“How’d the boy get ahold of it?”
“Some of these people around here aren’t so nice,” he said. “I was showing Lucero how to use the gun, just in case. Sometimes they take people, strong boys, to work in other places. I didn’t want that to happen.”
Ben nodded. Trails zigzagged through the Santa Ana Mountains, coyotes running folks through the night to drop-offs at the dimly lit edges of cities.
“You let him keep it?”
“No,” Santiago said. “I don’t like the gun. I only pull it out when I need it.”
“He knew where you kept it, though.”
“Sí.”
“It’s a good story, Santiago,” Ben said. “And I believe it, but not everyone will.”
Santiago glared at him. “I’ve got responsibilities,” Santiago said. “People depend on me.”
“I get it,” Ben said, “but some people don’t give a damn, especially about a Mexican with a prior. There’s a dead kid, it’s your gun—simple math.” Ben hadn’t signed the report yet. Left it on his desk at the station and headed over here. Maybe it was a suicide, probably was, but this wasn’t just some depressed kid, his circuitry gone haywire. This kid was pushed to do it; Ben knew it. “This serial killer complicates things, too,” Ben continued. “There’s some pressure to haul someone in soon.”
“I got kids,” Santiago said, terrified now. The cops could do anything they wanted—Santiago knew that.
“I need to see Lucero’s mother,” Ben said. “Entiende usted?”
Santiago toed a rotted strawberry for a few moments and then finally nodded.
—
AT THE CAMP, Santiago made him wait outside the door. He needed to talk to her first, Santiago said, to explain the situation, to assure her that Ben wasn’t here to deport her or her daughters. Sidewinders of dust blew down the alleyway between plywood homes. A few stragglers waddled down the field rows, but the streets of the camp were empty. Doors were tied shut, blankets yanked across window openings. People were watching him from inside, their eyes flashing between wooden slats, blanket ends snapped aside to get a glance.
Ben’s head throbbed now, his body hopped up with anxiousness. He watched the line of tiled rooftops of the housing complex on the other side of the field. New suburban homes—a whole other world. He followed the rooflines of the last street—one, two, three, five—and settled on the peak of what he knew was Wakeland’s house. Four hundred yards away, a five-minute walk. Ben wondered if Wakeland had ever stood on this dusty street, enveloped in the sugary rot of oranges, and looked back, imagining how badly Lucero would want to run across those four hundred yards and get the hell out of this world.
Santiago scraped open the door to the house. “Please don’t talk about the other boy,” Santiago whispered. “She doesn’t need to think bad of him in his death.” The mother couldn’t speak English, Santiago explained. He would have to translate. “She’s frightened,” he said, and Ben could see that Santiago would keep any pain from her, if he could. “She hasn’t slept in five nights.”
“I’ll be soft about it,” Ben said.
Lucero’s mother sat in the corner of the room, on an upturned plastic milk bin. A flickering veladora candle of the Virgin Mary illuminated the deep circles of her eye sockets. It was the same woman from the other day, the one he thought he heard crying the morning they found Lucero. There was a terror in her eyes that unsettled him. It was shocking, even to him, the hostility of her world right next to the placid order of the city.
“Where are the children?” Ben said. The little girls he saw the other day weren’t in the small room.
Santiago just shook his head. He had shuffled them out the back while Ben waited, Ben guessed, taken them to one of the other plywood shacks to be safe. Even if she was going to be arrested, their mother wanted them here, not in Mexico. That’s how bad it was back home.
“Where’s her husband?” Ben said. She wore a simple silver ring on her left hand.
“Back in Chiapas. He went home to see his sick mother and he never came back. Almost three years ago.”
“They heard anything?”
“Nada.”
“You’ve been taking care of them, right?”
Santiago nodded and looked at the ground, a gesture Ben took as respect for the absent husband.
The mother’s name was Esperanza. Ben smiled at the woman, gesturing to another upturned milk bin, asking if he could sit. She glanced at Santiago and then nodded.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Ben said in awkward Spanish once he was sitting. “Lo siento.”
She stared at the dirt floor.
He explained through Santiago why he needed her to identify Lucero. The body had to be claimed by a family member, or it would be used for medical purposes or buried in an anonymous grave. He explained that she and her children would not be sent back to Mexico. She would be allowed to claim his body, bury him here, if she wished, or send him back home to Chiapas.
“The state will pay for it,” Ben said. “If they don’t, I will.”
Esperanza glanced again at Santiago and nodded. Ben pulled out the forensics photo of Lucero’s empty face from his coat pocket, the one taken from the right side that didn’t show the damage to his skull. What if he’d been asked to do this with Emma? God, he wouldn’t survive it. She took the picture in her shaking hand, and Santiago put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at it for a long time, until a cry leapt from her throat.
“Sí,” Esperanza said into her hand. “Sí.”
Santiago took the photo from her, but she snatched it back. They waited in silence while she stared at the picture, as though she was trying to burn the shape of his face into her memory. Doubtful anyone had cameras here. Doubtful she had any pictures of the boy at all.
Finally she handed the photograph back. Ben gave her a handkerchief and she held it to her eyes. Esperanza said something to Santiago, and he said yes back to her.
“What was that?”
“She said he was a good boy.” She spoke again, shaking her head with grief, and Santiago translated. “She hopes God will forgive him.”
“Forgive him for what?”
“For killing himself.”
Anger surged in Ben. Sin. Ben understood plenty about sin, but he didn’t understand blaming the child. And no way could he believe in a God who would condemn a boy as young as Lucero.
“Was Lucero close to Coach Lewis Wakeland?” Ben asked.
Santiago glanced at him—afraid, Ben guessed, that he knew Wakeland was the one who gave the kids the address to go to school.
“Ask her, please,” Ben said.
Santiago did, and Esperanza said yes.
Ben asked if he spent a lot of time alone with the man. Sí. He asked if he got gifts from Wakeland. Yes, clothes.
She showed him a makeshift drawer with new Levi’s, a few polo shirts, an unopened package of underwear. The kind of clothes an illegal couldn’t afford. Next to the drawer was a cot with a bunch of flowers on top of a pillow. Below the cot was a cardboard box.
“Can I look?”