Land of Careful Shadows (14 page)

Vega took him for Latino but he'd been beaten so badly, it was hard to tell. His face was swollen and bruised. Blood congealed in his hair and stained his sweatshirt and jeans. Vega scanned the lot and road for a fleeing suspect. He saw no one. A crowd gathered on the steps of the assembly hall. Adele ran over.

“Keep everyone back and don't let them leave,” he told her. “Call nine-one-one and tell them we have a man in need of medical assistance and ask them to get the Lake Holly cops on the scene.” Vega had no authority here—as Greco would so quickly remind him if he could. Adele pulled out her phone and called in the information.

Vega picked his way closer to the man and crouched next to him. He managed to locate a pair of latex gloves in his jacket and slipped them on. He checked the man's pulse and the response of his pupils to light. His pulse was slow. His pupils were dilated. They didn't respond evenly. He probably had a concussion.

“Have you been shot? Stabbed?” Vega asked the man in Spanish. He searched for obvious wounds but didn't see any knife or gunshot penetrations. The man tried to get to his feet. Vega eased him back down. He could smell liquor on the man's breath. It was possible he was too drunk to know the full extent of his injuries. Most likely, the cops wouldn't know until he was assessed at the hospital. “An ambulance is coming. Relax, man. Who did this?”

The man's lips moved. His voice was a rasp.

“Nadie.”
(“No one.”)

“C'mon, man. Somebody messed you up. Did they do it here? Or did they just dump you here?”

The man clutched his stomach and doubled over. He vomited blood. Vega wondered if his spleen had ruptured.

“You're hurt bad, brother,” said Vega. “C'mon. Put the finger on those
pendejos.
”

Vega heard the sirens. Ambulance, police, he couldn't tell. Some of the guests at the
quinceañera
were going to give the police the slip—that was certain. They didn't
all
have green cards like Diego Martinez. He spoke to the man again. “C'mon, brother. This is your chance to tell what happened. You don't tell now, later, everyone will say you made it up.”

The man fell backward on the dirt and wiped a bloody hand across his face.
“Espero que lo hagan.”
(“I hope they do.”)

“P
lease tell me you haven't been drinking.” Greco's first words when Vega met up with him at Lake Holly Hospital. Adele had driven Vega to the hospital—a decision that, upon reflection, Vega realized hadn't been the wisest of choices. It didn't help that Adele was still in her red chiffon dress, getting looks from every male doctor who passed by. Even Greco shot a sideways glance at her backside when he thought no one was looking. Beneath the armor plating, the man apparently still had a heartbeat—and a few other working parts besides.

“I was off-duty, Grec. I had two beers.
Two.
Do a Breathalyzer on me if you want.”

Greco ran his eyes down Vega's black
guayabera
shirt. “You going native on me?”

“I was trying to get some leads.”

Greco shot another glance at Adele who was at the nurses' station, getting an update on the beaten man. “I'll just bet you were.”

“If I hadn't been at that
quinceañera
this evening, you'd be doing another homicide investigation instead of an assault.” Vega tried to explain the chain of events that started with finding Maria's potential employer, Cindy Klein, but Greco cut him off.

“Get some coffee in you and jeez—hide that shirt. You look like you just stepped off a cruise from Cancún. And tell your
girlfriend
to get lost. Happy hour's over. You're working now.”

“She's not my girlfriend.”

“Keep it that way, you hear? For your sake and mine.”

Greco had snagged a small, windowless conference room down the hall from radiology. Vega grabbed a coffee from the vending machine and followed Greco inside. The man did not look happy. He started talking before Vega sat down.

“We've got a situation on our hands that's going to blow this town out of the water and I can't keep a lid on it the way I did that chick up at the lake.”

“You mean Maria Elena,” Vega corrected. That “chick” had a name now. He wanted it used. Greco gave Vega a sour look.

“You can call her Carmen Miranda for all I care right now. We've got more immediate concerns.” Greco slipped a black-and-white photo of the beaten man's face in front of Vega. The man's nose appeared to be broken, both eyes were swelled shut, and blood crusted his hair. “We've identified the victim as Luis Guzman,” said Greco. “He's a regular in town. Been picked up before for drinking and urinating in public—that sort of thing. No papers, of course. He's in the ICU right now with a concussion, a ruptured spleen, and numerous fractures.”

“You get a statement from him?” asked Vega. “He wouldn't tell me anything.”

“He can't tell anyone anything right now,” said Greco.

“He's unconscious. But I don't need him to tell me what happened. Because I've got this.”

Greco pulled out his smartphone and brought up a Facebook page. He scrolled down to a photograph of a pale bicep with an American flag and eagle tattooed across it. The words 100
PERCENT
A
MERICAN
,
were tattooed beneath. The picture was posted on Facebook at nine-thirty this evening. Beneath it was a caption: G
OT A NEW TAT WITH BRENDAN AND EDDIE. THINK WE'LL CELEBRATE WITH A LITTLE BEANER HOPPING TONITE.
Vega looked at the name of the holder of the page: Matthew Rowland.

“Bobby Rowland's teenage son? This is the guy who beat up Guzman?”

“It gets worse,” said Greco. “I
got
the post because forty minutes before you called in the Guzman assault, Matt Rowland's two friends brought him into the emergency room with a knife wound to his abdomen. It's a superficial wound, but it matches a penknife one of my officers recovered near Guzman's body. Which means, depending on how you look at it, we've got Matt Rowland and his friends Brendan Delaney and Eddie Giordano for a hate-crime gang assault. And/or we've got Guzman for assault with a deadly weapon.”

“Sounds to me like Guzman was defending himself.”

“Maybe,” said Greco. “But I'm screwed no matter what I do here. If Lake Holly lets Guzman walk on the ADW charge, we'll be called out for being soft on crime and illegals. Plus, you and I both know a guy like Guzman ain't gonna stick around to testify against Rowland and his pals. He'll jackrabbit faster than José Ortiz. No victim? No case.”

“But if you charge Guzman on the ADW,” said Vega, “the same thing's going to happen.”

“Yep,” said Greco. “Soon as I put his fingerprints through the system along with an ADW charge, the Feds are gonna slap an ICE hold on him. Even if he's found innocent, he'll be deported on immigration violations. Which once again leaves us without a victim to testify against those punks.”

“You could file for a U visa for Guzman,” Vega suggested.

“And what's the likelihood a judge is going to grant that sort of privilege to a drunk with a knife?”

“None,” Vega agreed. “Which leaves only one option: charge Guzman with ADW and see if the DA's office can keep him locked up until
after
he testifies against Rowland and his pals.” Which meant Guzman could look forward to a lengthy stay in the county jail followed by a one-way ticket out of the country. Meanwhile, Rowland, Delaney, and Giordano would remain free on bail until their trials. Nobody but another cop could understand how tough it could be to do the right thing and still end up looking like a creep.

“That's not going to solve all my problems.” Greco took off his glasses and palmed his tired eyes. “I think these three punks might be behind the rash of hate crimes we've been seeing in town since the Shipley incident.” Greco ticked them off on his sausage-like fingers: “The fire at La Casa, the assaults in Michael Park, maybe even Reyes and your Maria Elena.”

“I don't buy Rowland and his pals for Maria's murder,” said Vega. “You said so yourself, Grec. It takes time to tie ropes around four limbs, time to weight someone down in a lake. It takes a cool head to walk away from that when it's over. That's not the work of three adrenaline-filled teenagers looking for kicks on a Saturday night.”

“That's why you need to talk to Bob Rowland, get him to convince his son to come clean.”

The room felt suddenly airless and hot. “You've got the wrong idea about our relationship,” said Vega.

“You were friends growing up, right?”

“Lotta history there.”

“History's good. History makes people say things they shouldn't.”

Vega ran his sweaty palms along the edge of the table. He didn't speak. There was nothing to say.

“Look, we've got no choice,” said Greco. “Those three teenagers are already lawyered-up tight. If Rowland doesn't get his kid to come forward, Lake Holly is going to look like it's orchestrating a cover-up. Porter will definitely go to the media with this.”

“But he agreed—”

“—Our little deal with him only applies to Morales and only for twenty-four hours,” said Greco. “You know as well as I do that once this shit storm hits, all bets are off.” Greco laid out the particulars like he was going to roll the cameras himself. “Porter's got three white teenagers, all ex-football players over six feet tall, walking out of a gang assault charge and possible involvement in a string of hate crimes up to and including murder. He's got their five-foot, two-inch immigrant victim unconscious and under arrest on what's bound to look like a trumped-up charge. You don't think every Twitter feed and blog and news outlet in the country's gonna eat this up? Porter will drive a wedge through Lake Holly that no one will ever be able to repair, not even your vixen in red.”

Vega tried to bite back the heat in his cheeks. He knew Greco saw it, which only made him more embarrassed. “Maybe the thing to do is to talk to Porter,” he suggested.

Greco offered up a vicious smile. “He's already got you on the unemployment lines, my friend. He called your boss after our meeting this evening and told him he was considering pursuing a police brutality lawsuit against you and the county. And that was
before
the Guzman situation.”

Vega felt like someone had landed a hard right when he wasn't looking. “Who told you that?”

“Your boss, Waring.”

“Captain Waring called
you?
”

Greco gave Vega a moment to let that sink in. Guzman or no Guzman, Porter was out for his blood. Vega wondered if it would have made a difference if Porter had known about his long-ago relationship with Linda. Or maybe that was the problem. Maybe on some level, he already did.

“Why did
my
boss call
you?
Why not me?”

“What? So he can hear you say you didn't hit Morales? Save that for the department lawyers if it comes to that, Vega. Waring wanted to know what I'd seen and get my opinion off the record.”

“But you couldn't see me in the woods.”

“No,” Greco agreed. “But I told him I thought you were a stand-up guy. I told him about how you could've fed Fitzgerald back his face in pieces after what he pulled the other day at the lake and you didn't.” Greco leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his belly. “And he told me about Desiree Soto.”

Desiree.
Vega hung his head. “I failed that child, Grec. She's why I moved to homicide and I'm still failing.”

“From what Waring tells me, you did everything you could to save her. You pulled her stepfather off her. You threatened to kill the son of a bitch if he touched her again. You called Child Services as soon as you could. But you were undercover. You had a multimillion-dollar narcotics deal going down and you couldn't do more without jeopardizing months of police work. How could you have known what would happen?”

It was a hollow victory. To Vega, it would always be a hollow victory. Sure, he'd stayed in character. And yeah, the sting went off without a hitch. Desiree's stepfather got twenty years for racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and assault, bargained down to eleven because he ratted out some associates. The mother got five years, bargained down to two because she turned in her own sister. But the child just disappeared. And by the time Vega found her, she'd been buried for so long, nobody could prove Vega's suspicions that she'd been beaten to death, much less who did it or when. It was too little, too late. Nobody paid for what happened to Desiree. Nobody.

“Took me six months to find her body,” Vega said softly. “
Six months,
mostly on my own time. Every little girl I looked at—on the street, in the supermarket, on a playground—I just kept thinking I'd find her. I keep thinking about Maria Elena's baby now and wondering whether we're already too late.”

“Then talk to Rowland, man. Play on his conscience, his guilt, your friendship—I don't care. But we've got to know what his son did and didn't do before Porter drags this whole town through the mud and makes us look like a bunch of crackers and mall cops who can't shoot straight.”

V
ega's cell phone rang at seven a.m. Tuesday morning. “Yeah?” He wasn't in a relationship right now. He didn't have to be nice to anyone first thing in the morning.

“Waring here. I wake you?”

Coño!
Vega pinched the sleep out of his eyes and caught himself before he cursed his boss's early intrusion out loud. Vega hadn't gotten back to his house until after midnight. He lived an entire county north of his job in a two-bedroom summer cottage he was still in the process of rendering habitable five years after his divorce. It was the only thing he could afford on a cop's salary.

“No, Captain. I'm awake.” The hoarseness of his voice gave him away. He sat up in bed and immediately felt a dull ache between his shoulder blades—a delayed reaction, he suspected, from his arrest of Rodrigo Morales in the woods yesterday. He wished he'd never met the guy.

“This situation in Lake Holly is snowballing, Vega.”

“I realize that, sir.” He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and tried to sound professional despite being dressed in nothing but a pair of undershorts. He kicked at a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, hoping for something to wrap himself in. The room was freezing, the upstairs insulation still on his “to do” list. He'd have to get that
guayabera
shirt cleaned and back to Adele soon. He didn't want to cost a fellow musician a gig for want of a shirt. “We're trying our best—”

“—Your best wouldn't have resulted in a potential lawsuit against this department.”

“No, sir.” There was no point wasting his breath defending himself. Cops were inured to claims of innocence. It was like white noise to them.

“Get a damn good—and I mean
damn
good—reason to charge that immigrant or release him ASAP. And I'll tell you now, my strong preference is that you find a damn good reason to charge him. Because if he turns into some freakin' Boy Scout, we don't have a prayer of convincing a judge you didn't rough him up.”

“Yessir, Captain.” Vega's twenty-four hours with Morales were up at six p.m. He had eleven hours to find something strong enough to convince a judge—and Porter—that Morales was guilty. He hoped like hell that he could get hold of Cindy Klein. She was his only prayer at this point. He started telling Waring about his potential lead, but the captain cut him off.

“—I didn't call for a status update. I called because I want you to put some pressure on Bob Rowland to confess.”

“Uh—I think you mean Matt Rowland, his son,” Vega suggested.

“I mean Bob Rowland.” Waring gave Vega a moment to let that sink in. “Tim Anderson at Metro-North thinks Rowland is lying about his whereabouts the night Ernesto Reyes died. He went back over the available video footage. Rowland's fire department SUV was in the vicinity of the train station at the time Reyes died, yet Rowland never responded to the engineer's nine-one-one call.”

“Greco said Rowland was responding to a call for chest pains.”

“Anderson checked the records. The chest pain call was an hour and a half earlier.”

“You think the chief of the Lake Holly Fire Department had something to do with Reyes's death?”

“More likely he's covering for his son who took his vehicle out that night,” said Waring. “But either way, we need to know. Detective Greco tells me you and Rowland go way back so I want you to handle this.”

Silence. Vega had never told Waring about his arrest at seventeen or the fallout that followed. There was a handwritten explanation somewhere in his personnel file in answer to the question:
Have you ever been arrested?
But it was not something a commanding officer was likely to look at without cause. Vega didn't want to dredge it up now, not when he was already in so much trouble.

“I think you should know,” said Vega. “Bob Rowland and I haven't seen each other in years. I doubt I have any special leverage.”

“Then find some, Vega. Today it's Rowland at the center of this shit storm. Tomorrow, Morales goes free and we've made no further progress in the case, it could be you. You get my drift?”

“Yes, Captain.”

 

There were two news vans camped out across from Rowland's Ace Hardware by the time Vega arrived. Outside the doors, there was the usual assortment of flowerpots, seed spreaders, and doormats, along with a sign:
PLEASE RESPECT OUR PRIVACY
.
People came and left the store on a regular basis, all of them white, all with bowed heads and tight lips and hands ready to wave away reporters looking for comment. Vega suspected a lot of these people probably shared some of the same sentiments about the immigrants as Matt Rowland, albeit in more law-abiding and polite terms. But they weren't about to say it on camera.

Vega sat in his black pickup truck trying to psyche himself up to confront Rowland about his troubled teenage son. A day ago, he might have been able to do this from a safe distance, smug in the knowledge that his own daughter had leapfrogged the hurdles of adolescence. But he couldn't shake the roller-coaster sensation now burbling in the pit of his stomach whenever he thought about Joy. Neither Joy nor Wendy had returned his calls this morning. If he weren't under so much pressure with this case, he'd have camped out on their doorstep. Wendy would have hated him for it, but at least he'd have some answers.

He got out of his truck and forced himself to walk into the store.

He knew every inch of the place, from the gouges in the pine-plank floor, to the shelves that always smelled like sawdust and mineral oil. He and Bobby used to park their bikes in front and buy balsa planes his dad used to sell for twenty-five cents apiece. Then they'd bike up to the old water tower and launch them off. Afterward, they'd head back to the Lake Holly Grill where they'd order ice cream and play songs on the accordion-sized jukeboxes bolted to the walls of every booth.

The Lake Holly Grill was a Starbucks now. The water tower was a cell tower. No one played with balsa planes or listened to jukeboxes anymore. Everything was Hi-def and virtual.

He felt old.

Rowland was at the back of the store when Vega walked in, helping a customer choose between two different varieties of paint. He'd put on weight since Vega had last seen him. He'd taken to shaving his already balding head. His skin looked puffy and yellowish, like old Polaroids. But he still had those long, fair lashes that reminded Vega of a newborn calf. They hadn't seen each other since his son Charlie's funeral three years ago, a mere press of the flesh that Vega was sure Rowland would barely recall. He had to go back more than twenty years to remember anything of substance between them.

Rowland kept his focus on the customer but Vega had a sense he'd already been spotted. There was no surprise in Rowland's eyes when he finally looked up. He waited until the customer was headed to the register with his gallon of paint before he spoke.

“Matt's not here, Jimmy. He's recuperating from being attacked and not offering any comment at this time.” Vega had a sense those were his lawyer's words.
Make sure you stress your son was attacked.

“I didn't come to talk to Matt. I came to talk to you.”

“I can't talk either.” Rowland turned and vanished into the stockroom. Vega followed. It was a maze of eight-foot-high rows of metal shelving stacked with dusty cardboard boxes. He and Bobby used to play assassin in here. Vega leaned a hand on the doorway and spoke to the dust motes floating under the sickly fluorescent light.

“C'mon Bobby, talk to me.”

Silence.

“This is bullshit, man. The boy who stood up to Darren Hovey with me wouldn't run away like this.”

There was a scrape of cardboard, a tinny sound of a nail skittering across the concrete floor. Rowland stepped out from the end of one of the rows of shelves. He had his arms folded across his chest. The fluorescent lights reflected off his shaved head. “That was different, Jimmy.”

“Why? Why was it different? Biggest, meanest kid in the sixth grade calls me a spic. Challenges me to a fight. You and me—we weren't even friends back then. I'd just moved here. And I'm thinking, I've gotta face that tub of lard after school by myself. Nobody's got my back. And suddenly, there you are.” Vega's eyes locked on Rowland's. There was gratitude in Vega's gaze. Always would be.

“You handled yourself pretty well as I recall,” said Rowland. “You'd have kicked his ass with or without me.”

Vega shrugged. “That's beside the point. You stood up for me, Bobby. We weren't even friends yet and you stood up. How could the son of that boy do something like this?”

Rowland grabbed a carton off a shelf and hefted it over to a scuffed Formica table where the employees took their lunches. The table sat next to a battered desk and file cabinet, the closest thing Rowland had to an office. Vega swore it was the same furniture he remembered his dad having twenty-five years ago.

“It was just a fight, Jimmy. A fight that got out of hand. That's all.” The words sounded weak and threadbare, like an old pair of jeans that used to fit but didn't any longer.

“You believe that?”

Rowland opened the carton. Inside were smaller boxes of assorted screws in various sizes, along with an inventory list. He thumbed the contents and tried to match it against the list but Vega could tell his heart wasn't in it.

“Bobby.” Vega put a hand on the box. Rowland looked at him. “What about the night Ernesto Reyes died? Was that just a fight, too?”

Rowland's eyes slid away from Vega's. And in that moment, Vega saw the truth like some slaughtered animal at their feet, all bloody entrails and feces, nothing clean or dainty about it. When it came to truth, there never was.

“You
knew,
didn't you? Goddamnit, Bobby.” Vega slapped the table. “All of it. You
knew.
”

“It wasn't . . . They didn't mean for it . . .” Rowland sank into the chair behind the desk and put his head in his hands. Vega took a seat across from him on a chrome chair with a seat patched in duct tape that he recalled from his youth. There were swivel casters on the bottom but one of the four casters only swiveled in one direction. He remembered that too.

“What about the other things that have been happening in town? The fire in the Dumpster at the community center, the beatings in Michael Park, that woman's body at the lake—”

The mention of the woman caused Rowland to shake his hands violently in front of him, like he was trying to stop a bus from running him over. “—No.
No!
Matt's no angel, Jimmy. But Jesus, you're wrong if you think he'd do something like that.”

“Then have him come in and talk to us. Have him own up to what he did.”

Rowland kicked at flecks of paint on the scuffed concrete floor. His voice was husky when he spoke. “I can't destroy my only surviving son.”

“But that's just it, man. You
are
destroying him. Everybody's got to be able to look themselves in the mirror. Down the road, will you be able to? Will Matt?”

“I can only deal with the present.”

“And how did that work for you back in high school?” Rowland glared at Vega. “Getting some pleasure out of this, aren't you?”

“None,” Vega answered honestly.

“I messed up bad for a while with drugs and drinking,” said Rowland. “I never meant for you to get caught up in that and I'm sorry. But I'm not the reason you lost Linda even though you'll always blame me. She was about to break it off anyway. And if you didn't realize that, then you were lying to yourself.”

“You didn't know her like I did.”

“Believe me, Jimmy, I did.” Rowland held his gaze. “Before you, in fact.”

Something snapped inside of Vega. A vestigial bone he didn't know he'd had until he felt the splintered pieces probing the soft casing of his heart. “You sorry son of a bitch.”

“You're right. I was.” Rowland smiled sadly. “If it makes you feel any better, I think she wished she'd lost it to you.”

“It doesn't matter anymore.” He tried to make himself believe that but he felt like he'd been carrying around a box of precious china only to discover there was nothing left but broken shards. “What's done is done. But Matt? You've got a chance to make that situation right, Bobby. Set both your hearts at ease.”

“You think, huh?” Rowland fingered a framed photograph on his desk. A long-ago snapshot of him and his two sons before cancer snatched Charlie and hate snatched Matt. The boys were in the limbs of an apple tree. Vega could read something on Rowland's face in the picture, the way he hovered at the trunk while the boys found their footing, the forward thrust in his stance as if he could shoot out at any moment and catch them if they fell. In the end, he hadn't been able to catch either one.

“You've never lost a child, Jimmy. You have no idea what that does to you. You'd do anything after that to protect the ones you have left. Believe me, in my shoes, you'd do the same thing.”

“I couldn't square it with my conscience.”

“You'd be surprised what you can do when you have to.” Rowland rose. “I have work to do. Let's just remember the friendship as it used to be, huh?”