A Blossom of Bright Light

by Suzanne Chazin

  “The only Mia I know is Mia Soloff. We were on the same tennis team in high—”

  “She’s not Mia Soloff!”

  “Okay, Dad. Chill.”

  “Chill? That girl was found in your hoodie, on your college campus, and now her blood is on your quilt.”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  “Are you?”

  “How could you even ask me that?”

  Vega slumped in his seat and rubbed his eyes. “I want to believe you, Chispita. I do. But see . . .” He couldn’t tell her about the link between the dead teenager and the abandoned baby. It could compromise the whole investigation. Yet he had to know what he was dealing with here. He just had to.

  “The other day when we were at the hospital, you asked me what would happen to a girl who abandoned her baby—do you remember?” asked Vega.

  “I remember.”

  Vega closed his eyes and chose his words carefully. “You—expressed a lot of sympathy for a woman in that situation.”

  “So?”

  “If someone like that came to you—would you—would you maybe try to do something to help them?”

  “Help them how?”

  Vega leveled his gaze at her and spoke the words slowly. “Make the child go away.”

  “What? You mean like an abortion?”

  Vega wanted to scream the facts to her: A teenage girl died in a botched childbirth. Her blood was found on a quilt with your name on it. Her body was buried on your college campus. Wearing your hoodie. Her newborn was smothered by a female hand in the woods not far from where you live. People were sent away for twenty-five to life on less evidence than this.

  Instead, he stayed very still and said nothing.

  “I didn’t help anyone get an abortion, if that’s what you’re asking me. Is it, Dad? Did this girl die from an abortion?”

  “I can’t comment.” He sighed. “You’ll need a lawyer.” He dialed Wendy’s cell and explained the situation as best he could. He had to repeat, “I don’t know” and “I can’t comment” so many times, Wendy finally hung up on him. Then he called Dolan and told him Joy was coming home and he would be following her in his unmarked.

  Twelve minutes later, they were pulling up to Wendy’s house, a massive whitewashed Georgian with columns down the front, a three-car garage, and a wide, Belgian-block-lined driveway that bisected a nearly treeless acre of lawn.

  There were six police vehicles parked at the curb and along the driveway by the time Vega pulled behind Joy’s Volvo. Cops in and out of uniform were traipsing through the double-height front entrance door, yammering on their radios, treating the whole event like a giant opportunity to milk some overtime. A lot of them knew Vega, so his presence had a chilling effect on the scene. They kept their heads down as soon as they caught sight of him or ducked back into the house to avoid an encounter. Cops defined the world as “us” and “them.” They didn’t have a clue how to handle a situation where “us” and “them” were one and the same.

  Dolan hustled over as soon as Joy got out of her car. He kept his body language light and breezy, but there was no mistaking the forced good humor in the smile beneath his bushy blond mustache as he extended a hand. Joy must have felt it too. She looked pale and shaky when she shook it. Dolan held out his hand to Vega. Vega ignored it, gesturing instead to the gridlock of black-and-whites.

  “Jesus Christ, Teddy! Did you have to turn this into a freakin’ circus?” Behind the neighbors’ expensive window treatments, they had to be taking notice.

  “I can’t change the rules just because she’s your daughter, man. Serving a search warrant’s a messy business. You know that. Believe me, I don’t want this any more than you do.”

  “How long did you wait to search the dump after we met this morning? Ten minutes? Did you even take a piss first?”

  “C’mon, Jimmy. In my shoes, you’d have done the same thing. I didn’t expect to find anything. This”—Dolan gestured to the open front door and squawk of radios inside—“is as much of a surprise to me as I’m sure it is to you.” Dolan turned to Joy. He kept that used-car salesman’s smile on his face. “Joy? I’m gonna need to talk to you for a little bit.”

  Vega stepped in front of her. “My daughter talks through her lawyer. Same as any suspect with half a brain.”

  “That’s the way you want to play it?” asked Dolan. “You want a formal arrest? Your daughter handcuffed in front of all your ex-wife’s neighbors?”

  “Daddy!” Joy started crying. It was finally dawning on her what she was up against. “I didn’t do anything. I swear!”

  “Shhh.” Vega put his arms around her and pulled her close. The shushing wasn’t just to calm her—it was to shut her up as well. For all Vega knew, Joy could be protecting someone else, someone whose full culpability Joy didn’t even fully understand yet. A statement like, “I didn’t do anything” was all prosecutors would need to convict her as an accessory down the line.

  “Please don’t let them arrest me, Daddy!”

  Vega rubbed her back and stared over it at Dolan. “He’s not gonna arrest you. If he were, he’d have done it already.” They both knew that no cop gives a damn about neighbors if he’s got enough evidence to slap on the cuffs. Dolan’s threat was a bluff to get Joy to talk. She couldn’t see it, but Vega could. His heart lifted slightly. If Dolan didn’t think he had enough for probable cause, there was still a chance to set things right.

  “Go inside,” Vega instructed her. “Find your mother. And don’t open your mouth to anyone. Not even to Mom. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Dad.” Her voice sounded swallowed and scared. Vega waited until she’d gone inside before he spoke again.

  “Level with me, Teddy. What have you got?”

  Dolan shook his head. “Enough to arrest her, despite your little show of bravado just now.”

  “Then why haven’t you?”

  “Because I’m a dad and a cop too, Jimmy. Andre and Keisha will be teenagers one day, and I don’t want to take a fellow cop down that road if I can help it.” Dolan held his gaze. “That’s why the best thing for Joy right now is to talk to me.”

  “Yeah, right,” Vega snorted. “Let her swim with the sharks.”

  “Sounds like you think she’s guilty.”

  “She’s not.”

  “Says every parent.”

  “No. I know by her dopey, glib answers that she’s telling the truth. Plus, I’ve got information that may clear her.”

  “Yeah? What?” asked Dolan, not really listening.

  “I just came from Claudia’s bodega in town. Her teenage grandson ID’d the dead girl as someone named Mia who visits the car wash where he works. He mentioned her visiting with her mom.”

  Dolan pulled out his notebook. “Go on.”

  “That’s—sort of it,” said Vega. “The grandson’s mentally retarded—”

  “So in other words, you don’t know if any of it’s accurate.”

  “It bears checking out.”

  “And I will.” Silence.

  “See, the way this works,” said Vega, “is that you offer me something now.”

  More silence.

  “All right. I’ll begin,” said Vega. “As I understand it, you went to WastePro’s dumping facility down in Port Carroll and the dog found a quilt with Joy’s name on it and the girl’s blood—”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The tooth fairy.” Dolan probably knew where Vega got his information from, but it did neither cop any good to start pointing fingers. “Are you sure it isn’t Joy’s blood?” asked Vega.

  “Positive,” said Dolan. “I can’t give you any details, but we’re awaiting a DNA matchup, and I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s gonna be a match to the dead girl on campus.”

  “Okay. So you found her blood on Joy’s quilt. A lot of it?”

  Dolan hesitated. “I can’t answer that one.”

  “You find it on anything besides the quilt?”

  Dola
n ran a hand across his shaved head and looked away. “Jesus, man. I shouldn’t even be talking to you—”

  Vega could feel Dolan disengaging. He plowed ahead. Joy’s life depended on it. “If you’d found evidence of the dead girl in the house or any of the vehicles, Joy would be in custody now. So I’m guessing you haven’t gotten another hit outside of that quilt at the dump.”

  “We haven’t checked Joy’s car yet. She had it with her.”

  “Which backs up my theory that you haven’t found blood elsewhere or you wouldn’t be all that concerned about checking her Volvo.”

  Dolan didn’t argue. Vega knew he was right. “So we’re back to the quilt at the dump. Did my ex-wife tell you whether she’d given it away like she did the hoodie?”

  “She said she gave both items away over the summer. But she’s got nothing to back up her claim. She didn’t give it to a store. She says she put a couple of trash bags of donations together sometime in July or August and gave them to Rosa, her live-in housekeeper, to dump in the bins over by the shopping center.”

  “Doesn’t mean that’s not what happened.”

  “And what are the odds, Vega, that a dead girl is in possession of two items of your daughter’s in separate locations and your daughter’s not involved?”

  “For all you know, maybe Rosa knows the dead girl. Maybe she helped out at the house and she cut herself at some point—”

  “We interviewed Rosa. She says she never saw the girl before.”

  “Not for nothing, but my daughter’s saying the same thing. Why take Rosa’s word?”

  “Because the girl wasn’t found wearing Rosa’s hoodie.”

  Vega tried a different tack. “Listen, Teddy—I want to do the right thing. If Joy’s involved, I want her to own up to it. So convince me. I believe you that the dog found that teenager’s blood on Joy’s quilt. But what’s that prove? Nothing, in my book.”

  “All of that trash the dog went through was picked up today in Lake Holly,” said Dolan.

  “It could have come from anywhere in Lake Holly. Can you say for sure that it came from Joy’s garbage?”

  “No. But you’re focusing on the wrong part of the equation,” said Dolan. “Where we found our evidence is the one thing keeping your daughter out of jail this minute. But you need to focus on what we found and why it’s the whole case.”

  “Blood—I get it. From the girl.”

  Dolan held his gaze, and a slow dawning crept into Vega, curdling the remains of the ham and cheese sandwich he’d eaten earlier. Blood. From a teenager who’d just given birth. A girl whose body showed no external wounds when Vega saw her in the woods yesterday. This wasn’t a cut or scrape. This was—

  “Holy—” Vega kicked at the Belgian blocks lining the driveway and cursed. He felt queasy and light-headed. “No.”

  “That’s why I’m saying it’s not random, man. It doesn’t matter whether we found it in Joy’s trash. She’d be pretty stupid to stick it in her own trash anyway. We could have found it anywhere and it wouldn’t change much about the case. Do you understand now?”

  “You found the afterbirth.”

  Chapter 19

  Vega barely slept that night and awoke Thursday morning just as the sky was turning from black to bruised. He was scheduled to work this upcoming weekend, so he had the day off. That meant a whole day ahead at his lakeside cabin to stew in his thoughts.

  Not good. Not good at all. The only thing he could think about was clearing Joy. But he was powerless to do so. Citing conflict of interest, Captain Waring had taken him off the case entirely.

  He made his coffee too strong just to feel the bite of it on his tongue, the sharp warmth as it traveled through his body. He felt lost in every other part of his being, hollowed out by doubts and recriminations. He had a long list of things that could keep him busy at home: a leaky faucet that needed replacing, guitar practice for a club gig with his band. His refrigerator was empty. His laundry hamper was full. He needed to make his monthly call to the homicide detectives in the Bronx—a useless exercise that always filled him with sadness and frustration. His mother’s unsolved murder was a wound that never seemed to close. On an index card above the phone, the original squad number grew ever more faded as detectives’ names were added and crossed out with each new officer assigned to the case.

  He drained the last of his coffee and walked out to his deck. A fog obscured the view of the lake. The air smelled of wood smoke and damp leaves. When he bought this two-bedroom, vinyl-sided cape after his divorce, friends told him he was crazy. It was on a postage-stamp of weeds, almost an hour’s commute from his office and a whole county north of his jurisdiction. A former summer cabin, it lacked insulation, decent wiring, or adequate plumbing. His first two winters here were the coldest he’d ever known.

  The lake, however, made it all worthwhile. Vega never tired of it—its perfect stillness, the way it caught and held the moods of the sky. In the mornings, from his back deck, he loved to watch herons skate low across the water. There were toads in the spring and perch that broke the surface with a whoosh in summer. There were morning mists and evening crickets and red-tailed hawks that hovered like kites overhead in the plenty of time. Here, he could prop his feet on the railing of his deck, play his Gibson six-string, and pretend for just a moment that this was his real life, that he’d never traded the hardened callouses on his fingertips for a gun and a steady paycheck.

  He threw a flannel shirt over his T-shirt and jeans and hiked down the steep slope to the edge of the lake. Matted leaves and twigs gathered along the shoreline, and a pearly softness floated like cotton candy in the feathery groupings of dark green hemlocks and eastern white pines that surrounded the water. Somewhere out in the fog, a fish splashed to the surface and a crow cawed overhead. Vega wanted to enjoy this rare moment off the clock, to drink it in, not cross it off like a con marking time. Yet he couldn’t stop the meth-addict voice inside his head that played an endless loop of all his worries at warp speed.

  Joy is going to be arrested . . . Adele is leaving forever . . .

  Maybe he could have reversed everything if only he’d let Adele go to La Casa Saturday night, if only they’d found that baby in time. If, if, if . . .

  Vega kicked at the rocky mud beneath his work boots, listening for the pleasing crunch of gravel. His left calf where the dog bit him was healing at least. The skin wasn’t quite so tender and the stitches itched less. He grabbed a flat piece of shale at the lake’s edge and skipped it across the water. It nicked the surface four times before disappearing into the gray depths. Vega watched the concentric rings grow in the pebble’s wake, each one blooming and spreading, seemingly of its own volition.

  Vega found another stone and skipped it, marveling at how such a small object applied at just the right angle could create all this turbulence and motion. Everything leaves a mark, he supposed. He didn’t want to think about the parallels to his own life, the way he’d carelessly cast things out only to realize the repercussions of his decisions when they were too late to call back. He had missed all the warning signs, all the clues.

  Vega thought about the dead teenager. She’d carried her baby in her womb for nine months—given birth to her, if not in Lake Holly, then somewhere close by. How was it possible that no one but a mentally disabled car-wash attendant had ever noticed her?

  Vega wiped his muddy hands on his jeans and straightened. He watched the morning sun poke through the clouds, dissipating the mist on the lake. And all of a sudden, everything came into focus. Vega saw tiny cabins like his that had lately started to get year-round owners. There were curtains on new dormered windows; stacks of fresh-cut wood for the winter, newly erected swing sets and flower boxes. He just couldn’t see it before. But it was there all along, right beneath the fog.

  Everything leaves a mark.

  Someone had to have seen that pregnant teenager, just as people saw Dominga Flores. They saw, but they didn’t see. What was he missing?

&nbs
p; He thought about Dominga in that huge, fortresslike house giving birth. Even she hadn’t been entirely alone. She said a midwife—a Spanish woman—had helped.

  Vega took a deep breath and felt a sharpness travel down his lungs as though the air were infused with peppermint. And all at once, he saw what he’d been missing. He ran back to the house, bounding up the steps of his deck like he was in a marathon. He opened the sliding glass door, grabbed his cell phone on the counter, and scrolled down his contacts list until he found the cell number of the Wickford detective who was in charge of Neil Davies’s arrest. Hammond. Detective Sergeant Mark Hammond. Vega remembered him from Monday night. He had a square jaw and big white teeth that reminded Vega of the Kennedys.

  Vega dialed Hammond’s cell. It rang and rang. Just when Vega thought it was going to go to voice mail, Hammond picked up.

  Vega reintroduced himself. He could hear voices in the background. Wherever Hammond was, he wasn’t alone.

  “Quick question on the Davies case: Did your guys ever track down the midwife or whatever she was who delivered Dominga Flores’s baby?”

  “Still looking,” said Hammond. “Flores claims she doesn’t know her. Davies claims Flores called her in. So far, we’ve had no luck finding her. I think Flores may be covering for her because the woman’s probably unlicensed and illegal.”

  Vega’s thoughts precisely. “Any chance I can swing by the station house and get a copy of what you’ve done so far?”

  “What we’ve done is gone through the available lists of licensed midwives thoroughly—”

  “I’m sure you have—”

  “Then any further checking on your part would be unnecessary, Detective.” Cops and turf. Vega wished just once everybody would cooperate.

  “See—the thing is—it’s for a different case.” Shit. Vega didn’t want to have to say that. If Captain Waring found out what he was trying to do, he’d get charges for sure.

  “In that case,” said Hammond, “I can probably pull something together for you tomorrow. Not today. Flores has gone back to living with the Reilly family if you want to contact her and ask her yourself. I’m in the field right now. Two hikers just called in a 10-47 in the woods off Route 170. That’ll take up all our extra manpower for the day.”