A Place in the Wind

by Suzanne Chazin

  Vega directed his words to Sanchez. A fellow Latino. A Mexican American, according to Adele, though she had no particular love for him. She felt that most cops were the same once they put on the uniform. Maybe she was right. Sanchez didn’t appear moved by Vega’s dilemma.

  “The best way you can help right now,” Sanchez told Vega, “is to get Adele to assemble better records on the clients who pass through her doors.”

  “This place has more fake IDs than a college bar,” Jankowski grunted.

  “She has intake sheets,” said Vega. “I know she asks every client who comes into La Casa to fill one out.”

  “We looked at those sheets already,” said Jankowski. “I could train my dog on them, that’s how worthless they are. There were twenty-eight men being tutored at La Casa last night. Do you know how many checked out cleanly through our criminal and immigration databases? Five. Twenty-eight people, and only five were who they said they were.”

  Vega wasn’t surprised. He’d heard the same from cops down in Port Carroll and Warburton and other towns in the county with large immigrant populations.

  “How about their addresses?” asked Vega. “Were they also bogus?”

  “We found five more guys at the addresses they listed, but they couldn’t provide us with any verification of their legal names,” said Sanchez. “The remaining eighteen are ghosts. All we’ve got to go on are the head shots in Adele’s computer and word of mouth on the street.”

  Vega cursed under his breath. He understood the detectives’ frustration. It was a never-ending struggle to get a full legal name from an undocumented immigrant. There was a host of reasons why. Some were relatively benign. The person lived under a fake ID or a relative’s ID to secure work or open a bank account. Others were not—like hiding a criminal conviction or a prior deportation. Not that Adele could have done anything about it. Even Vega, as a police officer, had to have probable cause to verify someone’s ID.

  “Maybe you can track down their identities through family connections,” Vega suggested. “A lot of these people are probably local, even if their names and addresses don’t check out.”

  “Yeah, but we’re racing against time here,” said Jankowski. “None of Catherine’s family or friends have seen her since ten last night. We haven’t been able to locate a signal from her cell phone. And now, on top of everything, we don’t even know who these people are that she was tutoring.” Jankowski’s features scrunched up so tight, he looked like the before shot on an ex-lax ad. “I mean, no offense to the Hispanic community. But Mike Carp is right. This whole illegal thing has gotten way out of hand.”

  Mike Carp. The billionaire developer who won election to county executive in November by promising to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants in the region. Adele openly campaigned against him—as did everyone in the Latino community. Vega felt queasy thinking about how Carp might use this girl’s disappearance to drum up supporters. He had plenty already. There were rumors he was just keeping the county exec seat warm as a dress rehearsal until his run for governor in two years.

  “You seem a little sure that one of La Casa’s clients is behind this,” said Vega. “You got some evidence besides the fact that this was the last place Catherine was seen?”

  “Not yet,” said Jankowski. “Still, a beautiful girl like that disappears from a place like this without a trace, what would you think?”

  “I haven’t seen a picture of her,” said Vega. “Do you have one?”

  Sanchez pulled out his cell phone and scrolled to a picture on the screen. He handed his phone to Vega. “This is her last yearbook photo.”

  Vega stared at the screen. Catherine Archer was the girl that teenage boys everywhere conjure up in their wet dreams and first flushes of hormonal glory. It wasn’t just the way her straight blond hair spilled like water down her back. Or the pale, bleached-denim hue of her eyes. Or the slight slouch to her narrow shoulders that suggested more child than woman about her. It was her smile. A small press of the lips that felt shy and hesitant yet welcoming. Vega could recall himself as a teenager—pimply and lacking confidence. A dark-skinned Puerto Rican kid in a high school full of sharp-edged Nordic beauties who treated him, like the janitor, or at best, like an exotic pet. It was the smile he would have fixated on and lusted over. The forgiveness in it for the anxieties of a clueless boy who didn’t feel he could ever fit in.

  Vega handed Sanchez’s phone back to him. “And her friends?” Vega asked the two detectives. “Are they the jocks? The school druggies? The popular crowd?”

  “All. None,” said Jankowski.

  “Huh?” Vega wasn’t following.

  “Everybody liked her,” he explained. “But we can’t find a best friend or close circle of friends.”

  “Really?” That surprised Vega. From his experience with his own daughter, girls dropped boyfriends like banana peels. But they always had at least one or two besties on their speed dial.

  “She was an honors student. A varsity tennis player. A volunteer English tutor.” Sanchez ticked off her accomplishments on his stubby fingers like he was putting together a college admissions packet for her. “But she didn’t socialize after school with any of the kids we spoke to, not even the other students who volunteered at La Casa.”

  “She was shy? Socially awkward?”

  “On the contrary,” said Jankowski. “Everyone describes her as very friendly. But she kept to herself, mostly helping out at her parents’ restaurant and hanging with her family.”

  “No boyfriend?”

  “None that anybody was aware of.”

  “So you’re back to the twenty-eight men in this center last night,” said Vega.

  “Yep.”

  It was after eight a.m. Catherine Archer had been missing ten hours. They all knew that if someone was likely to be found alive, it usually happened in the first twenty-four hours. The golden twenty-four. Every second counted.

  One of the uniforms appeared at Jankowski’s elbow to speak to him. Jankowski turned to Vega. “Tell Adele nobody’s on a witch hunt, much as she’d like to believe otherwise. But we’ve got a girl to find. La Casa is ground zero—and we’re running out of time.”

  Chapter 2

  Wil Martinez awoke with his cheek pressed against his textbook, the pages smooth and cool on his skin, the subheading, Measurement of Helical Pitch in DNA, swimming around in his brain. Swimming right beside orders to clear table twelve and clean up the shards of broken glass at table seven. By day, he was one person. By night, another.

  He wasn’t sure who the real Wil was anymore.

  He squinted at his watch still strapped to his wrist. Seven a.m. A pale, milky light drifted in through the dark blue bedsheet covering the window. Slowly the attic room the nineteen-year-old shared with his brother came into focus. The bunk bed that sagged and creaked with every shift of their weight. The soft hum of the mini fridge with its hot plate and coffeemaker on top. The scrape of bare branches against the roof’s uninsulated rafters. The steady drip of a leaky showerhead down the hall—the one bathroom shared by all the upstairs tenants.

  It was cold in the room. Wil felt the bite of the air on the tip of his nose. He forced his feet off the top bunk to the bare plank floor and dressed in as many layers as he could throw on. Socks. Sweatpants. Thermal shirt. Hoodie. He poked at the lump on the bottom bunk beneath a tangle of blankets.

  “Get up, Rolando.”

  “No me jódas!” Rolando cursed at Wil. He pulled the blankets over his head and turned his body to the wall. His bedsprings squeaked in response.

  “Come on, Rolando,” Wil pleaded in Spanish. “You’ve got to get up for work.”

  “Do you have to be so loud?”

  “Do you have to be so hungover?”

  Rolando sat up, hit his head on the upper bunk, cursed in English and Spanish, and flopped back down on his pillow. He stared up at the sharp coils that had just assaulted him and massaged his black wavy hair that was standing up at every
angle. There was dirt under his fingernails and dark smears across his unshaven face and army-green T-shirt. “Never again,” he rasped in Spanish.

  “You say that every time.”

  “No. I mean it this time, chaparro.” Slang for “shorty” or “squirt.” Rolando’s nickname for Wil, ever since their days in Guatemala. Rolando was Wil’s protector back then, his mother’s firstborn, before Wil’s father ever stepped into the picture. Rolando was nine years older than Wil, a rangy, good-looking boy with the speed and grace of a Jaguar. He was twenty-eight now, though at this minute, he looked more like a man pushing forty.

  Wil sat down on the edge of his half brother’s bunk. The thin mattress dipped into the frame. Rolando winced—from the screech or the movement, Wil couldn’t be sure.

  “You were supposed to come straight home from La Casa last night,” Wil said to him.

  “I know.”

  “Where did you go? You didn’t answer your phone.”

  “I didn’t hear it.”

  More likely ignored it, thought Wil. He should have read the signs before Rolando went out Friday evening. The way he paced the floor and checked his messages nineteen times. The way he grunted out replies to Wil’s questions. It was how he always got when the pressure built. Antsy. Distracted. As a boy, he’d been gentle and shy and infinitely patient. But that was before that day in the freight yard. Before those six weeks when no one knew where he was. All these years later, and Rolando still never spoke about that time. It came out in other ways. When the shy and gentle boy Wil once loved gave way to the other Rolando.

  The dangerous one.

  “So what happened?” asked Wil. “Did you even go to English class?”

  “I . . . went.” Rolando answered like he was dredging up the memory from ten years ago instead of last night.

  “And then you got drunk.”

  “I . . . had a few beers.”

  “A few beers? You woke up everybody in the house when you came home. The other tenants are mad. The landlord threatened to throw us out if this keeps up. Lando, it’s January. I’m stressed-out enough.”

  “About what? School?” Rolando’s dark, hooded eyes turned sober and focused. He grabbed Wil’s hand. He was obsessed with his little brother staying in school. Wil was the first person in their family to finish high school. And now, Rolando bragged to everyone he knew that Wil was a freshman at the community college studying to become a doctor. In Rolando’s mind, Wil’s here-and-there college credits that he gathered while holding down a full-time job were going to magically make him an MD. Rolando had no concept what a long and uncertain journey that was likely to be. Especially with Wil’s status.

  “School’s going okay,” Wil assured him. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

  “Mami? Money?” Those were the usual concerns. “Last night was the last time, I promise,” said Rolando. “I’ll work double shifts. Skip meals. Whatever you need, chaparro. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. You just concentrate on school. That’s all that matters.”

  Not anymore.

  Rolando swung his legs out of bed and cradled his head in his hands. He probably had a monster of a headache. He felt around his neck and cursed. “I think I lost Mami’s religious medal.”

  “What?” Wil pushed himself off his brother’s bed. “Where did you leave it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think, Lando. Think.” That necklace was the one part of their mother the men in jackboots and flak vests hadn’t taken away when they came for her three years ago.

  Wil knelt down on the bare plank floor and pawed through the jumble of clothes his brother had worn last night. Rolando’s jeans and jacket were covered in sticky pine needles and dead leaves. His sweatshirt reeked of alcohol and the faint odor of sweat and vomit. Wil didn’t see the gold chain or medallion. He wanted to cry.

  “Lando, how could you?”

  Rolando raked a hand through his unwashed hair. His eyes had a glazed look, as if he were trying to hold on to the edges of a dream that was floating away. He’d been babbling like a lunatic last night. His words and thoughts had been like stray sentences chosen at random from a book.

  Wil wished he’d asked Lando then about Mami’s religious medal. But he wasn’t sure he’d have understood anything his brother said anyway. When Lando was like that, he mixed events with hallucinations, actions with desires. Everything he said or did was unpredictable. Even downright scary. Lando had awoken from blackouts next to women he didn’t know, with injuries he couldn’t recall getting. Last year, he walked home with a deep stab wound on his thigh that had missed his femoral artery by an inch. He told the doctor in the emergency room that it was an accident. Self-inflicted. Wil was sure it wasn’t.

  “Hurry up and get that medical degree,” Rolando had teased Wil when he was feeling better. “I need you to be able to stitch me up.”

  Wil never mentioned the knife he’d pulled out of his brother’s coat pocket afterward. Or the blood smears on the blade that may or may not have been his.

  Rolando would need more than a doctor to save him from his messes.

  Wil laced his feet into sneakers and shrugged into his jacket. A faded green parka two sizes too big for his frame. The stuffing was coming out of the quilting. He looked like a molting goose. He had to bike to the library this morning and get in several hours of studying before heading over to the Lake Holly Grill to start his shift. But first, he needed to catch the bathroom when it was empty and brush his teeth.

  He walked over to the window and drew back the dark blue bedsheet. Daylight flooded in. Rolando threw a heavily-tattooed arm across his eyes.

  “Ay, the sun is so bright.”

  “You’ll feel better if you move around.”

  Wil’s toothbrush was on a shelf by the window. Through the double-hung panes of glass, Wil could see the square of cement yard in back, halfway covered in snow and rimmed in chain-link fencing. Beyond the fence were rails of track. Every night, the trains chug-chugged through his sleep, pulling his memories back to that freight yard in Mexico where his mother hitched their dreams to the beast that carried him north, forever leaving behind the Guatemala of his childhood.

  Rolando scoured the floor for a semiclean shirt. He pulled off the one he was wearing and slipped into the other. His back, chest, and arms were covered in tattoos that extended halfway up his neck. Wil caught him patting the pockets of his jacket on the floor. It was finally dawning on him that their mother’s religious medallion was really and truly gone. He sank back on his heels. “I’ll find it,” he vowed softly. But already, defeat frayed the edges of his words. He’d broken so many promises, he no longer trusted himself.

  “Do you remember taking it off?” asked Wil.

  There was a long pause. “Maybe. I think maybe I gave it to somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “A girl?” Was he trying to please Wil? Or did he really remember? Rolando used to be a ladies’ man in his younger days. Not so much anymore. Booze was his mistress now. Wil leaned on the window ledge and cursed. “Mami gave that medal to both of us. Both of us! She’s dying, Lando. And you gave away the only thing we have of her?”

  Rolando dropped his head. He looked ashamed and miserable.

  “Who was the girl?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “How can you not remember?”

  Rolando didn’t answer for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. He sounded tired and spent.

  “Chaparro?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How do you . . .” Rolando’s voice drifted off.

  “How do I what?”

  “How do you know what’s real?”

  “I’m real. Mami’s Virgin Mary medal was real.”

  “Sometimes I think things. And I don’t know if they happened or not.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “I don’t know.” He massaged his forehead. “Stuff you tell me. Stuff other
people tell me. Like right now? I close my eyes and I see this . . . girl. She’s very young and sorta . . . pretty. I shouldn’t even be talking to her. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help myself.”

  “Joder, Lando!” Wil cursed. “Who are you talking about? The girl with Mami’s medal?”

  “Maybe. Maybe I imagined it. All I can remember is the feeling. Like I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time. Wil swallowed back something bitter-tasting in his throat. He thought of all the possibilities. But no. He wasn’t going there. He couldn’t go there. He had enough troubles of his own.

  “It’s the drink talking,” Wil assured him. “Just shower and clean yourself up, okay? Maybe the medal will turn up. In the meantime, try to stay out of trouble.”

  “Okay.” Rolando stared up at his little brother with bloodshot eyes. He’d been handsome once. Before the tattoos that covered his body. Before the drink that bloated his once-muscular frame. Before the cuts—seen and unseen—that had carved him up from the inside out. Wil thought about that bloody knife he’d taken from Rolando’s pocket all those months ago. And he wondered if it was already too late to warn his brother to stay out of trouble.

  The trouble was here. And it wasn’t going away.

  Chapter 3

  “What did the detectives tell you? Did they give you any leads?” Adele Figueroa had been at La Casa all last night. She looked exhausted. Her makeup had gone soft and smudged around her almond-shaped eyes. Her lipstick had blurred and faded. She was shivering in a thin buttoned-down cotton shirt. Jimmy Vega wrapped his coat around her, but she still shivered. The cold seemed to be coming from within.

  “Come on, nena,” he murmured in her ear. His term of endearment for her. “Babe” in Spanish. “You need to go home. Get some sleep. The police are doing all they can. There’s no point in you being here any longer.”