“Chingada madre! He’s still in the house.”
Okay. Here, Luis sounded genuinely upset. He cursed. He gave factual information. Vega believed that whatever was going on, Luis definitely was afraid to have this guy still in his house.
“Can you get someplace safe in the house until police arrive?”
Luis took the phone away from his mouth and shouted in Spanish to someone in the room. The words were garbled. They sounded like . . . but no. That didn’t make sense.
Or did it?
“Sir? Sir? Are you still on the line? Police are on the scene.”
The dispatcher lost contact with Luis after that. The rest of the radio communication had to do with Vega and the Wickford Police. Vega went back to the beginning and played the tape again. He heard those garbled words more clearly this time: “Largo de aquí, joto!” Beat it, faggot!
Was Luis calling the intruder a homosexual? And if so, did that have something to do with why the man was there in the first place? Was that what Luis was hiding?
Vega left the building, still trying to make sense of this development, when a man stepped out of the front doors of the medical examiner’s office and began walking toward the only other car in the lot. He had a shaved head, broad shoulders, a blond walrus mustache, and the distinctive chest-forward walk of an ex-high school linebacker who still played in weekend leagues, albeit with increasing sprains and pulled ligaments. Dolan.
Vega stopped in his tracks. “Thanks for returning all my calls, Teddy.”
“I’ve been a little busy trying to save your ass.” He took in Vega’s bruised face and frowned. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Duran and Wilson didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Huh.” Vega figured the two officers would have blabbed to everybody in his department by now. He’d behaved like a bastard to them last night and they’d still covered for him. He owed them big time. “I tripped.”
“On what?”
“My good intentions.”
“The worst kind.” Dolan swept a gaze behind him to the video cameras mounted on the side of the building. “For a former undercover narc, you sure pick lousy meeting spots. The brass sees me here with you, we’ll both be stamping pistol permits.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“Get in my car at least, will ya?” said Dolan. “If I’m going to talk to you, it’s not gonna be out in the open like this.”
Vega hopped into the passenger seat of Dolan’s unmarked—a late-model gray Toyota Camry. Dolan always managed to draw the better vehicles. Vega started talking as soon as Dolan slid behind the wheel.
“Have you listened to the nine-one-one tape of the shooting?”
Dolan shook his head. “Not yet. The robbery’s Wickford’s jurisdiction.”
“Wickford is Boy Scouts with guns. Listen to it when you get a chance.”
Dolan gave Vega a sour look. “I gather you already have.”
“That would be against department policy.”
“Yes, it would.” Dolan played along. “So assuming a friend heard it, why is it worth listening to?”
“Because my friend thought it didn’t sound like Luis was getting robbed. It sounded more like he was having a homosexual encounter that went wrong. And by the way, Luis may have known there were two guys on his property.”
“We checked the gay angle,” said Dolan. “It didn’t pan out—least as far as Luis is concerned.”
“Wait.” Vega frowned. “Why would you check that angle if you haven’t yet heard the nine-one-one tape?”
Dolan fixed his gaze at the windshield and delivered his best hundred-yard stare. “Turns out the phone in our possession didn’t belong to Hector Ponce. It belonged to the other man—the one you shot. And a lot of the contacts on it are gay men. But Luis’s closest associates assure us he’s not gay or bi. We have no evidence to the contrary.”
“Hold on a moment, back up,” said Vega. “Are you confirming that the man I killed wasn’t Hector Ponce?”
“The DNA from Ponce’s toothbrush and hairbrush match the body from the Brighton Aqueduct. Dr. Gupta verified the results this morning.”
“So who’s this other guy? A gay friend of Ponce’s? Someone entirely unrelated?”
“Neither,” said Dolan. “When Gupta originally ran the DNA from Ponce’s hairbrush and toothbrush against the man you shot, some of it was a match.”
“What do you mean, ‘some of it’?”
“Gupta originally thought the samples had been corrupted,” said Dolan. “So she ran the test again. The second batch indicated that the man you shot had the same mitochondrial DNA as the mitochondrial DNA on the hairbrush.”
“That’s the DNA a person gets from their mother, right?” asked Vega.
“Affirmative.”
“So you’re saying the man I shot was Hector Ponce’s brother?” Vega blinked as it sank in. “How come nobody in the Ponce family told the police this?”
“Because they thought he was dead,” said Dolan. “Hector Ponce only had one brother, Edgar. He was supposed to have died in the desert twenty years ago.”