Land of Careful Shadows (10 page)

The car turned in the driveway. Only a couple of acres of field separated the car's occupants from the men. Rodrigo froze, hand on the shovel, watching as a man got out of the driver's side of the car. Dark blue police jacket. Mirrored sunglasses, even though the sun had traveled to the other side of the woods and the sky was bleached rather than bright. They couldn't hide his face completely. He was the Spanish-looking cop Rodrigo had seen yesterday at La Casa, the officer who was showing Maria's picture around. Another man got out of the passenger's side of the car—a big, heavyset Anglo who looked less than thrilled that he might have to walk across a couple of acres of swampy brush.

Even at this distance, Rodrigo knew. He saw it in the way the Spanish-looking cop took off his sunglasses and chucked them in the car, his eyes never once losing focus on Rodrigo. He was the one they wanted. Not Anibal or Enrique. Rodrigo knew why, too. It was bad luck for him, no matter what he did from this point forward.

Rodrigo willed himself to shut down. To become a stone. To have no needs, no wants, no desires, no capacity for pain or fear or remorse. But he could not stop the thrumming in his chest, the wild panic he felt as the Spanish cop started walking toward them, picking his way across the puddles and brush in the field. He felt trapped like a cow off to slaughter, hemmed in by a terrain he didn't know. Fields in back. Streets and houses in front and to the left. Only a dark woods to the right. A chance to get away.
Run and hide. Run and hide.

They would deport him if they caught him. Back in detention with all those big men and guards who punched and kicked you if you were too slow or didn't understand something. Back on that plane. To what sort of future? They would lose the house if he got deported. Lorenzo and Juliza would have to leave school. Stephany wouldn't even get to start.
Ay, chimado!
He wouldn't even get paid for today.

He broke out in a cold sweat. His breath turned ragged and shallow. His hands throbbed like they hadn't since he'd cut them up on that border fence.
Run,
a voice inside told him.
It's your only chance.
He'd run from so many people these past five years: the Mexican police, gangsters, border patrol agents, Arizona cops. He'd had machetes held to his throat and pistols to his head. He'd wandered the desert half-dead of thirst and seen things done to men and women in the name of greed and lust and ignorance that no man should ever have to see.

And so he ran.

It was all he knew how to do anymore. As a boy, he wasn't fast. Other boys always beat him in races. But you run differently when your life depends on it. You run pitched forward. You run without worrying about what you might crash up against. You can't feel the stitch in your side or the branch that scrapes your face or the stump that bangs your toe. You don't run to win; you run to survive and that makes all the difference.

He heard voices behind him. The cop's voice, cursing in a mixture of Spanish and English. And Anibal's voice, calm and reasonable as always. “
Mi hermano!
Why are you running? It will only make matters worse. We can talk to them. Please.”

By the time he reached the woods, the string had fallen off his right work boot and the rubber sole flopped open. He ran with the foolish hop-step of a comic-book character, his boot so useless that it would have almost been better to kick it off. He scrabbled over a fallen log and his sole caught a snag, tossing him chest first into the mud. He started to claw himself to his feet when he heard a crash through the leaves and felt the thud of a bigger man's body landing full-force against him, the man cursing in a rough, guttural-sounding Spanish as he shoved a knee into the small of Rodrigo's back and cuffed his arms behind him. The man hoisted Rodrigo roughly out of the mud. Rodrigo's baseball cap fell off his head and tumbled to his feet.

The Spanish cop was muddy now too, and not too happy about it. He let out a stream of invectives, mostly having to do with Rodrigo's mother and the worthless life she gave birth to, namely him. Rodrigo looked through the woods and saw Silva's truck parked behind the cops. He'd never get his money or even a glass of water now. He could see Enrique gesturing wildly to the other police officer who looked bored and uncomprehending. Anibal had a hand on Enrique's shoulder. He knew what the limits of their power were here.

Be a stone. Be a stone. Nothing can hurt a stone.
He had told himself the same thing that time the Mexican police had forced him and about thirty other people from that truck in Veracruz and stripped them of their money and valuables. They had grabbed Maria then. They had started to drag her off—Rodrigo and Maria both knew for what. Rodrigo stepped up. Foolishly, perhaps. He lied and said she was his wife. One of the
cerotes
punched him in the face, blackened both eyes, and threw him to the ground. But they spared Maria. She was grateful—too grateful. At this moment, Rodrigo almost wished he'd have let fate have its way. Then perhaps none of this would be happening.

The cop tugged on Rodrigo's handcuffs and told him to walk. It was difficult. The bracelets pinched his shoulders back uncomfortably. Without the benefit of hands, Rodrigo had nothing to break his fall. He hesitated for a moment, staring at his baseball cap in the mud, its frayed brim soaked and misshapen. The cop did not pick it up. Rodrigo offered it one last longing glance. He knew it would remain in the woods to molder and disintegrate—his little marker that he was here, that for one bright shining moment, he existed on this landscape of gray hills and gray trees and men with gray faces. He already knew he'd never be back.

Rodrigo took a step forward and fell. The cop yanked him to his feet and pushed him along. It happened again. The second time, Rodrigo fell face-first onto a decaying tree stump. It smacked against his lower lip with the force of a rifle butt. His vision went blank for a second and a white-hot pain shot through him the way it had when he'd taken those blows from the Mexican police. He could taste blood in his mouth along with pulpy sour bits of wood. He spit the wood out but he felt like a baby with drool running down his chin. Except it wasn't drool. It was warmer than that. And red. Bright red. His blood. The officer yanked him to his feet again and cursed. Rodrigo could feel his lip starting to swell as he mumbled an explanation and nodded his chin to his feet. The cop looked down at his useless right boot flapping open, his soggy, muddy sock beneath, and mistook the damage for being the result of the chase.

“Serves you right,
pendejo,
for running like that
.
” The cop pushed Rodrigo forward, though this time at least, he held him erect, a hard grip on one shoulder. Rodrigo did not fall again.

On the driveway, handcuffed, his clothes covered in mud, his lip swollen and bleeding, his work boot falling apart, Rodrigo felt ashamed. Broken. Silva didn't even look at them—any of them. He was talking to the fat cop, a mixture of annoyance and resignation in the way he folded his arms across his chest, the way he gestured to all of them as if they were cattle that had broken through a stockade and needed to be rounded up and contained better in the future.

Enrique was talking at fever pitch to the Spanish cop, saying that the men were being hassled for no reason. Anibal, calm and resigned as always, asked the cop if he could go over to Rodrigo and wipe the blood from his friend's face. The cop relented and Anibal produced a rag from his pocket and gently brought it across Rodrigo's lower lip and chin as if Rodrigo weren't just a friend or even a brother. It was as if Rodrigo were his son.

“You will be okay,
mi hermano,
” Anibal said softly. He dabbed at Rodrigo's lip as gently as if he were wiping the skin of a newborn baby. Then he folded the rag to a clean section and worked up from Rodrigo's chin, all the time murmuring words of comfort. “God is with you. He will not desert you.”

Rodrigo felt something thick and cottony well up in his throat. His friend's tenderness, more than anything else that had happened, brought Rodrigo close to tears. He tried harder than he could ever recall to hold back his emotions. He would not break down in front of all these despicable, indifferent men. These
choleros.
He swallowed hard and looked up. A flock of geese crossed the sky in V formation. They were perfectly attuned to one another. They were together. As it should be. He wondered if he'd ever see Anibal and Enrique again.

Anibal spoke calmly and respectfully to the police officer. He asked why the officer had handcuffed his friend.

“Rodrigo knows. He wouldn't have run if he didn't.”

Anibal said nothing, only gave Rodrigo a searching look.
Is it true?
his eyes asked.

Rodrigo turned away from his friend. He couldn't bear to look at anyone anymore. The police were going to ask him about Maria, if he knew she was missing. They would ask if he was innocent. And was he? Truly? He had broken one of God's sacred commandments. He had become no better than the
cabrones
he swore he would never turn into. He had let his family down. His wife. His children, too. And now they would all pay for his sins. How could he claim innocence in the face of all their misery?

“Let my friends go,” Rodrigo mumbled to the officer through swollen lips. He was thirsty. So thirsty he'd have licked the puddles off the ground if they'd let him. “Do whatever you are going to do with me. But please—let them go.”

J
immy Vega and Louie Greco were supposed to be veteran detectives, experienced enough to talk a short, uneducated illegal alien into their car without him ending up looking like he'd gone through an MS-13 gang initiation ceremony. Instead, Rodrigo was sitting in the Lake Holly station house with a busted lip, a muddy, blood-soaked hoodie, a work boot he couldn't walk in, and the quiet, doomed demeanor of a man who knew he wasn't walking out of here tonight, if ever. Vega and Greco were in the shit now. Up to their eyeballs. No amount of TLC was going to make Rodrigo look like a poster child for Latino-Anglo relations in the community.

And now Scott Porter was coming by the station, no doubt to demand Rodrigo's release, having gotten wind of the situation from those other two men at the job site. (Vega and Greco should have detained them as well, but on what grounds?) Most immigrants have to beg for decent legal representation. It was just Vega's luck that this guy was getting it delivered to his door after being in police custody less than an hour. They'd barely had time to get his full name and feed it into the computer, let alone interview him.

They sat Rodrigo in a windowless conference room and offered him a Coke. He asked for water instead and drank half a quart in one swallow—not an easy feat for a man with a badly swollen lip.

There was nothing in the conference room but a couple of chairs and a big wall clock that ticked off the seconds and kept reminding Vega how little time he was going to have with Rodrigo before Scott Porter got ahold of him. The room was hot and stuffy. The fluorescent light fixtures buzzed. Down the hall, Vega could hear two cops talking about the Yankees' batting lineup for the season.

Vega scanned what the database at Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE—had kicked back on the man. Full name: Rodrigo Eliseo Morales-Aguirre. Age: thirty-three. Born in Esperanza, Guatemala. One arrest, two years ago, when ICE agents raided a food processing plant in Rhode Island. Morales's employer got a small fine for hiring illegal aliens. Morales—who bought a stolen Social Security card for three hundred dollars so he could work at the food processing plant—got charged with identity theft. He was jailed and deported, which made him an automatic felon the moment he reentered the United States.

“Why did you run today, man?” Vega asked him in Spanish. “All we wanted to do was ask you a few questions. You ruined my shirt.” Vega gestured to his striped oxford, covered in a patchwork of drying mud. He was hoping to warm things up a bit, make it seem as if they'd both gotten off on the wrong foot. But Morales remained hunched and beaten, picking at a thorn that had gotten wedged in his right palm. Vega hadn't noticed his hands before this. The knuckles were abraded, the fingernails ragged and torn, the palms deeply callused. His hands told the tale of his life and it looked as if none of it had been easy.

Morales kept his eyes on his hands. “I was supposed to be paid a hundred dollars today,” he mumbled softly.

“Maybe your friends will get it for you.” But Vega already knew the contractor would never pay. He'd argue that the men hadn't worked a full day, that they'd brought cops to the site. Vega had been stiffed by a few contractors when he worked for them in college and he was an American with a native's command of invectives and a Bronx attitude. Rodrigo Morales didn't stand a chance. Not that Vega was about to feel sorry for the guy. He was in this country illegally after being convicted and imprisoned for identity theft. He ran from the police and cost Vega a nice set of clothes. And besides that, what if he turned out to be the killer of the mother at the lake? Sympathy had no place in a police interrogation room.

“You got a local address, Rodrigo?”

Morales hesitated.

“I'm not ICE, man. We're not gonna raid the place, okay?”

“It's just—I have friends there.”

“Your friends aren't going to get deported.” Vega held up his notebook. “See? I'm not faxing it to ICE or anything. I'm just putting it in my notes.”

Morales mumbled an address. Vega was already betting it wasn't the right address. Right street, wrong house number. Right house number, wrong street. He probably shared a room with three or four other men for three hundred dollars a month cash. Hot plate on the floor, mattresses or bunk beds against the walls. One bathroom for fifteen tenants. All his possessions could probably fit in one backpack if he had to leave in a hurry. That's why he was being detained in the first place.

“Cell number?” All these immigrants had prepaid wireless phones. The entire industry was founded on people without papers or credit.

“It's not working.”

“What do you mean, ‘it's not working'?”

“I haven't had enough money to pay for minutes in four weeks.” There was a catch in Morales's voice. Vega suspected he had kids back in Guatemala. Before cell phones, some of these guys went months without talking to their families. Now, four weeks probably felt like an eternity.

“You've still got a number, right? For when you can buy minutes again.”

Morales nodded and gave the number. This time, Vega was pretty sure he was telling the truth. He wouldn't fear offering up a cell number the way he'd fear offering up an address. In all likelihood, he didn't give his name when he bought his phone and he recharged up the minutes in cash.

Vega wrote down all the information and then slid a copy of the flyer across the table.

“Who is she, Rodrigo?”

Morales slowly traced a hand across the photo, then shook his head. “I can't go back to Guatemala. My family will lose everything.” Vega heard the tight pull of his vocal cords, the barely suppressed panic. He may have closed down on the outside, but the adrenaline was pumping beneath.

“I told you, man. I don't care about your immigration status. All I want is for you to answer my questions.”

Morales lifted his gaze and Vega saw his eyes for the first time. They were red at the rims, dark and deep as caves at their centers. Sad eyes. Old eyes. Too old for a man of thirty-three. Rodrigo Eliseo Morales-Aguirre already knew that he'd never see his hundred dollars. He already knew that no matter what Vega said, his criminal conviction pretty much guaranteed he'd be deported. Vega was a good liar but Morales had seen too much of the world to be easily lied to. Vega would have to try some other tack with him. Guilt maybe. He pointed to the photograph again.

“She's dead, man. And her daughter? We can't find her. Nobody's come forward to tell us where she is. She could be dead too for all we know. You want that on your conscience? A woman you knew buried in an unmarked grave thousands of miles from her home? No priest or anything to say a prayer for her? Her family never knowing what happened?”

There was no surprise in Morales's eyes when Vega told him she was dead. Then again, police officers don't chase people down and cuff them over a missing illegal. Even Morales knew that.

“How did she die?”

Vega thought he heard something tender in the man's voice. “First tell me her name.”

Morales took a deep breath. “Maria Elena. I don't know anything about the child. I never saw her.”

“What's Maria's last name?”

“Vasquez. But it wasn't real.”

“You gave yourselves fake names?”

“Not us. The coyotes.” Morales shuffled his feet on the floor beneath the table. His right work boot flapped open in front. Vega couldn't imagine how he'd managed to run in that boot, let alone work in it. Morales pulled a twig that had gotten lodged in his hair and dropped it to the floor. The police had let him wash his hands and face after they brought him to the station, but there were no facilities for detainees to do more than that.

“When you cross from Guatemala to Mexico,” Morales explained, tapping his feet nervously, “the coyotes give you a Mexican passport. You have to memorize the information. That way, if the police stop you, you can say you are Mexican. Otherwise, they deport you back to Guatemala.”

Vega thought deportations only happened if you made it to the U.S. It had never occurred to him that the whole process could stop before it began. “So her name on her Mexican passport was Maria Elena Vasquez?”

Morales shook his head. “Margarita Vasquez-Herrera. But I knew her real name was Maria Elena. I just never told her my last name and she never told me hers—in case we got caught.”

“I see. And out of curiosity,” said Vega, “what was
your
fake name?”

“Gonzalo Rivera-Jimenez. I was a thirty-one-year-old bricklayer from San Luis Potosi.”

“You remember all that?”

Morales touched the back of his hand to his swollen lip, crusted with dried blood. “I remember everything.” For a moment, the weight of those memories seemed to settle on his broad shoulders. He massaged his temples like a man trying to rub out a stain that refused to disappear.

Vega pressed on. “Did Maria talk about her daughter at all? The one in the picture?”

“We didn't talk much about our lives.”

“Did she say her daughter's name? Her age? Whether she had other children?”

Morales shook his head and took another gulp of water. He couldn't seem to get enough. Maybe it was a nervous reaction. “She only said she was coming North for her daughter.”

“You mean, to provide a better life for her?”

He shrugged. “What other reason is there?”

This was good news at least, thought Vega. It was possible the little girl was back in Guatemala with a grandmother or other relative.

“Did Maria Elena come from your hometown?”

“No. I think she came from Aguas Calientes,” said Morales. “About thirty kilometers away.”

“Know anyone else from Aguas Calientes?”

“No.”

That may or may not have been true, Vega realized. Morales wasn't about to give out the names of friends to a cop. “You met Maria where?”

“We were in the same group coming North. We both planned to come to Lake Holly.”

“She have family here?”

“Not that I know of. I think she just heard it's safe.” Morales shook his head sadly. Even Vega had to admit the irony of his words.
Safe, sure. Maria Elena is dead and Morales is likely to be imprisoned and/or deported.

“So you and she came to Lake Holly together.”

“We came together. But not—not in that way.”

Vega noted a slight coloring in Morales's cheeks.

“What way was it then?” Vega smiled but it was a cop's smile. He was already a step ahead of Morales. Men all cut the same way when you come right down to it.

“We didn't—I have a wife and children in Guatemala.”

“Yes,” said Vega. “I gathered that part.”

“Once we came here, I didn't—” Morales fingered a loose piece of veneer on the tabletop. “I promised my wife I would be faithful.” He looked more upset than at any time during their conversation. Vega had to smile. Rodrigo Morales could survive anything; endure anything—except the reproach of his wife.

“Look man,” Vega assured him. “You wouldn't be the first guy bearing up under difficult circumstances who forgot your vows for a while. Seems to me, a lot of the men who cross the border do that.” Vega knew plenty who had abandoned their families entirely and made new ones here. But he had a sense Morales was not that kind of man. He seemed genuinely distressed by his infidelity. The question was, could he have been distressed enough to kill Maria Elena if, say, she wanted to keep the relationship going and he didn't?

“I stopped it,” said Morales. “Soon after we came.”

“So you were having sexual relations with Maria Elena and you decided to stop?”

“Yes.” Morales looked down at his hands, embarrassed. “I stopped.”

“When?”

“I don't remember. Sometime in October maybe?”

“I have a witness who saw you come into La Casa with Maria.”

“That would have been in the fall. To help her find a job.”

“Did she find one?”

“Not right away. But eventually, yes. She worked as a live-in housekeeper.”

“Where?”

“I don't know the house. Somewhere on the hill away from town. Where the houses and lawns are very big and the trees very small. I've cut lawns there.”

“The Farms?”

“Maybe.” He jiggled his feet nervously again. “You never told me how she died.”

“How about you tell me?”

Morales blinked. “I don't know.”

“Sure you do. You ran, didn't you?”

“Because you were going to arrest me.”

Vega leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head as if they were just chatting over a beer. “I haven't arrested you, Rodrigo. Like I said, we're just talking here. So tell me how she died.”

“I don't know how she died.”

Vega decided to offer up a few details to help Rodrigo's memory along. “She was found in the lake. Maybe she couldn't swim?”

“No. She could swim. We both can.” Morales looked confused. “Did she drown?”

“So if Maria went into the lake,” said Vega, ignoring Morales's question, “she'd be able to swim out?”

“I—I think so. We never swam there. What happened to her?”

“I think you know.”

Morales frowned. “I don't.” And then it hit him. “Are you saying she was murdered?” He was so focused on his lost hundred dollars and the likelihood of getting deported, he'd completely missed the reason they'd brought him in in the first place. He touched his chest like Vega had just planted a fist in it. “You think I killed her?”