A Blossom of Bright Light (17 page)

She expected the case to take at least an hour. This was her father's life they were talking about.
Their
lives. But it was over in twenty minutes. Mr. Katz came to the door. He searched for their faces in the crowd, but when he located them, he didn't meet Luna's gaze. And she knew. She thought she was prepared for this moment, but it hit her like a shot to the jaw.

“Papi can go now?” Dulce asked Mr. Katz hopefully. Her little hand squeezed Luna's so tight, Luna's fingers were starting to lose circulation.

“I'm sorry,” said Mr. Katz. “They're allowing you five minutes in the courtroom to say good-bye.”

Dulce began to wail. The noise came from so deep inside of her, she sounded like a flock of seagulls rather than a seven-year-old girl. Mateo, who was normally so stoic, sat on the floor and began rocking himself back and forth. Mr. Katz looked scared and shaken. He searched for Doña Esme, who was behind them now.

“I did everything I could do!” he shouted. He was angry, though Luna didn't know whom he was angry with.

“I'm sure you did,” Doña Esme said calmly. “And Manuel is most grateful. Do I need to go inside and sign the paperwork?”

“Yes. Thank you. I'll be in touch.” And then, just like that, he left. Without even a good-bye.

Doña Esme managed to get Mateo off the floor and stop Dulce from crying long enough to lead them inside. Papi was standing by the table where he'd been sitting before with Mr. Katz. The Spanish officer was next to him. The blond lady in the dark blue suit had already gone. Luna knew her father would be handcuffed as soon as they left, but for the moment, Papi had no restraints. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down along his windpipe. His eyes were red and watery. He held out his arms. Dulce and Mateo ran into them. Both of them were crying, and Luna tried very hard not to join in.

Papi stroked their hair. “This is not for always,” he told them in Spanish. His voice broke on
siempre
—
always
—as if the word were too difficult to even think about. “This is just for a little while. Mr. Katz told me that he and Don Charlie will fight this. If Mr. Schulman gets elected, they will find a way to bring me back. In the meantime, we will talk to each other every day, yes? On the phone. Through Skype. And you can visit. See your uncles, your grandmother. Won't that be nice?”

Papi didn't look at Luna when he said this last part. Maybe Dulce and Mateo could visit their father if they came up with the money for plane fare. But Luna couldn't. Her immigration status was in limbo. If she left the United States, she wouldn't be allowed to return.
I want to leave
, she thought
. I want to be with Papi. I don't care where I am so long as we're together.
But Luna knew this wasn't what her father wanted. She had to stay, if only to give Dulce and Mateo the lives they deserved.

Papi reached across Mateo and Dulce and pulled Luna close. She drank in the warmth of his touch in the hope that it would make her feel less alone. He brushed back her hair and whispered in her ear in Spanish: “You must be strong, Mija
,”
he said more forcefully than Luna would've expected. “If you let this stop you from getting a good education and making a good life here, everything Mami and I sacrificed will have been for nothing.
Nothing!
Do you understand?”

He cupped his hands firmly around each side of her face. His calloused palms pressed against her cheeks. His moist brown eyes looked directly into hers. “Take care of your brother and sister. Keep them on the path of God. And whatever else happens, don't let anything come between you and what you want to do in this life. I have faith in you, Luna. In you, most of all, I have faith.”

Luna couldn't speak. She didn't want to break Papi's hold on her. But already the court officer was murmuring to her father to finish his good-byes. Dulce was clinging to his waist, and it was Luna's job to pull her away. Dulce tried to bite her when she did. Her sister had never done such a thing before. Luna searched for Doña Esme to help, but she was watching them all from a safe distance. Her arms were crossed. There was something sharp-edged—almost resentful—when her gaze settled on Luna. The room was warm and stuffy, but Luna felt a chill run down her spine.

Papi believed all these things he'd asked of Luna were within her power. He had no clue that she was as much a prisoner of her circumstances as he was of his.

Chapter 21

A
dead body draws cops the same way it draws flies: First, you get one or two. Then before you know it, they're swarming and multiplying and making a general mess of things. It didn't seem to matter whether the cause was man or God, the spectacle and commotion and general stink were near enough the same.

Traffic slowed on the eastbound side of Route 170 as Vega drove past the W
ELCOME TO
W
ICKFORD
sign. Up ahead, he saw a black-and-white patrol car parked at an angle to the road, its light bar flashing, red and blue. Vega put his foot on the brake and turned up the volume on the police scanner in his pickup truck. There had been little in the way of radio communication since the original 10-47. Wickford had called for the medical examiner's van but not the crime-scene unit. If the radio traffic was correct, Zambo's death was being treated as the legal and emotional equivalent of an abandoned jalopy in need of a tow.

Route 170 wasn't the sort of road anyone would expect to discover a corpse on. It was a winding calendar-worthy stretch of two-lane dotted with horse farms, old stone walls, and sprawling white clapboard homes, some with bronze plaques that proclaimed their history dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War. In between were fields of brittle grass that trailed off into vine-covered woods. It was easy for a person to go unnoticed even just a few feet from the road. Why the cops always dumped Zambo here was anybody's guess. It was probably a punishment since there was absolutely nothing a drunk who subsisted on twenty-first-century castoffs could want from a road that hadn't changed much in three hundred years.

A uniformed patrol officer directed traffic around a set of orange cones. Vega flashed his badge and quickly maneuvered to the side of the road before the young cop had a chance to process anything beyond Vega's department and title.

He wasn't supposed to be here.

He parked his truck on the shoulder and studied the area from his rearview mirror. There was a field the color of hay cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape. It was tamped down along a rough approximation of a path that trailed off into a copse of dense green hemlocks and maples. A crumbling stone wall meandered near the path, some of its boulders loosened and scattered like a child's set of blocks. Vega saw movement through the trees. Cops were like sheep: they never wandered by themselves. Even at the entrance to the cordoned-off area, Vega counted not one, but two uniformed officers—one from Lake Holly and one from Wickford. The Lake Holly cop was guffawing. Vega caught the last stanza of a familiar children's song that the Wickford cop had supplied with new lyrics:

The two cops stopped the moment Louis Greco emerged from the woods. He had a way of walking—knees out, chest forward—that gave the impression he could knock you down without breaking stride. He shot one glance in the officers' direction and sliced a blue-gloved finger across his throat. The singing stopped immediately. He had that effect on people.

Vega hopped out of the cab as soon as Greco caught sight of his truck.

“What the
hell
do you think you're doing here, Vega? And which dipshit rookie let you in?”

“Our one freakin' witness is dead and you don't call me about it?”

“ 'Cause it's not your case anymore. Go home.”

“I would if you were doing your job. How come nobody called in my crime-scene unit?”

“Because it ain't no crime scene.” Greco peeled off his nonlatex gloves and shoved them in the pocket of his insulated jacket. “Zambo drank himself to death, plain and simple.”

“Says who? Those Boy Scouts with guns?” Vega nodded across the field to the Wickford officer who had just given his “Bingo” rendition, no doubt replete with lots of politically incorrect stanzas.

“I just looked at Zambo's body,” said Greco. “There are no knife or gunshot wounds. No bruises. No evidence of a struggle. He was a lifelong alcoholic. It was bound to happen. It just sucks that it happened now.”

“I don't believe that.”

“Because you don't want to.” Greco squinted out at the roadway and cursed under his breath. “For chrissake, at least get in my car in case the brass drives by.”

Vega followed Greco over to his unmarked Chevy. They got in and Greco pulled out a package of red licorice Twizzlers from his glove compartment. His addiction. He tore open the cellophane and offered one to Vega. Vega waved it away.

“How did you even find out about Zambo?” asked Greco between bites.

“From Mark Hammond. I called him this morning because I think maybe the same Spanish woman who delivered Dominga Flores's baby delivered Baby Mercy as well.”

“And this is based on—?”

“It's a theory.”

“Well, here's something that isn't a
theory,
” said Greco. “Joy was the midwife. Your daughter. That's what the evidence says. The afterbirth on the quilt, Joy's hoodie on the victim, your daughter's medical familiarity with pregnant women—”

“Did you talk to Dolan yet about Claudia Aguilar's grandson?” asked Vega. “He claims he knew the girl.”

“You mean Neto Forgeto?” Greco swallowed the rest of his Twizzler and licked his fingers. He never lost his appetite, not even at a crime scene. “Dolan talked to everybody at that car wash this morning. No one's seen the girl. No one knows anyone named Mia. Dolan took a DNA swab from Neto just in case there's a reason we're not seeing. Neto's dad's a landscaper in town.”

“Neto has a father?”

“Yeah. Inés's ex. His name is—get this—
Romeo
. Aptly named. He's a favorite of the soccer moms in Lake Holly. And believe me, it ain't for his green thumb.”

Vega shook his head. “My daughter didn't do anything, Grec.”

“Give us time, maybe me and Dolan will believe the same thing. But you keep messing around where you don't belong, you're gonna force our hand. Don't be a jerk. Go home. Or better yet, find Adele and do what got you in trouble in the first place.”

Something inside of Vega deflated. He stared at his hands. “She's leaving.”

“Huh? Adele?”

“She's taking a job with Schulman in D.C. if he wins the election.”

“Well, that sucks. For you, I mean,” said Greco. “For our guys, it might be cause for a little fiesta. But either way, I suppose it was bound to happen.”

“What do you mean?”

“C'mon, Vega, Adele's an Ivy League lawyer who was slumming for a while—in her career and uh . . .” Greco's voice dropped away.

“You're saying I wasn't good enough for her?”

“I'm not Dear Abby, okay? I'm just saying, you know—you're a local cop. A blue-collar working stiff. And you two—aren't exactly alike in a lotta ways.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck you very much.”

Two attendants from the medical examiner's office emerged from the woods now with a body bag on a stretcher.

“Look, I'm sorry about Adele. But I gotta go.” Greco nodded to the attendants walking the body bag to their van. “Guess we won't be having any more Virgin Mary sightings.” He put a hand on the car door and began to open it.

“Zambo didn't call her the Virgin Mary.”

“Sure he did.”

“Not this last time,” said Vega. “He told Rafael he saw the Lady of Sorrows.”

“Same thing. So?”

“Maybe this time, he really saw someone. Someone carrying a baby in those woods. Someone he associates with the Catholic church in town. And now he's dead.”

“You're reaching.” Greco hopped out of the car and walked over to the attendants. They laid the stretcher down for a moment and Greco unzipped the bag. It was a personal habit of his and one Vega respected him for. He always liked to take one last look at a corpse away from the place of death, to remind himself that the person was a person before they were a body.

Vega got out of the car and walked up behind Greco. He saw Zambo's unshaven face, the skin dark gray with underlying splotches of purple. From the smell and the skin color, it was clear Zambo had been dead a few days. Up close like this, the man lost all his cartoonish humor. He was a human being, not a punch line to a joke. His mouth was crusted in bloody vomit; his cheeks had turned concave as if he were being eaten alive from the inside. But even in death, his eyes had a depth to them that Vega never would have expected, as if beneath the booze and the squalor, there was an intelligence that had tried to survive the onslaught. Vega noted his hair. It was still dark—naturally so. Not more than a few strands of gray. He wasn't nearly as old as everyone thought.

Greco zipped up the bag and nodded to the attendants to take him away. Then he began walking across the field toward the woods. Vega called out after him.

“You find any liquor bottles back there?”

“A ton of beer cans.” Greco said over his shoulder. “Wickford's doing the paperwork to get them tested. And that's the last thing I'm gonna tell you.”

“They're going to come up clean. They're not even going to have his DNA on them.”

Greco turned. “You know his drinking preferences all of a sudden? Maybe
you
should be my suspect.”

“Beer's too heavy to lug out here without a car. That's what the teenagers bring. The hardcore guys like Zambo want a lot of bang for their buck. Look for cheap plastic vodka bottles. Like we saw in the woods behind La Casa.”

Greco held Vega's gaze for a moment. The radio on his hip squawked with a voice Vega recognized as Mark Hammond's. He could almost picture that Kennedy jawline.

Greco clicked on his radio. “You find any liquor bottles, Mark?”

“Negative. Just beer cans.”

“Have you ever known Zambo to go somewhere and
not
drink?” asked Vega. Greco motioned for Vega to be quiet. Greco clicked on his radio again. “I'm coming out there. Ask your guys to do one more sweep for liquor bottles. Copy?”

A pause.
That territory thing again.
Finally, a voice over the radio: “Affirmative.”

Vega nodded. “Let me know if you find any.”

Greco feigned a salute but only his middle finger was extended. Vega got the hint.

“Get out of Dodge.”

He didn't.

He was only a five-minute drive from Bob and Karen Reilly's house. It was easier to speak to Dominga directly than to wait for the Wickford police to get around to sending him their report. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell beside the E
RIN GO BRAGH
plaque.

Dominga answered. She had her infant son propped over her shoulder. She looked surprised to see him—and a little wary.

“Detective?” The dark shadows had faded beneath her eyes. Her color had returned. She had sneakers on her feet, not plastic sandals anymore. All good signs.

“Miss? I'm sorry to bother you,” said Vega in Spanish. “I just had a few quick questions. May I come in and speak to you?”

“The Reillys aren't home.”

Vega wondered if she was fearful of letting a man in the house while she was alone. He couldn't blame her after what she'd been through. The fact that he was a cop would offer very little in the way of assurance. Many immigrants, Vega knew, had bad associations with the police in their own countries.

“Would you prefer I speak to you out here by the door? I can do that.”

She hesitated. “No. It's okay, I guess. But I'm watching the children.”

“I understand.”

Vega expected even more chaos in the house than before. But when he entered, there was a measure of calm he hadn't experienced the last time he was here. The five-year-old girl was in the living room, coloring. The two-and-a-half-year-old boy was near her, playing with his trucks. The eight-month-old was taking a nap on a pad on the floor. The living room toys were neatly stacked in piles. Vega could smell something cheesy and comforting simmering on the stove.

“I didn't think you'd move back in here,” he said.

“I didn't either,” Dominga admitted. “But they missed me. And I missed them. I don't want to live in a shelter. After everything that's happened . . .” Her voice trailed off. “The señora and I are trying to make it work.”

Vega nodded. “Don't tell her I said this, but you're doing way better with four than she was with three.”

Dominga smiled, the first smile he'd seen on her. She looked so much younger and prettier when she smiled. “I'm the oldest of eight. I've had practice.”

She led him into the living room. They sat on the beanbag sofa and spoke over Nick Junior cartoons. Gradually Vega eased the conversation around to the woman who helped deliver Dominga's little boy.

“Do you remember her name?” he asked.

“No.” She fussed with her son on her shoulder.

“No, you don't remember? Or no, you never knew it?”

Dominga shrugged. She did not meet his gaze.

“See, the thing is,” said Vega slowly, leaning forward to catch her eye, “Neil Davies doesn't speak Spanish and doesn't live in an area with a lot of Latinos. I find it hard to believe he'd be able to hire a Spanish-speaking midwife for you. But you? I know from Karen Reilly that you helped her run her eBay business. Karen said you know all the nannies and housekeepers in town. Maybe one of them also delivers babies? Or knows someone who does?”