No Witness But the Moon(79)

Dispatch was conveniently located right across from the medical examiner’s office. Just to make doubly sure no one knew what he was doing, Vega parked in the ME’s lot and crossed over to dispatch.

The vestibule door was alarmed, but he showed his ID to the video camera and immediately got buzzed through. The front reception area had all the warmth of a post office. The ceiling was acoustical tile, the floor was linoleum. There was a collection of flags—American, New York State, and county. At the front desk was a young white guy, not long out of college. He had close-cropped hair and wore a dark blue dispatcher’s knit polo shirt that looked as if it had been pressed, certainly not by him. Vega suspected he still lived at home with his parents.

Vega showed his badge and added a little push to his voice, hoping his rank and seniority might keep the kid from asking too many questions.

“I need to pull the tapes on the Benito Diaz shooting.” Diaz—a.k.a. Lil—was a teenager who had been gunned down in a lover’s triangle back in September. Vega was the lead investigator on the case so nobody was likely to question his motives.

The dispatcher buzzed Vega through the doors. Vega followed the hallway to a room with cubicles, computer monitors, and headsets. It reminded him of language lab when he was a kid. He expected to be listening to someone discuss their vacation in French. For all Vega’s fluency in Spanish, he couldn’t order off a menu in French.

The screen required him to type in his badge number and the number of the case he was looking to access. It meant there would be a record linking him to audio he wasn’t authorized to listen to. But who would bother to look?

Vega pulled out his phone and copied the case number from the evidence pictures Dolan had sent to him. Then he put on the headsets and hit play. A flat, emotionless female dispatcher’s voice came on the line: “County dispatch 911, what is your emergency?”

A male voice answered in a heavy Spanish accent.

“Ah, I was home? By myself? And this man? He, ah—he broke into my house.”

Vega frowned. It took Luis three full sentences to get around to stating his emergency. In Vega’s experience, people got to the point pretty quickly: I’ve been shot! My baby’s not breathing! My house is on fire! And okay, Luis wasn’t a native speaker. He was likely scared and under pressure. But why was every statement framed as a question? The only people Vega knew who framed statements as questions were teenage girls and lying suspects. And Ricardo Luis was not a teenage girl.

“Where is your house, sir?”

“Six Oak Hill Road. In Wickford.”

“Is the suspect there now?”

“Ah, I’m not sure. I think they—he ran away? After I shot him.”

They? Did Luis confuse singular and plural? Or did he know there were two men? If so, then why lie to the police?

Unless he didn’t want the police to go looking for a witness.

“You shot him? Where did you shoot him?”

“In the hallway.”

“No. I mean where on his body?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t listen. I told him to get out. It’s his fault he got shot.”

The more Vega listened, the more the 911 recording filled him with unease. When Vega was in uniform, he regularly responded to 911 calls. The contents—relayed by dispatchers—were nearly always some variation of Get over here now. Help. Save me. Hurry. The callers couldn’t care less what happened to the people who were hurting them. They never thought to justify their actions. The one time Vega remembered listening to a 911 transmission like this was on one of his first serious child abuse cases. A man called 911 to report that his girlfriend’s toddler had “fallen” down the stairs while he was caring for the boy. Vega arrived to find a man more interested in explaining how “naughty” the child was and how he was always “tripping” rather than in whether Vega and the EMTs could save him. They did save the boy, thankfully. But the man eventually confessed to beating the toddler when he wouldn’t stop crying.

So what was going on here? The dispatcher’s voice came on again.

“Okay, sir. Stay on the line with me. Police will be responding shortly.”

“Chingada madre! He’s still in the house.”

Okay. Here, Luis sounded genuinely upset. He cursed. He gave factual information. Vega believed that whatever was going on, Luis definitely was afraid to have this guy still in his house.

“Can you get someplace safe in the house until police arrive?”

Luis took the phone away from his mouth and shouted in Spanish to someone in the room. The words were garbled. They sounded like . . . but no. That didn’t make sense.

Or did it?

“Sir? Sir? Are you still on the line? Police are on the scene.”

The dispatcher lost contact with Luis after that. The rest of the radio communication had to do with Vega and the Wickford Police. Vega went back to the beginning and played the tape again. He heard those garbled words more clearly this time: “Largo de aquí, joto!” Beat it, faggot!

Was Luis calling the intruder a homosexual? And if so, did that have something to do with why the man was there in the first place? Was that what Luis was hiding?

Vega left the building, still trying to make sense of this development, when a man stepped out of the front doors of the medical examiner’s office and began walking toward the only other car in the lot. He had a shaved head, broad shoulders, a blond walrus mustache, and the distinctive chest-forward walk of an ex-high school linebacker who still played in weekend leagues, albeit with increasing sprains and pulled ligaments. Dolan.