Two Girls Down(51)

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.