No Witness But the Moon(41)

“You ever get any problems with those cameras?” Vega asked Carmela.

She looked up from her magazine. “Problems?”

“Yeah, you know. Loose wires? The thing doesn’t record? The DVD is just blank.”

“No,” she looked at him suspiciously.

“I’m not asking in order to rob the place. I’m thinking of purchasing one of those cameras for myself,” he lied. “I’ve heard the wires can get loose.”

“I don’t know. It never happened to me. Besides, a loose wire just means the thing’s not recording new stuff. It won’t make the DVD blank. Whatever was last recorded on it will still be there.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes. Of course. That’s what happens when there’s a power failure and I don’t remember to change the battery backup.”

“Huh.” Vega thought back to Brennan’s notes. He hadn’t written that the security camera had failed to record the night’s events. He’d written that the DVD was blank. There was nothing on it.

Someone had replaced the used DVD on the night of his mother’s murder with a blank one. Someone with access to the security camera. Someone with an extra seventeen minutes of time before he dialed Father Delgado or 911.

Hector Ponce.





Chapter 14


The doorbell rang just as Adele was trying to zip up her blue silk dress, the one the saleswoman had referred to as “form-fitting.” Adele wondered what form she was referring to. She was already late for Ricardo Luis’s party. She didn’t need any further complications. She tugged on the zipper, raced down the stairs, and shooed Diablo back from the door. The frame was warped. The door gave way all at once.

Adele’s heart froze.

“Please excuse me, se?ora.”

Marcela Salinez was standing on Adele’s front porch in an oversized jacket with the hood bound so tight around her face that only her eyes and nose poked through.

“Marcela.” It took all of Adele’s energy just to say her name. Sweat gathered under the armpits of her shrink-wrapped dress. She blushed with a deep shame as if she had pulled the trigger last night. She opened the front door wider and hugged Marcela tightly. The coat was ice-cold to the touch and so soft; it felt like hugging snow. Marcela had obviously walked all the way from her house on the western edge of town.

“I am so sorry for your loss,” Adele said in Spanish. Her words sounded weak and pathetic the moment they left her lips.

“Thank you,” Marcela said woodenly. Adele beckoned her inside. She could feel Marcela’s eyes taking in the shimmery festiveness of her dress. “You are going out.” It sounded like an accusation.

“It’s just a business function for La Casa.”

“I really need to speak to you. Maybe just for a few minutes?”

“I’d love to, Marcela. Believe me, I would. But I can’t talk about the—situation.” Adele glanced up the stairs where Sophia was about to get into the shower. “She doesn’t know,” Adele whispered.

“I’m not here to talk about my father, se?ora.”

Se?ora. Adele felt the full force of the word, the polite and stilted boundary it erected between them. Adele’s own parents were undocumented immigrants from Ecuador. Adele did not see a divide between her and the people she worked with at La Casa. But they did. The honorific, which Adele had shrugged off as simple “good manners,” now brought a dull ache of understanding to her heart. There was a chasm between her and Marcela that could never be breached, not even with the best of intentions.

Adele gave Marcela a pained look. “I grieve for you, Marcela. If there was something I could do right now, I would. But I’m already running late and I still have to take Sophia to her friend’s house.”

“It’s about my daughter, se?ora. She’s in danger.”

“Yovanna?” Adele frowned. “But she’s here now. She’s safe.” It was a miracle the child had made it at all. Adele heard so many terrible stories from clients. If a person was lucky enough to make it out of the cesspool of violence that was Central America these days, they faced rape, robberies, and beatings on the journey north through Mexico—assuming the Mexican authorities didn’t deport them first. At the Texas border (that’s where they almost always crossed), if they weren’t detained by U.S. immigration, smugglers often packed them thirty to a room in safe houses and held them for ransom.

Every moment of the 2000-mile journey was frightening and perilous. But here? In suburban Lake Holly? This was where they could finally begin to decompress and deal with the longer-term problems of being undocumented, uneducated, and non-English speaking in a country that wanted to deport them. Stressful? Absolutely. But far less dire than what they’d already endured.

“By danger—do you mean from the immigration authorities?” asked Adele.

Marcela started to cry. In the nine years Adele had known her, she’d only see Marcela cry once: the day she got word that her brother Reimundo had been shot and killed in San Pedro Sula by a fourteen-year-old gang member on a bicycle. Adele put her arm around her.

“It’s okay. Come. We can talk for a few minutes. At least until Sophia gets out of the shower.”

In the kitchen, Adele got Marcela a box of tissues. She offered to make coffee but Marcela declined.