Land of Careful Shadows (26 page)

“No. I didn't. We talked back and forth. She came to see me. She wanted to see Olivia but I said no. It would be too confusing for her. I offered Maria money. She got offended and left and I didn't hear from her after that. I didn't know what had happened until that cop, Vega, showed me her photograph. The police will charge me with obstruction of justice for withholding information in a criminal investigation. Depending on the judge, I'll probably do some jail time and maybe get disbarred. But Olivia will have Linda and Linda will have Olivia. Nothing will ever change that.”

“Then why did you send them away?”

“Because the cops will try to separate Olivia from Linda until the paperwork gets sorted out. Maybe put her in foster care, I don't know. This way, by the time the cops find them, they'll see there's nothing anyone can do. She's ours and she'll stay ours.”

“What about when Olivia gets older and starts asking a lot of questions or wants to search for her birth mother? How's she going to feel when she learns the truth?”

“Who says she has to know? You think all these Chinese adopted kids know where they come from? You think a few of them aren't better off
not
knowing? The truth's overrated, Adele. You're a lawyer. You should know that.”

Adele's voice trembled. She couldn't remember ever being so angry. “This is different, Scott. Olivia had a mother who loved her. She had a name. A history. That's all a poor person has—their history. And you stole it.”

“Correction: I rewrote it. Luz Maria Santos had a past. Olivia Porter has a
future.
”

Adele heard a squeal of car tires turning onto Porter's road. The vehicle was traveling fast in their direction, slicing the air with an urgency that was hard to miss.

“I stood the cops up too this evening,” said Porter. “I had a feeling they wouldn't take it well.” He tried for a light touch but his voice came off as shaky. He pushed himself to his feet. “For what it's worth, I never meant to hurt anybody. I didn't expect it to come to this.”

“This will close down the community center,” said Adele. Red and blue flashers slit open the darkness, aborting any sense of normalcy left between them. Adele's heart beat faster as if she were the one getting arrested.

“Consider my resignation, effective immediately.”

“A lot of good that will do.”

“Adele.” Porter gave up any show of bravado and kept his eyes on the driveway. They could hear the police cruiser making its way up the hill, jewel-colored lights bouncing off tree trunks like in a pinball game. Porter looked scared, dismantled, as if some piece of him were already missing. He kept his arms plastered to his sides. He knew enough about the police to make sure he made no sudden moves. “La Casa was never about me or the other board members. It was always about you. You can keep that place alive. I know you can.”

Adele faced the cruiser's headlamps and shielded her eyes from their brightness. She felt as Maria Elena must have felt on the night she walked along Lake Holly Road, a whole world of hurt, anger, and frustration on her shoulders. She must have noted the glare as the car barreled toward her or perhaps lit her up from behind, the push of displaced air that heralded the onslaught. There had to be a fraction of a second before impact when life cruelly presented its irony: she was about to die two thousand miles from home in search of a daughter who was less than a mile away—a daughter who would never know who she was.

“L
ook, Scott,” Vega said, straddling a chair backward. “We've put an AMBER Alert out on Olivia. You have to know we're going to find her and Linda.” He and Greco were in the same interrogation room with Porter that Morales had sat in forty-eight hours ago. Only Porter was no Morales. He'd spent his whole career pleading with clients not to open their mouths to the police without a lawyer present. He spoke off-handedly only once to Vega and Greco and that was to deny he'd killed Maria.

“All you can charge me with—all you'll
ever
be able to charge me with—is obstruction of justice.”

It pained Vega and Greco to admit for the moment that he was right. They would have preferred to hold off making any sort of arrest until they could have built up a murder case against him. But when Porter stood them up this evening, they were forced to arrest him on a lesser charge rather than run the risk that he and his family might flee. Still, Vega wasn't willing to back off just yet.

“You had motive up the ying-yang, Scott. You were the last person to speak to Maria. She died near your house.”

“Yeah? Well, whatever you think you've got in the way of evidence, it's not going to match up to me. I know you're gonna try hard—you especially, Vega.” Porter pointed a finger at him. “You'd love to see me take the hit for this, wouldn't you?”

Vega saw Greco frowning at him. He pushed himself off the back of the chair and said nothing.

“You think I don't know?” Porter glared at him. “About you and my wife?”

“That was in high school, Scott. Not now. She and I never—”

“—I see the way you look at her. I'm not blind, Vega. You want me? Get me. But if you care about Linda the way you seem to, leave her alone.”

Vega and Greco were hoping their subpoenas would produce a paper trail of forgery and deceit. But as far as the state of Iowa was concerned, Olivia's adoption was textbook legal. Her unsealed adoption records correctly identified her as Luz Maria Santos, the child of Maria Elena Santos. Scott and Linda were Luz Maria's lawfully designated foster parents before they filed for adoption. Her mother was alleged to have abandoned the child because she'd had no contact with her for over a year after her arrest. The only person who could have testified that Porter had lied or misrepresented that abandonment was Maria, and she was dead.

Porter had covered his tracks well in everything. Vega and Greco got the lab reports back from the accident investigation and they too were disappointing. The paint chips recovered at the scene could be matched to any black Acura model in a five-year production range—good news, since Porter owned a black Acura RL. The problem was, his car was in pristine condition and they had no insurance claims of any damage to his vehicle in the past six months. They still needed to check directly with auto-body repair shops, however. Porter could have paid for the repairs in cash.

An assistant district attorney showed up at Lake Holly town court and Porter was arraigned on obstruction of justice. He agreed to surrender his passport in exchange for being released on bail. The alerts were out for Linda and Olivia. There was little more either of the detectives could do this evening. They'd get a fresh start in the morning.

Vega walked out to his pickup in the parking lot. It was past eleven p.m.—too late to call Wendy and Joy and try to work things out. His mind was drifting, asking questions that had no answers, a habit he had when he was exhausted. He imagined what would have happened if Maria had lived. Would she have gone to court to get custody of Olivia and take her back to Guatemala? Was that even desirable anymore? Olivia was an upper-middle-class American girl now. English was her primary language. Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber were her cultural references. She texted. She tweeted. She wouldn't know how to survive in a world where iPads, iPhones, and Instagram didn't exist, not to mention indoor plumbing, higher education, and twenty-first-century medical care. Scott Porter had done a terrible thing, but there was no way now to undo it—not without traumatizing that girl for the rest of her life. The mold was set. The cement had hardened. Olivia Porter was not Maria's any longer.

Sometimes when Vega looked at Joy, he felt a little bit of that same sense of loss. He could locate parts of himself in his daughter: her talent for math, her fiery temper, the way her skin bronzed easily in the sun. But the culture that had spawned him was as foreign to her as a Spanish-language soap opera.

Maybe it was necessary, this shedding of the old ways with each generation. He had abandoned so much of what defined his mother: her religious faith, her kinship ties, her attachment to their old neighborhood in the Bronx. But lately, he'd begun to wonder if he'd abandoned too much. He felt like there was a box inside of him that had been locked away for so long, he'd forgotten where he'd put the key. There were things he treasured in that box: the sultry music of his childhood, the playfulness and sensuality of his culture. He longed to open himself up to these things again, to find comfort and acceptance in who he was rather than in what others wanted him to be.

He backed his truck out of the parking lot and tried to clear his mind for the forty-five-minute drive north to his house. At the first stoplight, his cell phone rang.
Adele
. He pulled over to the curb and took the call.

“I'm beat, Adele—can it wait 'til tomorrow?”

“She wants to know if you've spoken to the family.”

“She called me, Jimmy.” Adele's voice was soft and husky. “She wants to know if Maria has family.”

That woke him up. “Linda called you? When?”

“A little while ago.”

“From where?”

“I don't know.”

“What's her number?” If he had the number, he could triangulate the call and bring her in.

“Can you stop being a cop for just a moment and listen? She wants to do what's best for Olivia.”

“Then she needs to turn herself in.”

“She wants to. She's just afraid the police will take Olivia away and put her into foster care.”

“I can't guarantee that won't happen.”

“But Linda's innocent, Jimmy. Scott told me she didn't know about any of this before this evening.”

“Just because Porter says it doesn't make it true.”

“I would think you of all people would care what happens to her.”

He did care. He would always care. But this wasn't ultimately about Linda. It was about Olivia. His duty was to the child. He had failed Desiree Soto. He did not want to fail Olivia Porter.

“Linda's got to hand Olivia over, Adele. I'll do my best if she's innocent. But we need the child returned safely. Give me her number and I'll call her.”

“No.”

“
No?
You're telling a police officer
no?
”

“Why are you being such a hard-ass?”

“Why are you letting Linda turn you into an accessory after the fact?”

“Because like it or not, I'm involved. 214 Pine Road. That's my address. Linda will be here in about an hour to surrender to you. Come alone. And don't you dare turn this into some sort of SWAT operation. My eight-year-old is asleep upstairs.” Adele hung up.

A
dele's house was a small, blue, wood-frame Victorian on a street of similar-looking houses set apart from each other by the width of their driveways. It was a house that looked comfortably lived in. The driveway dipped and buckled like the surface of a home-baked cake. The garage behind the house had moss growing on the roof. A basket of pink flowers hung from a well-worn porch, along with several wind chimes, one made of forks and spoons and pieces of broken pottery that appeared to have been strung together by a child.

There were no parking spots on the street so Vega parked in the driveway behind Adele's Prius and lumbered up the front steps. His boots sounded hollow on the planks. The carpenter in him wondered if the boards beneath were beginning to rot. He peeked in the living-room window to see if there was anything he should be aware of before he rang her doorbell. Lights glowed behind gauzy curtains but he saw nothing else so he rang and waited.

Adele opened the door with a broom in her hand.

“You normally clean house at this hour?”

“I'm not cleaning.” Her eyes scoured the floor. “Oh my God!” She flattened herself against the door. “He's in the living room. He's going to go upstairs if I don't stop him. My daughter's upstairs!”

“Who?” Vega pushed past her and snapped back the restraining hood on his holster. He automatically shifted his weight to a crouch. It took him a minute to place the shadows and contours of the living room. Someone had pulled the sofa away from the wall and stacked a pile of books helter-skelter on a coffee table. But otherwise, Vega saw nothing out of place, no sign of a struggle, no movement.

“Who's in the house?”

“A mouse.”

“A
mouse?
” He took his hand off his holster and straightened. “That's what all this hysteria's about? A little mouse?”

“He's a big mouse.” She squinted into her living room.

“There he goes!”

A flash of dark gray scuttled from beneath the sofa to an umbrella stand. It was the size of a child's fist. Adele ducked behind Vega like she thought it was going to attack her.

Vega laughed. “You can't be frightened of a little mouse. A fencing champ like you? You could probably impale the sucker if you wanted to.”

“Foil fencing's a sport, Jimmy. Not a form of rodent control.”

“You got a trap? I'll bait it for you.”

Something pained crossed her features. “I don't know. Maybe in the garage?” Vega wondered if this was her first year alone since the divorce. If there were any mousetraps at all, it was probably because her ex-husband had bought them when he was still her husband, when this house was part of a bigger dream and not just a remnant of its failures.

“Come on,” he said gently. “Let's go see if we can find one.”

 

They crossed the driveway to the garage and went inside. One of the bays was completely filled with lawn mowers, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, and canisters of gasoline.

“Is this a second career you've got going here? Moonlighting as a landscape contractor?”

“The equipment's not mine,” said Adele. “It belongs to Cesar Cardenas. He's trying to start his own landscaping business to help pay for Kenny's college. I let him use one bay of my garage in exchange for him and Kenny doing my yard work.”

Vega started pawing through boxes on a shelf. “Are you such a soft touch with all your clients?”

“Once an immigrant's daughter, always an immigrant's daughter, I suppose.”

In the boxes, Vega found half-empty cans of paint thinner, rusted wrenches, and old tennis balls. He wondered how much of this had been her ex's. At least he and Wendy had been able to make a fresh start after their divorce.

“Here we go.” Vega held up an unopened package of three wooden mousetraps. They'd been stashed in a box between cans of Raid. “You got peanut butter?”

“I thought you're supposed to use cheese.”

“Trust me, peanut butter gets them every time.”

In the kitchen, Adele found a jar of peanut butter. Vega began smearing it on the bait portion of one of the traps. He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. No sign of Linda.

“What time did she tell you she'd be here?”

“She said it would take her about an hour.”

Vega retracted the catch on the first trap. Then he slid it between the refrigerator and stove. “How about you call her and ask how much progress she's made?”

“She said she'll be here,” Adele told him stiffly.

Vega fumed silently. Since when did suspects dictate the terms of their surrender? When Adele went upstairs to check on her daughter, Vega walked over to a row of hooks by the back door. On one of the hooks, he found Adele's shoulder bag and located her cell phone. The last call she'd received was at ten fifty-five this evening.
Caller unknown
read the display.
Linda?
There were no other calls after six-thirty p.m. He copied down the number and tossed the bag back on the hook. Then he walked out to the driveway, called Greco, and gave him the cell number to see if he could triangulate the call. When he walked back in, Adele was holding her bag open and glaring at him. He must have forgotten to do up the zipper. He probably didn't hang up the bag exactly the same way, either. Women were such sticklers for details.

“Did you just get Linda's number off my cell?”

“C'mon, Adele. It's not like I stole anything.”

“Only my trust.”

He walked over to the counter and began baiting the second trap. He could feel her eyes burning a hole in his back.

“I'm not the bad guy here.” But all of a sudden, he wasn't so sure. It had never occurred to Vega until that moment how much of her life she'd invested in La Casa. It had probably cost her everything: a high-paying career, her personal life, most likely, her marriage. And tonight, it was all in ruins.

He began to set the spring on the second trap. “Look, it's gonna be okay—”

He lifted his hand too quickly.
Snap!
The spring closed on the tip of his left middle finger. Vega flung the trap to the floor and tore through a stream of Spanish invectives. The noise must have scared the mouse because a flash of dark fur suddenly darted across the vinyl tiles.

Adele yelped and stepped back against Vega. Instinctively, he wrapped his good hand around her.

“It's okay,” he murmured. “You're gonna be okay.”

They stayed that way, neither relinquishing the moment. Then she turned to him and reached for his hurt hand. A purple welt was already beginning to form across the nail bed.

“Serves me right, huh?” asked Vega.

“I didn't say that.”

“But you thought it.”

“Maybe a little.”

Her mascara had smeared, giving her eyes a smoky look. Vega could see the glassy sheen in them, the uncertainty that this night had brought her. He lifted her chin and looked at her squarely. She was so small in stocking feet. Almost like a child.

“Listen to me, Adele. The center isn't going to go under. Not if you don't let it. I saw those people the other night, how much they need you. They believe in you.” He swallowed. “
I
believe in you.”

He brought his lips down on hers. He'd been fantasizing about the moment so much that the mere press of her flesh, the warm exhale of her breath, brought goose bumps to his skin. She leaned in to welcome him, her fingernails running in tandem down his back. He forgot about the pain in his finger and allowed his hands to drift down the seams of her jeans, to feel the way they hugged her curves like a second skin. She stilled a nervousness inside of him, a note that had been reverberating off-pitch for far too long. It was like they were back on that dance floor again. Only now the music came from within and they didn't need any accompaniment at all.

He flicked off the kitchen light. The room plunged into darkness with only the blue glow of numbers on the stove to guide them.

“Come.” She took his hand, her fingertips soft as rose petals, and led him to the living room. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet. Upstairs he could hear the heartbeat drip of a water faucet and the ticking of a clock.

His eyes gradually adjusted to the hint of streetlight seeping in through the gauzy curtains. Adele lit a candle on the fireplace mantel. It flickered across her features. She was such a beautiful woman, her body a generous roadmap of peaks and valleys all waiting to be explored. Vega pulled her close and snaked an arm around her backside. He gently untucked her shirt from her jeans. His body thrummed with anticipation as he brushed her silky black hair away from her neck and ran his lips down its contours. Her muscles quickened beneath the firm assurance of his fingertips. It was crazy, this hunger that had come over both of them. Linda could be at the front door at any moment. Adele's daughter was upstairs. But all that did was make everything feel more urgent.

And then a snap came from the kitchen, sharp as a firecracker. Adele jumped out of his embrace.

“Oh my God.”

Vega wasn't sure if the exclamation referred to the mouse or to him. He dropped his hands and stepped back. He felt light-headed and dizzy, certain that if Adele blew out the candle this minute, he'd see white arcs of current flowing between their bodies. They stared at each other for a long moment, neither saying anything. Finally, Vega spoke.

“Maybe I should get rid of the mouse.” His voice felt foreign and stilted, like he was trying out a new language. He walked into the kitchen and switched on the light. Its brightness jarred his senses.

The mouse was spread across the snapped trap, its tail dangling over the end like some rubber toy. Adele walked up behind him. She covered her eyes when he fished the trap from its hiding spot.

“Oh, the poor thing.”

“Now you're feeling sorry for it?”

“I can't help it. I feel bad.”

“That's a liberal for you.” Vega rolled his eyes. “You want someone else to make the nasty stuff disappear, then you act all guilt-ridden when it's accomplished.”

“Don't turn a mouse into politics, Jimmy.” They were back on solid ground again. It felt reassuring.

It felt disappointing.

“Do you have a garbage bag?” he asked her.

“Can't you just—I don't know—bury it? I don't want it in my garbage for a whole week. It will freak me out.”

He let out a long, slow exhale. “I'll get one of Cesar's shovels from the garage.”

 

Vega dug a shallow grave right behind the garage, thankful to have a physical outlet for his energies. When he was done, he covered the spot with a smooth fieldstone just in case Adele wanted to point out the grave to Sophia. Joy had always been sentimental about animals that way. Vega had buried more than a few squirrels in his time.

He returned Cesar's shovel to the garage. He was trying to rehang it on its proper hook when he accidentally hit a cardboard carton on the shelf above. The carton tumbled to the floor. Out spilled a rusty penknife and a plastic bag full of muddy rags and pieces of nylon landscaping rope. Vega started tossing the contents back into the carton. Then he noticed a faint green line running through the center of the rope.

He opened the plastic bag and examined the contents more closely. There was something hasty and haphazard about this stuff that didn't match the rest of Cesar Cardenas's neat and orderly arrangement of equipment. The way the rope had been cut into fraying bits and pieces, the way the blade of the penknife had been allowed to develop rust, the balled-up rags caked with mud. No. On closer inspection, they weren't rags at all. They were a T-shirt and jeans. And the mud—it wasn't just mud. Vega could distinguish that reddish-brown tinge from mud.

Something like distant thunder began a low, steady rumble through his chest cavity. Vega shoved the clothes and rope back into the plastic bag and returned the carton to the shelf as if simply restoring things to their original place could halt the unease he was feeling. None of the items was out of the ordinary. Mud, grease, blood—it came with the territory whenever you worked around tools. Vega's unease came, not from the items themselves, but from the careless way they'd been stashed. Which made Vega wonder: Did these things belong to Cesar? They couldn't be Adele's since she seemed to have no idea what she did and didn't have in here.

That left only one other person who could have put those things in that box. His father probably wouldn't have noticed. Neither would Adele.

Vega's cell phone rang, interrupting his thoughts. Greco.

“We found them.”

“Linda and Olivia?”

“Yeah.”

Vega heard the sound of a siren in the background. “Something wrong?”

“They're hurt, man. I'm out on Route 170 now. Bobby Rowland's kid was driving the other way and slammed into their minivan.”

Dios mío
. “How bad is it?”

A pause. Vega felt his heart drop to his shoes.

“I think you'd better get over here right away.”