“What are you doing with that?” she demanded in Spanish. The harshness of her voice surprised him. He’d never heard her speak like that before. He couldn’t imagine what he’d done that was so terrible. He put the form down on the desk. He didn’t even bother to stuff it back in the folder.
“It dropped on the floor, señora. I picked it up. I came to get scissors. To cut open the packaging.” He held up both for her to see. He felt like asking if she wanted to frisk him. He’d never seen her look so angry. It made him feel angry too. He wasn’t stealing or snooping where he didn’t belong. How could she think such a thing?
“How long will it take you to fix the toilet?”
She was impatient, too. He’d never seen someone’s mood change so quickly.
“Fifteen minutes perhaps, señora. I may need a llave inglesa. ”
She frowned. “What is a llave inglesa?”
Rodrigo supposed she wasn’t used to using Spanish words for tools. He tried to explain and mime at the same time. “It’s to tighten bolts. It adjusts—”
“—a crescent wrench,” she said in English.
Rodrigo tried the words on his tongue. “Cre-set rech.” Señora Linda turned to her daughter and said something in English and the daughter left the room.
“Olivia will bring one up to you. When you’re done, I’ll call you a cab, okay? I can’t drive anywhere tonight but I’ll give you a hundred dollars and you can pay the cab from that and keep the rest. The cab shouldn’t come to more than eight or nine dollars.”
“That is very generous of you, señora. Thank you. I’m sorry if I’ve done anything to offend.”
“It’s not you, Rodrigo.” She let out a deep sigh. “This isn’t a good night. I hope you understand.”
He didn’t. But there was a lot he didn’t understand these days.
“Señora—I just want you to know: I would never read anything I’m not supposed to.” Would never. Could never. At least not without a great deal of effort. But the second part he kept to himself. Everyone has parts they keep hidden. He was only sorry he’d found his way into one of hers tonight.
Chapter 26
There were no nine-year-old Luz Marias in all of Lake Holly. Or ten-year-old Luz Marias. Or eleven-year-old ones, for that matter. None in any of the surrounding towns either. Vega and Greco checked all the schools—public, private, and parochial—and came to the conclusion that Luz Maria wasn’t Luz Maria anymore and probably hadn’t been for quite some time.
Greco fished a Twizzler out of his bag and shoved it into the corner of his mouth. Vega had bought him two king-sized bags as penance for yesterday and Greco was nearly through the second one. A “two-bag” day, he called it. With good reason. They were looking for a nine-year-old Guatemalan girl who lived in Lake Holly without her biological mother. A nine-year-old girl who was born in Iowa. A nine-year-old girl whose parents would have the know-how and smarts to cheat an illegal alien out of her own child. They had only one candidate.
“We make a mistake here, Vega, it’s a whole universe worse than anything we could have done with Morales. We’ve got to be sure.”
“Sure means DNA.”
“DNA requires a court order,” said Greco. “So does unsealing Olivia Porter’s adoption records. Both take time. Plus, we gotta talk to the bastard. I mean, what if Porter’s the dad? He’s got a right to the kid then. We have to be careful what we’re accusing him of.”
“She doesn’t look a bit like that slimy worm.”
“All my kids look like me and none of ’em like my wife. What’s that tell ya?”
“That they got unlucky?”
“Smart ass.”
Greco had a point, though. They had to be sure—damn sure—that they knew what Porter was guilty of before they spoke to him. That meant a long, exhausting search of public records. That meant both of them working an all-nighter at the computer.
Puñeta, coño! Not tonight.
Vega’s cell phone rang. Wendy. She only ever wanted to talk when he didn’t. Story of their marriage.
“So, we’ll be done with dinner in like, fifteen minutes,” she said. He could hear sizzling and chopping sounds in the background. They were still at the hibachi place.
“I’m going to be tied up tonight, unfortunately. I can’t get away.”
“What do you mean, you can’t get away? You asked for this.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I want to talk. I really do,” said Vega. “But things changed on this end.”
“You couldn’t call?”
He could’ve. He should’ve. He kept thinking he’d be able to get away.
“My God, Jimmy—you asked me to rearrange my whole schedule for this—Joy’s whole schedule—”
“—How about tomorrow?”
“Alan’s working late. I have no one to leave the boys with.”
“I’ll come over to your house.”
“You will not.”
“Wendy, please. It’s important.”
“What’s the ‘it’ referring to, Jimmy? Your work? Or our daughter?”
“Both.”
“When you decide which of them is your priority, let me know. This is why Joy’s in therapy.” She hung up.
Vega ran his palms roughly down the sides of his face and fought the urge to drop everything and walk out of the station. Joy was the only thing that mattered to him when you came right down to it. But walking out under these circumstances would be tantamount to going AWOL under fire. He had to stay. He had to hope that whatever was going on with his daughter could wait just a little bit longer. He caught Greco looking at him. “Women problems?”
“Not now, Grec.” Vega put his phone away and continued scrolling down a list of Iowa birth records. Greco’s gaze remained fixed. He drummed his fingers on the armrests of his chair.
“We’re going to have to interview Porter about all this at some point.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Gonna be fun having the two of you in the same room again.”
Vega looked up from his computer and said nothing.
“Something between you and Porter that I don’t know about?”
Vega went back to the computer screen. “Linda,” he mumbled.
“Huh?”
“I guess this isn’t the best time to tell you, but Linda and I—we were sort of more than friends in high school.”
“More than friends.” Greco rolled the words around on his tongue. “Is that like confessing ‘impure thoughts’ to the priest when you’re fifteen and what you really mean is you jacked off a dozen times between breakfast and lunch?”
“Something like that.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Vega!” Greco threw a balled up piece of paper at him. “You couldn’t tell me before now?”
“It was personal.”
“Ain’t nothing personal between partners when you work a case.”
“I didn’t think it would matter.”
“What is it with you and women? Is it that Latin-lover shit?”
“What women?” Vega pushed back in his chair and massaged his eyes. “I’m divorced, Grec. That was my ex yelling at me on the phone. I was with Linda when I was seventeen years old.”
“Those first loves can stay with you.” Greco got a wistful look. At that moment, he reminded Vega of some kindly Italian grandfather in his vegetable garden. Then again, Don Corleone was an Italian grandfather with a vegetable garden and he had people hole-punched for a living.
“Can you handle this, Vega? If it turns out that Linda Porter’s involved? Can you do your job without letting your personal feelings get in the way?”
“I guess I’m gonna have to.”
“If you think at any moment you can’t, you gotta speak up. You drop the ball because you got all nostalgic on me, I won’t be sympathetic.”
“Understood.”
They managed to dig up Olivia Porter’s birth records online. Like most adoptees, her birth certificate had been amended so it showed only t
hat her full name was Olivia Socorro Porter, that she was born in Perkinsville, Iowa, nine years ago and that her parents were Scott and Linda Porter. Any proof to the contrary would be in her pre-adoption records and those would have been sealed at the time of her adoption seven years ago.
They did the same online search for Luz Maria Santos in Iowa. Nothing came up. Not in birth records or on the Social Security database. But all that did was confirm what they had already suspected: Luz Maria Santos wasn’t Luz Maria Santos anymore. It didn’t necessarily mean she was Olivia Porter.
Vega and Greco tried a different tack, focusing instead on Olivia’s purported mother, Socorro Medina-Valdez. They ran her name through the ICE database. What Linda had told Vega seemed to check out. Federal records showed that Socorro Medina-Valdez was a Guatemalan who had been arrested in the raid on the Perkinsville food processing plant eight years ago, just like Maria. She’d been represented by the law firm Shanahan & Pierce in Cedar Rapids—the firm that employed Scott Porter—just like Maria. She’d served her sentence at the same federal prison camp for women in Greenville, Illinois. Maria was released after five months. Socorro died three weeks before her release. Cause of death: complications from cervical cancer.
So far, so good. Scott Porter had a reasonable connection to both women. Both women had a reasonable connection to each other. There was just one problem. Greco didn’t notice it, but Vega, the accounting major, did.
“Socorro was forty-eight when she died, not thirty-eight.”
“You sure?”
“Do the math.”
Greco grabbed the file, mumbling his little “carry the ones” as he subtracted her birth year from the calendar year of her death and saw that Vega was correct.
“Sounds a bit long in the tooth for the mother of a two-year-old,” Greco agreed. “Then again, it could be a misprint. Immigration files aren’t exactly accurate when it comes to personal information.”
“Has to be a misprint,” said Vega. “Otherwise, we’re talking about Porter tampering with birth certificates, death certificates—a lot of paperwork that’s not easy to fake.”
“I used to think that, too,” said Greco. “Until I met our Mexican Michelangelo last year.”
“A forger?”
“An artiste. Right here in Lake Holly.” Greco leaned back in his chair and rested his hands on his belly—his favorite stance when he was talking war stories. For a small-town cop, he had quite a few.
“Guy was minting New York State driver’s licenses for illegals. I mean, primo quality. I couldn’t tell the difference. He was wholesaling them to this local building inspector who was retailing them to illegals for two grand a pop. If we hadn’t caught the guy red-handed, I doubt the licenses would’ve been questioned.”
“You think Porter found a guy like that in Iowa?”
“No less likely than finding one here,” said Greco. “These people’s lives are all about missing paperwork so they get real good, real fast at finding ways around it. Same time we collared that Mexican? I had this guy in town—a Salvadoran illegal who wanted to bring his thirteen-year-old daughter to Lake Holly but didn’t want her—you know—going the overland route? He was afraid she might get raped. So he found a couple in El Salvador who were legal U.S. residents, paid a guy down there to forge his daughter’s passport so she was listed as their kid, and brought her over. Cost him like two grand for the paperwork and another five to pay off the couple. But the girl’s trip to the States was a piece of cake.”
“And this father just uh—told you all this?”
Greco got a wicked smile. “Actually, the father was about to become another satisfied customer of our paperhanging Picasso. He hadn’t actually bought the driver’s license yet so we had a little leeway. Guy spilled his guts about how his thirteen-year-old would be here in Lake Holly by herself if we got him deported—not even allowed to go back with him on account of the fact that her passport now listed her as somebody else’s kid. So I let him off with a warning.”
Vega raised an eyebrow at Greco. “You? Let an illegal alien go?”
“Must’ve been my hemorrhoids acting up.”
“Or the fact that you had thirteen-year-old daughters once too.”
“How do you think I got the hemorrhoids?” Greco gave a throaty chuckle. “My point is, if Porter had wanted a document forged, he could have gotten it. Judges just make sure your paperwork’s in order. They’re not about to check the individual documents that closely, especially when it comes from a colleague.”
“Okay,” said Vega. “Maybe Scott could’ve gotten good forgeries to cover his tracks. But I can’t believe Linda would go along with something like that.”
“So you think because you took a few rolls in the hay with her when you were teenagers, that you know what a grown woman will do when she’s desperate to have a baby? Read the papers, Vega. Women walk out of hospitals all the time with newborns under their arms who don’t belong to them. That maternal urge is strong, don’t kid yourself.”
“Strong enough to kill?”
“That’s what we need to find out.” Greco frowned at the paperwork scattered across his desk. “Wish we had somebody who knew these women and could tell us what their story was. But we’re talking eight years ago now. That’s like centuries in an illegal immigrant community.”
Greco was right. People would have moved away, gotten deported, changed jobs, addresses—even names. The lives of the poor are always in flux. Nowhere was that more true than in a community full of people who could never legally put down roots. But there were some constants. Vega had only to think back on his old neighborhood in the Bronx to know what at least one of those constants was.
“Go to Google,” said Vega. “Type in Catholic Churches, Perkinsville, Iowa.”
Greco pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and typed in the words. One church came up: Saint Theresa’s. Vega copied down the telephone number.
“A lot of Guatemalans aren’t Catholic, you know,” said Greco. “They’re evangelical Protestants.”
“I’m gonna start with the Catholics and pray that Maria Elena was a better one than I ever was,” said Vega. “ ’Cause there’s no way a good Catholic wouldn’t have had her baby baptized soon after she was born. Which means somewhere in Saint Theresa’s there’d be a baptismal record with Luz Maria’s name on it and her date of birth. If it’s a match to Olivia’s, that’s one more piece of rope to tie around Porter’s neck.”
Chapter 27
Scott Porter had missed the monthly board of directors meeting at La Casa. Adele called his home, his office, his cell—even Linda’s cell—but no one picked up. In five years of being on the board, he’d never missed a meeting that Adele could recall. This was a big one to miss. Adele had presented several options to the other four board members about where La Casa might need to relocate in the event their lease couldn’t be renewed.
It was almost nine in the evening when the meeting wrapped up with nothing decided. The truth was, none of the options was good. The proposed locations were either too far from town for the immigrants to travel to, or they lacked enough parking for would-be employers and volunteers, or there was too much opposition from the immediate community. The board needed to agree on some backup property soon. Any location was better than no location. But they could hardly be expected to make such a serious decision without their chairman present.
When Adele still didn’t get an answer on any of Porter’s or Linda’s phones after the meeting, she decided to pay a visit to their house. She’d worked with both of the Porters almost since their arrival in Lake Holly seven years ago. Their families shared so much in common. Their daughters went to the same elementary school and were only a year apart in age. Both girls played AYSO soccer and belonged to Girl Scout troops. The families regularly bumped into each other at school events and in the supermarket. Yet Adele could count on one hand the number of times she’d been to their home, and in every instance, Adele’s title and po
sition were the reason she’d been invited at all.
She was always slightly uncomfortable being around the Porters socially, always aware in unspoken ways of the chasm between her life experiences and theirs. Despite their activism on behalf of Latino immigrants, they had a surprisingly monochromatic, all-American group of friends. The men played golf with Porter at the country club. The women were in a tennis league with Linda. In the summers, the Porters and their friends visited each other at their homes on Cape Cod and in the Hamptons. In the winters, they made yearly pilgrimages to Disney World and the Caribbean. Everyone knew how to ski and sail. Their kids went to each other’s bar and bat mitzvahs and sweet sixteens. They had seen all the latest Broadway shows and toured the major cities in Europe.
Being around the Porters outside of La Casa felt a lot like being at Harvard all over again. They and their friends were pleasant and gracious. But there was always a forced cheer about them in her presence, always a sense that the real social interaction had gone on before Adele entered the room and would pick up again after she left. She was not one of them, and in little ways—from a comparison of notes on a new French restaurant in Manhattan to the best slopes in Vermont—that distinction was always reinforced.
Adele didn’t much care for driving Lake Holly Road at night, especially since her recent encounter with a deer. She took the turns slowly. She used her brights whenever possible. She could see how easy it would have been for someone to accidentally run over Maria. There were no streetlights outside of town, no shoulders on the road. The curves were hairpin. Objects seemed to drop into her field of vision without warning like one of those fun-house rides.
The Porters’ driveway was no better. She drove slowly up the steep incline, half-expecting to smash into Porter or Linda traveling the other way. But the woods on either side of the house remained still and velvety with only a thumbnail of moonlight to guide the way. At the top, the land leveled out and Adele felt her heart unclench. The outside lights were on. The garage doors were open. Porter’s black Acura was in one bay of the garage, Linda’s light blue minivan, in the other. The rear of the minivan was open and Porter was stuffing what looked like suitcases and cartons inside. He was dressed in gray sweats and white sneakers. Adele’s headlights caught the gold rims of his glasses when he turned. The reflection on the lens obscured his eyes but the rest of his face did not seem happy to see her.
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