Voice with No Echo

by Suzanne Chazin

“What do you mean?”

  Michelle glanced over at her white ICE sedan with the blue angled slash down the side. “Maybe we should discuss this in my car. I’ve got five minutes before I need to be inside.”

  Vega followed Michelle over to her car. She beeped open the doors and began speaking as soon as Vega folded himself into the front passenger seat.

  “Two of my colleagues at ICE executed a removal order on Edgar Aviles at five this morning.”

  “He’s in custody?”

  “Not quite,” said Michelle. “He bolted. Witnesses say he boarded a southbound Metro-North train. He could be in New York City by now. Or points beyond.”

  Vega let out a string of Spanish curses. He forgot that Michelle knew every one.

  “Look, Jimmy,” she stopped him. “This decision was made by our enforcement division. I’m in investigations. All we share in common is an administrative assistant.”

  “One division doesn’t speak to the other? Share intel?”

  “On a Saturday morning at five a.m.? No. This order probably came down several days ago—before Talia died and Lissette went missing. And besides, having Aviles in custody might have worked to our advantage. If he knows something, we’d have had leverage.”

  “Except—you got nothing,” said Vega. “Because Dumb and Dumber couldn’t catch a cold in flu season.”

  Michelle gave Vega a sour look. “Were you always anti-ICE? Or is this her influence?”

  “Her?”

  “Your girlfriend. Adele Figueroa. The head of La Casa.”

  “How do you know—?”

  “Ryan Bale told me. He said your values were”—she put her fingers in quotes—“ ‘compromised.’ ”

  “Which means that asshole also knows—”

  “Relax, Jimmy. He has no idea we’re related.”

  Vega didn’t want Michelle dissecting his personal life. He had enough “personal life” with her already. He pulled up Dr. Gupta’s email with that list of names from the dead gangster. He showed it to Michelle while he explained where the list came from.

  “Okaay.” She handed Vega back his phone. “But what’s that got to do with Talia Crowley’s death? Or Lissette’s disappearance?”

  “I don’t know,” Vega admitted. “And now, I never will.” He slapped the dashboard in disgust. “Of all the people ICE could arrest, they had to arrest a janitor whose been in this country almost twenty years? The guy’s got no criminal record. He’s got a five-year-old with cancer and a sick wife. That doesn’t bother you a teeny, tiny little bit?”

  She glared at Vega.

  “You care so much for people you don’t even know,” she shot back. “How about caring for the ones you do? You haven’t asked a single personal question since we ran into each other.”

  “Anyone sick? Dying?”

  She tossed off a laugh. “That’s your idea of a personal question? No. No one’s sick or dying. Denise is still teaching. I don’t hear much from Natasha—I’m not even sure what she’s up to. But that’s to be expected, given our different mothers. My older son’s turning into quite a ball player. Just like you used to be.”

  “What’s his position?”

  “Shortstop.”

  “Same as I used to play.” Vega searched for something else to ask, but he couldn’t even remember the boy’s name.

  “Pop’s going strong,” Michelle offered. “He still plays bass with his merengue band when his arthritis isn’t acting up. I know he’d love to hear from you.”

  Vega drummed his fingers on the thighs of his khakis and said nothing.

  “You can’t spare an afternoon to visit your father?”

  “He may be your father,” said Vega. “He isn’t mine.”

  “You have another?”

  “I never had one.”

  Michelle reached into her handbag and pulled out her wallet. A shiny pink thing. Vega wondered if she caught crap for it from the other agents. She flipped it open. From a small flap on the inside, she unearthed a dog-eared photograph and held it out to him.

  “Here. A reminder. For old time’s sake.”

  It was a picture of Vega and two other boys playing stickball in the rubble of a Bronx lot. It was a color photo, but the picture was so faded and the background so stark, it might as well have been black-and-white. Two abandoned five-story tenements loomed in the background, their vacant windows dark and hollow like missing teeth. Old tires and broken refrigerators sat by a wall covered in gang graffiti, loopy bubble writing made by teenagers who were probably long dead now if they’d stayed in the life. The Bronx was a totally different place these days. Vibrant and reasonably prosperous.

  It wasn’t back then.

  “I don’t remember this picture,” said Vega.

  “I came across it one day in one of Pop’s drawers. I didn’t have any other pictures of you.”

  Vega had to be about six in the photograph. He was the smallest of the three boys. He was wearing jeans that were two sizes too big for him. They were rolled up at the ankles, pulled in with rope in the belt loops. Even in the photograph’s muted colorings, Vega could see he looked filthy and scabbed. His jeans were smeared with dirt. His oversized undershirt couldn’t possibly be called “white.” His bangs hung down, nearly to the lids of his eyes.

  The two older boys didn’t look much better. They were closer to nine or ten. Both were rangy, almost malnourished. Their clothes were dirty, their hair uncombed. Vega had only one word for all of them: feral. They looked like nobody was raising them. Nobody at all.

  Vega flipped the photograph over. Somebody had written all three boys’ first and last names on the back: Jimmy Vega, Johnny Ray Osorio, Angel Dominguez.

  “Were Johnny Ray and Angel friends?” asked Michelle.

  “I couldn’t tell you which was which,” said Vega. “I don’t have any memory of them.”

  “I asked Pop. He said he didn’t know. I thought maybe it was when you got sent away.”

  “Sent . . . ?” Vega felt like the ground beneath him had shifted. The day was heating up. It was warm in the car. Yet he shuddered like he’d just walked into a room with too much air-conditioning.

  “I was never sent away,” Vega insisted. “Sent away for what?”

  “I don’t know,” said Michelle. “That’s what my mom always said.”

  “Well, she’s wrong.” Vega went to hand the picture back to her.

  “Keep it,” she told him. “It belongs to you more than it does to me.”

  The photograph made him sad. Worse, it made him uneasy. He was anxious to get away.

  “They’ll be starting the cut soon,” he said. “You’d better go inside.”

  Chapter 10

  Vega sat in his truck after Michelle went inside, staring at the dog-eared photograph of him in that vacant Bronx lot with two other boys.

  You got sent away.

  Michelle’s words pressed against his insides like a half-remembered TV jingle from thirty years ago. From time to time as an adult, he’d catch a vague and fleeting sensation of great loss mixed with great rage. He never knew how to describe it except to say that it felt like he was standing at the bottom of a dark well while people walked above, oblivious.

  Odd things triggered it. The buttery sweet smell of Coppertone suntan lotion. Old reruns of Sesame Street. That Kool & the Gang song, “Celebration,” that always seemed happy and yet made him feel sad.

  He carried tics and phobias whose origins mystified him. He grew panicky in enclosed spaces. He was almost pathologically on time for things, fearful of showing up late and being left behind. He felt a special affinity for lost children, as if somewhere, somehow, a part of him was lost.

  And then there were the rages Vega recalled in early childhood. Dark, foul torrents of anger that came on in first grade. He spent much of that year in Sister Margarita’s office. For throwing a stapler at his teacher. For getting into fistfights on the playground. For overturning a table full of juice cups. Once, he took a black m
agic marker and drew over every part of his body—even his face—as if he were trying to obliterate himself. His kindergarten teacher at St. Raymond’s in the Bronx had described him as a “sunny, friendly child,” who “played well with others.”

  His first-grade teacher said he needed a special school.

  For his seventh birthday, his mother bought him an old guitar from a pawnshop on East Tremont Avenue. Music turned out to be his salvation. He practiced for hours until the pads of his fingers were as tough as shoe leather. The notes filled the hollow spaces inside of him. Gradually, the rages stopped. They were gone entirely by the winter of second grade. His mother and grandmother never spoke of them again. He’d outrun his demons.

  Or at least he thought he had. Until Michelle handed him that picture.

  Vega’s cell phone rang in his pocket. He tucked the photograph inside his wallet and checked the screen. Greco. He picked up.

  “What’s this I hear about you showing up at the ME’s office?” Greco growled into the receiver.

  “I thought no one was assigned to the cut,” said Vega. “Be glad I was here. I picked up some intel for you on the jewelry-store heist. Elmer Ortega, your chief suspect, is the headless and handless John Doe Warburton found down by the muffler factory a few weeks ago. The DNA just came in.”

  “So, you’re working the burglary too? What is this? Buy-one-get-one-free week with the county police?”

  “I thought you’d want to know,” said Vega. “Plus, it may figure into the Crowley case.”

  “How so?”

  “Ortega was carrying a list in his pocket when he died with five names on it. One of them was Edgar Ceren-Aviles. Switch those last names and you’ve got Lissette’s uncle.”

  “And this helps us . . . how?”

  “I don’t know,” Vega admitted. “But it’s surprising, don’t you think? Aviles is a handyman, not a gangbanger.”

  “Right now, he’s a fugitive,” said Greco. “Michelle told you, right? ICE tried to nab Aviles this morning. He jackrabbited.”

  “Maybe he’s with Lissette.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s hope so,” said Greco. “In the meantime, I need you to take a ride over to the new CIC.”

  Vega sucked back his disappointment. He’d much rather be out talking to suspects than sifting through data at the County Intelligence Center, a fledgling unit that gathered electronic surveillance material for law enforcement. Everything from bridge-toll receipts to footage from license-plate readers.

  “Something specific you’re looking for?” asked Vega.

  Silence. Greco seemed to be debating what to say over the phone. “Let’s just say, it doesn’t take three hours to drive from Lake Holly to Albany.”

  “Is that what Crowley is claiming?”

  “Me and Sanchez just came from speaking to him,” said Greco. “He says his driver, Victor Franco, picked him up at six on Thursday evening. They got to the hotel where the conference was being held at nine.”

  “No stops?”

  “He says they caught dinner at a place called Mario’s up in Taylorsville. I have a copy of the receipt. Long dinner.”

  Greco let that hang in the air for a second. Vega was wondering if Greco was having second thoughts about wrapping up the case quickly.

  “We’re having a meeting at the station house at noon,” he said. “I’m texting you the license plate of the Lincoln Navigator that Victor Franco drove Crowley up to Albany in. Get the license-plate reader records and E-ZPass receipts for the vehicle. We’ll talk then.” Greco hung up.

  Vega stared at his phone. The three-hour trip from Lake Holly to Albany got Vega curious too. He’d take a drive down to Warburton, to the former factory that now housed the CIC, and pull the records. And while he was there, he’d stop in to the Warburton Police and see his friend and drummer, Richie Solero, who just happened to work on their Gang Intelligence Squad.

  Elmer Ortega’s list was curious too.

  * * *

  It was another half hour south from the medical examiner’s office to Warburton, the most industrial part of the county. The terrain grew more congested with each mile, going from bungalows to garden apartments to strip shopping malls, and finally, to a steady skyline of red-brick and sandstone mid-rises along hilly boulevards. Beyond, Vega could see the wide, gray choppy waters of the Hudson River and the wall of chiseled granite cliffs on the other side.

  Solero had already punched out from his overnight shift, but he’d agreed to wait around for Vega—especially after Vega dangled the information that the John Doe at the ME’s office had been ID’d through DNA as Elmer Ortega.

  “Park in the precinct lot—even if you have to double-park,” Solero warned Vega. “The locals see your police sticker, you’re gonna have two broken headlights and a windshield covered in spray paint before you leave.”

  Vega couldn’t find a space so he double-parked like his friend had suggested and left his keys with the desk sergeant. He waited in a stripped-down front lobby that had no place to sit—by design, Vega suspected.

  A door opened a few minutes later, and Solero’s head popped out.

  “Only time I think I’ve seen you without a guitar strapped to your shoulder.” Solero held out a knuckle. Vega rapped it.

  “Only time I’ve seen you in uniform. Well, half in uniform.” Solero worked undercover, but for some reason he had on his dark blue police uniform shirt over jeans.

  “I had to take a new personnel photo this morning,” Solero explained. “I didn’t want to slip into all my gear so I just brought the shirt.” Solero ripped the two halves apart. Vega pointed to the buttons.

  “We county cops actually have to learn how to button our shirts, not Velcro them like preschoolers.”

  “Yeah?” Solero shrugged off the shirt, revealing two massive biceps and a neck that jutted from his black T-shirt beneath like a fire hydrant. “When you need your backup gun on your Kevlar vest quickly, tell me how those buttons are working for you.”

  “Good point,” said Vega. “You come up with that idea?”

  “A couple of cops at the gym gave me the idea,” said Solero. “It comes in handy when I’m going from working here to working out with clients.”

  Solero, like a lot of bodybuilding cops Vega knew, worked a side job as a personal trainer. The money came in handy since it was expensive to train and compete on the bodybuilding circuit. Vega never understood the appeal. He liked staying in shape too. He had a weight bench right off the dining area and worked out regularly. But he never cared for the Popeye look.

  Solero walked Vega through the locked entry door.

  “You get the text from Danny about tonight’s gig?” Solero was referring to Danny Molina, the band’s keyboardist.

  “No,” said Vega. “What’s up?”

  “The groom wants us to play the ‘Macarena.’ ”

  Vega groaned. Every drunken wedding and bachelor party the band played requested it. There was a nine-out-of-ten chance that the groom would want to come onstage and sing and dance too. Maybe bring the whole wedding party up.

  “Please tell me he’s not a guitarist.” Vega didn’t want some drunk messing with his guitars. “Half these gigs—they’d do better just hiring a DJ, you know?”

  “Be happy they don’t.”

  Solero walked Vega along a faded army-green hallway past file rooms, a small kitchen, and a detectives’ bullpen. WANTED posters and maps of the city lined the walls, along with personnel reminders against sexual harassment and police brutality. It was the same in every station house these days. Cops watched the citizens. The brass watched the cops. Nobody trusted anybody anymore.

  “Have you talked to Chuck McCormick recently?” Vega asked Solero. McCormick was one of Solero’s personal training clients. He lived up near Vega in a big house with his own recording studio. He’d given the band a special price to come in and lay down the tracks for an eight-song CD.

  Vega hadn’t cut a CD since before he became a cop. Ba
ck then, he harbored visions of becoming a full-time guitarist and going on the road with his band, Straight Money. Then Joy came along and he had to abandon his dreams. He was too old for the road now. His current band, Armado—Spanish for “armed”—was all cops with jobs and families and pension considerations that kept them from getting too serious. But he still loved the music. He and Molina had written a bunch of songs and it was exciting to put together a CD after all this time.

  “I saw Chuck last Tuesday,” said Solero. “He’s still working on engineering the mix.”

  “It’s been a month,” Vega grumbled.

  “He’ll get around to it in the next week or two,” said Solero. “Don’t worry.”

  Solero opened the door to a room with a bunch of desks pushed together. The walls were lined with more mug shots—mostly of black and Hispanic men. None of them looked to be more than about thirty.

  Gang members never lived much beyond that.

  “Welcome to Warburton’s Gang Intelligence Squad.” Solero grinned. “Though it’s debatable whether ‘gang’ and ‘intelligence’ belong in the same sentence.”

  Solero walked over to the squad refrigerator in the corner, next to a coffee machine. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out two Cokes. He threw one to Vega. “Heads up.”

  Vega caught it cleanly. “Thanks.”

  Solero pulled out two armless chairs on rollers and gestured to Vega to take one. He spun his own backward and straddled it, resting his chin on one hand while he sipped his Coke. His bristle-short black hair sat high and tight on his scalp like a crown. He was Cuban on his father’s side, but his features favored his Italian-American mother. Most people were surprised there was any Hispanic in him at all.

  “The crew’s not here on Saturday mornings,” Solero explained. “The knife-and-gun club is more of a Friday-and Saturday-night operation. So how’d you hear about Cheetos?”

  “Who?”

  “Elmer Ortega,” said Solero. “His gang moniker is

  ‘Cheetos.’ Word on the street was, he got the name because he tended to leave his prints on things—”

  “Like the jewelry store in Lake Holly,” said Vega. “They had a BOLO out on Ortega before he disappeared. You’d better check in with them.”