Chapter 41
Max Zimmerman was so deep in discussion with the two ICE agents on the steps of the synagogue that he didn’t notice Vega maneuvering past the preschoolers toward him.
“Jimmy!” Zimmerman called excitedly. “You’re a police officer. Please tell these two officers here that I’m not anti-police. I am only anti-injustice.”
Vega felt the two agents’ wary gazes. Vega’s military-short haircut and the gun on his hip gave him away as a fellow cop. But if he was Zimmerman’s friend, he wasn’t theirs.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded the white agent, a young man with thin lips and translucent blue eyes.
“Jimmy Vega. I’m a detective with the county police, working on a case in Lake Holly. I was just going to offer to take Mr. Zimmerman home.”
“I don’t need to go home,” Zimmerman insisted. “I need to beg mercy for a man who can’t beg it for himself.” Zimmerman raised a bony finger. “As a wise man once said, mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”
“I’m not interested in your Hebe quotes,” said the white agent.
“That was Abraham Lincoln.”
Embarrassment flashed on the agent’s face, then quickly turned to anger. Vega wanted to diffuse the situation. He hooked an arm under Zimmerman’s. “Mr. Zimmerman? Please let me take you home.”
“I will go—”
“Good—”
“If Adele and Rabbi Goldberg ask me to.”
“Ay, puñeta!” Vega pulled out his phone and dialed Adele.
The black agent pointed to Vega’s phone. “You have the head of La Casa on your speed dial?”
“Detective Vega is dating her,” Zimmerman said proudly.
The two agents exchanged a look like they’d tasted something rancid. Vega turned his back and tried to ignore them while he explained to Adele that he was trying to remove Zimmerman for his own good.
“I’ll be right out,” she promised. She sounded breathy and excited. “Good news—Michelle just faxed over an emergency stay.”
“She got through to Wayne Bowman?”
There was a pause. It sounded like Adele was reading the paperwork for the first time. “It’s . . . not from Bowman. It’s from Michelle.” Her voice faltered. “She can do that, right? Issue an emergency stay?”
Vega glanced over his shoulder at the agents. Their jaws were slack, their postures nonchalant but unyielding as they checked their phones. Nothing but a higher judge’s order or an emergency stay from their ultimate boss was likely to dissuade them.
“I don’t know,” Vega replied. “Either way, I think you’d better come out.”
* * *
“Michelle Lopez is in investigations, not enforcement,” The black agent, Tyler, told Adele when she thrust the faxed paperwork into his hands. “She doesn’t have the authority to set aside a judge’s order. And for that matter”—Tyler gave Adele a suspicious look—“what’s she doing interfering in the first place?”
Vega tried to explain that he and Lopez were working an investigation together. “Edgar Aviles’s testimony may be crucial to the case.”
“So?” asked Tyler. “Let him give it in detention if it’s so crucial.”
Back and forth they went. The rabbi came out and butted in. So did Zimmerman. It took three tries before Vega finally managed to coax the old man away.
“All right!” said Zimmerman. “I’m going. Please tell Edgar I tried.”
“I will,” Adele promised him.
Vega walked Zimmerman through the scattering of preschoolers still being led to parents’ cars. The mass exodus had tapered off to a handful now. Vega saw Fitzgerald at the curb, directing traffic.
“Is this the last of the kids?” Vega asked the young cop.
“There are still almost a dozen kids and two teachers inside,” Fitzgerald replied. “Some parents”—he heaved a sigh—“they leave an emergency contact number and then don’t pick it up in an emergency.”
“Where’s your partner?” asked Vega. “Where’s Ianelli and Hart?”
“Hart’s at the entrance with Ianelli,” said Fitzgerald. “I think they’re being dispatched on another call. I’m not sure where Ryan is. I think he’s getting a head count from the teachers.”
“A head count,” Vega repeated. Bale could get a head count by stopping one of the assistants on the sidewalk helping children into cars. He didn’t need to wander off. Short of an emergency requiring police response, he had no business in the synagogue right now. Not with ICE at the front door.
Something urgent and worrisome percolated through Vega’s veins. Like he’d just discovered that his wallet was missing. He walked Zimmerman over to his car, a gray Cadillac Seville that was buffed to a high gloss.
“Do you think you can drive home without me?” Vega asked.
“You’re not coming?”
“I just remembered something I need to do.”
Vega opened Zimmerman’s car door for him. The old man paused, the door between them. He reached over and gripped Vega’s arm. His dark eyes turned glassy.
“I’m alive today because an illiterate pig farmer made a split-second decision to hide me in a hay bale instead of handing me over to the Nazis.” Zimmerman’s voice, normally so commanding, sounded shaky and hoarse. “What I’m saying is, it’s not the big choices that define us. It’s the little ones.”
“I don’t know that I have any choices here,” said Vega. “Big or little.”
“Ah.” Zimmerman wagged a finger at him. “That’s where you’re wrong, Jimmy. God gave us two arms to lift and one mouth to speak. You think He did all that just so we could cuss out the Yankees’ pitching?”
Vega smiled. “I’ll try to remember that come playoff season.”
Zimmerman got into his Cadillac. Vega watched the old man slowly pull out of the parking lot. Then Vega doubled back to the synagogue. Adele and the rabbi were so deep in conversation with the ICE agents they didn’t notice Vega turn off the main sidewalk and onto a path that encircled the building. Beyond a copse of evergreens, Vega saw a fenced playground. It was empty of children. They were all inside.
No sign of Bale.
The back of the complex was much bigger than Vega realized from the front. The lower level bowed out where the preschool was located. An entire wall of glass windows afforded a perfect view inside. Vega could see a young female teacher negotiating a disputed toy between two four-year-olds while another teacher—or perhaps a teaching assistant, she looked barely out of college—poured juice into paper cups.
Vega didn’t want to startle them. He walked up to the sliding glass doors and held up his badge. The teacher negotiating the dispute walked over to the door and slid it open. She had dark curly hair that she pulled back into a ponytail and a peasant-style blouse with embroidery and tassels on it. A Hamsa medallion—the hand with the eye in the center—dangled from a gold chain around her neck.
“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” said Vega. “But have you seen any police officers enter the building?”
“I let one in,” she replied. “I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to. He said he wasn’t ICE. He just wanted to get a head count of the children and make sure the building was secure.”
Vega tried to hide his concern. He didn’t want to alarm the teachers. “Do you know where he went?”
“Upstairs, I think.” She flicked her gaze down Vega. Unlike Bale, he wasn’t wearing a uniform. “Can’t you call him on a radio or something?”
Vega didn’t have a radio. And even if he did, it would be on county frequency, not Lake Holly’s.
The teacher blocked the door. “How do I know you’re not ICE?”
“I’m with the county police—just like it says on my badge.”
She didn’t move.
“Look, ma’am,” said Vega. “Beth Shalom’s handyman may be in more danger from the uniformed patrol officer you just let in than from those two jokers on the front steps. I’m not ICE. I’m not here to arrest Aviles. I need you to step aside.”
“But the children—”
“The children will be fine,” Vega promised. “Just stick to your routines and everything will be over before you know it.”
She stepped aside and Vega slipped through the doors. He turned left, away from the classrooms and down a hallway lined with pint-size cubbies. On the tile walls above hung children’s finger paintings and the Hebrew letters of the alphabet. Vega wished he knew the layout of the synagogue better. Except for picking up Zimmerman the other night, he hadn’t been inside Beth Shalom in years. Even when he was married to Wendy, he seldom set foot in the building.
One hallway seemed to lead to more classrooms and a kitchen. Vega noted a large room beyond. It may have been the room where Joy had her bat mitzvah celebration. Vega couldn’t recall. It was all so long ago. It was empty now. Everything down here looked empty.
At the end of the hall was a stairwell. Vega plastered himself against the cool tile of the wall and listened. Bale was on duty. In full uniform. He would have had a radio clipped to his collar. It should have been squawking away with chatter from other cops on duty as well as occasional updates or requests from dispatch.
He heard nothing. Either Bale had muted it or he’d left the building already.
Vega walked up the first half flight of stairs, past a tapestry with Hebrew letters beneath an olive branch. He held his breath and tried to discern each noise around him. The chatter of little children below him and the clap of their teachers’ hands. A woman’s voice above him. Not Adele’s. It sounded like she was talking on a phone. Maybe the rabbi’s secretary.
He bounded up the second set of stairs and found himself in a hall paneled in blond wood with a glass case full of decorative menorahs and a bronze plaque attesting to the many families who’d financed the various additions and renovations of Beth Shalom. Somewhere in that long list of names were those of Dr. David and Sarah Kaplan. Vega’s former in-laws. Not that they ever really felt like family. More like neighbors who occasionally lent him their barbecue tongs and then moved away to a city he knew he’d never visit.
His whole former marriage sometimes felt like that.
Across from the stairs was a side entrance to the sanctuary. Light angled in broad brushstrokes from the skylights onto the pews. Even empty, the worship hall had a hushed reverence about it. Vega had fallen away from his own Catholic upbringing decades ago. But he still found himself moved by the power and majesty of any space devoted to faith—perhaps because he had so little himself.
And then he heard it. A voice followed by a slight echo. Vega recognized a Spanish accent in the soft consonants and singsong vowels even as he failed to discern the words. It was coming from somewhere inside the sanctuary. Not on the stage or in the pews.
Above. Forty feet above. On the opposite side of the worship hall.
Vega heard another echo as well. This second one looped beneath Aviles’s like a dark undertow, fracturing the sound waves like an unexpected sharp or flat. It changed the vibrations in the room. From melodic to discordant. From major to minor. From light to dark.
The second voice belonged to Ryan Bale.