Voice with No Echo

by Suzanne Chazin

  “All right!” said Zimmerman. “I’m going. Please tell Edgar I tried.”

  “I will,” Adele promised him.

  Vega walked Zimmerman through the scattering of preschoolers still being led to parents’ cars. The mass exodus had tapered off to a handful now. Vega saw Fitzgerald at the curb, directing traffic.

  “Is this the last of the kids?” Vega asked the young cop.

  “There are still almost a dozen kids and two teachers inside,” Fitzgerald replied. “Some parents”—he heaved a sigh—“they leave an emergency contact number and then don’t pick it up in an emergency.”

  “Where’s your partner?” asked Vega. “Where’s Ianelli and Hart?”

  “Hart’s at the entrance with Ianelli,” said Fitzgerald. “I think they’re being dispatched on another call. I’m not sure where Ryan is. I think he’s getting a head count from the teachers.”

  “A head count,” Vega repeated. Bale could get a head count by stopping one of the assistants on the sidewalk helping children into cars. He didn’t need to wander off. Short of an emergency requiring police response, he had no business in the synagogue right now. Not with ICE at the front door.

  Something urgent and worrisome percolated through Vega’s veins. Like he’d just discovered that his wallet was missing. He walked Zimmerman over to his car, a gray Cadillac Seville that was buffed to a high gloss.

  “Do you think you can drive home without me?” Vega asked.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “I just remembered something I need to do.”

  Vega opened Zimmerman’s car door for him. The old man paused, the door between them. He reached over and gripped Vega’s arm. His dark eyes turned glassy.

  “I’m alive today because an illiterate pig farmer made a split-second decision to hide me in a hay bale instead of handing me over to the Nazis.” Zimmerman’s voice, normally so commanding, sounded shaky and hoarse. “What I’m saying is, it’s not the big choices that define us. It’s the little ones.”

  “I don’t know that I have any choices here,” said Vega. “Big or little.”

  “Ah.” Zimmerman wagged a finger at him. “That’s where you’re wrong, Jimmy. God gave us two arms to lift and one mouth to speak. You think He did all that just so we could cuss out the Yankees’ pitching?”

  Vega smiled. “I’ll try to remember that come playoff season.”

  Zimmerman got into his Cadillac. Vega watched the old man slowly pull out of the parking lot. Then Vega doubled back to the synagogue. Adele and the rabbi were so deep in conversation with the ICE agents they didn’t notice Vega turn off the main sidewalk and onto a path that encircled the building. Beyond a copse of evergreens, Vega saw a fenced playground. It was empty of children. They were all inside.

  No sign of Bale.

  The back of the complex was much bigger than Vega realized from the front. The lower level bowed out where the preschool was located. An entire wall of glass windows afforded a perfect view inside. Vega could see a young female teacher negotiating a disputed toy between two four-year-olds while another teacher—or perhaps a teaching assistant, she looked barely out of college—poured juice into paper cups.

  Vega didn’t want to startle them. He walked up to the sliding glass doors and held up his badge. The teacher negotiating the dispute walked over to the door and slid it open. She had dark curly hair that she pulled back into a ponytail and a peasant-style blouse with embroidery and tassels on it. A Hamsa medallion—the hand with the eye in the center—dangled from a gold chain around her neck.

  “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” said Vega. “But have you seen any police officers enter the building?”

  “I let one in,” she replied. “I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to. He said he wasn’t ICE. He just wanted to get a head count of the children and make sure the building was secure.”

  Vega tried to hide his concern. He didn’t want to alarm the teachers. “Do you know where he went?”

  “Upstairs, I think.” She flicked her gaze down Vega. Unlike Bale, he wasn’t wearing a uniform. “Can’t you call him on a radio or something?”

  Vega didn’t have a radio. And even if he did, it would be on county frequency, not Lake Holly’s.

  The teacher blocked the door. “How do I know you’re not ICE?”

  “I’m with the county police—just like it says on my badge.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Look, ma’am,” said Vega. “Beth Shalom’s handyman may be in more danger from the uniformed patrol officer you just let in than from those two jokers on the front steps. I’m not ICE. I’m not here to arrest Aviles. I need you to step aside.”

  “But the children—”

  “The children will be fine,” Vega promised. “Just stick to your routines and everything will be over before you know it.”

  She stepped aside and Vega slipped through the doors. He turned left, away from the classrooms and down a hallway lined with pint-size cubbies. On the tile walls above hung children’s finger paintings and the Hebrew letters of the alphabet. Vega wished he knew the layout of the synagogue better. Except for picking up Zimmerman the other night, he hadn’t been inside Beth Shalom in years. Even when he was married to Wendy, he seldom set foot in the building.

  One hallway seemed to lead to more classrooms and a kitchen. Vega noted a large room beyond. It may have been the room where Joy had her bat mitzvah celebration. Vega couldn’t recall. It was all so long ago. It was empty now. Everything down here looked empty.

  At the end of the hall was a stairwell. Vega plastered himself against the cool tile of the wall and listened. Bale was on duty. In full uniform. He would have had a radio clipped to his collar. It should have been squawking away with chatter from other cops on duty as well as occasional updates or requests from dispatch.

  He heard nothing. Either Bale had muted it or he’d left the building already.

  Vega walked up the first half flight of stairs, past a tapestry with Hebrew letters beneath an olive branch. He held his breath and tried to discern each noise around him. The chatter of little children below him and the clap of their teachers’ hands. A woman’s voice above him. Not Adele’s. It sounded like she was talking on a phone. Maybe the rabbi’s secretary.

  He bounded up the second set of stairs and found himself in a hall paneled in blond wood with a glass case full of decorative menorahs and a bronze plaque attesting to the many families who’d financed the various additions and renovations of Beth Shalom. Somewhere in that long list of names were those of Dr. David and Sarah Kaplan. Vega’s former in-laws. Not that they ever really felt like family. More like neighbors who occasionally lent him their barbecue tongs and then moved away to a city he knew he’d never visit.

  His whole former marriage sometimes felt like that.

  Across from the stairs was a side entrance to the sanctuary. Light angled in broad brushstrokes from the skylights onto the pews. Even empty, the worship hall had a hushed reverence about it. Vega had fallen away from his own Catholic upbringing decades ago. But he still found himself moved by the power and majesty of any space devoted to faith—perhaps because he had so little himself.

  And then he heard it. A voice followed by a slight echo. Vega recognized a Spanish accent in the soft consonants and singsong vowels even as he failed to discern the words. It was coming from somewhere inside the sanctuary. Not on the stage or in the pews.

  Above. Forty feet above. On the opposite side of the worship hall.

  Vega heard another echo as well. This second one looped beneath Aviles’s like a dark undertow, fracturing the sound waves like an unexpected sharp or flat. It changed the vibrations in the room. From melodic to discordant. From major to minor. From light to dark.

  The second voice belonged to Ryan Bale.

  Chapter 42

  Vega flattened himself against the door of the sanctuary and lifted his gaze to a spot high on the opposite wall. There on a metal catwalk near the skylights stood B
ale and Aviles. Aviles was cornered at the endpoint of the catwalk. His back was to the railing, his hands out in front in a pleading gesture. Bale stood a few feet away, his massive bulk blocking off the exit. Their words to each other were unintelligible at this distance. If not for Aviles’s gestures, Vega would have assumed Bale was up there trying to talk down a suicidal immigrant facing deportation.

  That’s how Bale would play it too. When Adele and Rabbi Goldberg found Aviles’s bloody body sprawled out across the pews forty feet below, Bale would tell them how he’d tried in vain to save Aviles. Maybe even throw in some dramatic moment of personal peril. How he’d nearly gone over the rail himself in a desperate attempt to hang on to the man.

  Only Vega would know the truth. A truth he couldn’t prove. Not with a dead man for a witness.

  His first instinct was to shout up to Bale to come down. But why would he? Up there, Bale held all the cards. Vega couldn’t hear their conversation. He couldn’t read their eyes or facial cues. If Bale really intended to throw Aviles over the railing, there was little Vega could do about it from forty feet below. Bale was two hundred and fifty pounds of solid muscle. Aviles was shorter, flabbier, and easily a hundred pounds lighter. Vega had no radio, no way to summon help. With Aviles dead, the whole situation would amount to one cop’s word against another’s. And given Vega’s rep as a cop who shoots civilians, he had no doubt which officer law enforcement would choose to believe.

  His only hope was to find the entrance to the catwalk and get the jump on Bale before he could hurt Aviles. Vega edged his way down the hall outside the sanctuary, landing the rubber soles of his duty boots as quietly as he could on the shiny marble tile floors. His pulse quickened. His thoughts batted about like pinballs inside an arcade machine. Aviles was the link to Lissette. Lissette was the link to Deisy’s phone and how it related to Talia’s death. All of that in turn was linked back to Bale and the Ramirez brothers. It was a fragile chain of supposition and evidence. One broken loop and it could all fall apart.

  Aviles had to survive.

  Vega turned the corner and turned again until he was in an empty hallway. He was vaguely aware of voices in the distance. The rabbi’s secretary finishing up her phone call. Adele and Rabbi Goldberg arguing with the ICE agents at the front door. The children below, the sound of their happy voices floating through the air like swimmers on a beach.

  Vega followed the corridor past the restrooms where he found several unmarked doors. He tugged on each handle. One led to a coat closet. Another, to a storage area full of mops and buckets. A third, to a concrete landing with plumbing and heating ducts overhead and a big gray electrical box on the wall. Vega went to close it when his eye caught the mirror on the opposite wall. His image reflected back at him, wide-eyed and jittery. He saw himself. He saw the door.

  He saw the black metal staircase spiraling up behind it.

  Vega grabbed the handle and began to climb. Five steps. Then ten. He was right-handed—convenient for holding the banister. Inconvenient for drawing his weapon from his holster as he climbed. Speed and stealth mattered more here, he decided. He kept his Glock 19 holstered and climbed using only the toes of his duty boots to minimize the sound.

  Fifteen steps. Then twenty. He was almost two stories into a four-story ascent. Sweat slicked his skin and plastered his polo shirt to his back. The tight turns felt like some kind of funhouse climb. His breathing turned ragged and shallow. Voices faded in and out from above. About five steps from the top of the landing, Vega went into combat pose. He reasoned that Bale wouldn’t draw his gun on Aviles. Bale’s narrative was better served if his weapon never left his holster.

  Which meant Vega would have the advantage.

  Vega un-holstered his weapon and planted himself on the four-foot-wide catwalk.

  “Freeze!” He yelled. “Hands above your heads where I can see them!”

  Aviles held up his hands. Bale turned from Aviles and clamped his hands on each side of the railing.

  “Jimmy?” Bale took in the pistol aimed at his head. Not Vega’s preferred target but he had no choice. Bale was in uniform and wearing a Kevlar vest. A shot to the torso wouldn’t even slow him down.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Bale demanded.

  “Hands behind your head!” Vega ordered.

  “What is this? Have you gone full psycho?”

  “I’m not telling you again, Ryan. Do it!”

  “He was going to kill me,” Aviles choked out. “Throw me over the side. He knows where Lissette is. He knows.”

  Bale slowly raised his massive arms off the railing and laced them behind his shaved head. “Of course I know,” said Bale. “Same as any cop with half a brain. She’s been in on the whole charade from the beginning. She killed the DA’s wife.”

  “She wouldn’t do such a thing,” Aviles protested.

  “Where is she?” asked Vega.

  “Put the gun down, Jimmy, and I’ll tell you.” Bale unlaced his hands and started to lower them.

  “Keep ’em raised!” yelled Vega. He was feeling disoriented. He thought he’d figured everything out and here was Bale, telling Vega some things he suspected and some things he didn’t. “If you know something, Ryan, spit it out.”

  Bale shook his head. “Not with you pointing a gun at me. Put the gun down—”

  “He’s lying,” shouted Aviles. “He was going to kill me—”

  “Aw, for chrissake, Jimmy!” Bale demanded. “Who are you gonna believe? The Frito Bandito here? Or a fellow cop?”

  A fellow cop. Always. Even a racist one.

  Vega nodded his chin at Aviles. “Let him go. Then we can talk.”

  “He’s an illegal,” said Bale. “He’s treating a house of worship like a freakin’ Holiday Inn. You think I’m gonna let him go? With law enforcement waiting to escort him through checkout? Help me cuff him and turn him over to ICE. Then you and me, we can talk about this.”

  Vega hesitated.

  “Either you’re a cop or you’re not, Jimmy. So which is it? Which side are you on?”

  “Which side are you on, Ryan?”

  “Huh?”

  “The body cam,” said Vega. “You turned it on yesterday—right after you removed a tracking device from Adele’s car.”

  A muscle twitched down one side of Bale’s thick neck. His tiny raisin eyes registered a moment of surprise. He tossed off a low-rumble laugh.

  “Is that what this is about? That GPS?”

  “So, you admit removing it,” said Vega. “Which means you put it there as well.”

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Jimmy. I was doing Adele a favor.”

  “By arresting her?”

  “I’ve heard rumors that a couple of mechanics in town are stashing drugs in customers’ cars and using GPS to recover it. I didn’t want to tip off your girlfriend and have her confronting them. Figured I’d trace the GPS myself. Who knows?” Bale shrugged. “It could’ve proved her innocence.”

  Vega blinked at Bale. The man was either one of the smoothest liars Vega had ever encountered or he was telling the truth. Which was it?

  “Jimmy.” Bale took a step forward. “Whatever you think of me, we’re brothers in blue. Put the gun away, I’ll forget this ever happened, and we can take care of business, all right?”

  Bale reached for Vega’s gun. Vega stepped back.

  “Listen, Ryan.” Vega took a deep breath. “I believe you. I do. But we’re still gonna have to play this my way until I know for sure. I need you to lie down. Face forward and lace your hands behind your head.”

  Bale’s raisin eyes screwed up until they were pinholes. His voice was steely. “You really have lost your freakin’ mind—”

  “Do it!” Vega ordered.

  Bale hesitated a moment then took a knee and slowly dropped onto his stomach. He placed his palms on the back of his shaved head and pressed his square jaw into the honeycomb grid of the metal. Lying prone like that, in uniform, he took up the enti
re catwalk. But at least he was less lethal. Vega turned his gaze to Aviles.

  “Go downstairs,” he ordered Aviles. “Find Rabbi Goldberg or his secretary and tell them to fetch Officer Fitzgerald and bring him in here. Not ICE. Not a squad of police. Just Fitzgerald. Got it?”

  “Fitzgerald,” Aviles repeated. “Yes. Okay.” He stepped in between Bale’s arms and legs like a mouse scampering past a sleeping cat. Vega heard his footsteps die away as he descended the stairs.

  Vega removed a set of handcuffs clipped to his belt. Bale heard the familiar jingle.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Jimmy! You’re gonna cuff me now? An officer in uniform? The Lake Holly PD’s gonna go apeshit on you if you do that. Even Greco won’t talk to you ever again. I’m lying down. I’m complying. And besides, how the hell do you think I’m gonna be able to climb down that spiral staircase with my hands cuffed behind my back?”

  He had a point.

  “All right,” said Vega, backing off on the cuffs. He’d settle for disarming Bale instead. He stepped to the right side of Bale and removed the officer’s Glock from his holster. Vega tucked it in the back of his waistband.

  “You carrying a bug?” asked Vega. A backup gun.

  “Negative.”

  Vega had a hard time believing a bruiser like Bale wouldn’t arm himself with a second gun. He felt the man’s ankles and patted down the sides of his iron-piling legs.

  No gun.

  “You see, asshole?” Bale growled.

  Vega emptied Bale’s pants pockets. It was a reflexive impulse—the sort of thing he did when he was frisking suspects, looking for contraband and ID—totally unnecessary here. Ryan Bale was wearing his ID and he wasn’t likely to be carrying drugs.

  “C’mon, Jimmy. You don’t need to do that.” Bale tossed off a nervous laugh. “C’mon, man. You know me.”

  Vega found a set of keys, some sticks of chewing gum, his wallet, cell phone, and—in another pocket—a badge case. Bale didn’t need a badge case when he was in uniform. Unlike detectives, his shield was already clipped to his uniform shirt, along with his picture ID.