Sabrina sat, transfixed by what Church was telling her, remembering what Livingston Shaw had told her about Church. That her parents had been Russian spies. He’d called her Korkiva but mentioned she preferred Courtney—and that they’d been rooted out and her parents killed after being abandoned by their government at the end of the Cold War. “They were killed.”
Church nodded. “After the Cold War ended, we were left behind,” she said, seemingly unsurprised she already knew a measure of the truth. “Given up to the CIA by another family in exchange for immunity. You asked me why I didn’t kill Valerie and her baby like I’d been ordered to. That’s why.” Church looked at her. Her eyes were dry. “I’ve done things—horrible things that I never lose sleep over, but I won’t kill children and I won’t kill their parents while they watch.” She popped to door open, stepping a foot into the dark, sweltering heat. “That’s why I let Valerie and her baby live. And I won’t kill her little sister either.”
You can’t trust her. She’s been trained to lie from the day she was born.
She found Santos at his desk, going over the files he and Church had put together while she was gone. A quick glance in its direction told her that Alvarez’s desk was still empty. “Where’s your partner,” she said, not really expecting an answer. No matter what he said to her earlier, he was angry she was no longer focused on Paul Vega as their prime suspect. To add insult to injury, she’d opened her suspect list to include local law enforcement. As soon as the rest of the precinct caught wind of it she and Church could all but kiss their cooperation goodbye.
Santos shot her a glance before redirecting his attention to the file in his lap. “He called in while we were at St. Rose’s. Said something about following up on a lead.”
“Does he do that a lot?” she said, refusing to slink away with her tail tucked. “Take off on his own?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.” Santos sighed, closing the file in his lap to trade it for another. “We have different investigative styles,” he said, his admission reminiscent of what Alvarez had told her earlier of their partnership. He glanced up at her again, eyes narrowed like he’s was catching on to her line of questioning. “He’s a good kid—he just like to take a different approach to stuff sometimes.”
Funny, ain’t that what the Padre called Nulo? A good kid…
“Does that include leaving his phone in his desk so that no one can get ahold of him?”
Santos sat up a bit straighter, narrowing his eyes even further. “How do you know his phone is in his desk, Agent Vance?”
Her own phone vibrated against her ribcage and she reached for it, hoping it was Croft and that he’d found Graciella Lopez. “Excuse me,” she said, thumbing the touchscreen as she turned her back on a glaring Santos without checking the number. “Hello?”
“Do you know who this is?” Male voice. One she recognized.
“Yes,” she said, fighting the urge shoot Santos a look over her shoulder.
“Good,” he said quietly, like he was worried about being overheard. “I think we should meet. Alone.”
Church was in the conference room. She could see her through the blinds, honey-blonde head bent over a stack of files. She’d be pissed if she took off again without her but it couldn’t be helped. Elena was out there somewhere. She needed to find her and reading through files wasn’t going to get the job done. “I thought you’d never ask.”
70
Funny he’d ask you to meet him here, don’t you think, Darlin’?
Funny wasn’t really the word she’d used to describe it. Ignoring the voice in her head, Sabrina pulled the car into an empty slot in front of Luck’s truck stop and killed the engine.
No, I think funny is exactly the right word to use. It’s funny because this is where I—
“If you don’t shut the hell up,” she snarled, hands wrapped around the steering wheel so tight it felt like she was strangling it, “I’m going to eat the entire contents of the pouch Phillip gave me, understand?”
Her threat was met with silence and she smiled.
She popped the door to let herself out of the car. “I’ll take your silence as a yes,” she said, crossing the lot toward the restaurant. “Now, don’t open your goddamned mouth unless I ask you a direct question.”
More silence.
“Fantastic.”
Pulling the heavy glass door on its hinges, Sabrina was greeted by a blessed wall of refrigerated air. A different girl this time. A pretty Native American girl, the name Paulette stitched across the embroidered shamrock on her uniform, came at her from behind the counter. “Is a table—”
“I’m meeting someone,” she said before the waitress could pull a menu from the hostess station, pointing toward the back of the restaurant.
Following her finger, the waitress stood a little straighter. “Of course,” she said with a small nod.
Sabrina wound her way through the restaurant before depositing herself in the corner booth where Paul Vega waited for her, a half-eaten Denver omelet and a side of bacon on the plate in front of him.
“Should we wait for your cousin?” She offered him a cheery smile. “Sorry, I meant lawyer.”
“No.” Paul’s smile was decidedly less friendly. He shook his head, lifting his cup of coffee off the table between them. “Arturo doesn’t know I’m here.”
She looked out the large plate window that overlooked the parking lot. There was no squad car in sight. No unmarked either. So much for the surveillance detail that was supposed to be sitting on Vega.
He seemed to know what she was looking for, offering her a humorless chuckle in consolation while cutting into his omelet with the side of his fork. “We did an employment survey a few years ago. Hired a company to go door-to-door and ask residents questions,” he told her before forking the bite into his mouth. “Two cities. Nearly six-hundred thousand people. Know what we found out?” He said around his mouthful of eggs, pointing the tines of his fork in her direction like he really expected her to answer. When she didn’t, he smiled. “That one in three people know someone employed by Vega Farms. One in five are either directly employed or related to someone employed by us. That’s over a hundred thousand people who depend on me for their livelihood, Agent Vance. Fair or not, that fact affords me certain… allowances.” He gave her a look that was almost apologetic. “No one followed me here.”
“Like torture? Kidnapping?” She placed her hands flat on the table in an effort to keep herself from jerking his fork out of his hand and sticking it in his eye. “How about rape? Is that on your list of allowances?”
“Come on…” He placed his fork on his plate. “You don’t really believe I did those things. If you did, you wouldn’t be here,” he said, wiping his mouth with the napkin in his lap. “It’s okay, Claire—Santos isn’t here, you can admit it. May I call you Claire?”
“Maybe you didn’t physically have anything to do with what happened to Rachel Meeks—then or now,” she said, offering him an indifferent shrug. “But I think you know who did. I think you know and just… let it happen. At best, that makes you a coward. At worst, you’re an accessory to a half dozen murders. Maybe more. And no, you can’t.”
“I invited you here as a gesture of goodwill and cooperation.” He frowned at her. “If you’re going to be rude—”
“Cooperation? Goodwill? So far, all I’ve experienced is a bunch of narcissistic grandstanding,” she said, refusing to give him the apology he obviously expected. “What do you want?”
He sat quiet for a few seconds, probably deciding if he was going to continue to grace her with his presence or stick her with his bill. “Father Francisco is my uncle… but I suppose you already know that,” he finally said, watching her with the flat, dispassionate gaze of a shark.
She nodded. “He was attacked this afternoon. But I suppose you already know that.” It didn’t matter where or how he got his information. There were plenty of people who knew what had happened and any number of them co
uld have called Vega and told him.
He lifted his cup and took a drink. “People think that the priesthood somehow exempts him, but he is just a man. We all make mistakes. He’s no different.”
She wanted to ask him if one of his personal mistakes happened to be keeping his mouth shut while a murderer ran loose in his city. Instead she sat back in her seat, her hand going to the pocket where she’d slipped the picture she’d lifted from Father Francisco’s room. Pulling it out, she slid it across the tabletop. “Was one of your uncle’s mistakes named Magda Lopez?”
Vega’s eyes watched the photograph slide toward him, his expression unreadable. “She was Arturo’s nanny.” His finger tapped the piece of paper between them. “That’s him, with his mother.” In the background of the picture she caught a glimpse of a dark-haired baby, no more than a year old, sitting on a woman’s lap. A man stood over them, his face hidden by the wide brim of a cowboy hat. “I wasn’t born yet.”
Sabrina studied the picture from where she sat. The slight push of Magda Lopez’s stomach against the baggy fabric of her dress. The way Father Francisco’s fingers rested on her hip, the tips of them pressed into the baby bump she was so obviously trying to hide. Familiar, bordering on intimate.
Something prickled along her scalp, an instant before everything came into focus, so sharp and swift she was nearly blinded by it. “Father Francisco isn’t your uncle, is he Vega?” she said quietly, watching the way her words affected him. “He’s your father.”
Vega lifted his mug, taking a drink before setting it down with a careful click. “Magda Lopez experienced complications in childbirth,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “Her sons survived—a miracle the doctors said, but there was only so much miracle to go around. The first son killed her. The second son had to be cut from her womb. After she died.”
Sons.
Sabrina knew without asking which son he was. She could see it on his face. Paul Vega was the son Magda Lopez died giving birth to. “And their father?” she said, playing along. “What happened to him?”
Vega looked away. “The father went unnamed and the brothers were separated.”
“You were given to the Bautistas—raised by your cousin’s parents.” She looked at the picture, past the trio of young faces, at the mother and child in the background. “That must’ve pissed your uncle off.”
“Arturo’s father was a hard man,” Vega said, skirting along the edge of admission. “Francisco was the only heir to the family business. When he entered the priesthood, Arturo’s father rightfully expected the company to pass on to him and his own sons when he married into the family.” He swallowed hard against the memories his words stirred. “The existence of a male Vega heir would not have been welcomed by him, let alone two.”
“But he had to take you in,” she said, reading between the lines. “If he wanted to remain in good standing with your family. But only one of you. He’d only take one of you.”
He didn’t answer her.
“What about him? Where did your brother go? Who took care of him?”
Again, he didn’t answer her, either because he didn’t know or because he was protecting him.
“He’s out there and he’s pissed.” Her statement was met with more silence but she knew she was right. “At you for killing your mother and getting the life he didn’t. At you father for denying his existence. That’s why he targeted Rachel Meeks. To punish you.”
“And it worked,” he told her, baring his teeth in a semblance of a smile. “Everyone believed I raped her. Even my own—” he stopped himself short. “The only one who believed I was innocent was Graciella.”
“That’s why you sent her away, because she knows the truth,” she said. “That your brother is a murdering psychopath. You were afraid she’d tell the truth.”
Vega’s gaze came up, pinning her with a glare so hot and sharp she was sure he’d have hit her if he thought he could get away with it. “I love Graciella. I sent her away to protect her from him.”
“Who is he?” She leaned toward him, her tone low and urgent. “You have to know you can’t protect them both, Vega,” she said, tapping the photograph between them. “Tell me his name. His real name.”
“I don’t know it.” Vega shook his head. “I never knew it… I never knew him. The night we were born, was the last time I ever saw him. The truth is, he could be anyone.”
71
There were voices. People talking, murmuring quietly. Two of them. Men, somewhere nearby. She thought maybe she’d fallen asleep at her desk again. It happened sometimes when she was working a case. She’d put her head down for a moment, waiting for results to pop up on her computer or for a uniform to deliver evidence, and end up sleeping through her lunch hour.
Nights were hard. Her mother’s sleep schedule was erratic. Sometimes she’d go days without more than an occasional nap. It was exhausting.
On their last visit, the doctor prescribed her mom a sedative so she’d sleep through the night. “Fill the prescription, Ellie,” he’d said, tearing the script off the pad before pressing it into her hand. “And give her the pills. You need sleep. You both do.”
She’d taken the prescription and said thank you. She’d even filled it but in the end, she let it gather dust in the back of the cabinet above the refrigerator. She never even opened the bag.
She told herself it was because she wasn’t going to take the easy way. She wasn’t going to drug her own mother to make her more manageable. The truth was a harder, more painful thing to admit.
The truth was that, sometimes, in the small hours before sunrise, her mother was her mother again. Not the mother who needed constant supervision. Not the mother who couldn’t recognize her own daughters. She was her real mother. The mother who took care of her. The mother who told her everything was going to be okay and spent every day making sure that everything was.
The first time it’d happened, she thought it was a dream. She’d woken to the smell of tortillas toasting on the griddle, Vincente Fernandez on the living room stereo. She’d come out of her room to find her mother standing in the kitchen in her bathrobe, stretching tortilla dough and singing along to the music.
“Mom?’ she’d said, looking at the microwave’s digital display. It was two AM.
“Morning, Mija,” her mother said, leaning over to drop a kiss, a quick press of her flour-dusted cheek against her own. “Did you study for your math test?”
“It’s Saturday,” she said automatically. The doctor told her that it was best to go along with her mother’s delusions. That it’d be less confusing for her. Less traumatic for them both.
Her mother’s eyes clouded briefly before she smiled. “That’s right,” she said, pressing her into her chair. “Your test isn’t until Monday.”
She nodded, throat swollen with grief while she watched her mother butter the stack of tortillas she’d already made. It wasn’t Saturday. It was Thursday and she’d have to get up for work in a few hours but she didn’t care. She let her mother press her into one of the chairs that surrounded their battered breakfast table and ate buttered tortillas until her stomach hurt.
Watching her mother move around the kitchen with an easy confidence she’d always taken for granted, she listened to her chatter on about the errands she’d have to run later in the day. Taking her dress shopping for the school dance or picking Val up from work.
She never told her sister. It was the main reason she didn’t want her to come home. She told herself it was because she was afraid if Valerie saw her like that, she’d insist on upping her medication or worse, pulling her in an assisted-living facility. But that wasn’t it. Not really. She didn’t want her sister to come home because she in those brief, sporadic times, she had her mother back and she didn’t want to share her. She didn’t keep her sister away because she was afraid. She kept her away because she was selfish.
“Where is she now?” Val had asked the other night, her voice tight with worry. It was the Fea
st of St. Rose and her mother had insisted on attending midnight mass. “You can’t just let her—”
“Relax, mom’s fine,” she said, moving down the center aisle of the church, heading toward the stoup. “Believe it or not, I know what I’m doing.”
“Really?” Val said, indignation adding weight to her words. “Dr. Hayward called me. He thinks that maybe it’s time—”
“Fuck him.” She said it loud—too loud. Several people in the back of the communion line turned and scowled at her. She scowled back. “Dr. Hayward doesn’t get to decide. He isn’t her family. We are.”
“I know that, Ellie.” Val sighed. “I’m not saying he’s right. I’m just saying we should talk about it. Make these decisions together. You and me—not just you.”
“Fine. You and me—we’re not putting her in a home,” she said, her words heavy and final. “We can talk, but we’re not talking about that.”
“Okay, okay…” Val sighed again, like talking to her made her tired. “Maybe I can come—”
“You can’t,” she said quickly. “You’re pregnant, remember?”
“Can I at least talk to her?” her sister said, sounding sad.
“She’s in line to receive communion.” The fact that it was true did nothing to lessen the guilt she felt.
“Alone?”
“No,” she said, guilt instantly replaced by annoyance. “She’s not alone.” Craning her neck to see around the line of people that stretched down the aisle. Her mother had her arm anchored through the crook of Agent Vance’s elbow, her head cocked toward her while she chattered. “She’s made a friend.”
“A friend?” Now Val sounded torn between alarm and amusement. “Is this friend an actual person?”
“Sort of. She’s an FBI agent, here to help with a case but Mom thinks…” Like she knew she was being watched, Agent Vance turned and looked at her. “Mom thinks she’s you,” she said.
The Sabrina Vaughn series Set 2 Page 62
