Land of Careful Shadows

Also by Suzanne Chazin

 

 

SUZANNE CHAZIN

KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

 

I
t was the Day-Glo orange basketball sneakers that nearly got him killed. Adidas adizeroes with EVA midsoles. A hundred dollars on sale. You could have picked him up on a satellite transmitter as he swung his legs out of the open door of his black Escalade to untie the laces.

“Stop right there, sir.” The voice, full of sinew and muscle, didn't fit the freckle-faced altar boy in the police raincoat before him. “Step out of the car slowly and put your hands on the roof of your vehicle.”

Jimmy Vega stopped untying the laces and pushed back his Yankees baseball cap. “Hey man, chill. I only pulled over because—”

“—Sir? Get out of the car and put your hands on the roof of your vehicle.”

It was the “sir” that got to him. The knife-thrust of the word. All that coiled aggression tricked out as politeness. And okay, maybe he looked suspicious in his dark hoodie, pulling up on the gravel shoulder of this wooded two-lane a few hundred yards from where the Lake Holly cops had just found a body. But did this rookie really think he'd put it there?

“Just give me a minute to change out of my sneakers.” Vega slid a hand toward his back pocket. “Hey, if it makes you feel any better—”

That's when he heard the familiar rattle of plastic. A cheesy claptrap sound, totally out of sync with the smooth piece of hardware that produced it or the fresh-from-the-academy holster that cocooned it. Vega's hand shot out of his pocket like his jeans were on fire. The cop had his Glock nine millimeter pointed inches from Vega's chest.

“Out of the car! Now! Hands on your head!”

All the blood drained from Vega's extremities. His throat constricted. His bladder muscles developed amnesia. He was almost more embarrassed at the prospect of pissing his pants than at the prospect of getting shot. How odd that this little man-made contraption could so completely unmake a man.

He laced his fingers behind his head and willed his voice to stay calm by pretending he was still undercover, still behaving like somebody he wasn't.

“Okay, officer. Relax. I'm getting out of the car. My hands are locked behind my head.” He stated the obvious because he felt he needed to, felt this guy needed all his senses relaying the same information if Vega was going to walk out of this in one piece. Stupid what runs through your head at a time like this. He hadn't finished his paperwork on last night's job. He had a lottery ticket in his wallet worth twenty dollars that he hadn't collected on yet. He was no more than half a mile from his daughter's house and she had no idea he was in Lake Holly, though maybe under these circumstances, it was best she didn't know.

He tried to sidestep a puddle but it ran the length of the driver's-side door. Cold, gritty water sloshed between his toes the moment his feet hit the ground. Rain slipped under the sleeves of his hoodie when he locked his hands behind his head. A few hundred feet east, a circus of emergency vehicles beat out a blood-red rhythm against the bare trees that stood in mute witness on either side of the road.

“So you don't panic, I've got a nine millimeter in the waistband of my jeans. My badge and ID are in my back right pocket.” He supposed the rookie had already surmised the first part and never considered the possibility of the second or he wouldn't be in this mess. Something burned slow and deep. He thought he was past the stage where people judged him by the color of his skin or the cast of his features. He thought his line of work insulated him from that. But now, spread-eagled across the Escalade, he wondered if all he'd really done was get better at navigating people's prejudices. When he steered himself within the bounds of their assumptions, he managed to avoid the shoals and reefs that used to cut him so unexpectedly. When he didn't—well, here was the result.

A vacuum cleaner of a voice suddenly boomed over his shoulder. “He isn't that detective the county was supposed to send by any chance? Vega? James Vega?”

The young cop's voice faltered, the testosterone wavering as it sank in. “I thought—he looked—he didn't show me any ID—”

“—You wouldn't give me five freakin' minutes to change out of my sneakers,” hissed Vega. He felt safe enough to turn around and face the kid now. The cop's eyes, so full of suspicion a minute ago, now looked wild with panic and bewilderment. Vega studied the wavy brown lines that ran along the sides of his orange high-tops and shook his head. Water squished out of the fabric when he shifted his feet.

“I'll take my stuff back.”

The cop held out his gun, keys, and ID without meeting his gaze. Vega waited for an apology. It didn't come. Not that it would have changed anything. But still.

“I'll take it from here, Fitz.” The man with the vacuum cleaner voice casually stepped into view. He was a head taller than Vega, broad as a side of beef, with the put-upon look of a cop near retirement who felt he was not near enough. He was dressed head-to-toe in white Tyvek coveralls that made him look like a giant marshmallow. He held out a fleshy hand.

“Detective Lou Greco, Lake Holly PD.” The detective dropped his chin and peered at Vega over the black rims of his glasses, beaded with rain. “I see you came dressed for the occasion.”

“I didn't get the part that said ‘black tie.' ” Vega shoved his badge and keys into his pockets and returned his gun to his waistband. “I was up all night doing a meet-and-greet between a couple of heroin dealers and a rookie undercover. I didn't have time to change.” His skin still felt coated in sweat and nicotine.

Greco nodded to Vega's sneakers. “You got another pair of shoes?”

“I was trying to switch into them when your local representative from the Aryan Brotherhood stopped me.”

“You should have been clearer that you were a cop. Fitzgerald sees a gun under your hoodie at a crime scene, he's going to think the worst.”

“Not that he was profiling or anything.”

Greco ignored the dig. In his mind at least, the situation was already behind them when in fact Vega was just feeling the recoil. His fingers were only beginning to get back sensation. His bowels and bladder still felt temperamental. The back of his head throbbed as if he'd been cold-cocked. It would be hours before the flutter in his chest died away, weeks before the memory lost its primal hold on his senses. Still, what choice did he have except to move on? He had to work with these guys. He'd had to work with guys like Fitzgerald and Greco his whole career.

It might have been easier if being a cop had been a lifelong ambition. But the truth was, it just happened. One minute, he was the reluctant holder of an accounting degree (his mother's idea), planning for the day when he'd chuck it all for the wide-open road and his steel-string guitar. The next, he was out of work and in debt with a baby on the way. The county was recruiting Spanish-speaking officers. Vega needed a steady job with medical benefits. So he traded in his six-string for a nine millimeter and told himself he was doing for his kid what his old man had never done for him. There were worse reasons to give up on your dreams.

He sat in the Escalade and peeled off his high-tops and socks, tossing them onto the floor of the passenger side where they immediately formed their own ecosystem. He shoved his bare feet into black leather work boots.

“You don't have another pair of socks?”

“Nope.” He had a pair of white crime-scene coveralls and booties that would keep him dry enough, and a button-down shirt and pants for later. But he hadn't anticipated his run-in with Fitzgerald.

“Gonna have blisters tomorrow,” said Greco.

“Better than bullet holes.”

“True.”

Vega suited up and followed Greco down a path slick with mossy rocks and acorns. Through the bare branches, Vega could see the tin-colored reservoir for which this town fifty miles north of New York City was named. Back when he was a boy, the only things you could find in Lake Holly were the fan-tailed sun perch you could catch with a cheap rod and a loaf of Wonder Bread, the snapping turtles that sunned themselves on the broad, weather-beaten rocks, and the flakes of shale that if you threw just right, you could skim halfway to Bud Point.

Now unfortunately, you could find much, much more.

She was lying in a soupy mix of dead leaves and branches that had gathered in a pocket along the shoreline. If not for the reams of yellow police tape strung like parade garland or the dozen or so officers milling about in white coveralls, Vega might have assumed he was staring at an old picnic blanket. Its pattern, once distinct, was now brackish and covered in algae.

“Dog-walker called it in around o-seven-hundred this morning,” said Greco. “Female. Been in the water for at least a few weeks is my guess. No obvious trauma to the body.”

“You've ruled out drowning?”

“Duh. Give us townie cops
some
credit.” Greco snapped on a pair of blue latex gloves and squatted before the victim. He edged up one sleeve of her jacket. The underside of the material showed some sort of black-and-silver snowflake pattern. Beneath the sleeve, a frayed, algae-covered rope encircled her skeletal wrist.

“She's got three more just like it—one on each limb. Don't think it's a fashion statement.”

“Any indications whether she was dead going into the water?”

“The medical examiner will have to rule on that. The ropes are pretty thick. Three-strand nylon. She was tied down to something. Whoever tied her wanted her to stay a spell.”

“Find any ID?”

“On her? Negative,” said Greco. “But we found a handbag about thirty feet up the hill with a photograph in a zippered pocket. Forensics is gonna have to figure out if it's related, but I've got a feeling it's her. She's Hispanic, in case you're wondering.”

“How can you tell?” A bumpy, gray-white film covered the victim's face. Both eye sockets were empty. Only a long, thin tuft of black hair remained on the back of her head like some ancient Chinese scribe.

“We played Ricky Martin and she danced.”

“Better Ricky than Dean. I'd have tied the ropes myself.”

Greco grinned. Puerto Ricans versus Italians. Cops never tired of ethnic jokes.

Vega pulled on a pair of gloves and bent down to examine the victim. She was lying on her side; her body bloated to perhaps twice its normal size, yet her jaw had receded, exposing an overbite. Her clothes had begun to fall apart but the zipper on her jacket still worked. Vega opened it to reveal the remains of what appeared to be a pink buttoned-down polyester blouse over blue jeans. No jewelry, though that may have been stripped. Her ankles had decayed much faster than her sneakers. The contoured soles sported the brand name Reebok. Vega could still make out the red racing stripes along the sides.

“The sneakers made me think jogger when I first saw her,” said Greco. “We had that freak warm spell early last month. But the clothes are all wrong for it.”

Vega had to agree. He exercised in whatever old T-shirts and gym shorts happened to be lying around. But his ex-wife and teenage daughter seemed to have whole wardrobes devoted to getting sweaty and none of it looked like this.

Vega shielded his eyes from the rain and searched out a thirty-foot overhang on the far side of the lake. The steady April drizzle had turned the rock face black.

“Guess it's safe to say, given the time of year and the ropes on her limbs, she didn't Bud out, either.”

“You know about Bud Point?” asked Greco.

“Jumped off it, actually. At seventeen.” After a few cold ones, if you hit the water just right, you became a legend. If not, you became a statistic.

Greco's jaw set to one side. “So were you suicidal, shitfaced—or just plain stupid?”

“I did it to impress a girl. Though I think I inspired more pity than awe that night.”

Vega could still see himself at the edge of that cliff, his hair in an embarrassing mullet, dressed in discount-store jeans his mother—the only parent at his school with an accent—bought in one of her many excursions back to their old neighborhood in the Bronx. He didn't fit in at Lake Holly High. Not with all those fair-haired kids in Top-Siders and polo shirts. So he decided to stand out in some way he'd chosen, some way that wasn't thrust on him without his consent. When that girl batted her blond lashes and told him she didn't think he was brave enough to jump, he proved her wrong. If adolescence were a permanent state, the species would die out.

Greco wiped the rain off his glasses slowly and deliberately. Vega felt the grind of gears as he did the math. “I thought the closest this town got to Hispanic culture back then was watching reruns of
I Love Lucy.
”

“I guess we were what you'd call, ‘the tokens.' ”

“Different place now, that's for sure. Whole town's crawling with 'em.”

“I'm talking illegals, Vega. Not
your
people.”

He said it the way Anglos often did—like there was a chasm of difference between the two groups when to Vega, the distinctions sometimes felt as porous as the paper that divided them. Maybe that's why the words stung so much. The acid couldn't help but leak through.

“Come on, Vega. Don't get all PC on me. You drove through town this morning. You had to have seen them.”

He saw them. Of course he saw them. They were huddled in groups in front of the Laundromat and under the deli awning where Vega went to fetch his coffee. Their eyes were wary beneath the soaked brims of their baseball caps. Their shoulders were hunched, whether from rain or cold or fear, he didn't know. He felt their collective intake of breath when he walked by, the way their adrenaline seemed to hitch up a notch and their voices turned soft as prayers. They were like soldiers in a war zone, bracing for everything and nothing, all in the same instant.