A Blossom of Bright Light

by Suzanne Chazin

  “Sophia’s going to be at Peter’s this evening,” said Adele. “Are you free for dinner?”

  He couldn’t handle a big emotional talk right now—not with his workload and sore leg.

  “I can’t, Adele. Not tonight.”

  “Are you having dinner with Joy?”

  “Dunno.” Was he? With Joy, he never knew.

  Vega straightened his left leg to take some pressure off of it and looked across the quad to the state police booth. The female trooper was hiding a package inside a box for the dog to find. It was like a giant three-card monte game. That’s when he saw her. She was standing near the front of the demonstration dressed in that same shimmering leopard-print shirt jacket. It was too flimsy for the weather and almost made him long for that gaudy Pepto-Bismol pink one she owned, if only because it was a little warmer. She looked over her shoulder, and their eyes met. She lifted an arm full of bangles and gave her father a wave. Vega waved back. Okay, so he wasn’t the center of her universe. But at least she knew he was here. At least she seemed happy about it.

  “How bad is it?” asked Adele.

  “Huh?”

  “Your leg. I understand you got bitten by a dog last night.”

  “Who told you? Dolan?”

  “No. It’s not important who told me. Why didn’t you call me from the emergency room?”

  Vega shrugged. “It was late. You couldn’t have come anyway. You have Sophia.”

  “I’d still want to know. I always want to know.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and kept his gaze on the dog demonstration.

  “Jimmy? What’s going on? You don’t call. You don’t tell me you got hurt on the job. You do this heroic thing—rescue a mother and her baby—and don’t share it with me. You don’t even send her to me afterward. You send her to Jenny Rojas, who brought her to me anyway.”

  “Aha!” He unfolded his arms and looked at her for the first time. He could do in anger what he could no longer do in love. “So that’s what this is about. You’re pissed that I didn’t bring Dominga to you.”

  “I’m not pissed. I’m hurt. And confused.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.”

  Two students started to approach his table, then caught the vibe and thought better of it. He was in a very public place having a very private argument. Puñeta! He didn’t want this. But the juices were flowing and he felt powerless to stop them.

  “I took Dominga to Jenny Rojas because I know in a month Jenny will still be here to stay on top of her situation. Can you say that? Can you?”

  Adele blinked at him. A slow dawning worked through the muscles of her face.

  “I thought not,” said Vega. He slumped in his chair.

  “You want to go wine and dine the power brokers in D.C., be my guest, Adele. But you can’t have it both ways. I didn’t send Dominga to Jenny out of spite. I sent her there for her own good. Because I know what Jenny doesn’t.”

  There. He’d said it. It was out. The helium balloon inside of him sputtered and died. You can only fight when there’s something still at stake. And he’d just told her there wasn’t. He knew. It was over.

  She was quiet for a long moment.

  “How did you find out?” she asked finally.

  “Like you say, it’s not important who told me.”

  “Nothing’s been decided.”

  “Right,” he said without conviction. “That’s why you included me in the whole decision-making process.”

  “If I had, you’d have told me not to go.”

  “Damn straight, I would’ve. You’re needed here. Your clients need you.”

  Vega watched Joy maneuvering through the crowd, shouldering a backpack as she ran across the quad toward his booth.

  “And what about you, Jimmy? Do you need me?” Adele asked so softly, neither of them was sure she’d asked it at all.

  Joy ran up to his table before he could answer. She wasn’t wearing her jacket anymore, only a short-sleeved sweater and paper-thin bleached jeans tucked into high, rust-colored leather boots with stiletto heels. His ex-wife’s, if he’d had to guess. She always favored the good stuff.

  “Hi, Dad. Hi, Adele,” Joy panted. “Can you hide me?”

  “What?”

  “I’m supposed to hide so Daisy, the dog, can’t find me.”

  “Where’s your jacket?” asked Vega. There were goose bumps up and down Joy’s arms.

  “With Trooper Sorenson. Daisy needs my scent in order to track me.”

  Vega slouched off his sports coat and wrapped it around her.

  “Daaad. I’m okay.”

  “Indulge me.” The coat skimmed her thighs. The shoulders stuck out like football pads. She looked like she was five again, playing dress-up. She nodded to Vega’s hip holster. “Now everyone can see you’re carrying.”

  “The trooper’s carrying, too. What’s the big deal?”

  “You’re my father.”

  “Didn’t know that was a federal offense.”

  Joy crouched beneath the table and dropped her backpack beside her. “Do you see Daisy?”

  “The trooper’s letting her out of her crate and putting a harness on her now,” said Adele. She was still standing by the table as if frozen in some sort of time warp, their argument unfinished, the heat gone, but not the heartache.

  The trooper held Joy’s leopard-print jacket under the animal’s nose. “Jowww,” she said to the dog.

  “What’s jowww?”VegaaskedJoy.

  “Jowwwmeans‘find’inChinese. The trooper said many handlers give their dogs commands in lesser-known foreign languages. A lot use Czech and Dutch. She chose Chinese. That way, no criminal can ever control the animal.”

  “Unless he wants to order sweet and sour pork.”

  The dog’s tail was curled tightly. She lowered her head and kept her nose close to the ground, pulling the trooper along by the leash. The dog seemed headed in a straight line for Joy.

  “What will Daisy do when she finds me?” asked Joy.

  “Usually they’re taught to sit at attention and bark,” said Vega.

  “She won’t attack or anything?”

  Vega felt the throb in his calf and winced. He hadn’t told Joy about getting bitten last night. And this certainly wasn’t the time to discuss it. “She won’t attack. Not unless the trooper gives the command to bite. But hey, she’ll probably want chopsticks and a fortune cookie first.”

  “Not funny, Dad.”

  Daisy was halfway to Joy when a gust of wind blew through the quad. The dog stopped in her tracks and lifted her snout in the air. Then she turned in a circle like she was chasing her tail. When she came out of the spin, she began heading north of Joy’s location, maneuvering between legs and bicycles and skateboards with such single-minded determination, the trooper had to jog to keep hold of the leash.

  “What the—?” said Vega, cupping a hand over his eyes.

  “Where does that dog think it’s going?” asked Adele.

  “What is it?” Joy asked from beneath the table.

  Vega was no dog handler, but he’d been around a fair number of police dogs through the years. He’d seen dogs fail to track a scent. He’d seen dogs give up. But he’d never seen a dog so focused and so entirely wrong.

  “The dog is heading north,” he said. “I haven’t been on campus in a while. I thought there was just woods back there.”

  “Until you hit the shopping center,” said Joy. “But there’s a fence in between.”

  Vega expected the trooper to tug on the dog’s leash and shove Joy’s jacket in the animal’s face again. But the trooper continued to let the dog take control. She was either some sort of dog whisperer or she was too embarrassed to admit that her dog had screwed up.

  The dog stopped at the far end of the quad and circled again. There was something in the German shepherd’s posture that felt like alarm, something eerily human in the way the animal kept doubling back and rechecking herself. None of the students seeme
d to register the change in the atmosphere. But Vega felt it. Like static electricity. It pricked his skin and revved up his senses like he’d just mainlined a double espresso. It was the same sharp bite he used to feel in uniform when he made a traffic stop that he sensed was going to turn into anything but routine. Daisy was, after all, a search-and-rescue dog. Some SAR dogs are also cadaver dogs. He didn’t want to alarm Adele or Joy, but he didn’t think this dog was just plain incompetent, either.

  “Should I get up?” asked Joy.

  “Yeah. All right,” said Vega. Dogs have terrible eyesight. If Daisy couldn’t smell Joy, she definitely wasn’t going to be able to see her at this distance.

  “Maybe there are too many students in the quad,” Adele suggested. “All those different smells.”

  “Dogs smell like we see,” said Vega. “They don’t combine scents. Each one is distinct. That’s why you can’t wrap cocaine in fabric softener sheets and expect to sneak it past a trained police dog.” And Daisy was trained, Vega reminded himself. A dog like that was too smart to make such a big mistake. Then again, maybe this wasn’t a mistake. Maybe Daisy had a bigger mission in mind.

  “Wait here,” Vega told both of them. “I want to see what’s going on.”

  He caught up to the trooper and Daisy on a pathway north of the quad. Daisy was pulling hard and fast on her harness and panting as she tracked and then circled, lifting her snout into the air before zeroing in on the pavement again. Swear to God, Vega would kill that dog if all she was following was some kid’s discarded meatball hero in a Dumpster behind the shopping center.

  “So much for tracking my daughter,” Vega huffed as he trotted alongside the trooper. The trooper was young and fair-haired, with the sort of sinewy build and even, unassuming features that separately promised beauty but together added up to bland. “Pioneer stock” was the way Vega might have described her. Of course the uniform didn’t help, with its Smokey-the-Bear hat and Gestapo-tailored gray jacket and pants.

  “That was your daughter?”

  “She’s a freshman here.”

  The trooper flung Joy’s leopard-print jacket at him. “Then you might as well take this.”

  He caught the jacket and kept up his stride.

  She regarded Vega from the corner of her eye. “You’re welcome to go back to your daughter.”

  “Think I’ll tag along.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of working my dog.”

  “Well, your dog is in my jurisdiction, so you’re stuck with me until we figure out whether Daisy’s got a bead on something, or she just has a Jones for some shrimp fried rice.”

  “She responds to Chinese, Detective. She doesn’t eat it.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe next year, the state police can just bring pens like everyone else. In China, she’d be a menu item.”

  The trooper gave Vega an appalled look but stopped suggesting he stay behind. Good. Beyond the path, the campus trailed off into untended woods and thickets of brambles. Clouds swirled overhead like ink stirred into water. The wind picked up. Vega felt the first drops of rain. Shit. He didn’t even have a jacket on now.

  Daisy hopped over a fallen log and into the woods. Vega and the trooper followed. Thick gray stalks of maples and oaks obscured their field of vision. A lot of the leaves back here had already fallen, and the ground was blanketed with moldering acorns. Vega felt the first insistent drops of rain. His calf hurt. The gauze bandage scraped against the fabric of his pants every time he swung his leg.

  “We’ll be at the shopping center in a minute at this rate,” he panted.

  “There’s a shopping center back here?”

  “That’s why you need a cop who knows the terrain, Trooper—?”

  “Sorenson. Becca Sorenson.”

  “Jimmy Vega.” Vega nodded to the dog’s harness. It kept getting snagged on low-lying branches. The sooner they got this over with, the sooner they could take cover before the rain came down in earnest. “Is your dog trained to search off harness?”

  “Yes.” Sorenson unhooked the animal and shouted, “Chooo!” Daisy bounded ahead.

  “That a sneeze? Or did you just tell the dog something?”

  “Chooo is the command to fetch in Chinese.”

  “A Chinese German shepherd,” huffed Vega. “You couldn’t have at least taught it German?”

  “The dog doesn’t know she’s a German shepherd,” said Sorenson.

  “Well, she better know she’s a search-and-rescue dog or she’s gonna be retired after this.”

  Thirty feet in front of them, the dog stopped and began pacing back and forth in front of a dark, moss-covered tree limb that was lying across a pile of wet fallen leaves. Vega would have passed right by the spot. It looked identical to the rest of the woods except for the chain-link fence ten feet ahead that had been cut open at the pole and curled back like peeling wallpaper. It was the sort of small-time delinquency that might have gone unnoticed for months, especially with winter closing in. It felt ominous now.

  “You see the strip mall?” Vega asked Sorenson. It sat just beyond the fence, an acre of asphalt anchored by a long rectangle of stores with a KFC and a Payless shoe outlet at one end and a Staples office store at the other. Rain darkened the curtain of asphalt surrounding the building and beaded the windows of cars parked in tidy rows close to the stores.

  The dog sat in front of the tree limb and barked.

  Sorenson hooked the dog back onto her leash. Vega yanked the limb to one side and used his foot to feel around beneath the slick pile of leaves. His shoe brushed against something weighty and solid. He sprang back as if on fire—and he knew. He patted his pockets for a pair of disposable gloves. He always kept a spare pair on him, but they were in his sports coat and his sports coat was wrapped around Joy.

  This was awkward.

  “Um—Trooper? Do you happen to have an extra pair of gloves on you?”

  Sorenson blew out a slow breath of air as she reached on her duty belt and extracted a sealed pair of gloves. “Maybe the state police should bring gloves instead of pens next year, hmmm?”

  Vega ignored the dig and slipped into the gloves. Then he squatted down and brushed aside a few of the leaves. Daisy whimpered. Sorenson stroked the shepherd to calm her and fed her a treat.

  Vega saw the gray-tinged skin first, followed by a fan of long black hair threaded with bits of leaves and twigs. A woman. No, scratch that. She looked more like a teenager. A Hispanic teenager. She was lying faceup, her body preserved enough for Vega to think she hadn’t been here more than a couple of days. She was wearing a pair of baggy gray sweatpants and a black hoodie that was unzipped to reveal a faded yellow T-shirt beneath. There were no obvious gunshot or knife wounds. She could have died of a drug overdose and been covered up by a panicked companion. Or she could be a murder victim. It was impossible to tell at this point. With the breach in the fence, there was no way to even know if she was a student at the college or from somewhere else, via the shopping center.

  “I’m going to call this in to my people,” said Vega. “Do me a favor? Get campus security on your radio and let them know about this as well. This girl could be a student here. Tell ’em she’s Hispanic, maybe five-one, slight build. Maybe someone at the college can identify her—”

  “Your daughter can.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your daughter can identify her,” said Sorenson. “Daisy’s a search-and-rescue dog, Detective. She’s trained to go after scents she detects on the bait I give her, not look for bodies whenever the urge strikes her. If Daisy tracked us to this body, she did it by picking up the scent on your daughter’s jacket.”

  No. Impossible. Sorenson had to be mistaken. “My daughter’s very particular about her clothes,” said Vega. “She wouldn’t lend them out.”

  “The victim didn’t have to be wearing your daughter’s jacket, Detective. Your daughter just had to be in close contact with her.”

  “You mean”—Vega corrected—“the jacke
t had to be in close contact with her.” That distinction was everything, at least to Vega.

  “The jacket. Yes,” said Sorenson. She held Vega’s gaze for a moment and he looked away. He didn’t want to dwell on the implications.

  The rain was coming down steadily now, darkening the shoulders of Vega’s blue polo shirt. The heat from his jog into the woods had worn off. Sweat congealed on his skin. He shivered, not just from the cold, but from something deeper. He stared at the teenager’s body. She was surrounded by a glossy frame of wet orange and yellow leaves. With her Hispanic features and long black hair, she reminded him of those statues of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico—the ones encircled by golden rays of light.

  Vega held Joy’s leopard-print jacket away from his body. Its shimmer felt cheesy and tainted suddenly, like it belonged to someone he didn’t recognize.

  Or worse, someone he used to.

  Chapter 14

  Joy stared at the head shot on her father’s cell phone. “I swear, Daddy, I don’t know her. I mean, maybe I passed her on the street somewhere. But honest, I don’t know her.”

  They were sitting in Vega’s car, rain drumming hard on the roof, waiting for the crime-scene techs to show up. Joy was hunkered down in Vega’s sports coat since her own leopard-print jacket had been bagged as evidence. Vega had sent Adele home without telling her anything except that they’d found a body in the woods. Then Vega called Wendy and told her to cancel Joy’s evening tutoring engagements. He didn’t explain why. Nor did he elaborate when he ordered Joy into his car. She stopped protesting when he thrust that picture of the dead girl’s face at her. He’d hoped Joy would know the girl and have a ready, innocuous explanation for the jacket fiasco. She didn’t. That worried him more.

  “Think, Joy. Think. You were wearing the jacket when I saw you at the hospital on Sunday. When did you last get it cleaned?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t take it to the dry cleaners every week.”

  “Did you loan it to anyone? Did you leave it behind somewhere?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, you’ve got to. You’ve goddamn well got to!”