Land of Careful Shadows (24 page)

“Call me if you need anything,” she said and went back downstairs.

The dog stayed behind. She seemed to like Rodrigo and Rodrigo was glad of the company. He pushed open the door to the bathroom. A small gasp escaped his lips. He was glad Señora Linda wasn't around to hear it. He would have felt embarrassed to gawk in her presence.

The room was like something out of a palace. It was tiled in soft green-and-white marble. There were two sinks with shiny gold swan-neck fixtures, a toilet, a shower stall behind frosted glass, and an oval-shaped bathtub set in a dark wood frame that looked big enough for a small party. It was in front of a bay window that overlooked the woods in back.

Rodrigo ran a hand along the cool beveled rim of the bathtub. He wondered what it would feel like to soak in such a thing, to be enveloped in a caress of warm water like a baby in its mother's womb, to gaze out such a window on your own private paradise. Growing up, his family didn't even have an outhouse until he was ten. He remembered having to make his way to the river at night, how difficult it was to see. How terrifying. He was always afraid of stepping on a snake. He was afraid
La Llorona,
the spirit who drowned her children, would pull him into the water. It was a proud moment for him when he was able to build his wife and children a house with a real flushing toilet. It made him feel like a millionaire. But this? This was something he could not have conceived of if someone hadn't shown it to him. He wished he had a picture of it for Triza.

Enough of this foolishness. Time to work, as Anibal would say. Rodrigo opened the top of the toilet tank and depressed the handle. He saw right away what the problem was—the lift wire on the handle had sediment deposits on it. If it were up to him, he'd have removed the lift wire and handle, cleaned it all down with vinegar and a touch of mineral oil, and then tweaked it until it worked perfectly. But he knew from experience that when
Norte Americanos
want something replaced, they want it replaced. Not fixed or reconditioned. Replaced.

The dog went into the master bedroom and came back into the bathroom a minute later with a pair of brown men's moccasin-style slippers—Porter's slippers from the looks of them. Rodrigo laughed and murmured to the dog in Spanish.

“No slippers, dog. What I really need is a pair of scissors.” There was thick plastic packaging on the toilet repair kit that Rodrigo would never be able to open without scissors.

He checked the medicine cabinet and could only find a tiny nail scissor. He didn't want to go rummaging around. Señora Linda might get the wrong idea so he walked into the upstairs hallway to find her. The dog followed. He heard her voice downstairs on the phone. She was speaking English. She sounded upset.

“Do you need my mother?” asked the girl in Spanish. She was sitting on her pink-canopied bed on the other side of a beaded curtain that separated her bedroom from the hallway.

“I need scissors if you have them, please.” Rodrigo held up the plastic carton so she could see his dilemma.

The girl put down her electronic game and pushed herself off her bed. She opened a drawer of her desk and tossed aside broken pencils and erasers. Rodrigo waited on the other side of the beaded curtain. The floor of her bedroom was covered in a fluffy white carpet that looked as if no one ever walked on it. Her walls were plastered with posters of a dark-haired Anglo boy who smiled like a girl. He was probably a musician or movie actor the girl liked. Rodrigo suspected Juliza had such crushes also. He wished he were around his own children to know such things.

“I can't find my scissors. I think my dad borrowed them.”

“It's okay,” said Rodrigo. “I will wait until your mother can help me.”

“She's going to take a while,” said the girl with a roll of her eyes. “She's been on the phone since I got home.”

“Everything okay?”
What sort of rudeness was that?
He had no business asking a child about her parents. No business at all.

The girl shrugged. She had no wariness of strangers. Rodrigo wondered if that was her nature or because she was adopted. “I think she's having a fight with my dad.”

“I'm sorry,” said Rodrigo.
Ay, caray!
He shouldn't be hearing this!

“It's okay,” said the girl. “They don't usually fight. They'll probably make up by dinner.” She shoved all the pencils and erasers back in her drawer and slammed it shut. “I'll find you some scissors. We usually have a pair in my dad's office downstairs.”

Rodrigo followed the girl downstairs to a room off the kitchen with certificates in black frames on the wall and several large bookcases crammed with gold-bound books. He suspected it was Porter's home office. It all looked very official and important. Rodrigo wasn't sure he should even be in here.

Señora Linda was in the kitchen talking on the phone. The little girl perked up at something she heard her mother say. She called out a question to her but Señora Linda motioned for her to be quiet and turned away from them. Rodrigo hung back by the doorway of Porter's office and kept his eyes on the floor.

“I think we're going on a plane trip,” the girl told Rodrigo. “My mom's talking to my dad about it now. I think it's supposed to be a surprise.”

Unless you're getting deported, Rodrigo was under the impression that plane trips were supposed to be fun. But nothing in Señora Linda's demeanor suggested fun to Rodrigo. She paced the floor. Her voice rose and fell in tight little bursts that, even without knowing the language, sounded panicked and angry.

The girl rummaged through the center drawer of the desk until she found a pair of scissors. She handed them to Rodrigo.

“Many thanks,” he said, looking down. He did not feel comfortable looking at the girl as openly as she looked at him. All he wanted at this moment was to open the packaging, remove the guts of the old fixture, and replace it with this new one. It would be an easy job. He could already see that. Ten or fifteen minutes at most with the right tools. He felt bad that Señora Linda would have to drive him back to town. She was obviously busy right now. He'd offer to walk but it was a long hike on a narrow road and it would soon be getting dark.

The girl shoved the desk drawer closed. The motion dislodged a folder of papers that was lying on the edge of the desk. It tumbled to the floor, spilling the contents across the rug. Rodrigo bent to pick the papers up and put them back in the folder. He did not mean to read them. In most cases, he couldn't have if he'd tried. But it was the layout of the page that was so familiar. Shapes and patterns were things he seldom forgot, probably because he'd spent so many preliterate years as a boy depending on his visual memory to tell him things printed words could not.

He recognized the form as the same one Señora Linda had wanted him to fill out when he first came to La Casa. Señora Linda had called it an “intake sheet”—whatever that meant. Rodrigo had refused. Politely, but firmly. Too personal. Too much information he'd rather not have on file. Maria was with him when he refused. For some reason, she agreed. He would never have remembered that except he saw the name now, printed in block letters that were easy enough for even him to decipher:
Maria Elena Vasquez.
She had not given Señora Linda her real name either. Rodrigo was sad that in death he knew more about her than in life.

He was standing in Porter's office with the form in hand when he suddenly became aware of the jingle of dog tags behind him and the absence of echoing voices. Señora Linda was off the phone and both she and the dog had walked into the room.

“What are you doing with that?” she demanded in Spanish. The harshness of her voice surprised him. He'd never heard her speak like that before. He couldn't imagine what he'd done that was so terrible. He put the form down on the desk. He didn't even bother to stuff it back in the folder.

“It dropped on the floor, señora. I picked it up. I came to get scissors. To cut open the packaging.” He held up both for her to see. He felt like asking if she wanted to frisk him. He'd never seen her look so angry. It made him feel angry too. He wasn't stealing or snooping where he didn't belong. How could she think such a thing?

“How long will it take you to fix the toilet?”

She was impatient, too. He'd never seen someone's mood change so quickly.

“Fifteen minutes perhaps, señora. I may need a
llave inglesa.
”

She frowned. “What is a
llave inglesa?”

Rodrigo supposed she wasn't used to using Spanish words for tools. He tried to explain and mime at the same time. “It's to tighten bolts. It adjusts—”

“
—
a crescent wrench,” she said in English.

Rodrigo tried the words on his tongue. “Cre-set rech.” Señora Linda turned to her daughter and said something in English and the daughter left the room.

“Olivia will bring one up to you. When you're done, I'll call you a cab, okay? I can't drive anywhere tonight but I'll give you a hundred dollars and you can pay the cab from that and keep the rest. The cab shouldn't come to more than eight or nine dollars.”

“That is very generous of you, señora. Thank you. I'm sorry if I've done anything to offend.”

“It's not you, Rodrigo.” She let out a deep sigh. “This isn't a good night. I hope you understand.”

He didn't. But there was a lot he didn't understand these days.

“Señora—I just want you to know: I would never read anything I'm not supposed to.” Would never. Could never. At least not without a great deal of effort. But the second part he kept to himself. Everyone has parts they keep hidden. He was only sorry he'd found his way into one of hers tonight.

T
here were no nine-year-old Luz Marias in all of Lake Holly. Or ten-year-old Luz Marias. Or eleven-year-old ones, for that matter. None in any of the surrounding towns either. Vega and Greco checked all the schools—public, private, and parochial—and came to the conclusion that Luz Maria wasn't Luz Maria anymore and probably hadn't been for quite some time.

Greco fished a Twizzler out of his bag and shoved it into the corner of his mouth. Vega had bought him two king-sized bags as penance for yesterday and Greco was nearly through the second one. A “two-bag” day, he called it. With good reason. They were looking for a nine-year-old Guatemalan girl who lived in Lake Holly without her biological mother. A nine-year-old girl who was born in Iowa. A nine-year-old girl whose parents would have the know-how and smarts to cheat an illegal alien out of her own child. They had only one candidate.

“We make a mistake here, Vega, it's a whole universe worse than anything we could have done with Morales. We've got to be sure.”

“Sure means DNA.”

“DNA requires a court order,” said Greco. “So does unsealing Olivia Porter's adoption records. Both take time. Plus, we gotta talk to the bastard. I mean, what if Porter's the dad? He's got a right to the kid then. We have to be careful what we're accusing him of.”

“She doesn't look a bit like that slimy worm.”

“All my kids look like me and none of 'em like my wife. What's that tell ya?”

“That they got unlucky?”

“Smart ass.”

Greco had a point, though. They had to be sure—damn sure—that they knew what Porter was guilty of before they spoke to him. That meant a long, exhausting search of public records. That meant both of them working an all-nighter at the computer.

Vega's cell phone rang. Wendy. She only ever wanted to talk when he didn't. Story of their marriage.

“So, we'll be done with dinner in like, fifteen minutes,” she said. He could hear sizzling and chopping sounds in the background. They were still at the hibachi place.

“I'm going to be tied up tonight, unfortunately. I can't get away.”

“What do you mean, you can't get away? You
asked
for this.”

“I know. I'm sorry. I want to talk. I really do,” said Vega. “But things changed on this end.”

“You couldn't call?”

He could've. He should've. He kept thinking he'd be able to get away.

“My God, Jimmy—you asked me to rearrange my
whole
schedule for this—Joy's
whole
schedule—”

“—How about tomorrow?”

“Alan's working late. I have no one to leave the boys with.”

“I'll come over to your house.”

“You will not.”

“Wendy, please. It's important.”

“What's the ‘it' referring to, Jimmy? Your work? Or our daughter?”

“Both.”

“When you decide which of them is your priority, let me know. This is why Joy's in therapy.” She hung up.

Vega ran his palms roughly down the sides of his face and fought the urge to drop everything and walk out of the station. Joy was the only thing that mattered to him when you came right down to it. But walking out under these circumstances would be tantamount to going AWOL under fire. He had to stay. He had to hope that whatever was going on with his daughter could wait just a little bit longer. He caught Greco looking at him. “Women problems?”

“Not now, Grec.” Vega put his phone away and continued scrolling down a list of Iowa birth records. Greco's gaze remained fixed. He drummed his fingers on the armrests of his chair.

“We're going to have to interview Porter about all this at some point.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Gonna be fun having the two of you in the same room again.”

Vega looked up from his computer and said nothing.

“Something between you and Porter that I don't know about?”

Vega went back to the computer screen. “Linda,” he mumbled.

“Huh?”

“I guess this isn't the best time to tell you, but Linda and I—we were sort of more than friends in high school.”

“More than friends.” Greco rolled the words around on his tongue. “Is that like confessing ‘impure thoughts' to the priest when you're fifteen and what you really mean is you jacked off a dozen times between breakfast and lunch?”

“Something like that.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Vega!” Greco threw a balled up piece of paper at him. “You couldn't tell me before now?”

“It was personal.”

“Ain't nothing personal between partners when you work a case.”

“I didn't think it would matter.”

“What is it with you and women? Is it that Latin-lover shit?”

“What women?” Vega pushed back in his chair and massaged his eyes. “I'm divorced, Grec. That was my ex yelling at me on the phone. I was with Linda when I was seventeen years old.”

“Those first loves can stay with you.” Greco got a wistful look. At that moment, he reminded Vega of some kindly Italian grandfather in his vegetable garden. Then again, Don Corleone was an Italian grandfather with a vegetable garden and he had people hole-punched for a living.

“Can you handle this, Vega? If it turns out that Linda Porter's involved? Can you do your job without letting your personal feelings get in the way?”

“I guess I'm gonna have to.”

“If you think at any moment you can't, you gotta speak up. You drop the ball because you got all nostalgic on me, I won't be sympathetic.”

“Understood.”

They managed to dig up Olivia Porter's birth records online. Like most adoptees, her birth certificate had been amended so it showed only that her full name was Olivia Socorro Porter, that she was born in Perkinsville, Iowa, nine years ago and that her parents were Scott and Linda Porter. Any proof to the contrary would be in her pre-adoption records and those would have been sealed at the time of her adoption seven years ago.

They did the same online search for Luz Maria Santos in Iowa. Nothing came up. Not in birth records or on the Social Security database. But all that did was confirm what they had already suspected: Luz Maria Santos wasn't Luz Maria Santos anymore. It didn't necessarily mean she was Olivia Porter.

Vega and Greco tried a different tack, focusing instead on Olivia's purported mother, Socorro Medina-Valdez. They ran her name through the ICE database. What Linda had told Vega seemed to check out. Federal records showed that Socorro Medina-Valdez was a Guatemalan who had been arrested in the raid on the Perkinsville food processing plant eight years ago, just like Maria. She'd been represented by the law firm Shanahan & Pierce in Cedar Rapids—the firm that employed Scott Porter—just like Maria. She'd served her sentence at the same federal prison camp for women in Greenville, Illinois. Maria was released after five months. Socorro died three weeks before her release. Cause of death: complications from cervical cancer.

So far, so good. Scott Porter had a reasonable connection to both women. Both women had a reasonable connection to each other. There was just one problem. Greco didn't notice it, but Vega, the accounting major, did.

“Socorro was forty-eight when she died, not thirty-eight.”

“You sure?”

“Do the math.”

Greco grabbed the file, mumbling his little “carry the ones” as he subtracted her birth year from the calendar year of her death and saw that Vega was correct.

“Sounds a bit long in the tooth for the mother of a two-year-old,” Greco agreed. “Then again, it could be a misprint. Immigration files aren't exactly accurate when it comes to personal information.”

“Has to be a misprint,” said Vega. “Otherwise, we're talking about Porter tampering with birth certificates, death certificates—a lot of paperwork that's not easy to fake.”

“I used to think that, too,” said Greco. “Until I met our Mexican Michelangelo last year.”

“A forger?”

“An
artiste.
Right here in Lake Holly.” Greco leaned back in his chair and rested his hands on his belly—his favorite stance when he was talking war stories. For a small-town cop, he had quite a few.

“Guy was minting New York State driver's licenses for illegals. I mean, primo quality.
I
couldn't tell the difference. He was wholesaling them to this local building inspector who was retailing them to illegals for two grand a pop. If we hadn't caught the guy red-handed, I doubt the licenses would've been questioned.”

“You think Porter found a guy like that in
Iowa?
”

“No less likely than finding one here,” said Greco. “These people's lives are all about missing paperwork so they get real good, real fast at finding ways around it. Same time we collared that Mexican? I had this guy in town—a Salvadoran illegal who wanted to bring his thirteen-year-old daughter to Lake Holly but didn't want her—you know—going the overland route? He was afraid she might get raped. So he found a couple in El Salvador who were legal U.S. residents, paid a guy down there to forge his daughter's passport so she was listed as their kid, and brought her over. Cost him like two grand for the paperwork and another five to pay off the couple. But the girl's trip to the States was a piece of cake.”

“And this father just uh—told you all this?”

Greco got a wicked smile. “Actually, the father was about to become another satisfied customer of our paperhanging Picasso. He hadn't actually
bought
the driver's license yet so we had a little leeway. Guy spilled his guts about how his thirteen-year-old would be here in Lake Holly by herself if we got him deported—not even allowed to go back with him on account of the fact that her passport now listed her as somebody else's kid. So I let him off with a warning.”

Vega raised an eyebrow at Greco. “
You?
Let an illegal alien go?”

“Must've been my hemorrhoids acting up.”

“Or the fact that you had thirteen-year-old daughters once too.”

“How do you think I got the hemorrhoids?” Greco gave a throaty chuckle. “My point is, if Porter had wanted a document forged, he could have gotten it. Judges just make sure your paperwork's in order. They're not about to check the individual documents that closely, especially when it comes from a colleague.”

“Okay,” said Vega. “Maybe Scott could've gotten good forgeries to cover his tracks. But I can't believe Linda would go along with something like that.”

“So you think because you took a few rolls in the hay with her when you were teenagers, that you know what a grown woman will do when she's desperate to have a baby? Read the papers, Vega. Women walk out of hospitals all the time with newborns under their arms who don't belong to them. That maternal urge is strong, don't kid yourself.”

“Strong enough to kill?”

“That's what we need to find out.” Greco frowned at the paperwork scattered across his desk. “Wish we had somebody who knew these women and could tell us what their story was. But we're talking eight years ago now. That's like centuries in an illegal immigrant community.”

Greco was right. People would have moved away, gotten deported, changed jobs, addresses—even names. The lives of the poor are always in flux. Nowhere was that more true than in a community full of people who could never legally put down roots. But there were some constants. Vega had only to think back on his old neighborhood in the Bronx to know what at least one of those constants was.

“Go to Google,” said Vega. “Type in
Catholic Churches, Perkinsville, Iowa.
”

Greco pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and typed in the words. One church came up: Saint Theresa's. Vega copied down the telephone number.

“A lot of Guatemalans aren't Catholic, you know,” said Greco. “They're evangelical Protestants.”

“I'm gonna start with the Catholics and pray that Maria Elena was a better one than I ever was,” said Vega. “ 'Cause there's no way a good Catholic wouldn't have had her baby baptized soon after she was born. Which means somewhere in Saint Theresa's there'd be a baptismal record with Luz Maria's name on it and her date of birth. If it's a match to Olivia's, that's one more piece of rope to tie around Porter's neck.”