Voice with No Echo

by Suzanne Chazin

  Aviles shoved his feet into his work boots and tried to formulate a plan. He couldn’t go down the stairs. His only hope was to escape through the bedroom window, shimmy across the roof, and slide down to the back porch. He ran into the bedroom in such a blind panic that he didn’t even kiss his wife and children good-bye.

  The roof was steeper than Aviles had expected. A slick of pollen clung to the shingles. His boots slid as he shimmied across it. The grit on the tiles scraped his hands. The porch downspout was so dented, he didn’t dare trust himself to grab it. He was thankful it was still dark outside. Had it been light, the agents surely would have spotted him.

  He followed the porch roof around the corner to the back of the house. A curtain of weeds surrounded a cracked concrete patio. Several bicycles lay chained against the railing. Two grills collected a film of water that reflected the deep ocean blue of the sky. It was growing paler over the eastern hills. He wouldn’t have the cover of night much longer.

  He grabbed one of the column supports and slid down. He was thirty-five—not a teenager. His muscles protested. His body felt the pull of gravity. He tried to land quietly and cleanly on the back porch. But the boards were old and springy. He felt the thud of his weight right through his heels.

  “Around back!” a gruff male voice shouted in English.

  Aviles sprinted across the patio and hoisted himself on top of the Dumpster. On the other side of the chain-link fence ran the Metro-North train tracks. It was a minefield of deadly currents and speeding locomotives.

  “ICE! Policía!” yelled the voice as it rounded the building. “Levanta las manos!” Put your hands up!

  And then Aviles heard it—on the other side of the chain-link fence. The rumble of a southbound train. The first train of the morning.

  “Put your goddamn hands up!” the agent shouted, this time in English. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

  He was white with thin, almost nonexistent lips, close-shaved brown hair, and hungry eyes so pale they looked like they were clouded with cataracts.

  The train whistle pealed as it rounded the bend. Aviles heard the squeal of the tires. He was out of time. Out of options.

  “Get down. Now!” yelled the agent again, pointing his gun at him.

  Aviles looked to his left. He felt the blast of hot air push against his skin. He saw the headlight beams cutting through the last vestiges of darkness. The train was close enough now that he could see the engineer through the compartment window.

  He looked back over his shoulder to see another agent rounding the corner of the house. The second agent’s gait was slower, less urgent—like he was running because he thought he should rather than because he wanted to. He was black and older. With spreading jowls and a certain resignation in his eyes.

  Two against one. If Aviles delayed his decision any longer, the men would be on top of him, cuffing him. And then it would be all over.

  Aviles held his breath and jumped from the top of the Dumpster, over the fence and onto the tracks. One word looped through his brain, over and over.

  Run.

  It was all he’d been doing since that day, eighteen years ago in Olocuilta, El Salvador, when he found his cousin facedown in a pool of blood by the side of their fruit cart. He knew the masked gangsters would come for him next. He couldn’t afford the protection money they were demanding. So he ran—from El Salvador to Guatemala and then over the Mexican border. In Chiapas, a gang stole his shoes and he walked barefoot on bleeding soles. In Veracruz, cops beat him in the freight yards and broke his ribs. At the border, he nearly drowned crossing the Rio Grande into Texas.

  His entire thirty-five years came down to this moment. A few inches one way or the other would determine his fate. Aviles took a breath and pitched forward into the path of the train’s headlights. He would make it. Or he wouldn’t.

  One. Two. Three.

  He felt nothing but the beating of his heart and the whoosh of breath in his lungs. An air horn sliced the darkness, so loud Aviles could feel it through the soles of his boots. Then it was over.

  He fell to his knees in the gravel on the opposite side of the tracks and watched the train barrel past on a current of air. His legs had turned to jelly. His bowels felt weak. Bile and puke gathered at the back of his throat. He tried to shake off the sensation.

  He had no phone. No money. Nothing but the clothes on his back. He looked across to the chain-link fence that sealed off his yard. The two ICE agents were pacing there like tigers in a cage.

  “Go ahead and run, asshole,” the agent with the cataract eyes shouted as he pulled on the fence. It puckered beneath his grip. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  He didn’t want to. That was the point.

  Chapter 8

  Vega rose soon after daybreak on Saturday morning. A mist still hovered over the lake, shrouding the sky. He opened his cabin’s sliding glass door to the deck and let Diablo out. The only sound that greeted him was the haunting call of a loon, unseen beneath the cottony mist.

  A county south of here, in Lake Holly, the maples were iridescent green with seed pods, and the magnolias and dogwoods were in full gaudy bloom. But here where Vega lived—an hour north—the air still carried the damp breath of winter. The only shoots of green came from the patches of skunk cabbage near the water.

  Diablo trotted over to the back deck where Vega was drinking his coffee. The brown-and-tan mutt pushed off the bottom step with a little leap, then danced around in a circle as if chasing his tail. Vega knew what Diablo wanted. On Saturday mornings, they always took a long jog around the lake.

  “It’ll have to be a quick run today, pal,” said Vega. “Sally will be by later. She’ll take you for a long walk. And Joy will be here tonight, while I’m at the gig.”

  Vega hated abandoning Diablo to the pet sitter and his daughter. But Talia Crowley’s autopsy was scheduled for first thing this morning and, as of last night, Greco hadn’t assigned anyone in the investigation to oversee it. Not that that was always necessary. Unless the decedent’s body contained evidence, such as a bullet fragment, a report often sufficed.

  But not here. Not with such a high-profile investigation. Talia’s death was full of nuances that might get lost between the bloodless pages of an autopsy report. Somebody needed to be there. It might as well be him.

  Vega took Diablo on a short run, showered, and then drove nearly an hour south to the medical examiner’s office, a one-story building housed on the campus of the county teaching hospital. At 8:28 a.m., a deep green BMW pulled into the parking lot. An older Indian woman got out of her car.

  Vega knew Dr. Anjali Gupta would be the first to arrive.

  The chief medical examiner gave Vega a quizzical look over the tops of her red-framed glasses. Sunlight caught the gray streaks of a ponytail pulled back loosely at the base of her neck.

  “Detective Vega?” She put a hand up to shield her eyes from the glare of the morning sun. She was dressed in a shimmery orange and pink blouse which, coupled with those bright red glasses, made her look like an extra in a Bollywood movie.

  “If you’re here for Mrs. Crowley, I won’t be starting for another hour at least. I’m afraid you’re a little early.” Mrs. Crowley. Vega smiled. The doctor always treated the dead like patients. That’s what made her so good at her job.

  “I was hoping I could pick your brain beforehand,” said Vega. “I have some questions going in.”

  “Oh?” She gave him a look that lasted a heartbeat too long. Anjali Gupta had been the chief medical examiner since Vega was in uniform. They’d known each other a long time—through many ups and downs. Her bout with breast cancer. His incident with the shooting. They had enough of a rapport that Vega knew he could ask things of her that he might not of her assistants like Veronica Chang. She seemed to know this too. Which probably accounted for her probing expression.

  “Come inside,” she offered. “We can talk until my assistants arrive.”

  She walked Vega up
the concrete steps and used her ID to buzz them through the doors. The waiting area looked like a hotel lobby with its pale peach walls, skylights, and profusion of palms and ferns. Real ones. Not dust-covered plastic. Vega learned the hard way one day when he pulled a leaf and got reprimanded by the security guard.

  They signed in at the front desk. One door off the lobby led to the morgue, labs, and autopsy rooms. The other, to the administrative offices. Gupta took the administrative door, which continued the Holiday Inn vibe. There were bland floral prints on the walls and a sitting area with beige couches and low-pile carpet. The carpets smelled new. They must have gotten them in the new budget. Vega couldn’t recall the last time the county police got an aesthetic upgrade. Unless you counted getting rid of the refrigerator Detective Nowicki spilled sauerkraut in three years ago.

  Gupta walked Vega into the kitchen area and put on the coffee.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Vega insisted.

  “I would anyway. It’s no problem.” Gupta kept her back to him as she scooped the grounds into the machine. Her voice carried the singsong cadences of an Indian youth and British boarding-school education. His Bronx vowels sounded tortured by comparison.

  “I haven’t seen Mrs. Crowley’s body yet, you understand,” said Gupta. “I’ve read the thumbnail report and viewed the photos, but that’s it. So I don’t know what I can tell you.”

  “You know there was a flood in her basement, right?” asked Vega. “The police found her after the fire department pumped out the water.”

  “Yes,” said Gupta. “I saw that in the report.”

  “So my first question is, how much forensic evidence is going to be lost because of the flood?”

  “Some,” said Gupta. “But if someone hung her against her will and she fought back, there should still be evidence under her fingernails—even with the flood.”

  “And if there isn’t?”

  Gupta regarded him over the rims of her bright red frames. “You sound as if you have concerns about this case.”

  “Lake Holly is under pressure to close this quickly and quietly,” said Vega. “I don’t want to feel like I rolled over on this.”

  “I see.” She pulled two mugs down from a shelf and poured the coffee. Then she handed him a cup. “I can assure you, I will do a thorough job. As always.”

  “I know that.” Vega wondered if he’d offended her by coming here like this. “It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s all the loose ends. Her housekeeper is missing. Last night, Detective Sanchez went to interview the family. They wouldn’t speak to him.”

  Gupta thought about that for a moment. “What’s the housekeeper’s name?”

  “Lissette Aviles.”

  “She’s . . . Mexican?”

  “Salvadoran.”

  “Undocumented?”

  “Most likely.”

  Gupta stared into her coffee. “I don’t have to tell you how hard it is these days to get immigrants to speak to the police. Most likely, her whole family’s afraid of getting deported.”

  “Her uncle’s in removal proceedings.”

  “There you go.”

  “You’re probably right,” Vega admitted. “But I feel like I’m missing something. When I went through Talia’s drawers, I found this cheap wallet that didn’t look like something she’d own. It was hidden at the back of her sweater drawer. Inside, there was a photograph of two little Hispanic girls. Crowley has no idea who the girls are. And Lissette’s family isn’t talking so we don’t know if they’re related to Lissette or not.”

  “When you say, ‘Lissette’s family,’ do you mean a husband? Parents?” asked Gupta.

  “She’s twenty-three and unmarried,” said Vega. “She lives here with her uncle and his family. The uncle, Edgar Aviles, is the handyman at Beth Shalom.”

  Gupta put her mug to her lips and paused. Her eyes got the same razor sharpness they had when she was examining a bullet fragment in a corpse. “The uncle’s name is Edgar Aviles?”

  “Technically, Edgar Aviles-Ceren,” said Vega. “But I think he uses the Americanized version of his name here.”

  “Ceren . . . That’s not a common Spanish surname, is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Vega. “Why?”

  “Come to my office,” said Gupta. “I want to check something in the database.”

  * * *

  The walls of Gupta’s office—like her glasses—were a vivid shade of red. Not a color Vega would have expected for a medical examiner. But then again, nothing about Dr. Gupta was ordinary. Her shelves were filled with kitschy Third World souvenirs sandwiched in between family photographs, medical textbooks, and awards. Worry dolls from Central America. Carved wooden animals and death masks from Africa. Incense burners from India and Tibet. Over her desk was a framed quote by Voltaire: To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only truth.

  She turned on her computer and spoke over her shoulder as she scrolled through the screens.

  “A couple of weeks ago, the Warburton Police found a body in the brush near the old muffler plant. No head or hands. Male. Medium-brown complexion. Approximately five-foot-eight, a hundred and seventy pounds. Heavily tattooed.”

  “The John Doe gangbanger,” Vega remembered. “I saw the report at our weekly briefings. He had an MS-13 tattoo, as I recall.”

  “You are correct,” said Gupta. “We sent out the DNA and got a match yesterday to a convicted burglar and gang member. But that’s not what made me think of him here. It’s the scrap of paper we found in his jeans when his body was first recovered. There was a list of names on it. One of them, I recall, was ‘Ceren.’ ”

  “You remember a name on a piece of paper from a dead man you autopsied weeks ago?” Vega couldn’t hide his surprise. “Man, you’d be hell on wheels at a blackjack table.”

  Gupta swallowed a smile. Vega was flirting with her. He could tell she liked it. She went back to scanning the screen.

  “Ah. Here it is.”

  She opened the document and turned the screen to face Vega. On it was a photograph of a torn piece of lined notebook paper smeared in grease stains and dried blood. In the center, someone had scribbled five names in black ink:

  Cesar Zuma-Léon

  Jesús Monroy-Peña

  Deisy Ramos-Sandoval

  Wilmer Diaz-Garcia

  Edgar Ceren-Aviles

  Vega stared at the last name on the list: Edgar Ceren-Aviles. Was he Lissette’s uncle? If so, the last names were in the wrong order. “Ceren” was Edgar Aviles’s mother’s last name—not his father’s.

  But a bigger question lingered: What was a temple handyman’s name doing in the pocket of a dead gangbanger anyway?

  “Do you mind texting me a photocopy of this list?” asked Vega. “I’d like to run down whether there are any connections between these names and our case.”

  “Certainly.”

  Vega gave her his cell number. Gupta copied the document and texted it over. Her landline phone rang on her desk. She took the call while Vega studied the screen. The dead gangbanger had been ID’d through a DNA match to his arrest records as twenty-two-year-old Elmer Ortega.

  Ortega. Greco had mentioned a BOLO they’d put out on a gangbanger named “Ortega” after that jewelry store heist. Vega was betting this was the same guy.

  Gupta finished her call and hung up. She peered at Vega over the tops of her glasses like a school principal. “That was Detective Greco.”

  “Did you tell him I’m here?”

  “Yes. He said you weren’t authorized to be.”

  Vega shrugged. “Somebody from the investigation needs to be overseeing the autopsy.”

  “Somebody is,” said Gupta. “Greco called to say she’s on her way.”

  “She? You don’t mean Michelle Lopez?”

  “That’s the name, yes.”

  Chapter 9

  Jimmy Vega caught up to Michelle in the parking lot of the medical examiner’s office. She was dressed federal:
dark blue blazer, white blouse, low-heeled pumps, and minimal jewelry. Only those dyed-blond curls gave her a little bit of Bronx edge.

  “Exactly what do you think you’re doing here?” she demanded when she saw him.

  “My job,” he shot back. “I had no idea Greco had assigned anyone to the cut.”

  “Well, he did. This morning,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”

  She turned and headed for the front doors.

  “You know what you’re looking for?” asked Vega. “I don’t want to see anything lost on a learning curve.”

  “A learning curve?” She spun on her heel and faced him. “Are you always such a prick with women? Or am I getting the deluxe family special here?”

  Vega held up his hands. “This has nothing to do with you being a wo—”

  “For your information,” she cut him off. “I spent five-plus years at the Department of Corrections observing the autopsies of every inmate who died in city custody. I can tell a postmortem bruise from an antemortem. I know what a bone saw looks like. And I know that you can get a knockoff at Home Depot that will do the same job for a tenth the price. So don’t give me your boys-club bullshit, Jimmy.”

  She turned away and headed to the front doors.

  “Michelle . . .” Vega ran ahead of her and blocked her path, searching for a way to derail what his mouth had already set in motion. “I’m not the misogynist you think I am. I swear,” he said. “It’s just . . . seeing you like this . . . it’s disorienting. This case is so much more than a suicide, if it’s a suicide at all. I don’t want to see anything get overlooked.”

  “Neither do I.” She thrust her chin toward the building. “Did you find out anything I should know about before I go in?”

  “A lot,” said Vega. “But I have no idea if it has anything to do with Talia Crowley, or if it’s just a sub-drama concerning her housekeeper. Has she turned up yet?”

  Michelle shook her head. “Greco’s got an alert out on her but nothing’s come in. And now, it’s about to become a twofer.”