Chapter 29
Vega pulled out his phone and scrolled to the picture Dolan had texted to him Friday night—the one Edgar Ponce held in his hand when Vega shot him. Vega pointed to the man standing next to Hector Ponce by the fruit stand, the one with the slightly narrower face and soft smile. “This is Edgar? The brother who was supposed to have died in the desert?”
“That’s him,” said Dolan. “Edgar Antonio Ponce-Fernandez. That’s where the ID with the name ‘Antonio Fernandez’ came from, as well as the Atlanta, Georgia, connection. We’re just piecing all of this together now. We haven’t even notified next of kin yet so you can’t talk about this.”
“I understand.” Vega closed his eyes and tried to wrap his mind around this new development. He hadn’t killed Marcela’s father. He’d killed her uncle. There were people who loved and cared about him somewhere—in Georgia perhaps. They would never see him again. Changing the name didn’t change anything.
“So the family didn’t know he was alive?” asked Vega. “I’m assuming Hector knew.”
“That’s what I’m gathering so far,” said Dolan. “It seems the brothers crossed the border together twenty years ago, got separated, and each thought the other was dead. I think in Fernandez’s case, he saw no future as a gay man back in Honduras so he decided to stay dead to his family.”
“Okay,” said Vega slowly. “I get why he might want to disappear if his family was very traditional. But—why resurface now?”
“That’s the part we don’t know yet,” said Dolan. “Fernandez has an ex-partner in Atlanta who told us that he left for New York about three weeks ago to reunite with his brother. But his ex didn’t know any more than that.”
“So who was Fernandez staying with in New York? Not Hector and his family, I’m assuming. A gay lover? It seems like somebody in the Bronx would know.”
Dolan’s cell phone dinged with a new text. “Stay out of this, Jimmy. You’re sounding a bit too interested for my taste.”
Dolan checked his text and began tapping out a reply. Vega’s mind drifted. Twenty years. The brothers had been apart for twenty years. So what sparked their reunion? Some criminal enterprise? Vega the cop suspected as much. But Vega the man wondered if the motive could be something much simpler. Whatever else family was, it was shared recollection.
Vega could understand the hunger for such a thing. He’d felt it himself since his mother’s death. He had no brothers or sisters to soften the pain of her passing with stories of their life together, no presence of a father to color in the faint outlines of early childhood. All the rituals of his youth were sealed away inside of him. He was a soda can with a broken pop top. Even Martha, his mother’s best friend, couldn’t reminisce with him now. Vega wondered if maybe that’s why Fernandez and Ponce reconnected. There was too much shared memory not to.
“I’ve gotta go, Jimmy.” Dolan leaned across the empty seat as Vega stepped out of the car. “Hey, when this thing’s behind us, come over and have a couple of beers at my house, okay?” He wasn’t looking for a response. He was looking for an escape. “In the meantime, try to stay at least twenty feet back from every one of your good intentions.”
Vega watched Dolan drive away. He had the day to himself—and he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. He couldn’t handle being with friends. He wasn’t allowed to attend anything public. Adele wasn’t speaking to him—and in all likelihood, in a few hours she was going to be speaking about him.
Vega felt a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach that he could only describe as homesickness. He wanted to sit at his mother’s kitchen table while she fussed over him, piling too much fried food on his plate, straightening his shoulders, mussing his hair, and complaining that it needed a cut. He wanted to talk in shorthand about people and experiences long in the past. He wanted comfort without expectation and chatter that required no rejoinders.
In short, he wanted to feel like a child again.
He thought about what Ellen Cantor had said about visiting Martha Torres. She was not his mother. She was not even really Martha anymore. But she was the one person who had known him almost as well as his mother. If Vega wanted to start healing himself, he had to go back to a place before the pain began.
He was long overdue.
Chapter 30