Two Girls Down(39)

Vega didn’t answer him. She gazed out the window.

“Why don’t you bring that to Hollows too?”

“What—the Kinko’s?”

“Yeah. He doesn’t want our help,” she said. “Doesn’t mean he can’t help us.”



“Let them do the legwork there, talk to the staff,” Cap said.

“Why not. Keep everyone busy, going in the same direction. Here,” she said, handing him his phone.

Cap rubbed the top where it was nicked from the fall.

“Why’d you have to drop my phone and not yours?” he said.

Vega turned to face him and said, “I like my phone, Caplan.”





7

Evan Marsh moved like he had a pain in his shoulders or his neck. Vega stood just outside the loading dock of a supermarket called Giant, light rain landing in her hair, the temperature dropping. Marsh met her eyes and sped up, jumped off the dock and around the fork of a manual pallet jack with boxes stacked on top.

“Hey, Alice?” he said.

“Vega, yeah. Evan Marsh?”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“Do you have a minute to speak?”

They shook hands, and Marsh said, “Yeah, my shift hasn’t started yet. So you talked to my mom?”

“Yes, earlier today.”

“You have any idea who sent that email?” he said.

Vega watched his eyes. Big and brown, she couldn’t even separate the pupil in the low light. His hair was brown too, his skin smooth. Unlike his brother, who looked to be too big for his body in the pictures, Evan Marsh was in his midtwenties but looked about seventeen, young and lean like a greyhound.

“Not yet,” said Vega. “Do you?”

He laughed through his nose. “No. Nobody’s talked about my brother for three years except me and my mom. The police got the same message?”

“We think so.”

“And they didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “Not a surprise.”

Vega saw the tension in his lips, pushing his chin forward in frustration. She knew if there was something he wasn’t telling her, she could find it out, just by passing the tip of the blade over the wound that was already wide open.



“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I been in some small towns with some goddamn incompetent police departments, but this one is up there. They couldn’t find their assholes with a mirror and flashlight.”

Marsh smiled with half his mouth and nodded to the parking lot.

“You wanna walk?”

“Sure.”

As they walked out, Marsh took out a cigarette and lit it with a Zippo, silver with a cast metal skull on the face. He offered the pack to Vega, and she took one, let him light it for her.

“I don’t smoke around my mom,” he said. “Only started when Nolan disappeared.”

“I’m sure it was a stressful time,” said Vega.

“You do this for a living, right? Find people who are missing?”

Vega nodded.

“So you’ve seen all of this before—parents who can’t find their kids?”

“I’ve seen it. Every one’s different though.”

Marsh brushed the rain off his hair.

“What do you think the email means?” said Vega.

“I don’t have any idea. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

“You’re right about that. But let’s say you had to guess. Let’s say your brother and the Brandt girls are connected in some way. What way do you think that might be?”

Marsh frowned, shrugged.

“I don’t know. I was kinda hoping you would. You’re the professional, right?”

“Yeah. But you’d be surprised how much you might already know, just instinctually. I mean, you can’t be any more off base than the cops, right?”

Marsh smiled again.

“So you just want my gut?”

“Yeah. Your gut.”

“Maybe the same guy who took those girls took my brother, and someone, like a third party, knows about it and sent the email,” Marsh said, looking down, almost embarrassed.



“Hey, it’s possible,” said Vega, encouraging him. “So are they all in the same place—Nolan and the Brandt girls?”

“No, no way,” said Marsh. He stopped walking. “My brother’s dead. I know that. My mother knows that.” He took a long drag from his cigarette, shook his head and shut his eyes hard for a second. “She tell you that she’s sick?”

“Yeah, she did.”

“She seem upset about it to you?”

Vega watched him. Finger flicking the cigarette at his side.

“Actually no, she didn’t.”

“You think some people are just at peace with a death sentence, right?”

Vega thought about the cannula again, the way it scraped the insides of the nostrils.

“I don’t know.”

Marsh shook his head more slowly for dramatic effect, like that would make Vega listen closely.

“She doesn’t like the pain,” he said. “She’s got a lot of aches, says her bones hurt, hurts to cough and breathe. Her mind’s pretty sharp though, but she forgets to take the pills that will shrink the cancer cells. Get it?”