“Photograph? What photograph?”
Vega tapped his iPhone and pulled up the photograph Adele saw him looking at earlier. It was a picture taken before the digital age of three Hispanic males—two strapping men in their thirties and a teenage boy. Adele wondered if one of them was Marcela’s father at a younger age. All three males were dressed in scruffy, loose-fitting jeans, baseball caps, and T-shirts. They were posed in front of a fruit stand with bananas hanging in bunches on a cord overhead. From the muddy road, broad leafy trees, and misty jungle mountains behind the stand, Adele guessed they were probably in Central America or southern Mexico. They stood next to each other, slightly stiff and self-conscious-looking but with the straight shoulders and shy smiles to suggest something hopeful about the occasion.
“Why is everyone so interested in the photograph?” she asked. It was evidence of some sort. From her defense attorney days, Adele recognized the long string of numbers—a case number—in the corner.
Vega didn’t answer. He turned the screen away from her and went to scroll past the picture.
“Huh.” He frowned.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just—wait. No—” He wasn’t looking at the photograph anymore. He was looking at a cell-phone shot of a pay stub with the same case number in the corner.
“Did that belong to Marcela’s father?”
Vega ignored the question. He turned to where the light was better and enlarged a portion of the image on the screen.
“Holy—” He slumped against the doorway. “I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Adele.
“Look at the address on his pay stub.”
Adele read it off. “Three fifty-four, One hundred and Seventy-Sixth Street in the Bronx. That was his home address I guess. So?”
“That was my mother’s building.”
Chapter 6
Vega crept out of Adele’s bed on Saturday morning as the first light broke the sky. He slipped back into his clothes, which looked even worse in daylight. His blue button-down shirt was wrinkled and sour smelling. His dark khaki pants were snagged and muddy at the cuffs. He kept spare clothes in his pickup truck but it was still parked in the county police lot.
He hadn’t slept at all. He felt like he had crystal meth running through his veins. A hot shower didn’t help. He stayed under the blast an extralong time but his body still thrummed like a tuning fork. He kept whipsawing between two wildly different states of mind. In one, he was racked with guilt and shame at the thought that he’d killed Marcela’s father, an unarmed man with no criminal record. In the other, he felt a burning frustration that a potential witness—or even, God forbid, his mother’s murderer—had died by Vega’s own hand before he could question him in her death.
Adele had insisted it was just a coincidence. “A lot of the restaurant help live in the Bronx. The rents are cheaper. You don’t even know if your mother and Marcela’s father lived in the building at the same time.”
All true. And yet Vega couldn’t make himself buy it. He didn’t believe in coincidences. He did believe in irony, however. There was a hell of a lot of irony to his having killed off his best lead.
He shoved his wallet, phone, Swiss army knife, and truck keys back into his pants pockets. That’s when it hit him: he didn’t have his truck. He’d have to fetch it from work. If he called a cab, Adele could sleep in this morning. He stepped softly into the upstairs hallway and turned on his iPhone. He’d walk Diablo before he left, but for the moment, he just wanted to concentrate on his own situation.
His screen lit up. There were over a hundred messages.
Not good. Not good at all.
The smart thing to do would be to dial a cab company and stay away from the Internet but Vega had a sense he needed to know what was going on. He opened a search engine and typed Wickford, NY, shooting. A Pandora’s box of misery flashed across the screen.