Voice with No Echo

by Suzanne Chazin

  “Better peeing in a cup than peeing in a jail cell toilet,” said Vega.

  Adele’s car wasn’t at the police station. It was in an impound lot on the north end of town. Adele said her good-byes and thank-yous to Paola. Then Vega drove her there. They had to call a number on the fence and wait for the tow truck driver to come back from his nightly rounds.

  They sat in Vega’s truck with the heater on. The rain today had been followed by a temperature drop.

  “Maybe we should come back tomorrow,” Vega suggested. “It’s not like you can drive your car far anyway until you get a new tire.”

  “If it was just a matter of getting my car back, I wouldn’t have even dragged you here,” said Adele. “But all of Edgar’s paperwork for his administrative stay is inside. I’ve got to fetch it and find someone who’ll lend me their car so I can drive him down to Broad Plains tomorrow morning.”

  “Can’t someone else handle things for once?” Vega could hear the exasperation in his voice. He was tired. He thought Adele took on too much. “What about La Casa’s attorney? Frank what’s-his-name?”

  “Espinosa.” Vega could tell it irritated her that he’d forgotten the man’s last name. He never forgot a witness’s. “He can’t,” she said. “His wife’s going in for surgery. Besides, either way, I need the paperwork.”

  The tow truck driver showed up about twenty minutes later. Even though Adele’s charges had technically been set aside, she still had to pay for the tow: $75. At least someone had put the doughnut on so she could drive home. Vega followed her back to the house and carried the big accordion folder of papers inside, hefting them onto her dining table. She began pawing through them. Vega gently kissed her neck.

  “Nena, go to bed. You’ll handle that in the morning.”

  She didn’t seem to be listening. She tilted the folder sideways and allowed the contents to spill across the table, nearly knocking over her colorful Talavera pottery candlesticks.

  “It’s not here,” she said in a tight voice.

  “What’s not here?”

  “Edgar Aviles’s Salvadoran passport. His birth certificate. They were in this folder when I left Beth Shalom.”

  “You want me to check the car? Maybe they fell out?”

  “They didn’t fall out.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” she snapped. “Without his original birth certificate and passport, there’s no way ICE will grant him a stay of removal tomorrow.”

  “Can you delay the application?”

  “I delay the application and Edgar is as good as deported,” said Adele. “He was nearly deported on Saturday. It was only because those two goons didn’t have a signed judge’s order that I was able to intervene. Tomorrow morning, they’ll have the order. What then?” Adele slammed a fist down on the table. Vega had never seen her so angry.

  “God damn that Ryan Bale! I know that bastard took those documents.”

  “Adele . . .” Vega patted the air, trying to calm her down. He didn’t want to say what he was thinking—that she was being paranoid. Sure, the majority of cops Vega knew held strict law-and-order views. They didn’t like lawbreakers of any kind—and that included illegal immigrants. But that didn’t mean Ryan Bale would cross the line and tamper with evidence. That was a felony. A firing offense. And for what? Edgar Aviles was one of millions of illegals in the country. Why would Bale put his job on the line for this one?

  “In all likelihood, those documents are somewhere in the impound lot,” said Vega. “I’m sure we’ll find them tomorrow. I can go back now if you want.”

  “They’re not in the impound lot, Jimmy. I’m sure of it. Bale stole them. Maybe that’s what this whole arrest was about.”

  “Oh, come on.” Vega pulled a face. “I don’t like the bastard either. But cops don’t risk their jobs—their pensions —over petty crap like this.”

  “You think?” She turned to him. “Then explain why Bale tried to bully his way into La Casa on Saturday morning to arrest Aviles after he ran from the two ICE agents who tried to arrest him.”

  “He was being thorough.”

  “He’d just gone off-duty, Jimmy. That’s more than thorough. Stop with all this ‘brothers-in-blue’ crap and open your eyes. Something’s going on.”

  Vega stared at his face in the reflected glass of the dining-room windows. The streetlights outside didn’t illuminate so much as taint the darkness.

  “Look, Adele,” Vega began. “I get what you’re saying. But why would Bale risk himself like that? What’s in it for him? Aviles is a janitor. And—not that you’re not a great attorney and all—but I think the guy’s going to be deported no matter what you do.”

  Adele pulled out a dining room chair and sank into it. “You’re probably right.” She studied her thighs. The seams of her pants looked grimy from the jail cell. There was a spot of something on her blouse. Her makeup had gone blurry around her eyes. Bale had clearly put her through the wringer with this arrest.

  “The thing is,” said Adele, “I had a bad feeling the moment he pulled up. Like I knew even before he offered to change my tire that something was off. And yet nothing he did was improper. I was standing there the whole time. I saw him open the trunk. I saw him discover those bundles. I even saw him switch on his body camera before he walked to the trunk.”

  “Right before?”

  “That’s right,” said Adele. “Why?”

  Vega pulled out another chair and straddled it backward, facing Adele. He braced his hands across the back and balanced his head on his knuckles, deep in thought.

  “I was out of uniform before body cams came into being,” said Vega. “But other cops I’ve seen always switch their units on as soon as they get out of their vehicles on a call. Some forget, obviously. But Bale doesn’t strike me as the type to forget.”

  “He did switch it on,” said Adele. “Just not until he walked to the trunk.”

  “What did he do before?”

  Adele thought a moment, then rolled her eyes. “He told me the Ecuadorian flag hanging from my rearview mirror is a traffic violation in the state of New York.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No . . .” She massaged her forehead. “He walked around the car and checked all my tires.”

  “Was he visible the whole time?”

  “Not the whole time,” said Adele. “I remember him squatting down on the other side. For a moment I lost sight of him. I figured he was just being thorough. When he stood up, he turned on his camera.”

  “Huh.”

  “What’s that ‘huh’?” asked Adele. “You always say that when you’re thinking of something and don’t want to tell me.”

  She was right. Vega took a deep breath. He hated conjecturing like this about a fellow cop.

  “Wherever the drugs came from,” said Vega, “they were already in your car when Bale pulled up.”

  “I know that already,” said Adele.

  “Maybe, so did Bale.”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to think about how I’d set someone up for a bust,” Vega explained. “I’d take a slim jim to their car, pop the trunk, and put the contraband in when they weren’t home to catch me. Then I’d stick a nail in their tire. Not too big a nail. Something that would produce a slow leak.”

  “But I could have developed that flat anywhere.”

  “Not if I let just enough air out of your tires,” said Vega. “I could time it.”

  “You still wouldn’t know where I was,” Adele pointed out.

  “I would if I put a tracking device in one of your wheel wells—then removed it when I showed up.”

  Vega let the words hang in the air for a moment. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

  “Do you really think that’s what he was doing on the other side of my car?”

  Vega threw up his hands. “I don’t know. This is all me conjecturing. But this is how I would do it. Those GPS devices a
re magnetically mounted and small enough to fit into a man’s palm, so it wouldn’t be hard for him to pretend he’s checking out your tires and take the GPS back.”

  “He knows we can’t catch him either,” said Adele. “He turned his body cam on after he stood up so there’s no proof any of this happened.”

  “Not . . . quite,” said Vega.

  “What do you mean, ‘not quite’?”

  Vega pushed himself out of the chair and paced the floor. It went against every fiber in his being to accuse a fellow cop. For nineteen years, his work life had revolved around trusting his brothers and sisters in uniform. At traffic stops. On stakeouts. When he was working undercover. They held his life in their hands and he held theirs. But he loved and trusted Adele even more. And he knew something was very wrong here.

  “Body cams are designed to record thirty seconds of footage before an officer physically turns them on,” said Vega. “The idea being that an officer might not remember to switch on his camera in the heat of the moment.”

  “Every body cam?” asked Adele.

  “Every one I’ve ever encountered,” said Vega. “There’s no audio in those thirty seconds, but there’s video.”

  “So you’re saying that whatever Bale did when he was crouched by my wheels would have been recorded?”

  “If it was in those thirty seconds before he turned that sucker on, yeah.”

  “Can we get that footage?”

  Vega shook his head. “Not without a court order. If you went to trial, then I imagine, it would probably be part of discovery for your defense.”

  “So, by not getting charged, Bale walks.”

  “Wait. Hold up,” said Vega. “This is all me spinning wheels. I have no reason to believe Ryan Bale would take a risk like this. For what? So some handyman gets deported?”

  “Maybe he’s not just a handyman,” said Adele. “Maybe he’s a witness.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He told me this afternoon that gangsters are threatening his family,” said Adele. “He wouldn’t say why—not until he gets a reprieve from deportation. But he seemed genuinely scared. I think there are things he’s not telling the police.”

  About Lissette’s disappearance? That would be Vega’s guess. If Crowley was entertaining underage prostitutes at the house, Lissette would have known about it. Maybe Aviles did too.

  Vega swept a gaze over Aviles’s case file now fanned across the table. Crowley had ample reason to want Aviles deported. Vega wouldn’t put it past Bale to help grease the skids if he was on the take with the DA. But still—neither of them was ICE. If Aviles was put into priority removal, someone in ICE had to put him there.

  “Did Aviles give you any indication why he was put into priority removal?” Vega asked Adele.

  “None,” she replied. “I know the government’s doing away with temporary protected status for Salvadorans. But I have no idea why they targeted Aviles in particular. The letters explain nothing.”

  “Letters—plural? Aviles was only put into priority removal a week ago.”

  “Yes, but they’ve been threatening him for a while.”

  Vega blinked at her. “ICE doesn’t threaten, Adele. They do. Or they do not.”

  “Well, this time, they threatened. See for yourself.”

  Adele rose and pawed through the paperwork. “Here’s the most recent letter.” She handed it to Vega.

  The letterhead contained a blue embossed ICE seal at the top with an eagle logo. It was the letter Aviles showed Vega at the synagogue Friday night, advising him to self-deport immediately or face arrest. Vega had seen the same letter in Michelle’s ICE files yesterday. It was signed by Marcus Tyler, one of the two agents involved in his arrest.

  “Here’s the other from a month ago.”

  Adele handed Vega a letter with the same logo. Much of the wording was the same, with the exception of the last line demanding that Aviles deport immediately or face arrest.

  It did, indeed, appear to be a threat, rather than an immediate demand.

  One other thing was different too. The signature. Not Marcus Tyler’s. Not Lyle Donovan’s. The name was so forgettable that Vega wouldn’t have recalled it if not for the fact that the same ICE agent signed the letter in Cesar Zuma’s possession when he died.

  Vega handed Adele back the letter. He felt hopeful for the first time all day.

  “I think I just figured out a way you can help Edgar Aviles.”

  Chapter 35

  “Daniel Wilson,” said Vega, pointing to the name of the ICE agent who’d signed the letter to Edgar Aviles.

  “What about him?”

  “He signed this letter a month ago,” said Vega. “There’s just one problem. He retired six months ago.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Michelle told me,” said Vega. “And that’s not all. You know that immigrant who died on the Metro-North tracks yesterday? The one we thought was Aviles?”

  “Yes,” said Adele. “Cesar Zuma.” It figured Adele would make a point of learning the man’s name—even if he’d never been a client of La Casa’s. She reached out to everyone in the Hispanic community.

  “Cesar Zuma had a letter just like this. Signed a month ago by the same Daniel Wilson. And get this—according to ICE’s files, Zuma wasn’t even slated for immediate removal.”

  “But Edgar is,” said Adele. “Tyler and Donovan—those ICE agents who came for him—mean business.”

  “I know they mean business,” said Vega. “ICE put Aviles into priority removal. But we don’t know who made the decision or why. If Michelle can track down Daniel Wilson and prove that either he didn’t write that letter or he did but it was misdated or intended for someone else, you might be able to argue for an emergency stay.”

  “Would Michelle do that? Go to bat for the opposing team?”

  Vega winced. “Come on, Adele. It’s not like that. She’s a good person. And a good cop. She’ll do what’s right.”

  Adele lifted an eyebrow. “She and I have different versions of what’s right.”

  “Yeah? Well, you don’t know her.”

  “I thought you didn’t either.”

  That stopped him. Like a wet towel across the face.

  “I guess . . .” He didn’t know how to put what he was feeling into words. He felt a great comfort in Michelle’s presence that he hadn’t expected to feel. He hadn’t even acknowledged it until this moment.

  “Look,” said Vega. “Let me worry about Michelle. You just concentrate on Aviles.”

  “I can’t bring him to ICE if they’re just going to slap the cuffs on him.”

  “Then don’t,” said Vega. “Go to Beth Shalom in the morning and stay with him there. I’ll ask Michelle to track down Daniel Wilson and call you with an update.” Vega pulled out his phone. “I’m texting you her cell now.”

  “What if the gestapo shows up?”

  “Tell them to speak to Michelle. Tell them you’re working this out. And for God’s sake, Adele, don’t call them gestapo.”

  “Some would beg to disagree,” she muttered. “Where will you be tomorrow?”

  “Trying to convince Greco not to close Talia Crowley’s death investigation,” said Vega. “Everything we’re coming up with ties into that.”

  “How will you convince him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  He checked all her doors and windows and made sure she was secure for the night. Then he sat in his truck and texted Michelle about the situation with Aviles. He didn’t mention Adele’s arrest. He was pretty sure Adele wouldn’t want that broadcast.

  You’ve got to get someone at ICE to issue Aviles an emergency stay, Vega wrote Michelle. We need Aviles as a witness. ICE needs to speak to Daniel Wilson. Call me or Adele and let us know if you got the stay.

  It was late. He didn’t expect a text back tonight. But at least she’d get it in the morning. He turned on his ignition and pulled out of Adele’s driveway. A lef
t would take him north. To the highway. Home. Diablo. His comfy bed. A right would take him through town, east along the hill and up to Greenbriar Lane.

  Five minutes, he told himself. He was pulling a Hail Mary at this point. He knew he needed something to convince Greco not to close down the case. He didn’t have a goddamn clue what that might be.

  He parked at the end of the cul-de-sac, staring past the yellow crime-scene tape across the driveway. A pale wisp of moon lit up the flowing tendrils of the weeping cherry in the front yard. Aside from that slash of light, all was dark. The house was as black as the mouth of a cave.

  Vega got out of his truck and stood at the foot of the driveway, shivering in the cool breath of deep night before him. He thought of Talia’s neighbor, the old woman with the bony fingers and that tiny dog in a raincoat. Ethel or Edith or something. He was so tired, even witnesses’ names escaped him. But he remembered her words. He remembered her telling him about the water pushing out the basement windows of the darkened house when she dialed 911.

  Not a single light was on.

  Vega replayed her words in his head. Then he said them aloud. Once. Twice. A slow warmth spread through his body, melting something heavy that had settled around his heart. The weight of a promise he didn’t think he could keep. But he could now. He knew it.

  Greco said he needed hard proof that Talia wasn’t alone in the house on the night she died. And tomorrow, he’d get it.

  Chapter 36

  They met up when the dew was thick on the grass. Before the school buses and garbage trucks started their morning rounds. Greco lumbered out of his white Buick LeSabre, looking tired and ill-tempered. Vega skirted the yellow crime-scene tape across the driveway and pressed a coffee into the big man’s hands. The steam rose like mist, sparkling in the early morning sun. Greco’s jaw set to one side.

  “Is this an apology for getting me up extra early? Or for wasting my time?”

  “Take me inside before you tell me it’s a waste of your time.”

  Greco took a gulp of coffee and left the rest in his car. He retrieved a key from the seat. Both men slipped into blue latex gloves.

  “You couldn’t just tell me what you found?”