A Blossom of Bright Light (2 page)

I
t was the last good night's sleep Jimmy Vega would have for a long time. At seven the next morning, his cell phone rang by Adele's bedside. Both he and Adele sat up, certain they'd overslept. God forbid Sophia should come home and find them in bed together. Vega and Adele were careful to keep their relationship strictly platonic when the child was around.

The caller ID was blocked, and for Vega at least, that usually meant it was coming from a cop's cell. Vega tried to wring the hoarseness out of his voice before he answered.

“Vega? Captain Waring.”

His boss. Commander of the county police department's detective division. Vega wasn't due at work until four p.m. He was about to protest that he'd changed shifts with Teddy Dolan, but Waring was ex-Navy SEAL. Police work to him was like the military, a 24/7 calling. Plus, you never contradicted a superior officer.

“How far are you from Lake Holly at the moment, Vega?”

“Umm,” Vega grinned. “Pretty close by.” He stroked a hand down Adele's thigh and avoided her quizzical gaze. His own house was forty-five minutes north of Lake Holly, a little two-bedroom lakeside cabin he was still in the process of winterizing nearly six years after his divorce. He couldn't afford to live anywhere in the county on a cop's salary. He was on the promotional list for sergeant, but the list moved slowly and the pay raise wasn't huge.

“We've got a situation near the Lake Holly turnoff to the parkway. The local PD is there now, but it falls under our jurisdiction. I want you to take the lead if you can get there within the next half hour.”

There would be no sweet rolls from the bakery this morning, no strawberries with whipped cream. Vega tried to swallow back his disappointment. He was looking forward to another couple of hours with Adele. The sheets felt so buttery, her flesh so cuddly. He loved the way her lemon-yellow walls caught the early morning sun and warmed it. He loved the two paintings hanging behind her mission-style bed, one of women washing clothes in a mountain stream, the other of people picking crops on a bright green terraced hillside—both gifts from clients who mythologized their birthplaces even as they ran from them.

He could lie to Waring and say he was tied up, but there was no denying that the familiar adrenaline rush was kicking in. Somebody was dead, and he was enough of a homicide detective to want to know why. Although he'd backed into being a cop when his girlfriend—later wife, later
ex
-wife—got pregnant and he couldn't support a baby as a rock-band guitarist, the job had grown on him. Or perhaps more accurately, he'd grown into the job.

He'd worked at an insurance agency after college but couldn't stomach being cooped up all day behind mountains of meaningless forms and spreadsheets. He liked the pureness of police work, the way it divided the world into right and wrong. True, he saw people at their worst. And, no doubt, it had colored his view of human nature. But he still believed in the essential goodness of what he was doing. He was there to make things better. If he'd wanted predictability, he should have stayed in insurance. Just the thought of it made him want to put a bullet through his brain.

“I can be there in ten minutes, Captain.” Vega felt Adele's body shift to the other side of the bed. There was a coolness to the sheets where a moment before they had felt so warm and welcoming. He had a sense she would see a double standard in his willingness to work this morning when he'd given her so much grief about doing the same thing last night. Already, he was marshaling an argument in his head.
This is a matter of life and death—not babysitting a social club and listening to some drunk yammer on about his hallucinations.

Wait. Scratch that.
If he uttered even one word of what he was thinking, Adele would have his head. No matter how he phrased it, the subtext would be the same:
My job is more important than yours.
And yeah—he felt that. Deep down, if he was honest, he did. But if he'd learned one thing in thirteen years of marriage to Wendy, it was this: the more logic you bring to an argument, the more likely you are to spend the night on the couch.

Vega and Adele's clash of careers had been a sore point in their relationship from the moment they started dating five months ago. He was a police officer who believed in upholding the law whether he agreed with it or not. She worked primarily with undocumented immigrants who were lawbreakers by their mere presence in the country. And then there were the myriad of smaller differences between them. He worked shifts, often stripping down to a T-shirt and jeans as soon as they were over. She worked all the time, moving from the day-to-day of running a nonprofit to the cocktail-hour dinner jacket schmoozing that got it funded. He tried hard not to take his work home with him. She filled their time together with stories of her clients and their troubles. He hated politics—left or right, it didn't matter. She lived for it.

Some weeks, the only way he could see her was to suffer through some benefit dinner full of earnest, gray-haired patrons who asked what Latin American country he was from (
Does the Bronx qualify?
) and activists who considered a Puerto Rican cop at best a paperweight in a tie and at worst a sellout to his people. He and Adele were supposed to attend a fund-raiser for county supervisor Steve Schulman this coming Saturday night. Schulman was expected to win a seat in the U.S. Senate next month by a wide margin over his Republican opponent. Adele was a big supporter. She couldn't wait. Vega was dreading the event—the dull pleasantries, the handshakes that felt more like hand-offs, the obsession with inside-the-Beltway politics that wouldn't make one whit of difference in real people's lives. Adele had been nagging Vega for at least a month to secure a rental tux for the event. He'd yet to do it.

He tried to push these thoughts from his head and concentrate on the case at hand. “Can you give me an idea what I'm walking into?” he asked Waring.

“A couple of day laborers went to relieve themselves in the woods behind La Casa,” said Waring. “They found a dead newborn in a pile of leaves, umbilical cord still attached.”

“A—
baby?
In the woods behind La Casa?” The words came out soft as a prayer. All the sunlight seemed to drain from the room. Vega felt the mattress shift as Adele leaned in closer. A prickly static filled the air. They both sensed that if they touched one another, the shock might kill them.

“A female,” Waring added. “The first officers on the scene said she appeared to be full-term. Possibly Hispanic. She wasn't wearing any clothes or blankets. Only a disposable diaper.”

“Jesus,” said Vega softly, echoing Adele's conversation last night.

“Keep it together, Detective, all right?”

“Yessir. I didn't mean—”
No. Not now. Not until he knew more.
Already his insides were curdling like he'd drunk too much coffee on an empty stomach. This had to be what Zambo claimed he saw last night. A baby. In the arms of the mother who likely abandoned her. There had been a window of opportunity to save this little life perhaps—and Vega had talked Adele out of it. He'd failed that child. He'd failed himself. He'd failed Adele.

Vega shot a glance at Adele now. She turned away from him and got out of bed. She was wearing one of his old denim shirts folded across her. The sleeves came past her fingernails. She shivered as she looked out the window at the sugarcoating of frost glistening on the grass and the swirl of dead leaves dancing across the driveway. Temperatures had dipped into the freezing range last night. The wind had picked up. The promise of winter was already on the horizon.

“Did the local PD find any trauma to the body?” Vega was hoping for something to convince himself he wasn't to blame.

“Not that I'm aware of,” said Waring. “Are you going or not?”

“Uh, yessir. I'm headed over right away.” Vega disconnected the call.

“I'm going with you,” said Adele.

“Oh no you're not.”

Adele yanked a pair of pants out of a drawer and slammed the drawer shut with more force than she needed to. “A dead baby was found behind La Casa.
My
building!”

Vega grabbed his jeans off the back of her bedroom chair, stuffed his legs into them, and zipped them up.

“This is a potential homicide investigation, Adele. You can't go anywhere near that crime scene.”

“Well, it wouldn't
be
a homicide investigation if you hadn't—if I hadn't—”

Vega walked over to her and held her firmly by her shoulders. She tried to fight him off, slapping at his bare chest. He absorbed the blows without letting go.

“Nena, look at me.” She wouldn't. She was ashamed of him. What was he thinking last night, carrying on like some hormone-addled teenager? They'd had the
whole
night. An hour or two wasn't going to make any difference.

“Zambo's a crazy drunk who's always telling stories. Did you rush out to that Subway store when he heard the Virgin Mary behind the Slurpee machine?”

“This is different, and you know it, Jimmy. I had a duty to check on this one, and I let you talk me out of it. I let that baby die.”

Vega released her and grabbed the rest of his clothes he'd slung carelessly across her bedroom chair last night in a rush of passion. He yanked his undershirt over his head and mismatched the buttons on his shirt three times before he got them right. He looked like the mess he felt, but it would have to do. “
You
didn't let her die.
I
didn't let her die. Her
mother
let her die.”

“Is that how you rationalize things? Is that how you sleep at night? I never should have trusted you!”

The words sliced right through him. He stopped buttoning his shirt and sank down on the unmade bed. She sat down beside him. He felt the heat of her hand hover over his back. Then it retreated. It was the retreat that hurt more than anything, that sense that she was already weighing her actions, weighing him.

He pushed himself off the bed. “I've got to go.” He shoved his wallet, keys, and Swiss Army knife in his jeans, then tucked his gun in his duty holster and belted it around his waist.

“Go, then,” she said. It sounded like a curse.

Chapter 3

T
he Lake Holly police had already cordoned off the area behind La Casa by the time Jimmy Vega arrived. Save for one patrol car and a single unmarked, there was nothing on the street. All the businesses in this industrial neighborhood were closed on Sundays, all except for Adele's community center, which didn't open until the churches let out after noon. So the normal bustle was muted. The propane company's red and white trucks sat idle. The gate around the auto body shop was locked up tight, the smashed cars on the other side of the razor wire huddled like defendants awaiting bail.

Vega didn't want to waste time fetching a county police car, so he drove up in his own black Ford pickup and parked it behind the unmarked. He always kept a gym bag full of investigation essentials in his backseat. He started rummaging through the bag now for white coveralls, booties, a notebook, and a pen. The officer standing at the entrance to the cordoned-off area started walking over, all swagger and authority. Whatever the police said to the contrary, they all profiled. Vega never kidded himself into thinking that he was anything to them out of uniform but a toffee-skinned Puerto Rican with a gun.

The cop must have recognized Vega halfway over though, because his step relaxed.

“Hey, Detective.” His breath came out soft and cottony in the cold air. “You catching?”

“Affirmative,” Vega grunted as he pulled out a package of white coveralls to zip over his clothes. He wished he could remember the officer's name without squinting at his nametag. Something Irish.
Murphy? McNulty?
He had skin like a radish—white except for the ears, which were bright red from the cold.

Vega did a quick inventory of what he needed to bring with him: radio, iPhone, disposable gloves, notebook. “Who's doing the initial in your department?”

“Detective Greco. He's up there now. You've worked with him before, right?”

On the hillside, Vega spotted a set of white coveralls through the canopy of orange and gold trees. From this distance, Greco looked like a Macy's Thanksgiving parade float. Perhaps more than one.

“Yeah. Not sure if that's a blessing or a curse.”

“Funny. He said the same about you.”

Vega picked his way up the gentle slope, careful to disturb as little as possible. Leaves crunched like potato chips underfoot. A crow cawed overhead. In an hour or less, the hillside would be overrun by an army of crime-scene techs and personnel from the medical examiner's office. But right now, the ground felt as pure and unblemished as the little life it once held.

Vega found Louis Greco standing very still in a patch of yellow maple leaves so iridescent they looked as if they carried their own light source. With his wine cask of a body and fringe of graying hair, he brought to mind a medieval monk. Vega had run into the man periodically since they'd last worked together. Their relationship was built on slinging jibes at one another and their respective departments. But none of that had any place here. This death was different, the stain so much greater. No one knew that more than Vega.

Greco tucked a cross inside his pocket. His voice was phlegm-choked when he spoke.

“Just saying a little prayer for her.”

Vega set his gym bag down on the root of a maple tree. He wished he felt the power and presence of God the way people like Greco did—the way his mother had. When Vega looked around, he felt only a void stripped of weight and meaning. What meaning could there be in bringing a child into the world only to take her out of it right away? And what if he were to blame for it all? Maybe he wasn't enough of a Catholic to feel God, but he was still enough of one to feel guilt.

“Our guys, they've dubbed her Baby Mercy,” said Greco. “They figured she deserves some mercy, even if it's only in death.”

Vega slipped on a pair of light blue nonlatex gloves and approached the body. She was lying on her back, her lavender-tinged umbilical cord curled to one side of her. Vega had forgotten how small newborns were. It had been a long time since he'd held one. She barely compacted the leaves beneath her. She wouldn't have extended from his fingertips to his elbow.

She was full-term, though. And perfect. She had a beautiful, melon-shaped head with a fine dusting of black hair. There were dimples on her chubby limbs. She hadn't been dead long. Her skin still had a milky tea color, and her eyes caught and held the light in their glassy, dark blue irises.

Vega squatted beside her. He saw no lividity marks—those purplish stains on skin when the heart stops pumping and the blood begins to settle. If her blood had begun to pool at all, it was pooling beneath her, which meant she had died in this position—on her back, faceup, staring in her unfocused newborn way at the trees that towered over her, regally indifferent.

“Two day laborers found her at six thirty this morning,” said Greco.

“In the open? Like this?” She was naked except for a baggy disposable diaper that looked huge and tentlike on her tiny bottom. On the front of the diaper was an imprint of Winnie the Pooh chasing a butterfly. Vega felt the urge to pick her up and warm her the way he hadn't last night.

“She apparently had a few leaves covering her, but Mc-Caffrey, the first-due officer, said the men saw her feet poking out and pushed everything to one side. They thought she was still alive.” Greco gestured to some broken branches and leaves on the far side of the body. “Not much of a covering, as you can see. Whoever left her here did so in a hurry.”

Vega didn't touch her. His department's crime-scene techs hated when detectives messed with a “virgin” scene. But even without touching her, Vega could see that her color was good and rigor mortis hadn't yet set in. He was no medical examiner, but if he had to guess, he'd say she'd been dead less than four hours. Which meant she'd died sometime after three thirty a.m., at least seven and a half hours
after
Adele got that call from Rafael. Vega felt like he'd swallowed a roll of pennies. There was a coppery taste at the back of his mouth, a foreign weight pressing on his gut.

“Hey, Vega—you okay, man?” Greco stepped closer and put a meaty paw on his shoulder. “Maybe you wanna see if somebody else can take this one?”

“No.” Vega took a deep breath and pushed himself to his feet. He walked over to his gym bag and pulled out his iPhone. The crime-scene techs would take hundreds of pictures from every angle, but in a case like this, with so little obvious evidence, he liked a few shots of his own.

“Make sure you get some pictures of the bruises on her face.” Greco bent over and pointed out one on each side of her skull and another beneath her nose. The shadow of his hand was big enough to eclipse her entire body. “These look like broken capillaries to me. Like somebody put a hand over her face to smother her. A small hand, I'd wager, judging from where the bruises are.”

Vega took a close-up shot. Greco didn't have to state what they both knew from experience: In these sorts of cases, the killer is almost always the mother.

“I'm thinking she was smothered and dumped as quickly as possible sometime before dawn,” said Greco. “Probably not long before those day laborers showed up.”

A shaft of morning light angled through the trees. It lit up the mist on the fallen leaves and made them sparkle like they'd been dipped in honey. A spiderweb, pearled with dew and cocooned insects, dangled between two fallen trunks, brocaded in a rich emerald moss. Death was all around him. Some of it beautiful. Some of it unbearable. Vega took a deep breath. He had to tell. He just had to.

“What if she didn't die right away? What if it took a while?”

“You mean, like, she survived the smothering?” Greco shrugged. “No way to tell until the ME takes a look at her. It's possible, I guess.”

A sudden gust of wind rained down a shower of fresh leaves from sixty-foot-tall maples and oaks that had probably been on this earth as long as they had, perhaps longer. It made Vega feel small and insignificant. He closed his eyes and stood very still like a young child convinced that if he just confessed his sins, they might all disappear.

“Around eight last night,” he began, “Adele got a call from Rafael Lozano, the evening manager at La Casa. Zambo came in, claiming he'd just seen the Virgin Mary in the woods with the baby Jesus in her arms.”

“Zambo claimed he saw a woman and baby in these woods last night.”

“You think Zambo saw
this
baby?”

“I don't want to think so,” said Vega. “But yeah, it's possible. According to Adele, Zambo called the woman the Lady of Sorrows—”

“That's the name of the big Catholic church in town—”

“I know. It's also one of the names we called the Virgin Mary when I was an altar boy. We called her Lady of the Seven Sorrows and Mother of Sorrows too.” Vega couldn't believe how much of that rigmarole came back to him, whether he wanted it to or not. Only the words and rituals, though. Never the faith. He could have used a little faith right now.

“Did Adele check out Zambo's story?”

“No. I told her not to. I thought it was bullshit.”

“She called you about it?”

“She didn't have to call.” Vega held his gaze.

Greco's jaw set to one side. “Uh-huh. Right.” He'd been a detective long enough to recognize a confession when he heard one. “So you're figuring this baby died so you could get laid.”

“The thought's crossed my mind.”

Greco let out a slow breath of air, resigned as always to the human condition. “Didn't think you two would last this long.”

Vega didn't respond.

“Are you looking for absolution, Vega? Because you don't need it here. It's like they say: hindsight's twenty-twenty. How could you have known?”

“I guess.”

“I mean, it's not like Adele
knew
Zambo was reporting on something real for a change.”

Vega turned away. He didn't want to feed the lie. To outside eyes, it might look like an honest mistake. Only Vega knew how hard Adele had pleaded with him to check out Zambo's story. And what did he do? He brushed her aside. He treated her concerns like one more petty annoyance. Everything she cared about was unimportant and insignificant to him. That was his real sin. And he couldn't take it back. “I'm sorry” just didn't cut it here.

“So at this point our chief witness,” said Greco, “whom we can't yet rule out as a suspect, is a homeless, delusional drunk who may or may not have seen or done something that would impact this investigation.”

“He should be easy to find, at least. He's always around.”

“Except when he isn't. He likes to disappear every now and then. I'll call it in to my guys and see if they can track him down.” Greco pulled out his radio and paused. “Any other disclosures you care to share before we start working together again?”

“I'm not holding anything back.”

“Sounds like you never do.” Greco raised an eyebrow. “Might be a strategy to consider on the home front sometime.”

Greco radioed his patrol officers. Then he and Vega split up and scoured the area, searching for footprints, discarded chewing gum wrappers—anything that would give them a clue as to who dumped this baby and why. They found beer cans—lots of beer cans, and cheap plastic bottles of vodka, a favorite of the hard-core drunks in the area. Vega and Greco didn't really believe the alcohol containers had anything to do with the person who dumped the baby here. But they were hoping against hope that perhaps Zambo wasn't the only witness in these woods last night. Two drunks were better than one—at least in this case—if only to compare stories.

The two men worked silently, taking notes of things they wanted the crime-scene techs to bag and remove. Vega made a sketch for himself of where the body was found in relation to the community center. Through the trees, he could see the parking lot at the back of the center. At the far end of the lot was a Dumpster.

“We know the baby was probably abandoned before it got light out, right?” asked Vega.

Greco nodded. “At this stage anyway.”

“You're looking to get rid of a baby quickly. Why walk all the way into the woods? Why not just throw the body in the Dumpster?”

“Too great a chance of being spotted at the community center,” said Greco. “Remember, if you're right about Zambo, the baby was placed out here alive before eight last night. La Casa was still open.”

“But if the killer walked into the woods via the community center, they had to walk past La Casa anyway. Not to mention that Dumpster.”

“Even a mom who wanted to get rid of her baby might feel a twinge of guilt throwing her in a Dumpster.”

“Maybe,” said Vega. “Then again, maybe she came from another direction.” He scanned the hillside behind them. There was a vague path through the trees. In summer, it would be completely overgrown with nettles, porcelain berry vines, and barberry bushes. But this time of year, most of the underbrush had already died off, leaving just a few skeletal branches of red berries and thorns.

“The parkway's up this way, right?”

Greco nodded. “You think she parked on the side of the road and walked the baby into the woods from there?”

“It's worth checking out.”

They trudged up the hill past clusters of bright red viburnum bushes and feathery groupings of hemlocks. Acorns rolled beneath their shoes, and chunks of rotting bark littered the path like fallen plaster. Brambles caught on their coveralls and scratched angry white lines across the skin on Vega's wrists. He'd had a deep coffee tan all summer. It was fading now.