Vega leaned against the side of Greco’s cubicle. “I gather the autopsy results are in?”
“Nah. I just figured I’d make something up. Keep it interesting.” Greco pushed the report into Vega’s hands. Vega pulled up a chair and set down his coffee. He could smell the remains of an Egg McMuffin in Greco’s trash. There was still a smudge of bacon grease next to his computer. Greco’s workspace was demarcated by a fabric partition and a file cabinet with a two-year-old calendar of Florida travel scenes taped to one side. It had been up there so long, the edges had curled and the Gulf waters had faded to the color of urine. Vega knew Greco had three or four grown kids and a wife up north somewhere but there were no pictures in sight. He wondered what that said about the man.
“You’ve looked through the report already?” asked Vega.
“Enough to give you the highlights.” Greco pulled a red Twizzler from an open package on his desk and offered one to Vega. Vega declined.
“I don’t know why you eat that sugar-coated wire insulation.”
“This, from a Puerto Rican who’s probably never met a food he hasn’t deep-fried and smothered in Tabasco sauce.” Greco tore off a piece of the red licorice between his teeth and adjusted his black glasses. They were too big for his face and gave his eyes a perpetually startled expression.
“Cause of death is a skull fracture,” said Greco. “Manner, undetermined. Estimated time of death was four to six weeks ago. So she died in late February or early March. Any earlier, and Gupta says she would’ve just been fish food.”
“No water in the lungs,” Vega noted. “So whoever tied her down didn’t do it to drown her. She was already dead.”
“I ran a check on those ropes this morning,” said Greco. “They had a green tracer line running through them. I thought that might make them easy to pin down. But it turns out everybody carries that rope, including Rowland’s Ace Hardware downtown. All the landscapers use it.”
“Yeah, but Rowland’s has like nineteen different kinds of rope with any number of different-colored tracers running through them,” said Vega.
“You shop there?”
“Nah. I just remember all the ropes from when I was a kid. Bobby Rowland and I used to hang out in the store a lot. We were friends. His dad was our landlord.” Vega thumbed the report some more. “Dr. Gupta has no idea how her skull got cracked?”
“She says it could have been the result of an assault with a weapon like a baseball bat. There were fractures to her ribs consistent with an assault. But she says the cracked skull also could have been the result of falling backward against a hard surface.”
“Like being thrown off Bud Point?”
“I asked. Gupta said she’d have sustained more broken bones and compression injuries. And don’t tell me about your little swan dive at seventeen, Vega. You were the luckiest bastard in the world.”
“Then how does Gupta explain the rib fractures, if not from assault?”
“She said it also could have been bad CPR.”
“Bad CPR?” Vega made a face. “That’s like killing someone by taking their pulse.”
“Gupta says she’s seen similar rib fractures in people who have heart attacks and get CPR from someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
“Welcome to the future of managed health care,” said Vega. Greco gave a throaty chuckle. It sounded like a car backfiring. Vega took a sip of coffee. Next time he’d bring his own. Anglos didn’t have a clue how to make coffee. “Did Gupta manage to lift any fingerprints?”
“The tissue was too damaged from being in the water so long,” said Greco. “But the lab did manage to match her DNA to a bloodstain on the shoulder bag so we can be pretty confident the bag was hers and she’s probably the face in the photograph. The lab also lifted a fingerprint from that letter. I ran it through the database. No matches. Whoever wrote that letter has no police or immigration record.”
“Anything come up on the Dora sneaker?”
“The model was manufactured within the last five years. Sold in Target and Walmart. No DNA or prints. No way to tie it to a particular child.”
Vega had already combed the missing persons databases. Nothing matched. Even the pawn registry came up cold for that crucifix. He could see how a woman could end up unreported. But a little girl? How does someone not miss a child?
But he knew the answer to that already. With his own eyes, he had seen how a child could become forever lost. Desiree was two. She never saw three. He would always blame himself no matter what the official report said.
“What gets me,” said Vega, “is the media. Not one newspaper or television station has picked up on the flyers we sent. I figured, with a child involved—”
“—Technically, we don’t know for a fact that the child is involved,” Greco reminded him.
“Her mother’s dead. Little kids don’t stray far from their mothers.”
“Could be a father or grandparent is raising her,” said Greco. “As for the woman—well,” Greco spread his hands apologetically. “Comes with the territory.” They both knew that a dead Latina, especially one who might be undocumented, was unlikely to garner the same sort of media coverage as a white American woman.
“We’d get all the media attention we needed if we broadcast our suspicions,” said Vega.
“That’d be like using a fire hose to extinguish a candle. No thank you,” said Greco. “I don’t want to be the guy cleaning up that mess.”
“Is that what you told Adele Figueroa after someone torched the community center’s Dumpster last month?”
Greco drummed his fingers on his desktop. “What, Sherlock? So now you think a bunch of dumb-ass kids decided to move from vandalism to murder?”
“How do you know the fire was started by kids?”
“I don’t. But in my book, if it walks like a dog and shits like a dog, it’s not a camel with a personality disorder. That fire had all the earmarks of a few punks fired up on their own rage and bravado.”
“The words that were spray-painted across La Casa’s parking lot seem a little close for comfort, don’t you think?”
“Easily a hundred people saw those words, Vega. They weren’t poetic. Or original. That situation is nothing like what we found at the lake.”
“How about Ernesto Reyes-Cardona? Is he a dog or a camel in your analogy?”
Greco blew out a long breath of air as if Vega had been sent as a personal test from God. Job’s final burden. “That’s not a Lake Holly police matter.”
“I know. It’s Metro-North jurisdiction. But it happened here, Grec. All of these crimes happened here. Scott Porter told me about two other Latino men who were beaten in Michael Park. Don’t all these potential bias incidents make you wonder what’s going on in town?”
“So now you’re taking your cues from a guy who wants to hand out green cards like they’re grocery coupons?”
“Is Porter right about what’s happening in town or not?”
“That shit happens? That people sometimes behave badly? Of course. But I don’t like your insinuation that we’re not doing our jobs. Hell, you know the drill as well as I do. You try to interview an illegal, he won’t talk to you. Or he gives you a fake name. Or a fake address. Even if these people give you a real address, they move every fucking week. They don’t have steady jobs. How the hell can I catch a criminal if the witnesses and victims scatter like cockroaches every time I step into a room? Never mind all the shit I have to do when I finally do talk to them. I can’t ask them the same things I’d ask my own kids if I caught them messing around. I see a white guy pissing on the sidewalk, I can bust his ass and no one’s gonna do anything but applaud me for doing my job. I do the same thing to an illegal, and in two minutes flat, I’ve got Scott Porter and every Hispanic group in the county breathing down my neck and calling me a racist.”
Greco’s view of the world, 101. Vega leaned an elbow on the corner of Greco’s desk and rested his cheek against his fist. “I see the count
y-mandated sensitivity training had a big impact on you.”
“Yeah? Fuck you. You can’t decide if you’re for them or against them. That’s your problem. Least I know where I stand.”
Vega’s view of the world, 101: wherever you are, you don’t belong.
Neither man spoke for an instant. Then Greco turned away from Vega and punched a number into his phone. He told the person on the other end to wait around another ten minutes. He hung up and turned back to Vega.
“Ever meet a guy named Tim Anderson?”
“No. Should I have?”
“Depends,” said Greco. “He’s an accident reconstruction specialist for Metro-North Railway. He’s down by the station now. You want to know about this Reyes guy, you can ask him yourself.”
It took Vega a moment to process what Greco was saying. “So you mean to say that Lake Holly is working with Metro-North on the Reyes case—as we speak—and it didn’t occur to you to tell me?”
“It occurred to me,” said Greco. “But like I’ve said from the beginning—we want this situation at the lake to remain under the radar. There’s no proof right now that Reyes was chased to his death, much less that his case has anything to do with any other. Is Lake Holly looking at the particulars? Hell, yeah. But are we broadcasting it from the rooftops? Not if we want this town in one piece, we’re not.”
“Not even to me?”
“Your jurisdiction is the reservoir. Not Metro-North or anything else that goes on in my backyard. You asked, so I’m telling you. But when you’re not on lake property, we play things my way.” He put his palms on his desk and pushed himself out of his chair. “Want to talk to Anderson or not?”
They found Tim Anderson on the northbound side of the tracks, about fifty feet from the Lake Holly station platform. He had an ex-military bearing about him—rigid posture, buzz-cut blond hair, hundred-yard stare. He was wearing a hard hat, insulated boots, and a fluorescent vest that made him look like a maintenance employee, but he was taking photographs and notes. Vega assumed, given his radio and credentials with Metro-North, that he knew how to stop the trains from whipping through here when he was on the tracks. But the vest gave Vega pause. He never liked trusting his fate to anyone who relied on procedure—or the attention span of a civil servant during baseball season.
Greco made the introductions. A small crease gathered between Anderson’s eyebrows at the mention of Vega’s name. He ran a finger across his hedge-clipper-perfect blond mustache.
“Do you have a teenage daughter?”
“Yeah.” Everybody in town seemed to know Joy. But this time, Vega wasn’t so quick to trot out his efficacy speech. He felt suddenly protective. “Why?”
Then it hit him. If Tim Anderson did accident reconstructions for Metro-North, he was probably involved in Joy’s stall-out on the tracks. Vega wasn’t there when it happened. He was working in the southern part of the county that evening, handling a shooting outside a bar. By the time he’d learned about the accident, it was all over. Joy was back home; his Acura was history.
“You’re a lucky man,” said Anderson, shaking his head at the memory. “Never seen a stranger situation. But she walked away, so that’s what matters.”
“It was my car,” said Vega. “I loaned it to her, so you can imagine how I feel. It never stalled on me before.”
Anderson held Vega’s gaze for a moment.
“Your daughter,” he said. “She’s what? Five-three?”
“Five-two. Why?”
“Her driver’s seat was pushed all the way back.”
“So?”
“Strange—don’t you think?” Tim Anderson had the arctic eyes of an Alaskan husky. Cold and humorless. If they worked together ten years, they’d never become friends.
“What’s strange about it?”
“Hard to believe she was driving.”
“If she said she was driving, she was. My daughter doesn’t lie. Or drink. She passed the Breathalyzer the police administered on the scene.”
“That she did.” The words came out flat—almost sarcastic. Vega wondered if Anderson would be so free with his insinuations if Vega were a white detective. He could never be sure and it was the not knowing that always put him on the defensive, made him feel like a punk if he didn’t react, a prick if he did.
Vega went to argue, but Greco hollowed a fist to his lips and cleared his throat. He didn’t care about Joy’s close call on the tracks. He was only curious when he was paid to be.
“Wanna tell Detective Vega here about our boy Reyes?” asked Greco.
Anderson pulled out his radio and presumably relayed a command to temporarily halt the trains coming from both directions into the station. Then he cautioned Greco and Vega to stay on the gravel along the outer side of the tracks. “Don’t want to have happen to you what happened to Reyes.”
Vega ran his eyes over the rails. There were two parallel steel tracks lying flat to the gravel with pressure-treated wood slats in between. Beyond them, set off to the side, was the third rail. It was elevated about six inches off the ground and covered—except for the underside—in a black, shock-resistant casing. During the day, it was easy to see, easy to stay away from. But at night, in the dark, running, Vega could see how easy it would be to cross the first two tracks and think you’re in the clear, only to trip on the third rail. A moment of contact, that’s all it would take. There were 625 volts of direct current running through that rail. Reyes would have fried from within long before he was pulverized from without.
“That’s the camera that caught Reyes’s image,” said Anderson, pointing it out on the overhead walkway. “Detective Greco’s seen the footage. Reyes is running at a forty-five degree angle from where I’m standing. At two-eighteen a.m. on March twenty-seventh, he crosses the tracks, looking over his left shoulder while he’s running. He’s pitched slightly forward. He must have not seen the third rail because three seconds later the footage shows him collapsed across the northbound tracks. The medical examiner said he died of cardiac arrest from electrocution, which is probably just as well because at two twenty-two a.m. a northbound Harlem Line four-car turned him into hamburger meat.”
“He’s looking over his left shoulder?” asked Vega. “Wouldn’t that suggest someone was chasing him?”
“It would,” said Anderson. “The question I keep coming back to is, why aren’t we picking up the chasers?” He led Vega and Greco away from the tracks and gave an “all clear” on his radio. Then he pulled out a hand-drawn map from a pocket in his jacket and unfolded it. Definitely ex-military, thought Vega. It could have been an attack plan.
“This is the route from the Lake Holly Diner to Reyes’s apartment,” said Anderson. His finger drew an upside down L, beginning at the diner and ending on Elm Street in La Frontera. Vega saw right away what the problem was. The train station wasn’t on his route home. Vega frowned at the drawing, then bounced a look from Anderson to Greco.
“So, if Reyes was headed straight home, why was he running in the direction of the train station? Is that what you’re wondering?” asked Vega.
“I was thinking maybe he had a señorita he liked to see after work,” said Greco. “But Reyes’s sister said he always came straight home after his shift. He was too tired for anything else.”
“Here’s the real problem, no matter how you slice it,” said Anderson. “Greco and I have been pulling video footage from that time and date at the banks around town. They’re the only ones with cameras that operate twenty-four-seven. Nothing is coming up. We’ve got footage of three people using three different ATMs during that time period and we’ve interviewed them all. None of them saw anything and none of them fits as a suspect.”
“Maybe Reyes’s attackers weren’t on foot,” Vega suggested.
“We’ve considered that,” said Greco. “The cameras don’t pick up license-plate numbers, unfortunately. But even if you consider that option, we only had a few cars in town at that hour, and that includes one of our own cruiser
s and a couple of emergency vehicles.”
“Emergency vehicles?”
“There was a call-out for chest pains that night to our ambulance,” Greco explained. “Bob Rowland, our volunteer fire chief, was out and about in his SUV, probably for the chest pains call. And one of our officers was in his cruiser. Everybody’s been interviewed and no one saw anything.”
“So what does this mean, exactly?” asked Vega. “That Reyes was hallucinating and just decided to wander across the tracks? ’Cause from what you’re saying, it sure as hell looks like he was being chased.”
“We think he may have been pulled into a car and beaten,” said Anderson. “We think he may have managed to escape somewhere near the train station and run across the tracks. But we need a witness. No witness, no case.”
“That—” Greco told Vega, “is where you come in.”
“Me?” This wasn’t his case. Greco had made that amply clear at the station.
“See, I went back over the particulars of the Reyes case this morning,” said Greco. “And there was one person we never got to talk to after Reyes died: the other busboy who worked the same shift with him at the diner.”
“So you want me to talk to him?”
“We want you to find him,” said Greco.
“Okay. What’s his name?”
“José Ortiz.”
Chapter 8
A busboy at the Lake Holly Diner told Vega that José Ortiz had a cousin in town, a woman named Claudia, who might know where Ortiz had disappeared to. The busboy didn’t know the cousin’s last name but he knew she had a son who attended the Head Start preschool that was part of La Casa.
Vega was both reassured and discomforted by this information. Reassured, because now Adele Figueroa could provide a path to Ortiz through his cousin Claudia. Discomforted, because he had to wonder if that hadn’t always been the case. Wasn’t it possible Adele knew Claudia was Ortiz’s cousin all along? And, if she could withhold information about Ortiz, wasn’t it possible she was also withholding information about the woman at the lake?
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