Land of Careful Shadows (17 page)

“How about I call you when dinner's over?” Wendy suggested. “Alan can take the boys back home and you, Joy, and I can sit down somewhere for coffee.”

“All right.” He picked up his carton and turned to leave. Then he thought of something. “Hey, Wendy? The nightmares—when did they start?”

“I don't remember. Maybe a month ago?”

“Before or after the accident?”

“After, I think. I'm not sure. She was shaken up that night and all. But I think that was more because your car got totaled. I mean, physically, she was fine.”

“Yeah. Of course. Call me tomorrow.”

V
ega found Greco in the basement of the Lake Holly police station, down the hall from the holding cells. He was sprawled before a projection screen in a darkened room. Across the screen, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, were staggering down a dirt path in the woods at night. The girl's shirt was unbuttoned and the white of her breasts shone like two half-moons against the darkness. The lower right-hand corner of the screen was stamped with the time, date, and for some odd reason, the moon phase. It was taken last October fifteenth.

“Little early in the day for porn tapes, don't you think?” Vega dropped the carton of Maria's belongings on a table.

Greco gave a throaty chuckle and stuck a Twizzler in his mouth. “Not this porn, believe me.”

“Is that the reservoir?”

“Yep. A hunter brought it in this morning. Seems he rigged up an infrared camera at the lake last October to track deer movement. He forgot all about it until yesterday. He thought we might find the footage useful.”

“Find anything yet?”

“Yeah.” Greco gestured to the screen. “That lake sees more action after dark than your average congressman's bedroom. It's a regular lovers' lane for the Lake Holly High crowd. Tell ya one thing—our boys are gonna have to do a better sweep of the area. Usually, we only do it in summer. But it looks like every time the temperature hits at least fifty-five, that place goes from
Bambi
to bimbo in under five minutes. Our buddy down the hall, Morales, is on here with Maria by the way.”

“Do you have any footage of them last month?”

“I've only gotten up to mid-October so far. Why?”

Vega told Greco about his interview with Cindy Klein.

“If we've got him on camera for a Sunday in March, we may have the whole case right there,” said Greco. “Take a seat.”

Vega pulled up an uncomfortable metal folding chair—the kind they used for suspects when they were interrogating them. Greco nodded to the carton on the table.

“What else did you get?”

“Maria's cell-phone number. Maybe her last name. And what looks like her mother's address in Guatemala. I've already run a check on the number. It's a prepaid wireless account from Verizon.”

“You request a subpoena for her phone records yet?”

“Just put the paperwork in now. I asked them to speed it up given our deadline with Morales. We've already got his cell number so we can do a cross-check there, see when they last communicated.” Vega gave a quick overview of the rest of the contents of the carton.

“Still falls short of probable cause to charge Morales,” said Greco darkly. It was almost three p.m. They both knew they were running out of time.

“I know,” said Vega. “I'm going to go back to Cindy Klein and at least get her to ID Morales. But before I do, let's see if the video gives us anything.”

They sped up the rest of the October footage. Greco was right about the teenagers. Most of them came loaded down with six-packs and fifths and probably a lot more besides. Vega called for Greco to hit the pause button on several occasions. Matt Rowland was on two segments of the tape, both times toting six-packs. Once, with two other boys that Vega suspected were Brendan Delaney and Eddie Giordano. Another time with a girl.

“How come we keep getting footage of people walking in and we don't always have corresponding footage of them walking out?” asked Vega.

“There are other ways to get to and from the lake,” said Greco. “Hell, you probably used one yourself to get to Bud Point when you were a teenager. So if you're thinking that traffic in without a corresponding out means anything, forget it. There's no way to track anything about their movements except what you see on the screen.”

Vega flipped through more images until one brought him up short. He hit the pause button. Another teenage boy. A lanky, good-looking Hispanic with a walk much older than his years. A teenage girl with long, dark hair, tight jeans, and bangs that hid her eyes. Vega could feel the heat between them radiating off the screen, the hormonal thrumming and anticipation of release. The boy held out his hand and the girl grasped it as she stepped over a log. She threw back her head and laughed. It was how Vega used to feel with Linda at that age. Light. Reborn. Like every sensation was new and fresh and no one had ever felt this way before. It all counted. It all mattered.

“You recognize them?” Greco frowned at the screen.

“No.” Sometimes the only way to preserve something fragile is to leave it alone.

Vega started up the video again. They went through all the November footage. By the end of November, the temperature brought a halt to the nighttime revelries. There were only dog-walkers and hikers after that.

The couples and drinkers didn't start up again until that first week in March when a burst of unseasonably warm temperatures brought everyone out of hiding. There were plenty of people on the tape again. Joy and Kenny, but no shots of Matt Rowland and only one of Maria and Morales. The date stamp in the corner read
Sunday March 8
^th
, 4:23 p.m.
The film footage showed the two of them walking down the footpath to the lake with a six-pack of beer. Morales was holding Maria's hand. At one point, she tripped and he grabbed her before she fell. Then he stroked the side of her face and kissed her on her forehead, his lips lingering a second too long before he pulled them away. She offered Morales a weary smile that seemed to carry the weight of the world in it. Vega felt sympathy for them at that moment. The tenderness of Morales's gestures, the languid pace of their movements as if they both already sensed something slipping through their fingers.

Was this the day Maria disappeared? If so, something about their time together already registered a good-bye in it. Vega looked at his watch: three-thirty p.m. He had two and a half hours to assemble enough evidence to justify charging Morales in Maria's death. The tape was a good start. It proved that Rodrigo was lying about when he last saw Maria. If Vega could get Cindy Klein to testify that Maria disappeared on March eighth that would nail things down as well. There was just one thing troubling Vega: that hate letter. He mentioned it to Greco now.

“How do you know it had anything to do with the crime?” asked Greco. “It could've been sent to Maria by someone else before she got killed. It could have been sent to Morales and he just stuck it in her purse. The letter writer doesn't even have to be an American. Some immigrant from another country could've had a beef with her—or him.”

All possible. Still, without a confession, the evidence felt incomplete. “Let me take another crack at Rodrigo,” said Vega.

“You think he'll break?”

“He's been in that cell for nearly twenty-two hours. I think if he was ever going to break, he'll break now.”

R
odrigo watched the minutes and hours tick by on the big clock across from his holding cell. He had been in this cell since six p.m. last night.

No windows. Fluorescent lights that blazed day and night and sucked the life out of every surface they touched. A thin, ripped, vinyl pad on top of a block of cement for a bed, a stainless-steel toilet. Not even a place to wash up. There was a television high overhead but they were having trouble with the cable so it worked only sporadically. Not that he wanted to watch it anyway. The officer had tuned it to an English language station that seemed to show nothing but rich
Norte Americanos
having parties with each other and fighting.

He was the only one in a bank of three holding cells. There was a constant thrum from the heating ducts. His lip hurt. His clothes were covered in dried blood and mud and stank of sweat. His nerves had gotten the better of his digestive system and he was cramping up with diarrhea. Every time he thought the worst of his life in the United States was behind him, he'd come up against some new hurdle to jump over, some new despair that threatened to overwhelm him.

He stopped walking and tried to close his eyes, but the moment he nodded off, his thoughts drifted to that boxcar in Monterrey, to the smell of unwashed bodies and super-heated air, to that feeling of being buried alive. He had never been afraid of small spaces before that, but he often awoke at night now with the sense that someone had just stuck a plastic bag over his head and he couldn't breathe. That's what he felt at this minute. He was choking to death in this concrete tomb. It was worse than that time he jumped into the river in Esperanza to save Enrique's little sister, Sucely. The water sucked them down to a dark place where they couldn't tell rock from sky. It felt like
La Llorona
, the spirit who drowned her children, was holding tight to their legs. Sucely grabbed his neck, nearly sealing off his windpipe. But he managed to claw his way back to shore. He was thirteen at the time. So young. So strong. He wasn't that strong anymore.

He thought of all the stupid shit he'd had to endure to get to this point. How the Mexican police boarded their buses and tried to trick people by saying, “
amárrate las cintas”
—the way Guatemalans say, “tie your shoelaces,” instead of the Mexican, “
amárrate las agujetas.
” It was like a kid's game. If you moved, you were gone. If you forgot your fake birth date or the pretend place you were born, you were gone. If you were too bold or too scared, if you didn't have enough bribe money on you, if you complained, if you allowed even a shred of common decency to invade your veins, it was over.

And that was just to get to the border. Then it was the brutal desert crossing, the way you had to become an animal, always dodging helicopters, outrunning the big men in their uniforms with their gun belts and ATVs. The burning sun that boiled you from the inside out. Blackened your skin. Fried the soles of your shoes like you were walking across a hot griddle. You thought you had enough water on your back yet every time you ended up drinking your own urine through parched lips to stay alive. Then curling up in the pitch-black trunk of a super-heated sedan next to other rank-smelling people—you crushing them, them crushing you. Always feeling like you were going to die of suffocation or heatstroke. Some of the people crossing were little kids and young women. Rodrigo remembered the terror in their eyes, the way he felt like less of a man because he could do nothing to ease it.

It peeled off a layer of your humanity. Even after you showered and changed into clean clothes, the smell of desperation never left. It stayed with you as you traveled from Arizona to Colorado, an English-language book in your hand, hoping that no one would actually speak to you. You didn't have any money to buy food so you went a day and a half without. You didn't have enough English to ask where a bathroom was so you held it in as long as you could—twenty hours if necessary. You were so afraid. So afraid. Better to pee your pants than chance speaking and getting deported. Every white face felt threatening. Every uniform made your blood pressure soar.

By the time you arrived in a place like Lake Holly, the sight of a police car made you duck between buildings, your heart kicking up in your chest like you'd swallowed a fistful of hot peppers. All to get a job—any job. You'd shovel shit with your bare hands for five dollars an hour if somebody showed you the money. This wasn't about making a fortune. This was about making it from one day to the next. It was lunacy. Sheer lunacy.

The police took his shoelaces when they put him in this cell. The laces were so old, they fell apart when the officer unthreaded them from his boots. They would have taken his belt but he didn't have one. When they took the laces, Rodrigo thought they were crazy. He had come this far—did they really think he would kill himself? But now, sitting in this cell for so many hours with no one to talk to, the unbearable loneliness and confusion of his life began to work its way into his marrow like a cancer.

They thought he had killed Maria Elena. That would not be a simple deportation. That meant prison—a long, long stretch in prison. He had done five months in federal prison the last time for buying a Social Security card from his employer. He had gone nearly insane from the noise and the confinement and the casual cruelty that made you always hold yourself in. He could not survive that again.

At this moment, he wished he had a rope or a belt or even those rotten shoelaces. After all, what good was he to his family in here? Señor Porter had promised he would only be in this cell twenty-four hours. But Rodrigo knew that worse things might await him.

He jumped when the metal door to the entranceway clanged open. The Spanish cop was standing there, freshly shaved and changed from yesterday. He had that shark look to his eyes. He showed more of his teeth than he needed to when he smiled. Rodrigo reflexively leaned his back against the cinderblock wall of the cell.

“Afternoon, Rodrigo,” said the detective. “How's that lip you fell on yesterday?”

Rodrigo just stared at him. Porter had suggested to Rodrigo yesterday that perhaps he hadn't tripped in the woods. Perhaps he was assaulted by this detective. Rodrigo had tried to tell Porter the truth, but the señor held up a hand to silence him. Rodrigo saw right away that Porter couldn't tell him to lie, but he very much wanted Rodrigo to agree with his story. The truth didn't seem to matter to Señor Porter any more than it mattered to the detective. They were both playing him. He had no real friends here.

The detective pulled a chair in from the hallway and stuck it in front of his cell bars. Then he sat down.

“Thought we'd talk a little more.”

“What about Señor Porter?” asked Rodrigo.

There was the slightest twitch to the detective's shoulder blades. Then he stood up and shrugged. “Okay, Rodrigo. You don't want to talk to me. That's your right. So we'll just do what we have to do without your cooperation.” He got up to leave.

Rodrigo felt a panic thrumming in his chest. The detective seemed so confident. That could only mean they were going to arrest him either way.

“Wait,” said Rodrigo. “I didn't kill her. Why do you think I killed her?”

The detective very calmly and slowly put the chair back in place, scraping the legs along the bare concrete floor, adjusting and readjusting it with annoying fastidiousness. He didn't speak until he was looking straight into Rodrigo's eyes.

“You lied to me, man. You told me you'd broken off the relationship with Maria soon after you arrived.”

“I—I did.”
What is “soon”? What does this man want?

“When?”

“November, I think.”

“You said October before.”

“I did?” Rodrigo felt suddenly like he had the runs again. And now he couldn't use the toilet, not with this detective in the room. He felt so trapped—by his body and his circumstances.

“You never saw her again after that?”

Rodrigo blinked. No, he couldn't say that. That would be a lie. So he said nothing.

“Look, Rodrigo—you gotta tell me the truth. I just came from watching some film footage. A hunter rigged a video camera at the lake. It picked up everything—and I do mean
everything
—that went on there from October first until now. You're on it, man. You and Maria Elena. A lot. And I don't think your wife would like to see what I just saw.”

Rodrigo slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. The detective had to be telling the truth. They were at the lake last fall. Where else could they go? They had no money, no means of transportation. He lived in a room with three other men. She was a live-in housekeeper with no privacy. He had to travel almost two miles on foot one way to see her. The reservoir was near where she was living. It was private and quiet and beautiful at night with the water reflecting the sky so perfectly, Rodrigo could hardly tell up from down. She brought fruit and tortillas and a blanket to lie on and he brought the beer. They stayed up by a grove of tall pine trees, far enough from the path so that no drunken teenagers could bother them.

Sometimes the pinesap would stick to their clothes. Sometimes the needles got lodged in their hair. But the smell beneath those towering evergreens was so fresh, so pure. Rodrigo thought there were few places on earth more beautiful to make love. When things were bad, he usually thought about home. But every now and then the image that came to his mind was of those moonlit nights at the lake. He remembered the soft crunch of deer hooves through the leaves, the whoosh of a fish breaking the surface of the water, the distant hoot of an owl.

And okay, sure, it was wrong. He loved his wife, Beatriz—his Triza. She was the mother of his three children. But he was human, wasn't he? He was lonely and when he and Maria Elena were together, she made him feel like a man again. Looking up, seeing those bright pinpricks of light scattered across the sky, feeling her hot breath on his chest, her delicate fingers wrapped inside his large callused hands, he felt so reassured. Almost like he was back in Esperanza.

“We were at the lake, yes.” Rodrigo let the words out in one long expelled breath.

“In March?”

“Once, yes.”

“What happened?”

Rodrigo lifted an eyebrow. What did this police detective think happened? He was a man, surely. Did Rodrigo need to go into details about such a private matter?

“You fought?” asked the detective.

“No. Never. We didn't talk much at all. I didn't kill her. I've told you that.”

“Then why didn't you report her missing?”

“Because we had already broken it off. She was just—she was leaving. And I came to say good-bye.”

“Leaving? For where?”

“She had lost her job. She was talking about going back to Guatemala.”

“So Maria just
happened
to see you the same day she disappeared and you never contacted her again.”

“I didn't know that was the day she disappeared.” This was bad news. Very bad news. This detective would make a lot of this fact, Rodrigo knew.

“You've never seemed too upset about her being dead.”

“What do you know about what I feel?” Rodrigo could not suppress the irritation in his voice. For a moment, he forgot himself, his circumstances. He felt only a heat rising inside of him at the casual presumptions this detective made in his nasal, swallowed Spanish. “You cross the border twice the way I have, you learn quickly that human life has very little value. You can only do so much and no more. I have a family. I have responsibilities. So I can do nothing.” Just thinking about how long it had been since he'd heard his family's voices made Rodrigo's heart ache with longing. Then again, maybe it was better if they didn't know what was happening to him right now.

The detective tapped his pen on his notebook and stared at him. “We have you on video at the lake with Maria on the afternoon she disappeared in the very place her body was recovered. Her American employer says Maria told her she was going out with you that day. The employer is willing to testify to that in court.”

Rodrigo felt something cold and thick congeal inside of him. “I didn't kill her,” he repeated softly.

“Maria Elena was tied up and weighted down in the lake using the same sort of nylon rope a lot of the landscaping contractors use to tie up bushes. You've worked with a number of local landscapers, Rodrigo. You could have gotten your hands on that rope easily.”

“I would never hurt anybody.”

“Video doesn't lie, man. Why don't you just come clean? You loved her. You love your family. Do right by both of them. By your conscience. You didn't mean to do it. You're a good man, I can tell. You just didn't want her to come between you and your family, that's all.”

Rodrigo couldn't breathe. It felt like someone was pouring cornmeal down his throat. Each breath just made the next one harder. This couldn't be happening. They would lock him away for twenty-five years on a murder charge. A state prison this time. Full of murderers and rapists and gang members. Big men. Blacks who hate Latinos. Latinos who hate immigrants. Guards who hate everybody. He had survived so much but he couldn't imagine surviving twenty-five years of that.

“If I tell you I killed her—if I confess—will they just deport me?”