The media storm quickly faded from the Internet. By the third day after Torres’s arrest, it was already back page news. An anonymous donor offered to bury both Hector and Antonio in St. Raymond’s cemetery. The brothers would be together in death even if they never got much of a chance in life.
Vega thought he’d feel a great sense of relief knowing that his mother’s murderer had been caught and that Yovanna was no longer in danger. The district attorney even floated the possibility that the case could be cleared in-house instead of being submitted to a grand jury. But something still gnawed at Vega.
Ricardo Luis.
He was at the center of everything that had happened. And he wasn’t talking. Nor was Humberto Oliva. “I have made my peace with God,” Oliva insisted. “And now, Luis must make his.”
Vega refused to give up. He contacted a colleague in the FBI he’d once worked a joint investigation with to see if the Feds could press the case without Oliva’s cooperation. But that too proved to be a dead end. Word came back that there was no proof Luis’s victims had even died on the U.S. side of the border. The Mexican police had little interest in pinning such a heinous, twenty-year-old crime on a homegrown hero. Luis was free.
Not Vega. Antonio’s death hung like a ghost around him. Even the news, five days after Torres’s arrest, that the DA had declined to convene a grand jury, didn’t offer Vega the relief he’d been hoping for. He was going back to work.
He wondered if he’d still be able to do the job.
“You know what you need?” asked Isadora Jenkins as Vega walked her to her car after their meeting with the DA.
“To shut my big, fat mouth?”
She laughed. “Always. But in this case, you need someone to keep you honest.”
“I am honest.”
“I mean honest about how you’re doing.”
Vega started to protest. Jenkins dismissed him with a wave of her hand. Today, she was wearing a big, flower-shaped ring encrusted with rhinestones. Vega’s daughter had a ring like that back when she used to pretend to be a fairy princess. Isadora Jenkins apparently still thought she was.
“Don’t you dare hand me those words I’m fine,” said Jenkins. “Ninety-five percent of cops who kill someone in the line of duty don’t go to jail or face disciplinary charges. And yet something like a third of them quit their jobs within five years of the incident. Do you know why, Detective? Because they walk around with the same shell-shocked expression you’ve got on your face right now, saying, ‘I’m fine.’ And they’re not.”
Jenkins put a hand on his arm. Her eyes turned soft and maternal. “Keep going to therapy, Vega. And more than that, find somebody who gets what you’re going through. Not your family. Lord knows, they never will. Just—somebody who’s been there.”
Vega nodded. “Okay. I’ll keep that in mind.”
She hugged him fiercely. He wasn’t expecting that. “Thanks for everything,” he said shyly. “See you around.”
“Huh. Let’s hope not.”
And then she was gone with only her words still ringing in Vega’s ears: You need someone to keep you honest. Fortunately or unfortunately, Vega knew just the man.
Every Friday at four P.M., Detective Louis Greco could be found at the Lake Holly 7-Eleven buying ten lottery tickets. Always ten. Always at the 7-Eleven on Fridays at four P.M. Louis Greco was nothing if not predictable.
Vega parked his truck next to Greco’s white Buick and waited until the old detective barreled through the doors. He had a New York Post tucked under one arm. His face registered nothing—which meant he already knew everything.
“Get in.” Greco sighed. “You want me to pretend I don’t know? Or should we skip right to the ‘get your ass back to work’ speech?”
“The DA just cleared me,” said Vega. “How could you know?”
Greco tossed the newspaper to Vega. The headline, RUBEN’S LAP OF SHAME, was splashed across the front page, complete with a picture of Tate recoiling from the very media that had made him a star.
Vega scanned the text. “So I take it his interns were getting private tutoring sessions from the professor. Whether they wanted them or not.”
Greco chuckled. “Baiting cops, copping feels—it’s all the same. Anyway, as soon as I heard, I figured there was no way the DA was going to make an example out of you now that Ruben Rapes-His-Secretaries was out of the picture. The political will was gone.”
Vega folded the paper and handed it back to Greco. “So how come I still feel like I’m carrying around a dead man on my shoulders?”
“Give it time, Vega. It’s not going to get better overnight. I told you, you’re different now. You always will be. Something good will come out of this eventually. You’ll see.”
“Not this time,” said Vega. “Hector gave his life to bring his granddaughter over here. And now he and his brother are both dead and that poor kid’s a mess. She’s struggling at school. She’s distressed at home. She needs help she’s never going to get. And she’s not the only one, either. Adele told me about this boy who just came over from Guatemala. He’s sleeping in the restaurant where he works.”