Chapter 22
Vega’s band was playing a wedding reception at the Grand Marquis, a catering hall in Broad Plains. It was off a stretch of four-lane, around the corner from Lori Danvers’s Paws and Claws. The outside was poured concrete and painted in flamingo pink. Two gold lampposts fronted the oval driveway. The inside had all the charm of a cut-rate hotel. Low ceilings. Carpets that felt like Astroturf. No windows—probably because there was nothing worth looking at. Only the wall of mirrors and chandeliers overhead gave any indication this was a party space.
“It’s not very romantic,” Adele whispered when they were unloading Vega’s amps and guitars.
“The bride and groom were in a hurry,” Vega explained. “He’s getting shipped out with the First Infantry next month. And she’s, shall we say, a teeny, tiny bit pregnant.”
“How teeny tiny?”
“Let’s just say, if they’d left it any longer, Katie and Mike Grande would be spending their honeymoon in the delivery room.”
“Ah.” Adele grinned. “Well then, you’d better do the ‘Macarena’ early.”
“I hate that song.”
Three of the band members and the sound engineer were already inside, setting up. Danny Molina, Armado’s keyboardist and founder, was doing mic checks with Tony Furci, their sound engineer. Brandon Cruz, their bassist, and Chris Feliz, their sax player, were setting up amps and running through their riffs.
“Where’s Richie?” Vega asked Molina.
“On his way, I hope. What can I say?” Molina paused a beat. “Timing has never been his strong suit.”
Vega snorted. Every band piles grief on their drummer—most of it deserved.
Adele walked off to help Brandon Cruz and Chris Feliz unfurl amp cables and microphone wires. Vega pulled out his pedal board and began attaching the pedals to create different sound effects. He owned a total of sixteen pedals but never brought more than eight to a gig. Tonight, he’d brought his favorites—the wah-wah and the reverb and the overdrive, which created a clean, warm tone.
Molina grabbed a roll of black duct tape and began taping down Vega’s sound cables and amps. “Where the hell would we be without the invention of duct tape?”
“Unemployed,” said Vega. They could deal with a broken string or missed cue, but if somebody accidentally kicked out a power cord, their whole set was sunk.
Molina eyed the back doors, searching for Solero. “Richie will be here,” Vega assured him. “I saw him this morning at his precinct. He knows we have a gig.”
“You helping Warburton with a case?”
“No. Lake Holly,” said Vega. “But Warburton may figure into it. And Port Carroll too, come to think of it.”
“Yeah?” Molina was born and bred in Port Carroll and now walked a beat there. “What’s the case?”
Vega pulled out his phone and scrolled to the picture of the two Hispanic girls taken from Talia’s drawer. He showed it to Molina.
“You ever seen either of these girls around Port Carroll? The one on the right is Deisy Ramos-Sandoval. The picture’s old. She’s sixteen now.”
Molina pinched his meaty fingers together to magnify the girls’ faces on the screen. He was a talented keyboardist, but you wouldn’t know it from his thick fingers. He had the hands of a butcher.
“That’s Deisy all right,” said Molina. “Her mom’s a waitress at the Port Carroll Diner.” He handed Vega back his phone. “Do you know where she is?”
“I was going to ask you that,” said Vega. “Doesn’t she live in Port Carroll?”
“She ran away from her mother’s apartment a couple of weeks ago.” Molina’s eyes screwed tight in their sockets. He paled. “Please tell me you haven’t found a body.”
“No. Nothing like that,” said Vega. “The girl’s a missing link in a case of mine and I’d just like to speak to her. Her name appears on a list found in the pocket of an MS-13 gang member who was murdered in Warburton about a month ago.”
“What’s the mutt’s name?”
“Elmer ‘Cheetos’ Ortega.”
“Cheetos.” Molina nodded. “I’ve heard of him. He used to work with the Ramirez brothers. Carlos and Ramon. Small-time hoods. Mostly into burglary, car theft, and prostitution. They owned a chop shop in Port Carroll until we closed it down a few years ago.”
“What happened to them?”
“Beats the hell out of me.” Molina called over to Cruz to toss him another roll of duct tape. “The brothers went dark. They could’ve moved operations to Long Island or up to Buffalo. I’d like to think they hightailed it back to El Salvador. But if Ortega’s been murdered, you have to wonder.”
Molina fiddled with the positioning of a speaker. Vega thought it was in a good place already, but he knew that Molina, as the band’s manager, got the grief if the speakers blasted the audience. It was always a struggle to keep the music loud enough to be lively and soft enough so people could talk over it.
“Do you know if Deisy was the sort of girl to get mixed up with a guy like Cheetos?” asked Vega.
“She had a rough adjustment when she came here three years ago as an unaccompanied minor,” said Molina. “All these kids do. The crossings are brutal. So many of the girls are sexually assaulted. By the time they reunite with their families, they’re a ball of anxiety, depression, and rage.”
“So you’re saying, she fell apart.”
“For a while,” said Molina. “Hilda, her mom, came to me and I got the girl into therapy. It seemed to be doing the trick. She was going to classes. Getting good grades. She even made the high school’s varsity volleyball team. And then, a couple of weeks before she ran away, her mother said she got real quiet and secretive. She missed curfew a couple of nights. Then she lost her phone—”
“She lost her phone?” Vega knew that most young girls would sooner lose a limb than their phones.
“She wouldn’t tell her mother where she was when she lost it,” said Molina. “They had a big fight and the next morning, Deisy was gone. No note. Nothing. Hilda came to me and I put out a BOLO. You’re the first sighting I’ve had.”
“I’m not a sighting,” said Vega. “All I’ve got is that old picture and Deisy’s name on a dead mara’s list.” Vega thought about the photograph. “Do you know who the other girl was in the snapshot? It said ‘Nelly’ on the back.”
“Nelly?” Molina got a panicked look on his round, normally cheerful face. “Let me see the picture again.”
Vega pulled it up on his screen. Molina cursed under his breath.
“This is bad,” he said. “Something terrible has happened to Deisy.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Nelly was Deisy’s younger sister,” said Molina. “Deisy would never have parted with this picture you’re showing me. Not voluntarily.”
“Why?”
“Nelly Ramos drowned three years ago when the girls were crossing the Rio Grande into Texas,” said Molina. “That’s part of the reason Deisy was such a mess when she arrived. She watched her kid sister get swept away.”
* * *
They set up their equipment with a sort of grim determination after that. Like they were laying a supply line for an invasion. Molina walked Vega through the story of Deisy Ramos while they worked. His voice carried a weariness to it. They’d both heard versions of the same sad history dozens of times. Kids left behind in Central America who risked everything to be reunited with parents they hadn’t seen in so long they were strangers. Parents who’d built new lives with new spouses and children and didn’t always welcome their resentful, foreign offspring. What started out as a fairy-tale reunion seldom had a fairy-tale ending.
They were interrupted by a pounding on the back doors.
“I’ll bet that’s our fearless drummer,” quipped Molina.
“The knocking just speeded up.”
They opened the doors to see Richie Solero pushing a cart piled high with equipment. He looked like he was moving the entire contents of his apartment. Vega never got over how much time and effort it took to make a few hours of music.
“Hey, Jimmy,” Molina shouted across the cart. “What do you call a drummer who’s late to his own gig?”
“A deadbeat,” said Vega, right on cue. “Hey Danny—how do you know the drum solo’s coming up?”
“Half the audience runs to the can.”
Molina held out a knuckle and Vega rapped it. They were corny jokes that Solero had heard a thousand times before, but they usually elicited a grin from him. Or, at the very least, a middle finger. This evening, Solero didn’t even seem to hear them. His eyes, which always carried a vague sleepiness to them in the best of times, looked especially lost this evening. His face was flushed and sweaty.
“Hey, Richie—you okay?” Molina asked.
“Yeah. Sorry. Me and Kim were sort of going at it again.”
Kim was Solero’s ex-wife and the mother of his two children. Money—or the lack of it—seemed to be a constant source of conflict between them. So much so, it had spilled over into Solero’s budding romance with Jenn Fitzpatrick, the crime scene tech, and ended their affair a few months ago as well.
“Come on,” Vega said to him. “We’ll help you set up.”
Molina and Vega each grabbed a drum box while Solero began setting up his stand. From the kitchen, Vega heard a crash of dishes followed by a string of Spanish curses. The catering staff was having their own problems at the moment.
Molina pulled the kick pedal out of a soft zippered case and handed it to Solero to screw into place.
“Jimmy was just telling me about that dead mara who turned up in Warburton. Cheetos Ortega. And about that list of names you found in his pocket when he died.”
“What about it?” asked Solero.
“One of the names on that list is a runaway from Port Carroll,” said Molina. “A sixteen-year-old Salvadoran girl named Deisy Ramos. I know the mom. She’s a waitress at the Port Carroll Diner and she’s desperate to find her. If you know anything . . . ?”
“Sorry, Danny,” said Solero. “I don’t know anything more than you do.” He shot Vega a questioning look. “If anything, I know a whole lot less.”
The facility’s wedding planner—a pasty-faced man in a dark, well-worn suit, gestured to Molina that he needed to speak to him. Molina excused himself to talk to the man. Solero waited until Molina and the others were out of earshot to speak.
“You get reassigned to Warburton or something, Jimmy?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
Solero pulled a keychain from his pocket and removed a T-shaped key. His drum-tuning key.
“When I saw you this morning, you’d only just confirmed that the body at the ME’s office was Ortega’s.”
“That’s all I knew then,” said Vega. “This afternoon, I got access to ICE’s database, so I ran the names. Turns out Deisy Ramos’s name is not only on that list. Her picture’s in a wallet I found in the back of the DA’s wife’s sweater drawer. I don’t know what the connection between the two cases is. But I feel like there is one.”
Solero inserted his drum key into one of his tom’s tension rods and slowly tightened it, moving diagonally from one side of the drumhead to the other.
“So how come this is the first time I’m hearing about it? I walk in, and you’re telling Danny before you even tell me?”
“I’m telling you now,” said Vega. “I just happened to see Danny first. Deisy Ramos is from Port Carroll. His beat.”
Solero grabbed a drumstick and banged the head of his snare while he tuned it to pitch. He didn’t meet Vega’s gaze.
“Look,” said Vega. “It’s not just Deisy I found out about. Every name on that list is an immigrant with uncertain legal status. Several appear to have been the targets of some sort of scam.”
“What kind of scam?”
“I’m not sure,” said Vega. “But it looks like somebody’s going around blackmailing immigrants either by pretending to be ICE or by trading off some real connection to the agency. A mutt like Ortega wouldn’t have the know-how. But he may have been working for someone who does. That might be a good investigative angle for Warburton to pursue.”
Solero snapped his drum key back on his keychain and straightened. He met Vega’s gaze head-on. His normally sleepy eyes had a spark of something unfamiliar in them. Anger. Vega had seen that anger in Solero for his ex-wife. But never for a band member.
“Listen, Jimmy. You and me—we’re friends and all. So I’m gonna say this in the nicest way possible.”
“Okaay.”
“Don’t go into another man’s house and reprogram his TV remote.”
“Huh?”
“Cheetos’ murder is Warburton’s case. That list, those names—they’re all part of our case—”
“You’re gonna play turf battles with me? When we’ve got dead bodies on our hands? I’m not trying to steal your case. I’m trying to get answers—”
“Which Warburton will do,” said Solero. “I’m happy to pass on intel to you and Danny. I’m happy to see if we can find this runaway kid. But you are way overstepping your bounds here, partner.”
“And you’re getting into a pissing match while the building burns down.”
Molina heard their raised voices. He ran over. “Guys! Guys!” He tamped down the air. “Cool it. We got a gig to play.” The rest of the band and Adele hung back, gawking at the commotion. They never normally argued.
“Take a look at that list,” Vega sputtered, ignoring Molina. “Cesar Zuma threw himself in front of a Metro-North train this morning. Deisy Ramos ran away. Edgar Aviles is holed up in a synagogue, awaiting deportation. Things are happening fast. You want Warburton to get the credit? I’ll give you all the credit you want. But we can’t afford to let the situation get away from us.”
A swirl of voices rose up from the other side of the dining room’s double doors. The bride and groom and guests were beginning to arrive.
“Guys!” Molina hissed, holding up a meaty hand so both Solero and Vega could see. He wiggled his fingers. They looked like dancing sausages. “What do we always say?”
Solero sighed. “Armado is five fingers all joined at the hand. If the fingers don’t work, the hand doesn’t either.”
“We’re a family.” Vega extended a knuckle. Solero rapped it. Then Molina. Then Brandon Cruz and Chris Feliz. Then Tony Furci and Adele. The music was what mattered. It was all that mattered.
“Now”—Molina clapped his hands together—“let’s rock and roll.”