“When I was in the woods, it felt like somebody else was there.”
“My guys were at the bottom of the hill. Not sixty feet away. They didn’t see anyone.”
Vega winced. How could he not have seen them? “They were that close?”
Hammond nodded. “They had their lights and sirens on and everything.”
“I guess I just—blocked it out or something.”
Hammond put a hand on Vega’s arm and squeezed it for emphasis. “Don’t talk, Jimmy—okay? You can only go through this story once. You go through it more than once and change something, some attorney’s gonna eat you alive—or put me on a witness stand and eat us both alive.”
Vega nodded. “Any indications that he was part of that gang?”
The temperature inside the car seemed to plummet twenty degrees. Vega could feel it instantly.
“Listen, Jim—I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be saying this yet. But I just got a call from the chief of police? Over in Greenfield, Connecticut?”
Vega narrowed his gaze at Hammond. Cops aren’t teenage girls. They don’t frame statements as questions unless they’d rather not deliver the answers.
“Spit it out, Mark.”
“The Greenfield PD just arrested the whole gang. Like maybe an hour ago. Four Hispanic men coming out of a big estate over there.”
“The gang responsible for these home invasions? Are you sure?”
“One of the guy’s prints matches a print we picked up on that robbery. The DNA on another matches semen from the rape in Quaker Hills. That Connecticut rookie they pistol-whipped positively ID’d two of them from mug shots. ”
“So you’re saying—”
“The man you killed probably wasn’t connected to those other crimes.”
Chapter 3
Vega had no idea how long he sat in Hammond’s unmarked Toyota. Long enough, he supposed, for the county evidence techs to impound the two guns he was carrying (his and the homeowner’s) as well as the ugly silver Pontiac Grand Am Vega had checked out of the station house lot that morning. They found four shell casings from Vega’s Glock in the woods and one from the homeowner’s Sig Sauer in the house.
Ricardo Luis. The homeowner’s name came back to Vega while he sat slumped in the Toyota’s front passenger seat. Vega figured out how he knew him, too.
Heat of my heart, beat of my heart . . . oh, oh, oh.
Vega couldn’t remember the last two hours. He couldn’t recall firing four—four!—bullets into an unarmed man. But he could sing the stupid chorus of that Latin pop star’s wildly successful chart-topping song.
By the time Vega’s friend, county detective Teddy Dolan, came to fetch him and drive him to their own police headquarters, Vega felt wrung-out. Dolan was all forced good cheer, his voice casual and slightly country-sounding—the same voice Dolan used to talk down wife batterers and would-be bridge jumpers. Vega wondered if he fell into the latter category.
They weren’t allowed to talk about the shooting so Dolan tried to fill the space between them with distractions. He prattled on about last week’s Giants game against Dallas, the upcoming division Christmas party, and how their boss, Captain Waring, was getting on everyone’s case about detectives leaving litter in their cars. Vega couldn’t even muster the energy for yesses and noes. There was only one thing that interested him.
“Who was he?” Vega asked softly.
Dolan bit the inside of his cheek and said nothing. He was a big, burly ex-Marine with a blond walrus mustache, a shaved head, and a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his right forearm. To look at the two of them, any civilian would think Dolan would be the one in this mess, not Vega. But Dolan was one of the most even-tempered cops Vega knew. Vega couldn’t help but wonder whether the man he shot tonight would be alive right now if Dolan had been the officer he’d encountered instead of Vega.
“C’mon, Teddy,” Vega pleaded. “In a few hours everyone’s gonna know his name, and in a few days everyone’s gonna know mine.”
“It’s not helpful to you right now.”
“Let me decide what’s helpful.”
Vega already knew some things about the case from eavesdropping on conversations at the scene. He knew that the security footage from Luis’s video cameras was useless because Luis had recently had his gutters cleaned and whoever cleaned them knocked all the cameras out of position. He knew that Luis had a bodyguard in Miami—his main residence—but not in Wickford where the Latin American community consisted of a thousand domestics and two transferred bank execs from Argentina. The police found no evidence of illegal drugs in the house or any other illicit activity. But they did find ten grand in small bills, which Luis claimed was cash he gave to his entourage in the form of tips and Christmas bonuses. No wonder he was a great robbery target.