rotten tooth.

  Cap parked on the street. There was one other parked car, a beige compact under a carport behind the brick building. The sun was almost down.

  “Apartment two,” said Vega, reading from her phone.

  “Gotta be up there,” said Cap, pointing to the second floor.

  Evan Marsh’s apartment was above an eye doctor’s office, a monument-style sign in front that read BETHLEHEM EYE ASSOCIATES, along with the logo of an eye, wide open with lashes. The office was closed.

  Vega followed Cap to the stairs, metal and rattling under their feet. On the landing, Cap knocked hard on the door, and they waited. Vega put her ear to the door and heard nothing. She leaned over the railing to look through a small window and could see a part of a living room—a recliner and beanbag chair. She looked at Cap and shook her head.

  She eyed the gold-finish doorknob and stretched the bottom of her shirt over the fingers on one hand. It was locked but cheap, clicking back and forth. Cap glared at her, vaguely disapproving.

  “Okay, now, we can wait in my car,” he said.

  “That’s got to be his car over there,” she said, reaching above each ear and pulling out two thick bobby pins.

  “You’re probably right,” said Cap, peering over the railing. “And it’s beige.”

  “We’re friends with the cops now, right?” she said.

  She turned her head around to see his face—tired and put-upon. It made her imagine him waiting for her outside a dressing room. In another kind of life wherein she didn’t order her clothes online and would drag a man shopping. And in which Cap was the man. The whole fantasy was so weird it made her smile, and that made him smile, contagious like a yawn. The lines around his eyes softened up.

  “Right,” he said.

  She extended one of the pins, bent the other, and stuck them both in the lock. She felt around for the driver pins inside, turned the plug, and the door snapped open.

  “We’re doing this now,” Cap said.

  Vega went first into the living room, saw the recliner and the beanbag she’d seen from the window. Also a television, shaggy carpet, an outdated light fixture hanging from the ceiling on a garland chain. The space was not big, and there was a musty smell in the air—body odor, dust.

  She sensed a familiar element shifting—something chemical, like a change in altitude. Early decay: she knew what it was even before she saw the body.

  There was Evan Marsh, the boy from this morning, now smaller and whiter and lying on the ground faceup, legs buckled, with his forehead blown open. Vega stepped back without thinking about it, almost into Cap, but stopped right before she hit him. It was a few seconds before she spoke.

  “I’ll check the other rooms,” she said.

  “You want company?”

  She shook her head and drew the Springfield, kept it pointed at the floor, stepped lightly toward a partly open door. It was a bedroom, sparsely decorated: a mattress without a box spring, an uneven set of gray blinds over the window. She pushed open the sliding door of the closet with her foot and there were three shirts on hangers.

  She went into the bathroom, flipped the light switch with the nose of her gun. It was dim and dirty. There were two fat prescription bottles without labels on the sink. Frosted shower door slid open. The Zippo with the skull and an ashtray full of butts on the edge of the tub. Vega hovered over it, leaned down and picked up the lighter with two fingertips, careful not to touch the tile. She held it up for a second, then slid it into her back pocket.

  She came back out and saw Cap squatting over the body, stretching his neck around, examining the head.

  “All clear?” he said, without looking up.

  She nodded and let her eyes follow the blood sprays and clumps of pulp. The biggest spatter was on the cabinets above the kitchen counter; it was streaked and had dripped onto the counter below, into coffee cups, over the edge and down to the floor in thin lines. Bullet hole in the cabinet door.

  She stayed there for only a second and then went to the body, kneeled opposite Cap.

  Evan Marsh’s eyes were open, the lids either gone completely or mashed into the scramble that had been his skull, brain and hair a clotted mess. A halo of blood had spread underneath his head, dried into the threads of the carpet.

  Vega thought of another body in another cheap room. It was in some Inland Empire meth den with plastic tablecloths tacked over the windows, mice darting across the countertops, the stench of meat and milk left in ninety-degree heat. She’d shoved the butt of her Browning into some punk’s chest and shot another one in the foot, left them both scuttling around on the floor moaning and yelling. Into a back room where she found her skip, a nineteen-year-old black kid named Zion, lying on a bed with his limbs stretched out so far they looked gummy, fingers extended like they were webbed, eyes and mouth open in shock. Dead.

  It was the first time she had felt bad for a skip, on account of him being so young and so freshly dead. Could have been because he wasn’t alive to call her a cracker dyke, which would have eroded her sympathy a bit. But it was easier to pistol-whip and cuff them that way. She had kneeled and stared at him for a few minutes first, and then placed her head on his chest, ostensibly to listen for a heartbeat but really, truthfully, to narrow the gap between him and her, or was it the gap between life and death? Whatever it was it hadn’t worked, because Zion was dead and gone, and now so was Evan Marsh.

  “Fuck,” she said, quiet and pissed.

  “Yeah,” said Cap. “Happened a few hours ago. Blood’s separating.”

  Vega looked where Cap was pointing, the blood on the cheeks was dried, yellow and thin at the edges of the splotches. She was confident she knew the details but wanted to be sure.

  She slid a hand under Evan Marsh’s shoulder, felt the still weight of it, and then Cap’s hand clamped down on her wrist.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  It sounded like a warning. His eyes searched her face.

  “Let go now,” said Vega, which also sounded like a warning.

  Neither moved. She had her right hand free and knew Cap favored his right side, so she would need only a second, or less than that, to shove her palm into his nose. His fingers were hot on her skin.

  He let her go.

  “We have to wait for the ME,” he said.

  Vega clenched her teeth and felt a pressure in her ears. She held her hands up to them.

  “Fuck that, Caplan.”

  “You’d like to know what happened here, right?” said Cap. “Then we call Junior and Em. We wait for the ME and we find out.”

  “How long does that take? You really think your boys and the coroner are going to get to the bottom of this one quick? With all their spare time and powers of deductive reasoning?” she said.

  “If you fuck with this crime scene, you contaminate a hair or a print that could lead us to the killer, and—”

  Vega sat back on her haunches and shook her head.

  “—and it could, it could bring us the girls. If Evan Marsh has some connection to the girls, which we have yet to figure out.”

  “If we wait we’re losing more time.”


  “Wait for what? What are you going to find out by moving this body around right now?”

  “The entry wound.”

  Cap smirked.

  “So you got a forensics lab back at the bed-and-breakfast, you’re gonna analyze some residue and bullet-casing striation?”

  “Stop it,” said Vega calmly, and she stood up.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop being a dick.”

  “This is me,” he said, and he stood up too. “I have some experience here too. Maybe you think it can’t stack up to all your street guerrilla bullshit, but I’ve seen a lot of bodies and a lot of evidence get trashed because of sloppy police work.”

  “Good thing we’re not police,” said Vega.

  That almost made him laugh but he stopped himself.

  “What do you need to know exactly that you can’t guess?” he said, holding his hand over the body like he was in a séance. He walked to the door. “Okay, so the shooter is either invited in or the door is unlocked—no forced entry. Victim’s standing at the counter when shot from behind, six to twelve inches, I’d say. Vic flops forward, bounces back to the ground. Bullet’s probably in the wall behind the cabinet. You got anything else?”

  “Shooter was invited in. Victim knew him,” said Vega quietly.

  “How do we know that?”

  Vega pointed to the counter.

  “Two coffee cups. Can of Folgers.”

  Cap sighed. “Yeah, looks like he was going to make the guy coffee.”

  Cap put his hands on hips and stared down at the body. Vega watched his face change as he thought of something disappointing, swept his open hand over his mouth.

  “Oh shit, Vega. Maryann Marsh. Fucking Maryann Marsh,” he said.

  This seemed to exhaust him; he slumped where he stood.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Vega.

  “Okay, okay,” Cap muttered, like he was talking to himself. “Okay, Vega, look. You want to put your hands all over the stiff first, go for it. You want to drag your feet through this place, muddy up the fibers, do it. Can we please just give the ME a shot here after, see what he can pull?”

  Vega wondered if this was how he got women to sleep with him, disarming them by giving in to them on one thing and asking for something else at the same time.