Two Girls Down(72)

She sent back a rolling eye face, and Cap smiled. He tried to find a face that implied fatherly worry without being pushy, but there was really nothing in that department. Just heart eyes.

Then Arlen White emerged from the back, looking stunned. He turned a flat wool hat around in his hands like a wheel. Maggie, Cap, and Vega gathered around him.

“Arlen, what is it?” said Maggie, a plea in her voice.

Arlen coughed into his elbow, then said, “She’s gonna be all right. They took everything out of her. They’re gonna keep her overnight at least.”

“Oh, thank God,” Maggie said, and she pressed her clasped hands to her chest, as if she were going to start praying right then.

“That’s good news,” Cap said to him.

Arlen smiled very faintly, then turned to Vega and said, “Ma’am?”

“Yes,” answered Vega.

He stopped turning the hat and said, “Been gone a week now.”

Vega exhaled a small breath and said, “Yes.”

Arlen nodded. Then he addressed all of them: “You can go. Gail wants to stay, ’course.”

Maggie asked if he was sure, and he said, yes, he was, and that was all. He turned and went back through the swinging double doors to where his wife sat next to a cot that held his daughter, knocked out from the trauma to her insides.

The three of them left the ER in silence and made their way to the parking lot where Maggie said good night but didn’t make a move to leave.

“You okay, Miss Shambley?” said Cap.

Maggie nodded, distracted. Then she said quietly, her eyes cast down, “How many of the eighteen people took more than a week to find, Miss Vega?”

Vega’s nose crinkled up as she paused. Cap knew she didn’t have to think about it, that she knew how long it had taken her to find every one of the eighteen, because she thought about them all the time when she wasn’t working a new case, because she kept living and reliving the old cases over and over; that she probably dreamed about them the way a starving man dreamed about food.



“Three,” said Vega.

Maggie put her hand to her cheek like she was checking herself for a temperature.

“And out of those three, one of them was dead, and one was alive but,” she said, tapping her head, “dead.”

Vega nodded.

“Right,” said Maggie solemnly. Then again, “Right. You’ll let me know how your lead goes?”

“Yes, of course,” said Vega.

“I’ll send you a text in the morning,” Maggie said. “Tell you how Jamie’s doing.”

“That would be great,” said Cap, wanting to make everything easier for everyone.

Then they all said good night and got into their cars. Cap headed for the inn and drove a few blocks before saying anything.

“Alive but dead,” he said. “What did she mean?”

Vega rolled her shoulders one at a time, stretching. Then she spoke.

“It was a girl in the Valley, near L.A. Christy Polo?ez. Twelve years old. Her uncle kidnapped her, put her in a basement, filmed her with three men at a time, four men at a time. Knocked her teeth out so she could give them a smoother ride. She’d been down there two weeks when I found her, real out of it, but I thought it was the drugs they’d given her. Her parents were so happy she was alive that they didn’t care at first that she wasn’t talking in sentences.

“Then they did a press conference. They wanted to thank the city, the police…me.”

Vega paused, rubbed her hands on her pants legs as if she were wiping something off.

“So the press is asking, ‘Christy, how does it feel to be back home?’ and Christy’s just smiling. Smiling, smiling, smiling like a drunk. And everyone’s happy and laughing and being encouraging, you know, because this is a good story for everyone. Everyone likes to see the kids come home. And Christy’s looking at the cameras and starts taking her clothes off, because in her brain, now, and forever, when she sees a camera, that’s what she’s supposed to do.”



Vega stopped, and Cap could tell there was more, but that she was deciding whether or not to tell him.

“What happened to her?” he asked.

Vega sighed.

“Her mother covered her up and took her away. Last I heard they were homeschooling her because she couldn’t function in a regular school. That’s what happens, Caplan, when they’re gone more than a week, two weeks.” She pointed to her head. “Train goes off the tracks.”

“Not unequivocally,” said Cap. “Every case is different.”

She stared out the passenger window now, removing herself from the conversation.

“Vega, everyone’s had a shitty night. They’re all just hitting an emotional wall. We’ve both seen this before,” he said.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Attempt the pep talk.”

“I am not attempting pep talk,” he said. “I am sharing my experience.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” said Vega.

She wasn’t laughing or even smiling, but she seemed suddenly to have more energy, inspired in some odd way by his sappiness.

As they pulled up to the inn, she checked her phone and said, “So Wilkes-Barre is what, fifty miles?”