No Witness But the Moon(25)

Vega collapsed on the lumpy corduroy couch in front of the stone fireplace and palmed his eyes. “I don’t think I’m up to it, Joy. I need a shower and some rest.”

“You could take a shower and nap and we could go later. I’ll drive.”

“In the Bronx? No way.”

“You need to keep busy, Dad. Be around people. Talk things out.”

“I can’t talk about the shooting.”

“You can talk about your feelings. You’re going to make an appointment with a therapist, I hope.”

Vega didn’t respond. Joy’s mother was a school psychologist. Therapy was Wendy’s answer to everything—except ironically, their marriage. The phrase, “I’m pregnant with twins and you’re not the father,” kind of puts a dent in the notion of talking through your marital problems.

Vega noticed that the dining table across from the kitchen counter was covered in old photo albums, some of them open to yellowing snapshots of him as a child. He usually kept them in a trunk in the spare bedroom upstairs.

“Why are the albums out?”

“While I was waiting for you to come home, I thought it might be nice to look back through Lita’s life,” said Joy.

“Mmm.” Vega never liked looking at old family albums. They just made him sad. Joy walked over to the refrigerator and opened the door. She was greeted by a can of coffee, a pint of milk, a six-pack of beer, and a bottle of hot sauce. She was probably just beginning to discover what living with her single father might be like.

“Are you hungry?” asked Vega.

“A little. I can go to the supermarket for you,” she offered. “Stock up your refrigerator while you get some sleep.”

“You don’t know where the supermarket is.”

“I don’t need to,” said Joy. “I have GPS.”

Vega wondered if anyone under thirty could read a map anymore. He fished some bills out of his wallet and handed them to her. “I’m too tired to write up a grocery list.”

“That’s all right. I’ll improvise.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

As soon as Joy left, Vega trudged up the stairs, showered, and fell into a deep sleep. In his dreams, he was running through a dark forest. But instead of chasing someone, he was being chased.

Someone is in the woods with me.

He stopped and slipped a hand into his back pocket, searching for the snapshot of Joy that he always kept in his wallet. It was gone. And then he heard it. The deep kettledrum sound:

Bam.

Bam.

Bam.

Bam.

He woke up shivering and soaked in sweat. His head was pounding. His stomach was turning flips.

Someone was in the woods with me.

No matter how much Teddy Dolan and Mark Hammond insisted otherwise, Vega couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been another person in the woods the night of the shooting. He threw back the covers and squinted at his watch on his bedside table. He felt like he’d been sleeping for days. He’d only been asleep for an hour. Joy wasn’t even back from the grocery store yet.

He forced himself back into the shower and then toweled off and slipped into clean jeans, a T-shirt, and a button-down deep green Oxford. He was still shivering and achy. Deep regret felt like the mother of all flus. He checked his phone and saw that his lawyer, Isadora Jenkins, had texted him to see how he was doing. On the off chance that he was actually doing okay, she passed along a copy of Ricardo Luis’s statement to the press calling Vega’s “escalation” of the situation “regrettable.” So much for civilian gratitude. He already hated that Mexican ham.

Everywhere Vega looked on the Internet, someone was selling him out. Ruben Tate-Rivera called him an “executioner” and compared today’s police tactics to Nazi Germany. His own brass was quoted as vowing “a full investigation”—as if Vega had something to hide.

Hector Ponce, by contrast, was being readied for sainthood. Neighbors described him as “a devoted father and die-hard Yankees fan” who “held down two jobs.”

Two?

The first one at Chez Martine Vega already knew about. The second stopped him cold:

Though Ponce worked nights as a dishwasher at an upscale French restaurant in Wickford, neighbors fondly remember him fixing leaky pipes and painting hallways in the Bronx building where he was both the super and a resident for the past eight years.

Vega felt an electric current zip through him. Ponce was the super in his mother’s building? That meant he had a master key to every apartment. This guy had warning sirens going off all around him. He’d forced his way into Ricardo Luis’s house. And now it turned out that not only had he lived in his mother’s building at the time of her murder, he had access to her apartment as well. So how come Vega couldn’t recall the Bronx detectives ever mentioning Ponce as a person of interest in her murder investigation?

You’re looking to fix your conscience. Greco’s words echoed in Vega’s brain. So what if he was? He had the paperwork. He owed it to his mother to run down every lead.

Vega opened his bedroom closet and pulled down a brown cardboard box from the shelf. Inside were copies of nearly two years of NYPD paperwork concerning his mother’s murder investigation. Witness statements. The autopsy report. Forensic analysis. The various detectives who’d worked the case had forwarded copies of their work to Vega piecemeal over the last two years as a professional courtesy. He’d read it all at one time or another. He’d made notes and charts and diagrams—all of it to no avail. Nothing had ever jumped out at him. Nothing.