The fragile edge, p.1
The Fragile Edge, page 1
Books by Suzanne Chazin
The Jimmy Vega Mystery Series
The Fragile Edge
Voice with No Echo
A Place in the Wind
No Witness But the Moon
A Blossom of Bright Light
Land of Careful Shadows
The Georgia Skeehan Mystery Series
The Fourth Angel
Flashover
Fireplay
THE FRAGILE EDGE
SUZANNE CHAZIN
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Acknowledgments
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2021 by Suzanne Chazin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2021905340
The K logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1556-2
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: September 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1559-3 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-4967-1559-4 (ebook)
To my son Kevin,
my cheerleader and pillar.
Thanks for the story charts and late-night brainstorming
sessions.
I couldn’t have written this book without you.
We walk on the fragile edge
of a heap of earth.
A wing goes by, anointed with oil,
with purity. But a blow,
falling somewhere I don’t know of,
grinds a hostile tooth
out of every tear.
From: “Pilgrimage” by César Vallejo, reprinted from Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, edited by Robert Bly. Beacon Press, Boston, 1993. Copyright 1993 Robert Bly. Used with his permission.
Prologue
He didn’t think too deeply about the job before him. He understood that it was necessary. Sometimes people must be punished for their poor choices.
Sometimes they have to die.
He concentrated instead on the particulars. The location of the security cameras in the bus terminal. The fastest route upstairs. The nearest exits. He tried to ignore the reek of diesel fumes, fried food, and sweat that wafted over the passengers swirling around him. The nearness of their bodies. It rekindled the acrid memory of his stepfather, the way he’d come home, stinking of booze, and grab him in a headlock. He was a small boy then, powerless to fight back.
He wasn’t powerless any longer.
Everything he needed was in his black backpack, disassembled and wrapped in foam and clothing so it wouldn’t jiggle. A twelve-pound bolt-action Nemesis sniper rifle with a holographic scope. Two five-round magazines of high-velocity full metal jacket ammo. A military-grade flash suppressor. He knew the courthouse schedule. Knew when his target would move across the security lot.
In his thirty-plus years, he’d taken many a life. How many, he couldn’t say anymore. He was in his teens when he made his first kill. It didn’t bother him, though he suspected it might other men. It was never just about good vision and steady hands. It was about something deeper. A dead calm at his center. An impenetrability.
Some men are born to build. He was born to destroy.
Not that you’d know it by looking at him. He was on the short side, a little husky but otherwise unremarkable in appearance, dressed as he was in khakis and a baseball cap. He had deep, close-set eyes that sometimes made people uncomfortable if he looked at them too long. He wore sunglasses to hide them as he took the stairs to the second floor, past the office of the station manager who was always on his phone or playing games on his computer. He made his way through a door he’d already familiarized himself with and headed to the roof. The August day was blistering, and the silvery gray thermoplastic roofing concentrated the heat like a frying pan. The humid air felt gauzy on his tongue. His cheeks itched from the beard he’d glued on this morning.
He pulled a toothpick out of the front pocket of his khakis and chewed on it. Chewing cleared his sinuses. He hated this kind of weather, the way it constricted his nasal passages. Made him feel like he was trapped in a house full of cats and dogs. He was allergic to every kind of animal. Just as well. He didn’t like them anyway.
Too unpredictable.
One shot. One kill. That was his MO. Always had been. That’s why he used a bolt-action rifle. Semi-automatics were less accurate over long distances and more prone to malfunctions. He’d retrieve the shell casing when it was over and disappear. Everyone checks the adjoining rooftops. No one thinks to look for a shooter positioned a half mile away.
He stayed low beneath the lip of the roof as he unzipped his backpack. He pulled out the rifle receiver, rotated the collapsible stock into place, then inserted the barrel, tightening it with a quick two-finger turn of a screw. He slipped the hand guard over the top of the barrel and inserted a pin to hold it in place. He flipped the bipod down so the cushioned feet balanced the weapon and mounted the scope on top. Then he screwed a flash suppressor onto the muzzle. When he was satisfied with the alignment, he slid a five-round magazine into the well and settled the rifle securely on the lip of the roof. From the scope, he scanned the courthouse security lot and waited for the golf cart to motor into view. Rubber tires kicked up a trail of dust and stopped short of the rear doors.
Three people sat in the cart. One in front. Two in back. He was interested in only one. He waited for the perfect moment to get his subject dead center in his scope.
He fired.
There was a moment of Zen-like stillness after he squeezed the trigger, when the earth seemed to balance on the head of a pin. He didn’t hear the screams. From this distance, he had only a vague sense of the blood and carnage he’d unleashed. And yet, for the first time ever, he felt a flutter of uncertainty in his chest. A tremor in his hands. Not because of who he’d killed.
But because of who he hadn’t.
Chapter 1
“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
“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.”
