No matter how much Teddy Dolan and Mark Hammond insisted otherwise, Vega couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been another person in the woods the night of the shooting. He threw back the covers and squinted at his watch on his bedside table. He felt like he’d been sleeping for days. He’d only been asleep for an hour. Joy wasn’t even back from the grocery store yet.
He forced himself back into the shower and then toweled off and slipped into clean jeans, a T-shirt, and a button-down deep green Oxford. He was still shivering and achy. Deep regret felt like the mother of all flus. He checked his phone and saw that his lawyer, Isadora Jenkins, had texted him to see how he was doing. On the off chance that he was actually doing okay, she passed along a copy of Ricardo Luis’s statement to the press calling Vega’s “escalation” of the situation “regrettable.” So much for civilian gratitude. He already hated that Mexican ham.
Everywhere Vega looked on the Internet, someone was selling him out. Ruben Tate-Rivera called him an “executioner” and compared today’s police tactics to Nazi Germany. His own brass was quoted as vowing “a full investigation”—as if Vega had something to hide.
Hector Ponce, by contrast, was being readied for sainthood. Neighbors described him as “a devoted father and die-hard Yankees fan” who “held down two jobs.”
Two?
The first one at Chez Martine Vega already knew about. The second stopped him cold:
Though Ponce worked nights as a dishwasher at an upscale French restaurant in Wickford, neighbors fondly remember him fixing leaky pipes and painting hallways in the Bronx building where he was both the super and a resident for the past eight years.
Vega felt an electric current zip through him. Ponce was the super in his mother’s building? That meant he had a master key to every apartment. This guy had warning sirens going off all around him. He’d forced his way into Ricardo Luis’s house. And now it turned out that not only had he lived in his mother’s building at the time of her murder, he had access to her apartment as well. So how come Vega couldn’t recall the Bronx detectives ever mentioning Ponce as a person of interest in her murder investigation?
You’re looking to fix your conscience. Greco’s words echoed in Vega’s brain. So what if he was? He had the paperwork. He owed it to his mother to run down every lead.
Vega opened his bedroom closet and pulled down a brown cardboard box from the shelf. Inside were copies of nearly two years of NYPD paperwork concerning his mother’s murder investigation. Witness statements. The autopsy report. Forensic analysis. The various detectives who’d worked the case had forwarded copies of their work to Vega piecemeal over the last two years as a professional courtesy. He’d read it all at one time or another. He’d made notes and charts and diagrams—all of it to no avail. Nothing had ever jumped out at him. Nothing.
Vega hefted the box down the stairs and onto the kitchen table. He pushed all of his mother’s photo albums to one side to make room. Then he opened the box and began sorting through its contents. He’d never bothered to organize it before. Every time something new surfaced, Vega read it and placed it on top. As a result, the whole box was like an archaeological dig with information in layers going all the way back to the initial police report.
Vega separated out all the DD5s—the official form NYPD detectives use to follow up on a criminal investigation or complaint. Hector Ponce’s name was not listed on any of them. There was however a mention of a Hector Fernandez who was listed as the building super. Vega checked the name of the interviewing detective: Mike Brennan. He was the first detective on the case and had since retired and moved to Florida. Vega was betting Brennan had made the classic Anglo mistake and assumed Hector Ponce-Fernandez’s last name was Fernandez—his mother’s maiden name—rather than Ponce. That’s why the name never registered with Vega. But at least he’d been interviewed.
Vega began reading the DD5: Fernandez states that on April 5th at 10:05 P.M. he went to fix a light in the third-floor hallway and noticed Lisa Rosario-Vega’s front door partially open.
Lisa. Vega gritted his teeth. His mother’s name was “Luisa.” He remembered how annoyed he’d been the first time he read the misspelling of her name. He couldn’t ask Brennan to redo the report because the guy was passing it on as a favor to begin with. But it made Vega wonder suddenly: if Brennan could be sloppy about Ponce’s last name and his mother’s first name, what else had he been sloppy about? He read on.
Fernandez states that he entered victim’s apartment and found her beaten and unconscious near the front door. Dispatch indicates that Fernandez dialed 911 at 10:22 P.M.
Seventeen minutes? Ponce spent seventeen whole minutes inside his mother’s apartment before dialing 911? Why hadn’t this registered before? Had he been so annoyed with Brennan for getting his mother’s name wrong that he’d completely overlooked the most important part of the report? Vega continued.