“Many of the police take bribes,” Kenji said.
“So bribe them better!”
Benjamin said, “Liv. He’s been very helpful.”
She whirled on her husband. “Don’t be the peacemaker. Don’t act like I’m the crazy one.”
“I’m not,” he said, holding his hands up.
“I just don’t understand,” she said to Kenji. “I don’t understand what your job is, if it isn’t helping us. I want to talk to this team you’ve mobilized.”
“They’re in the field,” he said.
“What field? Where? Let us talk to them! Is it just the lesbian detective? Is she the team?”
Kenji raised his eyebrows in reproach.
“We need to offer a reward,” she said. “For information.”
“You can do that,” he said. “But you’ll get flooded with tips.”
“Good!” she said. “I want to be flooded with tips! Why hasn’t there been a demand for ransom? Doesn’t that happen all the time down here? Isn’t it just ransom city here?”
“This is a different kind of kidnapping.”
“How do you know that?”
He pressed his lips together. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the police do have leads. And a flood of tips can drown out useful information.”
Her heart stopped, then started again. “What leads?”
“I can’t jeopardize the investigation.”
“Just tell me if the leads say they’re okay,” Liv said. “Just tell me that, please.”
Kenji nodded imperceptibly.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Tell me what the leads are!”
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“Why are we not in the loop on this? What the fuck? Why do you know when we don’t?”
She felt the collected, competent person she had always been starting to dissolve. Why was she swearing at Kenji? The observing part of her brain wondered if this was a psychotic break. But if the observing part still functioned, could it be a psychotic break? She thought she might just collapse in his office, like those toy figures that buckled when you pressed the button at the base.
“Honey,” Benjamin said. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t fucking touch me!” He was still trying to play the reasonable, calm man, and she hated him for it.
“I’m sorry,” Benjamin said to Kenji.
“Don’t apologize to him! He is not our friend!”
“Liv. This isn’t helping.”
“Nothing is helping! No one is helping!”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
Benjamin steered her out of the office as she started to hyperventilate. She caught Kenji’s concerned gaze as Benjamin closed the door. His concerned, sad, compassionate face. She wanted to tear it off.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” she whispered, when she could breathe.
Benjamin put his arms around her. “We’ll find them,” he said. “I promise you, we’ll find them.”
18.
BENJAMIN LAY IN bed, unable to sleep, watching the video feed from the security cameras at their house in Los Angeles. The light from his phone gave the rumpled hotel blankets a cool digital glow. The cameras had been installed right before they left on the cruise. Their old security system had been a glass break alarm with a loud robotic voice, and it had started to malfunction, going off when no glass had broken, scaring the shit out of him in the middle of the night. He would leap out of bed and stumble downstairs in his underwear, his heart racing. After it happened twice, he bought a wooden baseball bat and kept it under his side of the bed.
“Are you really going to club someone with that?” Liv had asked.
“I just want to have something,” he said. “I hate being empty-handed.”
“Maybe we should get rid of the alarm.”
Liv had grown up in a small Colorado town with unlocked doors. When the alarm went off, she rolled over and went back to sleep. Benjamin had grown up in Manhattan in the last days of getting mugged for your pocket money on the way home from school. It made your brain different. The next time the alarm went off he’d prowled the house with the bat and stayed awake until morning. Then he’d ordered a new alarm system with cameras.
The feed went straight to a server, so he could see their quiet house in real time from six angles on his phone. Nothing was happening. The street and the backyard and the covered pool were empty and quiet. His heart rate jumped once, when a skunk scurried past the lemon tree by the front door. And meanwhile his kids were missing, on the least adventurous vacation possible, in a supposedly safe country. He was convinced, now, that if he’d been the one at the beach, their kids would still be here. Liv’s nervous system was not trained for real fear.
They’d tried having sex, which might have been reassuring, but it had gone horribly wrong. Liv had ended up crying, and Benjamin had felt guilty and weird. Now she’d taken an Ambien, and was comatose next to him. One of them needed to stay clearheaded, in case some news came in the night. But at 2:00 A.M. it was tempting to take something. He refreshed the video feed on his phone. The back door in Los Angeles, the empty street, the lemon tree, no skunk. He thought about jerking off.
“That light,” Liv muttered. “It’s so bright.”
So she wasn’t comatose. He turned off the screen and put the phone on his chest.
The clock radio on the bedside table glowed red—2:27—and a faint line seeped under the door from the hotel hallway. They were past the first forty-eight hours now, in which crimes were usually solved. They were almost at sixty-four hours. He had been obsessively googling kidnapping statistics and knew the chances were grim.
Liv’s breathing was regular again, and Benjamin picked up his phone. He had heard the guide’s full name on that first night, but he couldn’t remember it now. He searched online, starting with the cruise line website, and then with the zip-line company. Pedro wasn’t there, but Benjamin followed a link to another ecotourism website. There he found a photo of a grinning asshole in sunglasses, giving a double thumbs-up. Pedro Navares.
Next he searched Facebook and Twitter, and there were lots of accounts with that name, but none of the profile photos seemed to be the right one. He searched Instagram, and one unlocked account looked promising, the bio in Spanish, the tiny photo possibly of Pedro. The posts were of sunsets, beaches, pints of beer. A young man enjoying his life; nothing incriminating. But what had Benjamin expected to find? Photos of the children? Pedro didn’t have the children. He was just the closest person to blame.
Benjamin had asked his wife about Nora wandering off with Pedro. She said they’d been looking for birds. Nora had told her so, and she believed it. But Liv seemed mildly evasive, and then changed the subject.
Finally he fell asleep, and had a dream. He was standing with his arms around Liv at a party, looking at Nora standing behind her. Nora was facing away from him, and her hair was put up in some complicated way, with twists at the nape of her neck. He realized that his mind must be creating each of those strands of hair, because he was in a dream. He was creating every person at the party. He took Liv by the hand and said, “Let’s go find the kids.” They left the house and went outside. They needed to get in a car and go, but there were no cars in the driveway. He knew he should be able to create a car in the driveway with his mind, because this was a dream, but no car appeared.
There was a knock at the door. Benjamin leaped out of bed. He experienced a stab of regret: He could have just flown, in the dream, to the children. But now he was awake, and the children were gone. He felt crushed. It was as if they’d been taken away all over again. Liv, beneath the covers, murmured a protest. The clock radio said 5:01. Benjamin went to the door and answered it in his T-shirt and boxers.
The tall detective was standing outside in the hall with a male cop a foot shorter than s
he was. Benjamin was afraid of what they were going to say.
“I’m Detective Rivera,” she said. “We met before. This is Officer Arnal. Will you please come answer some more questions?”
“Did you find anything?” he asked.
“If you come with us, we can talk about it.”
“Do you want my wife to come?”
“Just you,” Arnal said. His tone was mildly threatening. Benjamin thought he must hate being the little guy with the towering female partner.
“Wait—are you arresting me?”
“No,” Detective Rivera said.
“What if I don’t want to go?”
“You want to find your children?” Arnal said.
“Shit,” Benjamin said, rubbing his eyes. It was hard to think clearly. He was still half in the dream. Did they have important information? Should he ask for a lawyer? “Let me get my clothes.”
He closed the door without latching it, so they wouldn’t think he was locking them out.
“Is everything okay?” Liv mumbled from the bed.
“Yeah,” he said, pulling on his pants. “I’ll be right back.”
He found his wallet and phone, and started a text to Kenji Kirby. He kept hitting the wrong letters with his thumbs. Finally he got it sent:
Police picking me up,
no explanation.
Then he went out and closed the door behind him. The two cops flanked him down the hall. This felt like a perp walk, but why? What did they think? They rode the empty elevator down to the lobby and he got into the back of their car, in the predawn darkness. No reporters were camped out this early, and he was grateful for that.
Then he was in an interrogation room at the police station, just like in a movie. Detective Rivera and her partner sat across from him.
“So what’s going on?” he asked.
“You told me when I first interviewed you that you had never been arrested,” she said.
“Right.”
“But you were. For assaulting a police officer in 1996.”
He frowned. “Wait—what does that have to do with my kids?”
“So it’s true?”
“No! I mean, the arrest is true. But I didn’t assault anyone. And they said it would be expunged from my record.”
“Why were you arrested?”
Benjamin sighed. “I thought you really had something.”
“We have to follow everything,” she said. “We need to understand why you lied.”
“I didn’t lie!”
“We could send you home,” Arnal said.
“Are you fucking kidding me? While my kids are missing?”
They both waited. Benjamin stared at Detective Rivera’s smooth, impassive face. She had warm, light hazel eyes, almost golden. He was disappointed in her. She had seemed like she was on his side. He guessed that was her job.
“Okay,” he said. “I was in college. I was at a bar with my friends. A guy hit on one of the girls I was with. When she told him to go away, he threatened her, said he was going to rape her. So we called the college cops, and this old white Berkeley cop showed up and was really shitty to the girl, Tracey, who was black. He kept asking where her parents were from and why she wore her skirt so short. I was impatient, because the cop wasn’t doing his job. But I was just standing on the street with my friends, talking to him, and all of a sudden I was flat on my back on the concrete. The cop had sucker punched me before I even knew what had happened. But he can’t hit a college kid in the face without some reason, right?”
The cops said nothing.
Benjamin sighed and went on. “So he said in his report that I assaulted him, which wasn’t true. My father hired a lawyer, who told me it was my word against the cop’s, with some drunk witnesses, and I should plead nolo contendere. I didn’t want to, because it sounded like ‘no contest.’ But he said if I did, the incident would be expunged from my record. So I could honestly answer ‘no’ when asked if I’d ever been arrested for a crime. Which is what I did, when I talked to you. But obviously it wasn’t expunged, if you guys dug it up.”
Officer Arnal didn’t seem to have followed the story.
Benjamin wished he could explain in Spanish. “Sucker punched?” he said. “What’s the word for that here? No warning. He cold-cocked me. Punched me in the face, out of nowhere.” He mimed it, fist tapping his chin, head turning away from the impact.
He remembered the strange violation of it, the way the pain hadn’t kicked in until he was lying on the sidewalk, looking up at a streetlight, watching Tracey in her short skirt yelling at the cops. She later told him that he’d called the cop a racist asshole before he got punched, though he didn’t remember that. He’d never been hit before. His face had been tender and bruised for days.
The whole thing had made Benjamin disgusted and depressed. He’d thought about dropping out of school. He lost weight. Everything seemed pointless, if people with power could abuse it like that, and get away with it. Tracey had told him to get on with his life. Shit like that happened all the time, just not so much to white dudes. He shouldn’t be so surprised.
“You should have told us,” Detective Rivera said now.
“It happened over twenty years ago,” he said. “Honestly, I’d forgotten it. And it has nothing to do with my kids.”
“But it could make us think you have other things to hide.”
“I would never, ever assault a police officer,” he said.
But the truth was that he might, if he thought he could get away with it. It seemed like a very satisfying thing to do, to leap across the table and throttle them both. The only question was: Which one first? The guy, to be gentlemanly. And also because Detective Rivera could probably take him.
Instead, he said, “Please tell me you’ve uncovered some information besides this. Please tell me you’ve investigated the actual, immediate crime of this kidnapping. What about Pedro, the guide? Have you investigated him this thoroughly?”
“We have,” Detective Rivera said.
“And?”
There was a knock at the door and young Kenji Kirby came in, looking neat and cool in a light suit and an open collar, even at this ungodly hour. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“There was some confusion,” Detective Rivera said. “It’s okay now.”
“They dragged me out of bed,” Benjamin said. “And they’ve done nothing to find my kids.”
Kenji stood looking at the three of them as if they were children fighting in school. “Tell him what you found,” he said to the cops.
“We don’t have to,” Arnal said.
“Just tell him,” Kenji said.
“What?” Benjamin said. “Tell me!”
Detective Rivera hesitated. “We think we’ve identified the people the courier was working for.”
“And?”
“We’re following up leads.”
“How hard can that be?”
“We’ve eliminated one house, at least,” she said. “Two officers went to check it out, and the kids weren’t there.”
“You didn’t go yourself?”
“We can’t be everywhere,” Arnal said.
“No, you have to be here, doing bullshit investigations of my college drinking career.” He could feel his blood pressure rising. He was definitely capable of assaulting a police officer now. He didn’t care if Rivera could beat him up. “What about the other leads?”
“We’re working on it. It’s New Year’s Eve.”
“Bring people back! Pay them overtime! I will pay them overtime!”
Kenji gestured toward the door. “Let’s get you back to the hotel,” he said.
19.
RAYMOND WOKE EARLY and watched his wife’s face as she slept. Her hair was coming loose from the ponytail that held it back, in dark wisps around her face.
It was the third morning since the kids had gone missing. If an abductor was going to kill a kid, they usually did it in the first five hours. He’d learned that on some cop show. He hadn’t said it to Nora. But it meant that if the children hadn’t been dead by the time he got to that clearing, they were probably still alive.
He couldn’t believe that people were still drinking coffee, making breakfast, going to work, when his kids were gone. He’d had so many worries about his children, because of the melanin in their skin. But their disappearing on a zip-line tour had not been on his mind. He’d been blindsided.
Nora woke and blinked, her eyes wide and green, with tired circles beneath them. He could tell she didn’t remember. Then he saw the awareness slowly return, her mind fighting it. Pain took over her face, her forehead crumpled. “Oh God,” she whispered. “I can’t bear it. I can’t.”
He put his arms around her until she fell asleep again. Sleep was insulation and armor.
He was fully awake, so he went to the hotel gym to try to work out some of his misery by causing himself pain. If he didn’t exercise, he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t shit. The gym was a smallish converted hotel room crammed with four weight machines, a treadmill, and a stationary bike, with mirrored walls and fluorescent lights. A TV mounted on the wall played the morning news at top volume. Raymond turned it off, in case he might be on it.
Liv had described the guide pretending to be dragged under the water, at the beach. At that moment, Raymond would’ve picked up his family and left. He didn’t care about being able to take a joke. He didn’t care about being cool. He would’ve walked back to the road and waited for a taxi to drive by.
He had that fantasy a lot: the taxi back to the ship. Just him and Marcus and June waiting by the road. The other families could fend for themselves. He didn’t know where Nora was, in his fantasy. Maybe the women had gone golfing, and the men had gone to the zip line. But Marcus and June were very vivid, packing up their beach stuff, leaving that joker of a guide, hiking back to the road. They were hot and sweaty and a little whiny and reluctant. June gave him side-eye in the cab. But they were dumped out safely on the dock, next to the enormous ship. They trooped back to the metal detector at the gangway, and showed their ship cards to José, the Filipino officer at security.