The Fragile Edge

Book 6: Jimmy Vega Mystery

by Suzanne Chazin

Genres: Hispanic & Latino; Police Procedurals; Thrillers

Synopsis

A sniper attack propels Latino cop Jimmy Vega on a twisting hunt for a predator who stalks the unforgiving landscape of immigrant America. Probing beyond the hardships of the journey north, Suzanne Chazin’s taut and timely novel explores the perils that await the hopeful once they reach their destination—and the price they must pay to survive . . . 
 
Jimmy Vega straddles two worlds – the hardscrabble Bronx where he grew up as the child of a Puerto Rican single mother, and the upscale, mostly white, suburban county where he now serves as a police detective. Yet despite his sense of never belonging, he’s a good and decent cop—even if the multi-million-dollar civil suit he’s facing says otherwise. 
 
His own troubles take a back seat when Vega learns that a court officer has just been shot and killed while transporting a controversial judge across the courthouse lot. Vega quickly surmises that the judge was the real target. She’s earned the ire of alt-right hate groups for going soft on undocumented defendants accused of petty crimes. The sole witness to the sniper’s identity is a Guatemalan girl traveling by bus from the border. And now, she’s vanished—melted into a community fearful of the police. Her days are numbered if Vega can’t get to her before the killer does.
 
But as Vega and his girlfriend, Adele Figueroa, head of the local outreach center, probe deeper into the shadowy farm community where immigrants toil in horrifying conditions, they tap into a chilling discovery. One that offers Vega a stark choice: keep quiet and be lauded as a hero, knowing he let the real villain go. Or risk everything for an ugly truth no one wants him to find . . .

 
 

Release date: August 31, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

“Will the defendant please take the stand.”

Defendant. In nineteen years as a police officer, Jimmy Vega never expected that term would apply to him.

He rose from the safety of his lawyers’ table and walked to the witness stand. He could feel the jury’s eyes on him as the court clerk lifted her bifocals from a chain around her neck, then produced a well-worn Bible and swore him in. Juror number two, a balding white man in a New York Jets football jersey, wiped a handkerchief across his sweaty pate and yawned. Juror number three, a Black woman with long, beaded braids, folded her arms tightly across her chest and eyeballed Vega like he’d just ticketed her for jaywalking.

“Detective Vega,” the plaintiff’s attorney, Bernard Carver, began in his TV doctor’s voice. “You’ve been a homicide investigator with the county police for three years now. Is that correct?”

“Yessir.” Vega resisted the urge to loosen his blue polyester tie or remove his JC Penney suit jacket even though the air was dense and humid. The courthouse was old. Its high ceilings and ancient air ducts did little to quell the heat of such an oppressive August day. The hot breath of so many sweaty bodies didn’t help. In the gallery, Vega saw reporters he recognized from the local news outlets, along with representatives from the police union and members of various anti-police groups united in their singular hatred of him.

“Before your stint in homicide, where were you?”

“I was a detective in the narcotics division for five years,” said Vega. “And a patrol officer for eleven years before that.”

“What was your primary assignment in the narcotics division?”

“I worked undercover, infiltrating drug rings and gang operations.”

“I see.” Carver nodded like this was news to him, even though, as opposing counsel, he’d likely spent the last two months combing through every detail of Vega’s life, from his statements after the shooting to who was in the courtroom supporting him this morning.

Joy. Adele.

Vega slid a sideways glance at two faces seated directly behind the defense table. His nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy, and his girlfriend, Adele Figueroa. Vega hoped Carver wouldn’t find a way to drag them into this case. Especially Adele. Here she was, director of one of the most influential immigrant advocacy organizations in New York State, dating a cop who’d shot and killed an unarmed immigrant. True, the man had been a suspect in a home invasion at the time of the shooting eight months ago. Vega was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing. But in the court of public opinion, the taint never really left him. And now this civil trial was stirring things up all over again.

“During your time undercover,” Bernard Carver continued, “did you ever step out of your role to make arrests or serve search warrants?”

“Occasionally,” said Vega. “Usually, my superiors didn’t want me to blow my cover.”

“But it happened?”

“Yes.”

“Did you just show up and”—Carver made a tumbling motion with his left hand—“bust down someone’s door?”

“I never just busted down someone’s door.”

At the defense table, Vega’s attorney, Isadora Jenkins, made a subtle patting motion away from the jury’s view. Vega got the drift. He was losing his temper. That was a ten-million-dollar mistake he couldn’t afford.

Vega cleared his throat and clarified. “There were rules. Procedures.”

“Can you educate the jury a little about such . . . procedures?” Carver made the word sound like code for something illegal. Vega forced himself not to rise to the bait. Be honest. Be humble. Be sincere. Those were the instructions Isadora Jenkins and the county’s attorney, Henry Zaroff, had given Vega this morning before court. Among many others. Don’t wear sunglasses. Juries hate cops in shades. Dress neatly but not expensively. Shine your shoes. Stay off your phone. Make eye contact with the jury.

Vega tried the last piece of advice now. There were six jurors—not twelve, like in a criminal case. This was a civil suit. It was all about money. How much the county could be squeezed into paying in recompense for the man’s death. The more they paid, the less of a future Vega could expect in the department. No one came out and said that, of course. But every cop knew it.

“In the cases where I was involved in an arrest or search,” Vega explained, “I would notify my sergeant, who would dispatch a patrol to assist.”

“A patrol?” Carver leaned a hand on the witness stand, the sort of subtle invasion of space Vega himself used on suspects. The light caught the soft sheen of silk in Carver’s gray suit. Vega noticed, too, that the man’s nails were buffed. He probably had a personal stylist. One for him and one for the dead man’s widow, a full-figured Latina in her late thirties with dark eyes that watered on cue. Lucinda Ponce. In all the months Vega had gone over the case in excruciating detail, not once had anyone mentioned Ponce having a widow back in Honduras.

“When you say that your sergeant dispatched a patrol to assist,” Carver continued, “do you mean uniformed officers?”

“That’s correct.”

“Why uniformed officers?”

“So the suspect understood that we were the police.”

“In other words, Detective Vega, you had concerns that the people you were trying to arrest might not realize you were a real police officer.”

“Objection!” Isadora Jenkins rose from her chair. She was a tiny, wizened Black woman with close-cropped white hair and orthopedic loafers, so standing didn’t offer much height advantage, but her voice more than made up for it. She had the vocal range and depth of a Pentecostal minister. “Mr. Carver is asking Detective Vega to speculate.”

“Sustained,” said Judge Edgerton.

Carver offered a slight bow. “Your Honor, I’ll rephrase the question. Detective Vega, isn’t it standard operating procedure for plainclothes officers to request uniformed officers to assist in an arrest?”

“Yes.”

“Yet, on the night of December fourth of last year, you violated your own department’s procedures—”

“I didn’t violate—”

“You just said it’s standard operating procedure to request uniformed backup. Yet you didn’t do that when you chased Mr. Ponce into those woods.”

“I didn’t have time.”

“You . . . didn’t . . . have . . . time.”

Carver let the words hang in the air for an uncomfortably long moment. Vega could hear the rumble of air-conditioning through the antiquated ducts and the shifting of jury members in their seats.

“Things happened in a matter of seconds,” Vega explained. He wished he could ask the jury to stand in his shoes for a moment. To contemplate a job where every routine encounter had the potential to be an officer’s last. A traffic stop. A domestic dispute. Teenagers fighting in a park. He was twenty-four years old when he came on this job and one of his very first call outs was for a triple homicide with a fourth victim—a six-year-old girl—clinging to life. He saved her—and many others since then. But every choice boiled down to seconds. Not hours or minutes.

Seconds.

“So, you made a split-second decision—the wrong one, it turned out,” said Carver. “And yet, you’ve been allowed to return to the homicide unit, a very prestigious assignment in your department.”

“I was cleared of all criminal charges and therefore entitled to resume my former duties, as is standard procedure after any officer-involved shooting.”

“And now, you’re being rewarded.”

“Rewarded?”

“Promoted,” said Carver. “To sergeant. The official swearing in will be sometime next month, if I’m not mistaken. September twenty-first. At the county center.”

Vega’s breath caught in his chest. Bernard Carver knew about the promotion. Even before Vega did. Well, officially, anyway. Last Friday afternoon, Sergeant John Simonelli—Forty-year John—turned in his retirement papers, a surprise in itself since Simonelli’s nickname was RIP, short for Retired-in-Place. He’d stopped working years ago. He just came in for the free coffee.

With Simonelli gone, there was suddenly an opening. Vega’s name was next on the promotion list. Every wannabe sergeant knew that list by heart. This morning, right before court, Vega’s cell phone began dinging with texts from fellow officers. Texts Vega couldn’t answer because Isadora Jenkins and the county’s attorney, Henry Zaroff, wouldn’t let him check his phone.

“A sergeant’s promotion is not a reward,” Vega explained. “It’s based on a civil service exam I took more than a year and a half ago—”

“Your Honor,” Isadora Jenkins cut him off. “Mr. Carver’s statement is factually inaccurate. The department is in no way rewarding Detective Vega. If my colleague and I could approach the bench with Mr. Carver to explain.”

“Very well.” Edgerton tugged at his black robes. “Let’s get on with it.” The heat was making him irritable. It was making everyone in the courtroom irritable.

The court clerk produced a small step stool and helped Jenkins onto it. Carver and Zaroff flanked her on either side. Her voice was a soothing murmur, soft enough to remain unintelligible to the jury. But Vega, on the witness stand, could hear every word.

“Mr. Zaroff spoke to Detective Vega’s supervisor this morning,” said Jenkins. “The department is promoting another officer instead. A man named Drew Banks.”

Vega felt like he’d just been tossed out a ten-story window. Drew Banks was the next officer on the sergeant’s list below Vega. What were all the texts on his phone about, if not to tell him he was getting promoted?

Unless . . .

Unless it was to tell him that he’d been passed over.

“Given this new information,” said Edgerton, “I will rule with the defense—”

Two court officers burst through the rear doors. All heads in the packed courtroom turned.

“Folks, we need everyone to exit the building right away,” said one of the men. “Officers in the hallway will direct you to the emergency stairs.”

Edgerton banged his gavel and adjourned court. Vega stepped down from the stand and hustled over to Adele and Joy.

“What’s going on?” asked Joy.

“Someone probably called in a bomb threat.” Vega put a reassuring hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “These things are almost always false alarms.”

Vega felt less sure of his words as they followed the crowd into the hallway. There was a coiled, nervous energy to the cops and court officers that didn’t look routine as they directed civilians toward the exit stairs. One Broad Plains cop turned away from the crowd and talked excitedly into his radio. Two court officers hugged each other. A civilian with a court employee lanyard around her neck passed by in tears.

“I’m so sorry about the promotion, Jimmy,” said Adele.

“Yeah. Me too.” The pain was theoretical at this point. It would hurt more later, when the shock wore off. Right now, his mind was elsewhere. He kissed Adele on the cheek. “Get Joy out of here. I’ll catch you later.”

“You’re not coming with us?”

“I want to find out what’s going on. Last I checked, I’m still a county detective. For now, anyway.”

It wasn’t a bomb threat. It was something much worse. “Somebody shot a court officer in the security lot,” one of the local cops told Vega.

“Who?”

“Darryl Williams.” Vega knew a lot of the court officers, but not Williams. “Word is a judge was hit too.”

“Which judge?”

“Julia Spruce.”

“Is the suspect in custody?”

“Don’t think so,” said the officer. “It’s crazy outside. Everybody’s running around.”

Vega took the staircase one flight down to the security lot. A blast of humid air assaulted him as he pushed open the door. The midday sun cut into his vision like the straight edge of a razor. He had no gun. No Kevlar vest. Not even a pair of sunglasses. He lacked all the normal things he’d carry as a cop because his lawyer had warned him not to bring them to court.

But that wasn’t what bothered him. It was the crowd. The disorder. Courthouse employees were wandering the fenced-in lot, talking on their cell phones or crying and hugging each other. Court officers were traipsing in and out of the building, touching doors and vehicles with their bare, sweaty hands. Nobody was taking charge.

Vega cupped a hand over his brow and stepped closer to the tight circle of bodies surrounding a white golf cart with blood trailing down the front of it. Judge Julia Spruce was sprawled in the backseat. She’d sloughed off her judicial robes, revealing capri pants and a T-shirt beneath, all of it spattered in blood. Her black hair was raked back from her pale white face as she wadded up her robe and held it to her left ear. The robe had the wet, oily, maroon color of soaked blood. A little man in gold-rimmed glasses sat next to her, fanning her with a stack of papers. Her court clerk, Albert Pearsall. He’d been a clerk since Vega was a rookie in uniform. His gray hair was tousled, though he otherwise looked unharmed. His lips were open in horror, his mustache framing them like two parentheses.

On the ground in front of the golf cart lay Darryl Williams. His dark blue uniform shirt was soaked with blood. His face had turned the color of cigarette ash. His lips were nearly white. Another court officer knelt beside him, leaning hard on his chest, trying to stop the blood spurting from a spot below his collarbone. A squeal of sirens in the distance punctuated his efforts.

Vega scanned the perimeter. The fence was eight feet high, slatted in solid metal, rimmed in razor wire—and locked. No way could a shooter have done this sort of damage on the ground and gotten away. The surrounding buildings—a parking garage, a row of delis and fast-food joints—were all one story. Which meant the assailant hadn’t aimed from close by, either. This was a sniper attack, accomplished at a distance, with a scope and a high-powered rifle.

If the shooter was still in position, they were all fish in a barrel.

He walked over to a court officer he recognized. Soft, fleshy chin. Chest and arms like a bouncer—useful for keeping defendants in their place. He was a head taller than Vega. Vega didn’t remember his name until he read it off his name tag: McAllister.

“Hey there, McAllister. Jimmy Vega. County homicide. You’ve got too many people here. Can you round up a couple of your guys and move them out of the lot?”

McAllister didn’t budge. Maybe it was the cheap suit that made Vega look like a defendant. “Our priority is Darryl . . . and the judge.”

“You’re gonna have a lot more priorities if the shooter’s still in position.” Vega gestured to the fence. “You’ve got a potential active sniper out there. He could be reloading as we speak.”

McAllister called over to two court officers by the golf cart.

“Gary, Cesar—get everyone out of here who isn’t helping Darryl and the judge.” He turned back to Vega. “That means you too, Vega.”

“I’m leaving. Just one question.”

“What?”

Vega pointed to a corner of the courthouse’s white stucco facade. Above a surveillance camera sat an electronic receiver that Vega recognized as a ShotSpotter—a device designed to isolate the location of gunfire. “Where’s the feed for that go?”

The surveillance room was in the basement of the courthouse. It was the size of a projectionist’s booth. Banks of video monitors lined the wall above a desk littered with empty coffee cups and vending machine wrappers. A county dispatch radio crackled with codes and commands. More cops were arriving on scene. The FBI was on its way.

“Don’t know what you expect to see,” the court officer on duty grunted. He spoke from the side of his mouth, his eyes never leaving the computer screen on his desk. “The ShotSpotter’s wrong. Been wrong before. They spend a fortune on this high-tech crap and it ain’t worth a damn.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“It picked up a single shot ninety degrees due west. There’s no vantage point in that direction, plus two people were shot.”

“The bullet could have ricocheted after hitting Williams. You have video, right?”

The officer swiveled his chair to face Vega. He had lizard eyes and a paunch barely concealed beneath his Kevlar vest. “I have video for the FBI.”

“Pretend I’m the FBI.”

“Pretend I give a rat’s ass who you are.”

Vega pulled a pen and a small notepad out of his jacket. A detective’s habit. He always carried it. He squinted pointedly at the man’s name tag. “P. Daley,” he said slowly, scribbling down the name. “I assume there’s only one P. Daley in the courthouse?”

“Why?”

“So that when my superiors at the county police ask why I couldn’t see the video, I can give them a name.”

Daley exhaled slowly, like he was dealing with an incompetent. Vega suspected he was the sort of cop who referred to officers with college degrees as “professor” and everyone who came on the job after him as “kid.” He swiveled back to the screen and brought up the video.

Vega watched a small white golf cart putter into the frame, traveling north from the records building to the courthouse. At the wheel sat a tall, athletic-looking Black man who appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties. Court Officer Darryl Williams. His shaved head glistened with sweat. Behind him sat two figures: Judge Julia Spruce, a white woman in her fifties with long black wavy locks, save for one very prominent strip of white hair down her left side. Vega thought it made her look like a skunk. Next to her, on the inside seat of the cart, sat her clerk, Albert Pearsall. With his neatly trimmed gray mustache and gold-rimmed glasses, he looked like a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt.

Darryl Williams stopped the cart near the rear entrance door to the courthouse and jumped out of the vehicle with an easy stride that suggested to Vega that Williams liked his job. He was probably the sort of court officer who chatted with all the judges and clerks. Maybe he was chatting to them now. The judge appeared to be leaning forward slightly, as if in conversation with him, though it was hard to tell from the security footage. Williams turned to the backseat and bent forward, perhaps to help the judge out of the cart. Then he reared back and clutched a hand to his upper right chest, his face stretched tight with shock and disbelief.

“The shot clearly came from the west,” said Vega. “The angle of the shooting confirms it.”

“Then it punched a hole through the fence,” said Daley. “There’s nothing else high enough in that direction.”

Vega didn’t see any bullet holes in the fence when he was outside. “Can I get a satellite map on your computer?”

Daley rolled back his chair and waved his hand with an exaggerated flourish. “Knock yourself out, Detective.”

Vega took Daley’s seat and settled in at the computer. He forced himself to blot out the turmoil going on outside. The bank of video monitors above him captured it in grainy footage with a fisheye lens. In the security lot, EMTs loaded Darryl Williams’s body onto a stretcher. On the courthouse roof, SWAT officers in flak gear took up positions. Out front, local cops redirected traffic. Vega tried to tune out the static bursts of chatter on the dispatch radio and tapped some keys until he found the right screen. He wasn’t looking for high-rises. He was looking for something else. A very specific building to the west.

Down the hall, two sets of dress shoes clicked briskly along the linoleum tile. Only the FBI wore dress shoes to a crime scene.

“You don’t need to be here anymore, Vega,” said Daley.

“I’m a county homicide detective and this is a county building.”

“Yeah, but now the FBI—” Daley stopped midsentence when the dispatcher came over the airwaves and asked for radio silence. Something important had happened and needed to be relayed privately. Vega was pretty sure what that information was. On one of the monitors, he watched an EMT pull a sheet over Darryl Williams’s face before he loaded him into the ambulance.

“Goddamn,” said Daley, slapping the edge of his desk. “The poor bastard.”

Two FBI agents in identical navy-blue windbreakers edged into the doorway of the small room.

“You just heard, I take it,” said the shorter of the two agents. “About the court officer?” He had the lean, compact build of a soccer player and dimples that contracted his cheeks, even when he was affecting a somber expression. The agent extended a hand to Daley. “Doug Hewitt. FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. Special agent in charge.” He had boyishly thick chestnut-colored hair with just a wisp of gray at the sides. A dye-job, Vega suspected. He wasn’t as young as he pretended to be.

“And this is my associate, Richard Fiske.”

Fiske offered no words of greeting or eye contact. He felt like Hewitt’s polar opposite. Silent. Dour. With crew-cut white-blond hair and sharp, leathery features. He brought to mind a villain out of Nordic noir.

“And you are?” Hewitt turned his gaze to Vega.

“Jimmy Vega. Detective. County homicide.”

“Captain Waring assigned you to the case?”

“I was in the building already.” Vega didn’t give Hewitt a chance to ask why. “Has the shooter been apprehended?”

“We’re working on it.” In other words, no.

“How big is your search area?”

“We’ve secured a three-block perimeter around the premises.”

“You might want to enlarge that,” said Vega. “Officer Daley picked up a shot on the ShotSpotter ninety degrees due west. The only building that could clear the eight-foot-high fence from that angle is the Broad Plains Bus Terminal.”

“The ShotSpotter’s wrong.” Daley jabbed a thumb in Vega’s direction. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell this guy. The terminal’s only two stories tall. And it’s four blocks away.”

“A high-powered rifle could certainly hit a target more than half a mile away,” said Vega. “That’s four blocks. Plus, the terminal’s on a rise. I know, because after nine-eleven, the county police established a command headquarters on the building’s second floor. They chose it for its visibility.”

Hewitt walked up behind Vega’s chair and considered the aerial view on the screen.

“Is the command center still at the bus terminal?”

“They don’t use it much these days,” said Vega. “They have a newer operation at the county airport. But it’s still there. And it’s a great vantage point.”

“Interesting.” Hewitt turned to Fiske. “Enlarge the perimeter to five blocks. Seal the terminal. No buses or passengers may enter or leave.”

The Nordic ghost disappeared without saying a word. Vega wondered if he spoke at all. Hewitt swung his attention back to Vega.

“Can you show me this headquarters?”

Vega hesitated. He was a defendant in a ten-million-dollar lawsuit who’d just been passed over for a sergeant’s promotion. Not the sort of poster boy Waring would choose to represent the county police. “Sir, it’s just four blocks due west. I’m sure the FBI can find it without—”

“Time is of the essence, Detective. I need your help now. We can handle the paperwork with that boss of yours later.” There was an edge to Hewitt’s words that sent a flutter of alarm through Vega. The last thing he wanted was to get between two powerful men. “What I don’t get,” said Hewitt, “is why the bus terminal? Wouldn’t it be quiet on a Monday afternoon? I would think a sniper would pick a place where he could melt into a crowd.”

“You’re not from the area, I take it.”

“I was transferred about six months ago from the Denver office.”

“Broad Plains is a major travel hub for asylum-seekers coming up from the border,” Vega explained. “When the buses come in, it’s a madhouse.”

Cold, clammy air greeted Vega as he followed Agent Hewitt into the Broad Plains Bus Terminal, now rimmed with emergency vehicles and police posted at every door. Sunlight faded, replaced by the glare of overhead fluorescent lights. An electronic billboard overhead flashed bus arrivals and departures to small towns in the Midwest and up and down the eastern seaboard: Columbus, Ohio. Richmond, Virginia. Schenectady, New York. Lowell, Massachusetts. Lewiston, Maine. All were followed by a single word in capital letters: DELAYED.

Nobody was going anywhere.

In the main waiting area, every bolted seat was filled with a warm body, most of them Hispanic-looking. Women nursed crying babies. Men crouched against walls, their eyes nervously scanning the police officers who clustered by the exits. Children stuck close to parents and grandparents, their little fingers holding onto the sleeves and belt loops of adults, as if fearful of being separated.

“It’s like a third-world country in here,” said Hewitt.

It’s like a modern-day Ellis Island, thought Vega. It was the same throughout so many small towns and cities in America. So much hope. So much fear.

“The terminal was slowly dying until recently,” Vega explained. “Most people drive or fly or take an Uber these days. For people coming up from the border, however, this is the only means of transportation they have to reunite with family members.”

“Speaking of which,” said Hewitt, “how’s your Spanish?”

“Fluent.” It was the language of Vega’s youth, the one his mother and grandmother argued and joked with him in when he was growing up in the Bronx. He used to be embarrassed that his grandmother never learned English. Or that his mother never lost her native Puerto Rican inflections, especially when he was still married into Wendy’s large, Jewish family. Now, he felt only admiration for how hard they’d worked to give him a footing in both worlds.

“Good to know,” said Hewitt. “I might ask you to stick around and help with the interviews.”

The two men picked their way across the waiting area, dodging backpacks, overflowing trash cans, and children playing tag. The squawk of police radios intensified as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. There were no passengers up here. Only cops with badges slung around their necks and cell phones plastered to their ears. They spoke in loud, authoritative voices and strutted around with an inflated sense of self-importance, like they were the guests of honor at a party of their own making.

Hewitt scanned the ceiling pockmarked with water stains and plaster repairs. The terminal had seen better days. “I don’t see surveillance cameras on this level.”

“There aren’t any, to my knowledge,” said Vega. “Only employees of the terminal or law enforcement are allowed up here.”

At the far end of the hallway, a Greyhound manager was pacing in the doorway of the command post. He was nearly as wide as he was tall, with sweat stains encircling the armpits of his bright blue uniform shirt. He was conversing with someone, but he seemed to be doing all the talking. When he turned, Vega felt himself shrink a little as the other man’s gaze fell upon him. The man had the straight-backed stance of an ex-soldier and the flinty-eyed bearing of a Depression-era dustbowl farmer, all hollow cheeks and stoic endurance. In the best of times, Captain Frank Waring never looked happy to see Vega.

This was not the best of times.

Hewitt strode forward, working his dimples into a smile that reminded Vega of a game-show host. “Fraaank. Good to see you.”

“Doug.” Waring nodded. He was never one for bombast or flattery. “Why is Detective Vega here? He’s on inactive status.” Waring held Vega’s gaze just long enough to make him squirm. Inactive—that was one way to describe Vega’s current situation. Maybe his future one too.

“Detective Vega was the one who suggested that the shooter might have fired from this location.” Hewitt pulled a pair of latex gloves from his jacket and slipped them on. Then he crouched down and examined the locking mechanism on the open door. It was a solid wood-core door with a veneer of dark brown finish. Neither the door nor the frame showed any evidence of being tampered with.

The shooter hadn’t broken in. Vega was wrong. Ay, puñeta! He’d brought the FBI and his own agency here for nothing.

Hewitt straightened. “The door doesn’t appear to have been breached. Yet you’re still up here, Frank. You haven’t pulled your men or called off the search. So that leaves two possibilities. One, the sniper had a key. Or two, the door was never locked to begin with.”

Bad news either way, thought Vega. By bringing the FBI here, he’d just highlighted his own department’s failure to secure the post—a failure that cost a court officer his life and wounded a sitting judge.

“It has no bearing on the investigation,” said Waring, sidestepping the question. “The sniper didn’t fire from here.” He pressed a set of binoculars into Hewitt’s hands and led him past desks with peeling wood veneer and boxy computers that had been written off years ago. The command center hadn’t been used since the operation was moved to the county airport. The whole place had a dusty, museum feel to it.

At the window, glazed with years of oils and grime, Waring gestured across the street to two new two-story buildings. They filled up the space that had once supplied a clear view of the courthouse.

“You see?” said Waring. “The shot didn’t come from here.?