A Place in the Wind

by Suzanne Chazin

  The wind had picked up, blowing snow across the two men. Vega felt it working its way down the back of his shirt, mixing with the congealed sweat on his skin.

  “We should go inside,” said Molina. “We’re back on in five.”

  * * *

  By the time the band finished the rest of their set, it was after midnight. The breakdown took another forty-five minutes. There were duct-taped cables to rip up off the stage floor; amps, instruments, and mics to unplug and put away. The snow was falling harder. They would have to dig out their cars and scrape down their windshields.

  “Jerry wants us back,” said Molina as he handed Vega his share of the night’s take: just under a hundred dollars. The band made more doing weddings and quinceañeras—Latina coming-of-age parties. But playing a club was more fun. Here, the music was the main attraction, not just something between the entrée and the dessert.

  Vega tucked the bills into his wallet, cranked up the heater in his pickup, and focused on a hot shower and a chance to see his daughter. He was barely a mile from the Port Carroll waterfront when he heard the ding of a text on his phone. He didn’t check it. He’d seen the results of too many texting-while-driving accidents to ever take that chance. There was no place to pull over on the narrow road he was traveling. Not with snowplows still out and flurries still coming down. He drove on until he found a gas station. He pulled in front of the station’s convenience store and checked his messages. The text was from Adele: The police found her. Call me ASAP.

  There was no mention if Catherine was alive or dead. But Vega had a sense that if the news had been good, Adele would have said so. It was almost two a.m. Almost twenty-eight hours since Catherine Archer had walked out of La Casa into a frigid January night. They were past the golden twenty-four—if indeed it had ever been golden. Vega felt the rock-hard certainty that if it took the cops to find her, it was not the way any parents wanted their child to be found.

  Chapter 7

  “Dave Lindsey called me with the news.”

  The rest of Adele’s words spilled out faster than Vega could process them. Something about the woods and the post office and a volunteer search party. It all ran together. Vega was always a little deaf after a gig—even when he used earplugs. Plus, he was parked at a gas station next to a tractor-trailer that the driver had left idling while he bought something in the convenience store. The rumble of the big truck’s diesel engine reverberated through Vega’s pickup like someone gargling.

  “Wait,” said Vega. “Back up a minute. The chairman of the board of La Casa called you? Not the police? How would he know what happened to Catherine?”

  “His wife plays tennis with a friend of Robin Archer’s. She was the one who found her.”

  “Lindsey’s wife?”

  “No.” Vega could hear impatience in Adele’s voice. She was always a beat ahead of everyone, including him. “Robin Archer. Catherine’s mother! She was in the search party combing the woods behind the post office. She found her own daughter’s body.”

  “Jesus.” Vega flicked his wipers, cutting an arc through the snow across the glass. The steady thump felt like a heartbeat. The windshield went from clear, to salt-streaked, to blurry, and back again. A flashing lottery sign in the convenience store window lent everything a sickly greenish glow. It matched the queasiness Vega felt inside.

  “Did Dave say anything about how the girl died?”

  “I don’t think he knows.”

  “Maybe it was an overdose.”

  “Jimmy . . . some of her clothes were off.”

  Vega closed his eyes and cursed under his breath. Every one of his worst fears was coming true.

  “I want to go over there,” said Adele. “But I can’t. Sophia’s asleep.”

  “The cops wouldn’t let you within a hundred feet of that crime scene anyway.”

  “They’d let you in.”

  “No, they would not.”

  The truck driver lumbered out of the store, hefting a bag of Doritos and a gallon of Gatorade. He climbed into his cab and put the engine in gear. When he drove off, Vega became acutely aware of Adele’s silence.

  “Nena, I can’t just waltz into another jurisdiction’s crime scene. For cops—especially male cops—that’s like flopping down on their living-room sofa and reprogramming their remote. It won’t get you the answers you need. It’ll only piss them off.”

  “Like they’re not pissed off already.”

  She had a point. “Look, let me come over and stay with you so you’re not alone.”

  “I’m not alone. I’m with Sophia. If you won’t go speak to the police, then I will. I’ll take Sophia to Peter’s and then stand there all night, if I have to, until I get some answers.”

  “Even if they let you in for some reason, trust me,” said Vega, “you don’t want to see that.” There are some things, Vega knew, that you can’t unsee. Cruelties and savageries that you can’t forget once you’ve witnessed them. He didn’t want those nightmares visited on Adele. That was reason enough to take her place.

  “All right,” said Vega. “You win. I’ll go.”

  “You will?”

  “You have to promise me that you won’t wait up. These things tend to take a while.” Vega flicked the wipers across his windshield again. The snow wasn’t letting up. He looked down at his clothes. He was wearing sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt—all of it sweaty. Even with a couple of hand warmers and his insulated jacket, he’d be sorely underdressed for a winter romp in the woods. But if it kept Adele away from the crime scene, it was worth it.

  “I’ll text you the basics and call you tomorrow morning. All right?”

  “Thank you, Jimmy.”

  * * *

  Snow at a crime scene makes everything harder. Collecting evidence. Keeping personnel on the scene. Determining time of death. Vega could only imagine how this was going to impact the case.

  He couldn’t get within three hundred feet of the post office parking lot so he parked at a business up the road and hiked back. His dark blue police jacket, black knit hat, and lined leather gloves provided enough protection on top. But his sneakers and jeans were soaked and coated with clumps of snow by the time he made his way to the police checkpoint. The cop on site protection, a rookie who barely looked old enough to carry a gun, knew Vega—and knew he wasn’t supposed to be here.

  “Can’t let you in, Detective,” he said. “Jankowski and Sanchez would have my head—and a few other parts besides.”

  “Is Greco here?”

  “Everyone’s here.”

  Vega counted four marked cruisers. Several more unmarked SUVs. A fire truck. The medical examiner’s van. His own department’s crime scene unit—probably Jenn and her partner. This was their case after all.

  Emergency lights flashed across the pure white of the landscape—each vehicle at different intervals. An epileptic’s nightmare. It gave Vega a headache just looking at them. The wind had died down and the temperature hovered just below freezing so the flakes grew thick and fat on the bare trees. The snow muted almost everything. The slam of car doors. The officers’ voices. The static from their walkie-talkies. It could never mute the horror. Twenty feet back in the woods, bright halogen lights lit up the night. There was no mistaking where the body was.

  “Can you radio Detective Greco? See if he’ll give me an update?”

  “I’ll try to reach him.”

  Vega stamped his soggy feet as he watched men and women with grim expressions traipse like ants back and forth through a narrow path into the woods. He counted the initials of at least six different agencies. Why the hell were their vehicles parked all over the lot? The first cruiser, he could see. Maybe the officers didn’t know. But the rest? They were messing up the crime scene.

  Now, if this was my crime scene, I’d cordon off the vehicles. Restrict movement along narrow lines of access.

  But it’s not your crime scene. Those words hit Vega like a wet towel to the face. He was ashamed to admit that b
eneath the anguish and alarm, he felt something else—something he could only describe as excitement. The adrenaline rush he used to get when he showed up at a homicide. His homicide. That he’d run his way. He missed it. God, how he missed it! He felt guilty to even admit that. A young girl’s life had ended brutally here. How could he feel anything at the minute but sorrow? And yet he did. It was the detective in him. To do the job well, you had to have fire in your heart and ice in your veins.

  He’d been like that once. He wondered if he’d ever get the chance to be that again.

  The officer turned back to Vega. “Detective Greco said to meet him at the entrance to the woods. He said not to go farther.”

  “Thanks. Got it.”

  Vega was careful to pick his way across the snow in tracks already used by others. But already, there were too many trails. Car tracks. Truck tracks. Boot prints all over the parking lot. It was still snowing, so they were filling up fast. It might not matter in the end. But still.

  He pulled up the collar of his jacket and did a quick scan of the one-story post office with its veneer of brown bricks. There was a fenced-off area at the far end of the building with mail trucks behind it. There were two surveillance cameras in front, aimed at the entrance, and two on the side, aimed at the fenced-off area. None of them were likely to yield any usable footage.

  Greco emerged from the woods like a grizzly bear roused from hibernation. Snow coated the shoulders of his puffy black jacket. His knit cap looked like he’d rolled in coconut.

  “This is a courtesy, Vega,” he growled as he trudged over. “A little good will from the Lake Holly PD. So make it quick. I have work to do.”

  “What have you got so far?”

  “Volunteer search party found her,” said Greco. “A party that unfortunately included her mother.”

  “I heard,” said Vega. “Is there a lot of trauma to the body?”

  “Her jeans and underwear were down around her ankles. Her sweater and bra were bunched up around her neck. Was she sexually assaulted? I can’t say for sure. I didn’t see any bruising in that area. She has no obvious injuries outside of a small bruise to her chin.”

  “You said her sweater and bra were around her neck,” said Vega. “Did you notice any ligature marks?”

  “No marks to suggest she was strangled,” said Greco. “Not by her clothes or anything else. No gunshot or stab wounds either. At least not that I can see.”

  “Is it possible she wasn’t murdered?” asked Vega. “Maybe she overdosed? That heroin and fentanyl stuff is making the rounds and it’s superpotent. Maybe somebody panicked.”

  “It’s possible,” said Greco. “Then again, someone pulled down her pants. It has all the appearances of a rape or attempted rape.”

  “How about lividity?” asked Vega. He was referring to the purplish marks after death that indicate the settling of blood beneath the skin.

  “There was some on her back where she was lying,” said Greco. Which meant that Catherine died in the spot she was found in—or was brought to it soon after death. “If I had to bet at this point, I’d say she was a victim of opportunity—and we both know where that opportunity probably came from.”

  La Casa.

  Vega and Greco were standing less than a quarter mile from Adele’s community center, in a wooded area that extended about a mile along a streambed to the old stone bridge. In summer, the marshy land attracted the heavy drinkers and semi-homeless among the immigrant population, who passed out near the stream or sought shelter under the bridge or in the abandoned cars that riddled the thick brush—remnants of a former mechanic’s garage that went bust and was torn down years ago.

  Vega didn’t have to say what both men were thinking: If Catherine was assaulted, the most likely suspect was an immigrant she’d tutored Friday night.

  Mike Carp, the new county executive, was going to have a field day with this.

  “Can you walk me back there?” asked Vega.

  “No can do, my friend. This is Jankowski and Sanchez’s case. And I’m just a pair of eyes and legs—”

  “Don’t hand me that cataracted crap again, Grec. You could do it if you wanted to.”

  “What part of ‘this isn’t your case’ don’t you understand? You want to play detective? I’ll take you down to our local five-and-dime. Buy you a supercool cowboy badge and a shiny set of plastic cuffs.”

  “I’m playing detective? Let’s not forget who gift wrapped that lead on the play slips at Hank’s Deli.” Vega gestured to the tracks running through the snow. “Look at this lot. You’ve got Grand Central Station walking through here. I’m not gonna mess up Lake Holly’s precious crime scene any more than it’s already messed up.”

  Greco stood there, jaw set to one side, snow piling up on his shoulders like pigeon droppings. He unwrapped a Twizzler from a cellophane bag in his pocket and chewed thoughtfully.

  “Head down. Don’t touch anything. And the next time you come to a crime scene?” Greco frowned at Vega’s sneakers. “Do me a favor and dress for it.”

  * * *

  Vega followed Greco about twenty feet down a slope to a snow-encrusted canopy. It looked like a lunar-landing module under the glow of halogen spotlights. The glare bleached out any sense of day or night. Radios squawked but voices were muted, visible in the clouds of shimmering breath that rose from the officers’ lips and evaporated into the night.

  Catherine was lying on her back under the canopy, her blond hair frozen in matted strands at her sides. The middle of her body, from her breasts to her knees, was bare and blue as an old lady’s veins. With the exception of the twilight cast to her skin, she could have been sleeping. There was no blood. No trauma, save for one thin bruise on her lower left jaw. A silver chain still dangled from her neck, weighted to one side by a small charm. An elephant with a raised trunk. Costume jewelry most likely. But still. In most violent encounters Vega had seen, necklaces were the first things to get broken or disappear. Yet this one remained intact.

  Jenn Fitzpatrick was kneeling beside Catherine’s body, her white Tyvek coveralls perfectly blending in with the landscape. With her freckled face and curly hair, she looked more like a ski instructor than a crime scene tech. She was tucking one of Catherine’s hands inside a plastic bag to preserve any trace evidence under her nails. The nails were painted blue with yellow polka dots. None of them appeared to be broken. That surprised Vega even more than the necklace. A girl fighting for her life should have broken a nail or two. Then again, maybe she’d been wearing gloves. Or maybe she’d never seen the assault coming until it was too late to fight off.

  He crouched down next to Jenn. “Wish you’d been at the club tonight,” he said softly. “Wish neither of us was here.”

  “Keep this up, Jimmy, and I’m sure your wish will be granted—permanently.” She pulled out a zip tie to secure the bag around Catherine’s wrist. “You can’t possibly have permission to be here.”

  “I got a hall pass from Detective Greco.”

  “Ah.” Jenn moved over to bag Catherine’s other hand. “How was . . . ?” Her voice trailed off. This was no place to talk music. There was no music here.

  “Good. Great, in fact.” Vega tried to recall the feeling, but it was gone. Catherine’s death had rendered everything else insignificant. He forced himself to run his eyes along the perfect, unblemished contours of the girl’s body. She had died faceup, staring straight at her killer.

  “Her mother found her like this?” asked Vega.

  “Basically,” said Jenn. “She had a black jacket covering her face and upper torso. The search party told the police they removed it. They shouldn’t have. But really, can you blame them?”

  “Makes me think whoever did this knew her.” Vega straightened and looked past the tent at the bushes surrounding the clearing. Even with their delicate blossoms of snow on top, he could see that there were no obvious broken branches.

  “Some predator lures her out here,” said Vega. “He’s looking to sub
due her and get out. So where’s the struggle? There’s no evidence there was one.”

  “Maybe she’d already passed out,” Jenn suggested.

  “Then why kill her?”

  “Maybe it was an accident.”

  “I’d buy that,” said Vega, “if the scene wasn’t so obviously staged to look like a rape. Something’s not adding up.” He stepped back from the body. “Did you find her wallet?”

  “Negative.”

  “Her cell phone? Car keys? Mittens or gloves?”

  “We haven’t found any of that so far. Detective Jankowski told me she owned an Apple 7S. It was in a case embossed with a photograph of her playing tennis.”

  “It’s probably in some Dumpster by now,” said Vega. His feet were numb. His pants and sneakers were soaked. He needed to get back to his truck and warm up. So he thanked Jenn and left the tent.

  By the time Vega hiked back across the parking lot, the news vans had set up. Two reporters were interviewing a hefty white man in a dark overcoat, with a mop of silver hair. On either side of him were other white men in dark overcoats, with cell phones to their ears and umbrellas in their hands—not to shield themselves, but to protect the man in the center.

  Mike Carp had arrived. This was bad news. Very bad news.

  “Vega!”

  Greco lumbered toward him, out of breath. Vega held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “Keep your shirt on. I’m leaving.”

  “Good. But before you do, I thought you’d want to know—a fingerprint from those play slips came back.”

  “You get a hit?”

  “Affirmative. To a twenty-eight-year-old Guatemalan national named Rolando Benitez-Ochoa. And get this: Benitez has a record for sexual assault. Convicted seven years ago in Colorado for beating and raping a woman. Did eight months and then got deported.”

  “Eight months? For rape and assault?”

  “Some kumbaya liberal judge probably thought it was cheaper to deport him,” said Greco. “And now we’ve got a dead girl on our hands as a result.”