No Witness But the Moon Read online

  Vega switched to Spanish. “Soy el policía! Déjeme ver sus manos!” I’m the police! Let me see your hands!

  Nothing.

  “Are you deaf, pendejo? Está usted sordo?”

  The man straightened but kept his back to Vega and his hands hidden. “Hay una razón”—the man choked out between gasps of air—“por la que . . . hice esto.” There’s a reason I did this.

  So they were going to conduct this interchange in Spanish. Fine. At least now Vega knew. But why wasn’t the suspect cooperating? What could he possibly hope to gain by refusing to obey a police officer with a gun pointed at him? “I don’t care about your reason, pendejo,” Vega replied in Spanish. “Put your hands where I can see them.”

  “You are making a mistake,” said the man in Spanish.

  Was that a threat? “Show me your hands! Now!”

  Vega felt a burning in his gut—that fight or flight instinct that every officer has to conquer in order to survive. You can’t back down when you’re a cop. You can’t negotiate a command or turn it into a request—or, God forbid, a plea. You’re no good to anybody if you do. Not to other cops. Not to civilians. Not even to yourself. You have to own the situation or one way or another, it will own you.

  “I’m not gonna tell you again,” shouted Vega.

  “But you don’t understand. You can’t do this—”

  The man lifted his right hand off his left shoulder. Vega thought he was going to raise it in the air. Instead, he shoved it into the right front pocket of his jeans and spun around to face Vega.

  One. Two. Two seconds. That’s all the time a police officer has to make a decision.

  One. Two. A lot can happen in two seconds.

  An object can fall sixty-four feet.

  A bullet can travel a mile.

  And an indecisive cop can become a dead one.

  Vega wasn’t aware of squeezing the trigger. But he heard the shots. Like burst balloons.

  Bam.

  Bam.

  Bam.

  Bam.

  The man crumpled to the ground. The confrontation was over.

  The pain had just begun.

  Chapter 2

  Jimmy Vega’s hands were shaking so much, it took him several tries before he could press the button on his radio.

  “This is County twenty-nine,” he said, trying to squeeze the breathlessness and panic from his voice. “I’m in the woods behind Oak Hill Road. Suspect on the ten-thirty-two is down on a four-four-four.” Local code for an officer-involved-shooting.

  It was like waking from a dream. Just fifty or sixty feet farther down the hill Vega could see the flashing lights of police cars bathing the woods in a strange, otherworldly glow. Did they just show up? Or have they been there all along? He’d been so focused on the suspect, he’d blotted out all other sensations.

  Two uniformed patrol officers with heavy-duty flashlights began climbing cautiously toward him. Vega took a step forward into the pool of light. The suspect was lying on his back, not moving. From this angle on the hillside, all Vega could see were the soles of his sneakers and his tan baseball cap, now lying on the ground near him, soaked with blood. Vega wanted to rush over and begin CPR. That’s what he was trained to do after a shooting. But he couldn’t—not until these officers cleared him to move. He wasn’t in uniform. For all the police knew, he was another perp. He dropped his gun to the ground, slowly removed his gold detective’s shield from his belt, and cupped it in his left hand. Then he raised both hands in the air.

  “Police officer! Don’t shoot!” he shouted, waving his shield.

  The two Wickford cops stepped into the floodlight. A man and a woman. The woman had a soft chin and frizzy bleached hair that reminded Vega of a dandelion. The man was shaped like a torpedo—with a shaved head beneath his cap and a wide torso made wider by his Kevlar vest. Both officers holstered their weapons as soon as they recognized him from the station house earlier. They were closer to the suspect than Vega was. Vega noticed the woman’s mouth form a perfect O at the sight of the man. Torpedo raised an eyebrow and stepped back.

  “No ambulance needed here, Detective. You got him good.”

  “Did you find anyone else?” asked Vega. He was still panting hard. His side had a stitch in it like he’d just run a marathon. “I think I heard someone else in the woods.”

  “There are police everywhere down there,” said Torpedo. “If there’s anyone else, we’ll find them.”

  Vega retrieved his gun from the ground and ran over to the man he’d just shot. He was a homicide cop. He was used to pulling up on bloody, sometimes gory crime scenes. But he was unprepared for the damage he himself had inflicted. He’d aimed, as he’d been taught in his police training, for the center mass of the body—the torso. But as the man collapsed and fell backward, one of the bullets must have caught him in the chin and gone through his skull, cracking it open as easily as an egg. Blood and brain matter glistened, dark and gelatinous, across the fallen leaves. The suspect was unrecognizable from the neck up.

  I’ve killed a man. Dear God, I fucking blew his head off! In Vega’s eighteen years as a police officer, including five in undercover narcotics dealing with hardened gangbangers and felons, he’d never had to shoot anyone. He’d pointed his gun plenty of times and had guns pointed at him. He’d seen people killed. He’d wrestled suspects into handcuffs while they were trying to take a swing at him. But he’d never fired his weapon in the line of duty. The vast majority of police officers never do. You practice for it. Every couple of months you go out to the shooting range and train. But it’s like a fire drill. You do it to stay sharp. You don’t expect to ever really need it.

  “Are you okay, Detective?” asked the woman cop with the dandelion hair.

  “Yeah.” Vega was shaking badly but he tried to cover it by pretending he was just cold. He began frantically walking the perimeter of the body. “Where’s the gun? He had a gun.”

  Torpedo felt the dead man’s jacket then stepped to the side and conferred with his partner.

  “Anything?” Dandelion murmured. Torpedo shook his head. “He seems pretty sure he had one.”

  Vega paced impatiently. “No,” he muttered to himself. “I just blow people’s brains out for the fun of it.” He hadn’t even realized they’d heard him until he noticed the two officers looking his way. Both dropped their gazes and shined their flashlights on the ground to give them some extra wattage over and above the floodlights. They nudged the leaves with their boots. Nothing.

  “He had one,” Vega insisted. “I know he did!”

  “We’ll find it,” Dandelion assured him.

  More cops were heading up the hill now. Wickford’s Detective Sergeant Mark Hammond was with them, carefully maneuvering his perfectly pressed khakis past the twigs and brambles that had snagged Vega’s own pants.

  Vega ignored them all. He crouched down next to the dead man. The suspect’s bloody right hand was turned palm-side down. There was something underneath. It was too small to be a gun. A knife, perhaps? A box cutter? Vega knew he wasn’t supposed to touch anything. But he had to know. He uncurled the fingers slightly. Staring up at him was a creased, blood-smeared photograph of two Hispanic men and a teenage boy.

  There was nothing else in the dead man’s hand.

  Vega’s stomach lurched. He felt light-headed and dizzy. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, ran over to the nearest tree, and vomited. He heaved again and again until there was nothing left inside of him. The man I killed was involved in a home invasion robbery, Vega reminded himself . He ran after I identified myself as a police officer. He refused to surrender. He turned on me.

  He had no weapon.

  That thought beat out every other in Vega’s brain.

  The other officers on the scene gave Vega space. No one said anything to him. They probably thought that’s what he needed right now, and a part of him did. But another part of him would have given anything for someone to tell him he’d done the right thi
ng. Instead, everyone went about their business like actors on a stage waiting for someone to feed them their lines. Nobody knew what to say. Two EMTs started up the hill but were quickly turned back. Vega watched their faces absorb the news in the ghoulish alternating flashes of red and blue light.

  Hammond eventually walked over and patted Vega gently on the back.

  “Come sit in my car, Jimmy. Okay? Maybe call your family? No sense you being out here.”

  Vega nodded, not trusting himself to speak as Hammond led him down the hill and into the front passenger seat of Hammond’s unmarked Toyota.

  “I thought for a moment you were gonna put me in back,” said Vega.

  It was meant to be a weak joke but Hammond’s response gave Vega pause. “Take as long as you need to get your thoughts together, okay, Jimmy?” The detective’s smile had too many teeth in it.

  Hammond’s unmarked Toyota smelled of peppermints and Lysol, but it calmed Vega down to be encased in this tomb away from the murmurs of other cops. He felt certain everyone was judging him. How could they not? He would.

  Hammond got in the driver’s side and radioed a request for the medical examiner and the county crime scene unit. The uniforms began cordoning off the area with yellow police tape. Vega felt like he was watching it all unfold underwater. Voices and sounds came at him disconnected from their sources. The dispatcher’s voice over the radio provided a constant update of all the additional vehicles and agencies that were now being directed to this tiny lane in Wickford. All because of Vega. Because of what he’d done.

  When Hammond left the car to go back up the hill, Vega took out his cell phone and dialed Adele. He could barely get the words out before he started to choke up.

  “I just shot and killed a man.”

  “What? Oh my God! Mi amado, what happened? Are you okay?”

  Vega’s head was pounding. His eyes burned like someone had rubbed them with sand. He took a deep breath and heard it catch in his lungs. He hadn’t felt the urge to cry this strongly since that day nearly two years ago when a Bronx detective called to tell him his mother had been found beaten to death in her apartment. At least then, no one would have blamed him if he’d broken down. The crime was brutal. It was still unsolved. But now? This was different. The police officers on the scene would take it as a sign of weakness. Worse, they’d take it as a sign of guilt.

  Whatever you do, stay strong, he told himself. If he stopped believing that he’d had no choice about what he’d done, why would anyone else believe it either?

  He tried to steady his voice and state the facts as dispassionately as possible. “Dispatch reported a home invasion and shots fired at a residence here in Wickford. I was nearby so I took in the call. The suspect refused to surrender and turned on me.”

  “Oh, Jimmy, how awful. Are you hurt?”

  “No.” He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that the man he’d killed probably wasn’t armed. He needed time to wrap his head around that one. He still didn’t want to believe it was true.

  A silence hung between them. It was just a moment’s worth but Vega felt the sting. Was she judging him? Or was he judging himself so much that he read every hesitation as a criticism?

  “It’s going to be all right,” she cooed softly. “Where are you? Peter was going to drop Sophia off after he took her to the movies.” Peter was Adele’s ex. “Maybe I can get her babysitter Marcela to come over.”

  “There’s no point,” said Vega. “They won’t let you within a hundred feet of me.”

  “Have you given a statement yet? Spoken to counsel?” Adele had been a criminal defense attorney before she started La Casa. It was still in her blood.

  “No.” Vega squinted through the windshield. Already things were heating up. On the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape were civilian onlookers, news cameras, and more police cars. A lot more police cars. “It’s going to be a long night,” said Vega. “Can you call Joy and let her know?” Vega’s eighteen-year-old daughter was a freshman at the local community college. She lived with Vega’s ex-wife.

  “Of course. I’ll do that now.” Adele hung on the line for a moment without speaking. “A delicate question,” she said finally. “The uh—suspect. Was he white? Black?”

  “Hispanic. He spoke to me in Spanish.”

  “Good.”

  “Why good?” asked Vega.

  “Well, you’re Puerto Rican,” said Adele. “So you’ll probably get a pass on the race issue.”

  Vega couldn’t contain himself. “There is no race issue, Adele! I wasn’t thinking about the color of his skin or the color of mine. My only thought was not getting shot!”

  “Calm down, mi amado,” she said softly. “I understand. I’m just trying to think ahead.”

  Ahead? Vega couldn’t think through the next hour. “I don’t need you to be my lawyer, nena. I’ll have lawyers up the yin yang soon enough.”

  “Sorry.” She exhaled. “You’re right. I’ll get in touch with Joy and check in with you later, okay? I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” Vega hung up just as the driver’s side door opened and Hammond slid in.

  “Hey, Jimmy”—Hammond patted his shoulder and gave him a big, fake smile that was all pink gums and white teeth—“how you holding up?”

  Vega wasn’t interested in small talk. “Did you find a gun?”

  “Not yet.”

  “A knife? Any sort of weapon?”

  Hammond ran a finger along the pleats in his slacks without looking at Vega or answering his question—which was answer enough, Vega supposed.

  “So that photograph?” asked Vega. “That was all that you found in his hands?”

  “At the moment.”

  “How about accomplices?”

  “The homeowner says he only saw one man.”

  “When I was in the woods, it felt like somebody else was there.”

  “My guys were at the bottom of the hill. Not sixty feet away. They didn’t see anyone.”

  Vega winced. How could he not have seen them? “They were that close?”

  Hammond nodded. “They had their lights and sirens on and everything.”

  “I guess I just—blocked it out or something.”

  Hammond put a hand on Vega’s arm and squeezed it for emphasis. “Don’t talk, Jimmy—okay? You can only go through this story once. You go through it more than once and change something, some attorney’s gonna eat you alive—or put me on a witness stand and eat us both alive.”

  Vega nodded. “Any indications that he was part of that gang?”

  The temperature inside the car seemed to plummet twenty degrees. Vega could feel it instantly.

  “Listen, Jim—I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be saying this yet. But I just got a call from the chief of police? Over in Greenfield, Connecticut?”

  Vega narrowed his gaze at Hammond. Cops aren’t teenage girls. They don’t frame statements as questions unless they’d rather not deliver the answers.

  “Spit it out, Mark.”

  “The Greenfield PD just arrested the whole gang. Like maybe an hour ago. Four Hispanic men coming out of a big estate over there.”

  “The gang responsible for these home invasions? Are you sure?”

  “One of the guy’s prints matches a print we picked up on that robbery. The DNA on another matches semen from the rape in Quaker Hills. That Connecticut rookie they pistol-whipped positively ID’d two of them from mug shots. ”

  “So you’re saying—”

  “The man you killed probably wasn’t connected to those other crimes.”

  Chapter 3

  Vega had no idea how long he sat in Hammond’s unmarked Toyota. Long enough, he supposed, for the county evidence techs to impound the two guns he was carrying (his and the homeowner’s) as well as the ugly silver Pontiac Grand Am Vega had checked out of the station house lot that morning. They found four shell casings from Vega’s Glock in the woods and one from the homeowner’s Sig Sauer in the house.

/>   Ricardo Luis. The homeowner’s name came back to Vega while he sat slumped in the Toyota’s front passenger seat. Vega figured out how he knew him, too.

  Heat of my heart, beat of my heart . . . oh, oh, oh.

  Vega couldn’t remember the last two hours. He couldn’t recall firing four—four!—bullets into an unarmed man. But he could sing the stupid chorus of that Latin pop star’s wildly successful chart-topping song.

  By the time Vega’s friend, county detective Teddy Dolan, came to fetch him and drive him to their own police headquarters, Vega felt wrung-out. Dolan was all forced good cheer, his voice casual and slightly country-sounding—the same voice Dolan used to talk down wife batterers and would-be bridge jumpers. Vega wondered if he fell into the latter category.

  They weren’t allowed to talk about the shooting so Dolan tried to fill the space between them with distractions. He prattled on about last week’s Giants game against Dallas, the upcoming division Christmas party, and how their boss, Captain Waring, was getting on everyone’s case about detectives leaving litter in their cars. Vega couldn’t even muster the energy for yesses and noes. There was only one thing that interested him.

  “Who was he?” Vega asked softly.

  Dolan bit the inside of his cheek and said nothing. He was a big, burly ex-Marine with a blond walrus mustache, a shaved head, and a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his right forearm. To look at the two of them, any civilian would think Dolan would be the one in this mess, not Vega. But Dolan was one of the most even-tempered cops Vega knew. Vega couldn’t help but wonder whether the man he shot tonight would be alive right now if Dolan had been the officer he’d encountered instead of Vega.

  “C’mon, Teddy,” Vega pleaded. “In a few hours everyone’s gonna know his name, and in a few days everyone’s gonna know mine.”

  “It’s not helpful to you right now.”

  “Let me decide what’s helpful.”

  Vega already knew some things about the case from eavesdropping on conversations at the scene. He knew that the security footage from Luis’s video cameras was useless because Luis had recently had his gutters cleaned and whoever cleaned them knocked all the cameras out of position. He knew that Luis had a bodyguard in Miami—his main residence—but not in Wickford where the Latin American community consisted of a thousand domestics and two transferred bank execs from Argentina. The police found no evidence of illegal drugs in the house or any other illicit activity. But they did find ten grand in small bills, which Luis claimed was cash he gave to his entourage in the form of tips and Christmas bonuses. No wonder he was a great robbery target.