No Witness But the Moon(17)
Vega didn’t answer. He turned the screen away from her and went to scroll past the picture.
“Huh.” He frowned.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just—wait. No—” He wasn’t looking at the photograph anymore. He was looking at a cell-phone shot of a pay stub with the same case number in the corner.
“Did that belong to Marcela’s father?”
Vega ignored the question. He turned to where the light was better and enlarged a portion of the image on the screen.
“Holy—” He slumped against the doorway. “I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Adele.
“Look at the address on his pay stub.”
Adele read it off. “Three fifty-four, One hundred and Seventy-Sixth Street in the Bronx. That was his home address I guess. So?”
“That was my mother’s building.”
Chapter 6
Vega crept out of Adele’s bed on Saturday morning as the first light broke the sky. He slipped back into his clothes, which looked even worse in daylight. His blue button-down shirt was wrinkled and sour smelling. His dark khaki pants were snagged and muddy at the cuffs. He kept spare clothes in his pickup truck but it was still parked in the county police lot.
He hadn’t slept at all. He felt like he had crystal meth running through his veins. A hot shower didn’t help. He stayed under the blast an extralong time but his body still thrummed like a tuning fork. He kept whipsawing between two wildly different states of mind. In one, he was racked with guilt and shame at the thought that he’d killed Marcela’s father, an unarmed man with no criminal record. In the other, he felt a burning frustration that a potential witness—or even, God forbid, his mother’s murderer—had died by Vega’s own hand before he could question him in her death.
Adele had insisted it was just a coincidence. “A lot of the restaurant help live in the Bronx. The rents are cheaper. You don’t even know if your mother and Marcela’s father lived in the building at the same time.”
All true. And yet Vega couldn’t make himself buy it. He didn’t believe in coincidences. He did believe in irony, however. There was a hell of a lot of irony to his having killed off his best lead.
He shoved his wallet, phone, Swiss army knife, and truck keys back into his pants pockets. That’s when it hit him: he didn’t have his truck. He’d have to fetch it from work. If he called a cab, Adele could sleep in this morning. He stepped softly into the upstairs hallway and turned on his iPhone. He’d walk Diablo before he left, but for the moment, he just wanted to concentrate on his own situation.
His screen lit up. There were over a hundred messages.
Not good. Not good at all.
The smart thing to do would be to dial a cab company and stay away from the Internet but Vega had a sense he needed to know what was going on. He opened a search engine and typed Wickford, NY, shooting. A Pandora’s box of misery flashed across the screen.
Right away he knew he was in trouble. Although Vega’s department hadn’t formally released his name yet, the activist, Ruben Tate-Rivera, had somehow gotten hold of it. Worse, Tate had put Vega on his Wall of Shame, along with Vega’s incredibly unflattering departmental photo. Vega had lifted his chin too high and blinked at the wrong time so he had a brutish look in the picture. His coloring was washed out too so he looked much whiter than he did in real life. Beneath the bad photo was his name: James O. Vega. The O was for “Orlando,” his father—the only part of the man that stuck around. The middle initial gave Vega’s name a Gaelic lilt. Great. Just what I need. I’m now a brutish, white-looking Irish cop. A perfect image for all his new Internet fans.
Vega scrolled through the copy on Tate’s website. There was almost no mention of Ricardo Luis who’d mistakenly led dispatch to believe Marcela’s father was armed in the first place. Instead, Tate told readers that the shooting happened in Wickford, NY, one of the wealthiest towns in the United States. It identified the dishwasher as Hector Mauricio Ponce-Fernandez (where the name “Antonio” or the Atlanta connection came from on his other ID was anyone’s guess). It went on to describe Ponce as a married father of two young boys with a steady work history and no criminal record. Vega’s stomach tightened to read about the boys, ages twelve and fourteen. Vega couldn’t believe he’d robbed them of their dad.
But his guilt was quickly replaced by rage as he read on. Tate mentioned that Vega, a detective with eighteen years on the force, had shot Ponce four times and that some of the shots had been delivered to the head, execution-style.
Whoa. Hold on. Was Tate seriously suggesting to his almost one million website followers that Vega had executed the man? Here, Vega was forbidden to speak about the shooting, and this media gadfly who hadn’t even been there was making unfounded accusations and turning him into a coast-to-coast whipping boy for all that was wrong with the police.
People were buying it, too. On Twitter, Vega’s name suddenly popped up under hashtags like #handsupdontshoot, #killercops, #immigrantlivesmatter, and a hashtag created exclusively for him: #shotforaphoto. Under each was a torrent of hate mail: I hope they lock up his sorry ass and throw away the key. . . .
Wait until he sees what happens to cops in prison....
If I could do to him what he did to that dishwasher and get away with it, I would....