Land of Careful Shadows (27 page)

T
here are almost no straight roads in the counties north of New York City. Everything curves and kinks, wandering beside streambeds, cutting paths between hills that blot out the sun too early in winter. Even the highways look like they were drawn onto the landscape by a cartographer with Tourette's. It doesn't take much to become an accident statistic here. A patch of slick pavement, a deer in the headlights, a truck in low gear on a bend and it's over.

Vega didn't handle accidents anymore. Before he became a detective, however, he'd probably done hundreds. They always caught him by surprise. The sudden alteration of the landscape. The stark before and after of the lives involved. They weren't like homicides, which usually had some buildup to them, or other sorts of accidents where an ounce of common sense might have made all the difference. No. Car accidents had the hand of God about them. The way they shredded any sense of power or control people thought they exerted over their lives.

The local police had blocked off part of Route 170 to civilian traffic. Vega saw the flares and emergency lights first, the way they made a spectacle of the darkness. At the checkpoint, he powered down his window and flashed his badge. Beyond, he could see the smashed remains of car carcasses sandwiched between police cruisers and fire trucks. The ambulances were gone but not the van from the medical examiner's office. Vega's chest tightened. Somebody was dead. He tried to get his emotions under control enough to ask the cop at the checkpoint who.

“The nineteen-year-old driver of the red Mazda hatchback.”

“Bobby Rowland's son? Matt?”

“Yeah,” said the cop, nodding grimly. “He was DOA by the time the first unit arrived.” Vega felt the breath leave his lungs. Rowland had already lost one son. It seemed inconceivable he'd lose the other.

Vega drove slowly past the accident and parked farther east before heading back on foot. Torn metal and pebbled glass littered the asphalt. Rowland was sitting in his fire department SUV with Greco, who was taking down his statement. Every part of Rowland seemed to sag from the weight of what was happening. His shoulders melted into his chest. His jowls hung slack. His head looked too heavy for his neck. Every now and then, he would let it rest on the steering wheel of his car. His body would start to quake and Greco would wordlessly lay a patient hand on his back until he could straighten and begin again. Vega wanted to go over to his old friend but he knew this wasn't a condolence call. It was a police investigation. The accident was on a local road, not a highway. He had no jurisdiction here.

He made sure to steer clear of the officers taking measurements and photographs at the scene, of the volunteer firefighters with their grim faces. Vega could see that the red Mazda hatchback that Matt Rowland had been driving had taken the brunt of the collision. It was smaller and lighter than the minivan Linda had been driving and it looked as if Linda had had the quick instincts to turn away from the oncoming car and perhaps spare Olivia the worst of the crash. Matt may have been too impaired to react.

Vega studied the car now. The front end had folded like a child's paper fan. The back windshield was shattered and bloody. Vega suspected Matt hadn't been wearing a seatbelt. The seat had been pushed all the way back to make room for the teenager's large frame but the belt was still in the retracted position. The car's white airbag hung limp and deflated over the steering wheel like someone's just-washed underwear.

Vega stared at the seat, at the way it had been pushed all the way back. Of course it would be. Matt Rowland was a big guy like his father. Well over six feet. Well over two hundred pounds. Every time Joy used to borrow Vega's black Acura TSX, she pushed the seat close to the steering wheel to accommodate her tiny size. And every time Vega reclaimed it, he'd had to step into it like he was squeezing himself into a child's preschool chair and adjust it so he could exhale.

Something shrill and atonal rose above the white noise in Vega's brain. He felt edgy all of a sudden thinking about his totaled car in that auto-body lot. He'd only concentrated on the crumpled fenders and crazed glass when he saw it. He'd only felt the gratitude of knowing his daughter had not been inside when the damage occurred. It hadn't even occurred to him to look at the position of the driver's seat until Tim Anderson mentioned it. But now he understood.

The tow truck driver hadn't pushed the seat back.

The accident hadn't pushed the seat back.

Someone tall had done it before he drove the car, the car that Joy was supposed to be driving herself that Sunday night in March on her way back from studying with friends. Sunday night, March eighth, eleven-thirty p.m. was the time Joy totaled Vega's black Acura TSX on the Metro-North railroad tracks. Sunday night, March eighth, eight-twelve p.m. was the last call from Maria Santos's cell phone.

All this time, Vega had been racking his brains to figure out why someone would turn a car accident into something far worse. And now he understood. Only two scared teenagers could make such a stupid, reckless, life-altering decision. Bobby Rowland wasn't the only parent who could be blindsided by a child.

“Toughest accident I've been to in a long time,” said Greco, coming up behind Vega. “The autopsy will have to confirm it, but it's likely Matt Rowland was DWI. Too bad our guys didn't catch him before this happened.”

“Yeah.” Vega could barely choke out the word. He felt like someone had stuffed a rag down his throat. He was suffocating on the inside, drowning in his own world of hurt and denial. “Any news from the hospital?” he managed to ask.

“One of our guys notified Porter,” said Greco. “He's at the hospital now. Olivia's doing well. Just a few scrapes. As for Linda? No news is good news at this point.” Greco put a hand on Vega's shoulder. He'd assumed the look of despair on Vega's face was over Linda.

“She could still pull through, man. I've seen it happen. One minute, you're thinking, that's it, it's over. And a couple of weeks later, they're up and about like nothing happened.”

Vega wasn't sure whether Greco believed that or wanted to believe that. The longer he'd worked with the man, the more Vega had come to realize that Greco was like a lot of cops. He really did have that fairy-tale notion of good and evil. Sometimes, there is no good and evil. Sometimes, there are just moments when a millisecond of indiscretion meets up with a micrometer of misjudgment.

Joy could have called him when it happened. Okay, he was at work that night. But she could have gotten through. Why the hell hadn't she called him?

It was entirely possible no one else would ever put the pieces together. His Acura had long since been turned into scrap metal. Even if the car had survived, the damage after the train collision was so extensive; there'd be no way to separate it from the damage to the car from the fatal hit-and-run. There was likely to be DNA on that carton of rope and clothing in Adele's garage. But that box could sit there for years and no one would think to look inside. There were no eyewitnesses. Forensics had only one fingerprint on that hate letter that didn't show up in any database and probably never would so long as Joy and Kenny never got arrested. The car paint would prove that Maria had been hit by a black Acura similar to Vega's. But it wouldn't conclusively prove that that was the car that hit her.

Vega could choose to say nothing. It would be so easy to go that route, to let Kenny and Joy move on with their lives. They both still had a chance to have bright futures ahead of them. Nothing could bring Maria back. Joy was already racked by nightmares and guilt. Kenny too, from what Vega had observed and what Cardenas had said at the
quinceañera.
Forcing them to come forward might push his daughter over the edge entirely. She would hate him forever. So would Wendy. So would Adele who was so desperately pulling for Kenny and his family.

One of the volunteer firefighters agreed to drive Bobby Rowland and his SUV home. They didn't want him on the roads tonight. They didn't want him to have to deliver this news to his wife alone. Vega and Greco watched him get into the passenger's seat of his SUV. The big man wiped an arm across his face and fought back tears.

“I feel bad for Bobby,” Greco said softly. “I'd never say it to him, but Jesus, what did he expect? He let Matt go on too long that way. You can't cover for your kids like that. They gotta take responsibility for their actions. Didn't he understand that it was only going to get worse?”

Vega felt like his thoughts were being ripped out of his head and thrown under a white-hot spotlight. He turned on Greco. “Who the fuck made you judge and jury?”

“Relax, man. I'm just saying—”

“—Do you have any idea what sort of pain he had to be in? You know how hard a decision like that is? He loved his kid, Grec. You're a cop. You're a father. You know what jail does to people. It kills their souls. How many people you ever met were better after they went in? Do you really think that was gonna save his boy?”

“Would've saved him tonight and two innocents besides,” said Greco. “Would've let him know there's right and wrong and what's expected of him.”

“Oh, and doing right automatically gets you brownie points in this world. C'mon man. Look around. Matt Rowland's dead. But his two pals, Delaney and Giordano, are probably gonna walk for Guzman's beating and the other crimes as well now that he's gone. Porter's gonna get away with stealing Maria's baby because he legally covered his tracks. Where's the life-is-fair clause in any of that?”

“I didn't say life is fair, Vega. I said there's right and wrong. Just because it doesn't work perfectly doesn't make it any less true.”

“You can't really believe that.”

Greco put a hand on Vega's shoulder and gave him a long, searching look before he spoke. “Yes, I do,” he said softly. “That's why I became a cop. Look inside, man. You do, too.”

T
he high school was spread out long and low, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be assembled. The design had won awards when it was built in 1957, but now, it had a dated feel with its oddly angled windows and chrome supports that looked vaguely space-age to Vega. A convoy of yellow school buses idled out front. Vega waited with them, drinking in the diesel fumes from their engines, craning his neck for Joy. He felt like a convict being sent upstate, watching from the mesh windows of a corrections van as the free world floated by. Nothing would ever feel the same again.

Teenagers pushed out of the front doors, their chatter like birdsong to the basso profundo of the buses. They all looked so young. He couldn't believe he'd ever been their age. There were girls on cell phones, walking in pairs and groups, Siamese-attached as always, backpacks slung over their shoulders. There were boys in track shorts and T-shirts, their hair uncombed, their sneakers so big they looked like clown shoes.

He sat in his pickup and waited. He'd texted Joy an hour earlier and asked her to meet him after school.
I KNOW ABOUT MAR 8,
he wrote.
WE NEED TO TALK.

OK. IM SORRY DAD
she'd texted back.

Never had four words had to cover so much ground.

He'd spent the last fourteen sleepless hours tracking down every lead and every piece of evidence he could find, hoping to locate something to convince himself that Kenny and Joy weren't behind Maria's death. He visited Tim Anderson at Metro-North and pored over the evidence photos and police report of Joy's car accident. He reread the report from his own agency reconstructing the accident that killed Maria. He scanned the forensics findings on the paint chips and the medical examiner's conclusions from Maria's autopsy. Everything pointed to Kenny and Joy, right down to Maria's rib fractures that Dr. Gupta had originally said might have come from a bad attempt at CPR. Kenny and Joy would have tried to save Maria's life—Vega was sure of it. They weren't cold-blooded killers. They were kids who had made a tragic mistake.

He told no one what he was doing. Not Greco, who was phoning him nearly hourly with updates on Linda's and Olivia's improving conditions. Not Captain Waring, who kept pressuring Vega to track down more evidence on Porter. Not even Wendy. If he told, there was no going back. And he was scared, more scared than he'd ever been in his life. Maria had been dead a month. The case was public and high profile. Hell, with Matt Rowland dead, Giordano and Delaney had a much better chance of walking for all the shit they'd pulled than Joy and Kenny did. He could not count on leniency here.

The school buses were loaded up and heading out. A few stragglers wandered the sidewalk, scanning their text messages or rolling back and forth on their skateboards. Joy was nowhere in sight. She'd stood him up. A part of him was no longer surprised.

Such simple statements, so hard to come to grips with. There was so much failure in those words, so much feeling that he was to blame. He was on unfamiliar turf, a tourist in a country he'd never expected to visit. He wasn't prepared. How do you prepare for such a thing? He felt like someone had switched time zones on him. He was queasy. His reflexes felt sluggish. A dull headache took up residence in the back of his head. This girl he was supposed to meet today wasn't the Joy he knew, not the girl who used to cry over dead squirrels and goldfishes.

His phone rang.

“Daddy?” Her voice sounded husky and choked. She rarely called him Daddy anymore.

“Hey.” He tried for a light tone but the words wouldn't flow. “I'm in the school parking lot. Where are you?”

“I cut class and left early.”

A month ago, such a transgression would have been unthinkable. Now, Vega couldn't even process it with all the other things on his mind. “We need to talk.”

Silence. Then a wave of confession, her words all jumbled together: “It was an accident, Daddy, I swear. We never meant it to happen. It's all my fault. Kenny didn't want to do any of it. I talked him into it. I came up with the idea. Everything—”

“—Joy.” Vega cut her off. He couldn't do this over a phone. Besides, she was panicking. Panicky people say and do stupid things. Cops bank on that. Fathers don't. “We'll assign blame another time. Right now, you need to tell me where you are.”

Her voice got small and tight, like she was trying to shoehorn it into a much younger child's body. “Please don't be angry with me.”

“I'm not angry.” Anger would have been easy. This was—he didn't know except to say that when people talk about a broken heart, he understood now that it wasn't a metaphor. There really was such a pain in the chest. His heart felt like it had been cleaved in two. “Are you home?”

“I can't go home anymore.”

“Don't talk nonsense. Are you with Kenny?”

“No.” That eerie silence again. Wherever she was, it was outdoors and not near any major roads or parking lots. He heard the caw of a crow and little else except a slight breathlessness on her end. Wherever she was, she was on the move and it was requiring all her energy. Then she seemed to stop in her tracks. She was panting.

“It's amazing up here. Everything feels so far away.”

“Where are you?” He willed himself to stay calm but already he felt the warning sirens going off in his body. They had the sharpness of microphone feedback.

“She must have mattered very much to you,” said Joy.

“Who? Your mother?”

“No. When you were seventeen and you just—you closed your eyes and did it. I know what you were feeling, Dad—like no one could ever matter as much again.”

Puñeta, coño! She's up on Bud Point! She's going to jump!
He could feel the adrenaline punch in every one of those words. A cold sweat broke across his skin. His breathing turned rapid and shallow. Better that he had not survived that jump at all than to endure this. He had used up the good luck for both of them. There would be no more.

“No,
Chispita!
Please, stay where you are. I'll come get you. We can work this out—”

“—I love you, Daddy. Please tell everyone I'm sorry.” The disconnect felt like a gunshot. Vega redialed frantically, like some radio-show contestant hoping to be caller number twenty-five. The phone went straight to her voice mail.

He fumbled for his light bar and threw it on the dashboard. Red and blue lights pulsed along the windshield of his truck as he gunned his engine out of the parking lot. He cursed his stupidity for having texted her earlier today. He should have waited until she got home from school and confronted her in person. What would an hour have cost anyone? His own need for answers had pushed her over the edge.

He thought about calling Greco for backup or Wendy to try to intervene. But he dismissed both ideas at once. Joy may have already jumped. He did not want her mother seeing that, nor did he want his grief on display for the entire Lake Holly PD. If she hadn't yet jumped, then the carnival that would surely follow would embarrass them both and force the situation out of his hands. No, this was something he needed to do alone.

He turned onto Lake Holly Road and accelerated into the bends, whipping past cars on the narrow stretch of roadway. He was close enough to feel the stream of air as he passed. Horns blared. Drivers gestured. Vega barely noticed. He felt like there was a fist wrapped around his heart, a rubber band cinching his lungs. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly his fingers tingled with pins and needles.

He was not a praying man but he prayed now. He cut deals with God like he was back undercover, setting up a score. He'd be a more attentive father. He'd tone down his temper. He'd trade twenty years of his life. No, thirty.
Hell, take me now.

He took the turns too fast, felt the pull of his tires as they kept a bare grip on the road. Up ahead, he saw the reservoir's small gravel parking lot and swerved in. Yellow crime-scene tape still fluttered from several tree trunks. There were no other cars in the lot. If Joy was here, she must have walked—left school early and just
walked.
He cut the engine and tried her phone again. There was no reply.

Already, the sun was taking leave of the woods as Vega hiked the muddy footpath to the lake. He sensed the approach of night in the shadows beneath moss-covered rocks and decaying limbs. The air was growing colder, wetter. He could feel the dampness like a dishrag in his lungs as he tried to catch his breath. The forecast called for rain this evening.

“Joy!” He called hoarsely through the crosshatch of bare limbs. There was no answer, no movement save for a solitary red-tailed hawk that hovered like a kite overhead.

He had a stitch in his side by the time he reached the shore. His eyes skimmed the water, looking and not wanting to look at the same time. The lake still held the promise of late afternoon, its surface striated with ribbons of shadow and light. Three ducks rode the ribbons, leaving an arc of incandescent ripples in their wake. He squinted up the dark granite face of Bud Point. Atop was a cluster of overgrown barberry bushes, their sinewy brown branches as tangled as fishing lure this time of year. Stuffed in the middle was something fuzzy. Something the color of Pepto-Bismol.

It didn't move.

Vega's limbs went slack. He forgot how to swallow. He could think of only one reason why Joy's jacket would be stuffed in those bushes: because she didn't need it anymore, no matter how cold it got.

His leg muscles registered the loss first. They gave out completely. He sank to his knees in the gritty mud along the bank. His lungs forgot how to take in air. He could only gulp at the humidness like a drowning man.

“Joy!” he wailed hoarsely, his daughter's name a mockery of his pain. He couldn't imagine ever getting up again.

Then the jacket moved.

“Dad?”

Vega squinted at the granite face, certain he was hallucinating. A thumb-sized figure emerged from the bushes and stepped closer to the edge of the cliff, the jacket wrapped tightly around her, her arms hugging herself against the cold. The waning sun lit her up in profile, giving her baby face more shade and shadow than he was used to. It was as if she had aged ten years on that cliff. Maybe she had. Maybe they both had.

Vega pushed himself to his feet and tried to brush the mud from his hands and pants. He wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes and fought to collect himself.

“Come down
, Chispita.
” His voice sounded unfamiliar, even to his own ears, like a car that hadn't been started in awhile
.

Joy took a small step forward.

“No!” he shouted. “For God's sake, no! I just want to talk to you.”

“There's nothing to talk about.”

“There's
everything
to talk about.”

“I e-mailed you a letter, Dad. It's all there. My confession. Everything.”

“I didn't get the e-mail.”

“I just sent it.”

Vega fumbled with his phone. His hands were shaking. The new e-mail came up on his screen. He gambled instead on a lie. “I didn't get it, Joy. Let me come up. Maybe I'll get it in a few minutes.” Now was his only chance. Now, while she was undecided. To reach her, he would have to circle the edge of the lake and climb up to the point. He would have to lose visual contact with her. Anything could happen. He needed a distraction.

“I want you to do me a favor, Joy, okay? One favor?” he called out, willing his voice to sound firm and confident. He'd had only the most rudimentary training as a hostage negotiator. But he knew one basic: keep a person talking. If you can keep communication going, you've got a chance.

“You always sang that Pink song really well—you know the one? ‘Perfect'?” he asked. “Can you sing it to me now?” She had a lovely voice, a breathy alto just like Pink's.

“I can't.”

“Yes, you can. Come on. Curse words and everything. I don't care.” He began the song himself: “Took a wrong turn, once or twice—” He was a good singer normally, but his throat had constricted from panic and adrenaline. He sounded like a saw cutting wood.

And then he heard her, those raw, earthy notes that formed little more than a tiny vibrato in her chest. But it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard. She was singing. She was alive—and she would stay that way as long as the notes kept pushing out of her.

He doubled his step, picking his way over tree limbs and pushing past branches that snapped like broken bones in his wake. He climbed toward her voice. It's what kept his legs moving when he thought they'd give out, when the rocks got too slippery or cut up his hands until the knuckles began to bleed.

The light was fading. He hadn't climbed Bud Point since he was seventeen, a lifetime ago. He'd forgotten how steep it was, how dense the vegetation was, even now in early spring. He felt hemmed in and claustrophobic, surrounded by thick, remorseless timber that walled him off and left him directionless, like a small child in a sea of legs. He could barely hear Joy's voice for the hard pulls of breath he was taking.

And then the singing stopped.

“Joy?” He was just below the summit. He could hear nothing but the distant backwash of cars speeding along Lake Holly Road and the vague yawn of a jet engine coursing through the sky. He hoisted himself up the final rock and pushed past a thicket of barberry bushes, thorns digging into his bloody hands. That's when he saw her, shivering in that ridiculously gaudy pink jacket like some hip-hop diva.