Voice with No Echo
Page 9
“They could have,” Michelle admitted. “But here’s the kicker: Gupta ran the tox screen. Talia had a blood concentration of .8 milligrams of diazepam and .12 of alcohol at the time of her death.”
“Valium and booze,” Vega muttered. It was a potent combination. But if anything, it argued against Talia hanging herself.
“She’s doped up on sedatives, how the hell did she have the coordination to tie a slipknot and cinch that rope over the basement pipe?” asked Vega. “Not to mention having the balance to stand on a chair or stool and then kick it away.”
“Someone wants to kill themselves,” said Michelle, “they’ll find a way.”
Vega watched the town speed by like a movie on fast-forward. The turrets and bay windows of gingerbread Victorians. The wrought-iron street lamps with flower baskets dangling from their hooks.
“So what’s Gupta’s conclusion?” he asked. “That the manner of death was suicide?”
“Gupta left it as undetermined,” said Michelle. “Pending the outcome of our investigation. She said the flood diluted the quality of the evidence.”
“Yeah. No kidding.” Vega told Michelle what he’d found at the CIC. “Crowley made a pit stop at a parlor, all right. Only, I’m betting it was the massage kind—not the pizza.”
“That’s conjecture.”
“Sure, it’s conjecture,” said Vega. “Every piece of evidence starts as conjecture. We gotta build it from there. Same for Lissette. Her last cell phone transmission was Friday night at ten p.m. in the vicinity of the Magnolia Inn.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s this big old eighteenth-century farmhouse restaurant up by the Lake Holly Reservoir,” said Vega. “Most of the help is immigrant Hispanic. That should be our starting point in finding her.”
Michelle was quiet for a moment as they pulled into the Lake Holly train station parking lot. She stared past the century-old timber-frame building with its green clay tile roof to a spot about two hundred feet beyond the platform where all the emergency vehicles had gathered.
“Greco’s not going to let you investigate the DA’s sex life,” she said slowly.
“What if it’s the key to the case?”
“God,” she whispered. “I hope not.”
* * *
Vega and Michelle got out of the car and followed Greco and Sanchez over a low wall. They signed in on a log sheet and slipped into bright orange vests before moving onto the tracks. The Metro-North cops had already erected a privacy barrier around the body. They’d stopped all trains in both directions and turned off the juice to the third rail.
It was a quick, clean kill, as train accidents go. The victim was lying in a fetal position on the gravel by the edge of the outside rail. All his limbs appeared intact. He must have been knocked aside by the momentum of the train. The impact left deep bruising on his back and shoulder and tore his shirt. Vega noticed gravel deeply embedded in one arm. But at least it wasn’t the usual bloody mess. The man’s family could have an open coffin, for once.
From this vantage point, he looked like Edgar Aviles. Medium brown skin. Broad shoulders. Dark hair.
Everyone introduced themselves with quick nods and grunts.
“What’s the engineer telling you?” Greco asked one of the Metro-North investigators, a man with buzz-cut blond hair and a waxed handlebar mustache like something out of the 1890s.
“He said the guy casually walked in front of the train,” said the investigator. “He wasn’t running. He wasn’t pushed.”
Greco nodded. Most train deaths in the county were suicides. It was rare for someone to accidentally wind up on the tracks. And, even if they did, the trains never ran more than every ten or fifteen minutes—plenty of time to escape if it was an accident.
Vega crossed to the other side of the rail and squatted down to get a better look at the victim’s face. He straightened.
“It’s not Aviles.”
Greco picked his way over the rail bed and came up behind Vega. “You sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure,” said Vega. “I met him last night. This isn’t him.”
“Vega’s right,” said Omar Sanchez, stepping up beside Vega’s elbow. “I know this man. He’s a painter in town. He was the foreman for that paint crew”—Sanchez looked at Greco—“remember? The ones I interviewed after the jewelry-store heist? They painted the store about two weeks before the heist.”
“I thought you cleared them,” said Greco.
“I did,” said Sanchez. “But I decided to take another crack at them when Elmer Ortega went MIA. I kept trying to reach the foreman. He never answered my calls.”
“We didn’t find a wallet or ID on the body,” said the investigator with the handlebar mustache. “But we found this.”
He held out an evidence bag to them that contained a typewritten letter and envelope. Vega recognized ICE’s blue eagle logo on the upper right of the stationery. The letter was a boilerplate denial for a stay of removal with an order to leave the United States immediately or face arrest and deportation. It was addressed to a Cesar Zuma-Léon with an address in Lake Holly.
“That’s the guy,” said Sanchez. “Cesar Zuma.” Zuma. Vega pulled out his phone and called up a picture on his screen. He handed it to Sanchez.
“This is a list of names the Warburton Police found in Elmer Ortega’s pocket when his body turned up. Cesar Zuma’s on the list. And maybe Edgar Aviles’s as well.”
Sanchez and Greco read the names:
Cesar Zuma-Léon
Jesús Monroy-Peña
Deisy Ramos-Sandoval
Wilmer Diaz-Garcia
Edgar Ceren-Aviles
“Well,” Greco grunted. “Least we know who Ortega’s inside man was on the jewelry-store heist. This will help clear the case.” Greco handed the phone back to Vega. “Text me a copy of that list. I’ll run it past the Warburton Police.”
“That’s it?” asked Vega as he forwarded the list.
“What do you want us to do?” asked Greco. “Invite them all to Zuma’s funeral?”
“These names are connected to a dead MS-13 gang member,” said Vega. “One of them is now dead himself and directly linked to a crime in town. Another could be the uncle of Talia Crowley’s missing housekeeper—”
“Which, outside of the jewelry store heist, helps us, how?” Greco interrupted. “That is, assuming the name on the list even corresponds to Edgar Aviles. The last names are reversed.”
“I know that,” said Vega. “But shouldn’t we track down those other names? Figure out if there’s a connection?”
“If I was the Warburton Police? Investigating Ortega’s murder? Sure,” said Greco. “But I’ve got enough on my plate without taking on freelance. Zuma’s death is between Metro-North and Lake Holly. Your priority right now should be finding Lissette Aviles and closing Talia Crowley. Nothing else.”
Vega and Michelle left Greco and Sanchez at the scene to confer with Mr. Handlebars. On the way back to the car, Michelle confronted Vega.
“What’s this about meeting Aviles?” she asked. “You know him?”
“No, I don’t know him,” said Vega. “I just happened to meet him last night when I was picking someone up at the synagogue where he works. I’m sure your enforcers already know his place of employment.”
“Don’t call them ‘enforcers,’” said Michelle. “It makes them sound like mafiosos.”
Vega didn’t reply. He thought in some respects, it was an apt comparison.
“Why didn’t you mention this earlier?” she demanded.
“I told Greco,” said Vega. “I didn’t think it mattered. You said Aviles ran to New York City. Besides, wouldn’t ICE have checked out where he works already?”
“I don’t know what they’ve checked or haven’t checked,” said Michelle. She picked up her phone and began punching in a number. “What’s the name of the synagogue?”
Vega felt an acid knot tightening in the pit of his stomach. He wouldn’t even ha
ve known where Aviles worked if not for Max Zimmerman. His friend. Adele’s neighbor. Vega’s cheeks grew hot as he recalled what Zimmerman had said to Aviles last night:
You can trust Detective Vega.
“Jimmy—the law is the law. You need to tell me.” Vega closed his eyes. He heard nothing but the rumble of fire trucks as they left the station parking lot. His breath stilled in his chest. He was Max Zimmerman’s friend, sure. But he was also a police officer. He swore an oath. He took a deep breath and forced himself to say the words. Each one felt like a lead weight on his tongue.
“Edgar Aviles is the handyman at Beth Shalom.”
Chapter 14
Edgar Aviles crouched in a corner of the toolshed, behind the lawn mower and leaf blower, shivering. The adrenaline from his run had worn off, his white undershirt was soaked. The damp early morning chill made him shiver. He felt like he was back in Olocuilta, standing over the bloody corpse of his teenage cousin. His best friend. The food cart they’d pooled their money to buy was supposed to be their ticket out of poverty. Instead, it spelled their ruin. When they couldn’t make their protection payoffs, the local gang killed his cousin. Sliced him fifteen times with a machete.
Aviles left Olocuilta that same day and never looked back.
He wiped an arm across his sweat-slicked forehead and tried to think about what to do next. He felt a deep well of shame hiding in the shed of his employer. On a normal Saturday morning, he’d be unlocking the front doors of the synagogue and running a mop along the raised stage so it sparkled for Saturday worship. He’d be dusting the front of the great carved cupboard—the ark—where the religious scrolls were kept, and polishing the bimah, or lectern, where they were read.
His favorite job was shining the glass panes of the lamp— the eternal light—that glowed brightly above the ark. Aviles liked the way the lamp was always lit, even when the sanctuary was empty. Rabbi Goldberg said it was to remind people that God was always present, even when people couldn’t feel Him.
Aviles prayed that that was true. He sorely needed God’s presence now.
Most Saturdays, there was a bar or bat mitzvah. The pews would fill with the relatives of the young boy or girl celebrating this Jewish rite of passage. Rabbi Goldberg would read Hebrew from the Torah. Cantor Bloom would sing. The songs were mostly bittersweet—nothing like the bright, rousing tunes Aviles knew from the assembly he went to with Maria and the children. And yet both worship halls filled him with wonder and reverence. A sense that no matter how dark things got in the world, there was still hope and goodness. He just had to find it.
He stayed in the shed for a long time, listening to the birds in the trees and the distant whoosh of cars along the main road. And then, he heard it, the sound of a car slowly pulling into the temple parking lot. Just one car. He knew whose car it would be. The second car to arrive on Saturday mornings—after Aviles’s.
Rabbi Mark Goldberg.
Aviles watched from a crack between the shed frame and the door as the rabbi got out of his Dodge minivan. Rabbi Goldberg was a lean man with a close-cropped beard and wire-rimmed glasses. He was thirty-five—the same age as Aviles—yet he felt both older and younger.
The rabbi’s hands were soft, almost girlish, with long, double-jointed fingers that seemed to move of their own accord, like beach grass. He was shy with audiences and sometimes mumbled when he read from the Torah. He had no stomach for containing some of the older and more difficult members of his congregation. They tended to walk all over him—unlike Rabbi Weiss, now retired, who had a voice like God and knew how to control them.
Yet Aviles had also seen how tender Rabbi Goldberg was when he spoke to Mrs. Teitelbaum, now addled by dementia. Or when he helped the Klugers, who’d lost a son to drugs. He seemed sincerely drawn to his faith, not out of a desire to speak or lead but from a deep-seated belief that he himself was being led. He didn’t talk so much as listen.
If Aviles ever needed someone to listen to him, it was now. He took a deep breath and slid open the aluminum door of the shed. It echoed like an empty oil drum. Rabbi Goldberg’s head swiveled at the sound. His face registered a moment of relief seeing Aviles, then puzzlement at the fact that his custodian’s white undershirt and uniform pants were covered in grass stains and dirt.
“Edgar? Where’s your car?”
Aviles noticed that Rabbi Goldberg wasn’t traveling alone this morning. His wife, Señora Eve, was in the front passenger seat. Their two little girls, ages three and five, were strapped in car seats in back. The girls blinked at Aviles. The señora got out of the minivan. She put her hands on the hips of her long, flowing dress, her narrow shoulders backlit by the sun. Her wavy brown hair rippled across her shoulders like water, amplifying every movement.
“Mark,” she chided her husband in her lilting French accent. “Can’t you see that something’s wrong?” She set her eyes on Aviles. Dark, kind eyes that searched for an answer that might not be found in his words. “Is Noah all right?”
Her oldest, Sarah, was the same age as Noah. Of course she’d think of the boy first.
“He’s fine. Thank you, missus.” Aviles shoved his hands in his pockets and stared down at the blacktop. A blacktop he’d helped repave two years ago. He was too ashamed to face their scrutiny. “It’s me,” he choked out. “This morning, two men—two agents—came to my door—”
“ICE?” The señora was a beat ahead of her husband, as always. “Are you saying ICE tried to arrest you?”
“Yes, missus. I ran. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You ran here?” the rabbi’s voice cracked on the last word.
“Of course he ran here, Mark,” said the señora. “Why shouldn’t he run here? He’s been part of Beth Shalom longer than you’ve been its rabbi. We need to get him inside—”
“Do you think that’s wise?” the rabbi asked his wife. Then he turned to Aviles. “I’m sorry, Edgar. You are a good man. And a loyal employee. I want to help. If it were up to me alone . . . But last night, you heard what the board said—”
“A broch on what the board said!” his wife interrupted in disgust. “The board is five men and a hundred and five opinions. Look at him, Mark. He’s cold. He’s frightened. Whatever is or isn’t going to happen, he’s our employee. Our friend. He deserves to go inside, warm up, and eat. Feeding someone a bagel isn’t a federal crime.”
Her words had the desired effect. Rabbi Goldberg turned to Aviles. His tone was almost apologetic. “My wife is right. Let’s get you inside and figure out what to do next.”
Aviles followed the Goldberg family into the synagogue. It was a beautiful building, paneled in blond wood with walls of windows and plenty of skylights that made even the grayest day feel sunny. Plush red carpets covered the lobby floors and bright oil paintings of Jerusalem covered its walls. A chandelier sparkled outside the door to the sanctuary. A large bronze plaque listed dozens of names of families who’d made large contributions to the synagogue. Some of the families were two and three generations.
“I’m going to need to make some calls about this,” said the rabbi. He excused himself to his paneled office.
“Come,” said the señora, taking the girls by their hands and beckoning Aviles to follow. “Let’s go downstairs to the preschool. The girls can play and we can eat and talk.”
On the building’s lower level, bright yellow walls welcomed them to the preschool, along with pictures of children’s artwork beneath letters of the Hebrew alphabet. There were two big playrooms, complete with pint-size bathrooms and a full-size kitchen—one of two in the building. The building was built on a small hill, so even though the preschool was down a flight of stairs, it was on the ground floor in back. Large windows and sliding glass doors overlooked a playground.
The señora flicked on the lights in one of the big playrooms, revealing two long tables with little chairs stacked upside down on the tables—just where Aviles had left them yesterday afternoon when he’d finished cleaning.
“I think there’s a clothing donation bin down here somewhere,” she said, her French accent soft and buttery—so much more pleasing to Edgar’s ear than the sharp consonants of English. “We can probably find you a warm shirt.”
She began opening cabinets until she found the one she wanted. “Ah. Here it is.” She rummaged through one of the bags and pulled out a dark-green flannel with the name Ralph Lauren inside. She held it up. “I think this will fit you.”
“You don’t have to do all of this,” he told her.
“Nonsense,” she said, pressing the shirt into his hands. “You need to eat. You need clean clothes. You might be here a while.”
“Maybe in a day or two, ICE will give up.”
She tucked a thick strand of wavy hair behind one ear and studied him for a long moment. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
Aviles slipped into the shirt. It was a lovely soft cotton. The sleeves were too long, but they were easy to roll up. “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t stay here beyond today.”
“Where will you go?”
Aviles kept his eyes on his hands as he buttoned the shirt. He had no idea. He felt a rising panic in his chest and tried to swallow it back.
“You have to stay here,” she told him softly. “You can’t leave your family. They need you.”
The señora’s two little girls chatted away behind him. Aviles felt a sharp pain slice his heart thinking about leaving his own children behind. Especially now. After that call. Those threats. And Lissette missing. But he couldn’t tell the señora any of that. She wouldn’t understand. It would only frighten her. So he said nothing. And neither did she.
There was no answer.
She poured coffee and spread cream cheese on two toasted bagels. She did not eat the second bagel but split it in half and set it on one of the children’s tables for the girls, along with some juice.