“Chief?” Cruz says, getting to his feet.
The kid looks so shook up that the Chief wants to give him a hug but instead he indicates that Cruz should sit. “Did anyone offer you something to drink? Water? Coffee?”
“I can’t. I don’t want…” Cruz collapses in the chair and clutches his head. “Vivi is dead. She’s…” He swallows. “She’s dead.”
“Okay, okay,” the Chief says. He wonders if he made a mistake deciding to do this interview himself. He’s never had a problem separating his personal and professional lives, but the Chief holds Joe in very high esteem and he has grown fond of this kid and rooted for him to succeed. “Just take a couple deep breaths. I know you’re upset. A lot of people are going to be sad when this news gets out. It’s my responsibility to try and figure out what happened.” The Chief eases into the seat across the table from Cruz. “Let’s start with what you remember about finding Ms. Howe.”
“Vivi,” Cruz says. “She’s like my second mom. Leo and I are…well, we’ve been best friends since preschool. And Vivi…she jokes that I’m her favorite child. I have, like, my own seat at their dinner table. And Vivi bought a Christmas stocking with my name on it that she hangs on the mantel.” Cruz chokes up. “I feel like I belong at that house. Like I’m part of the family. Not because I’m some motherless kid she feels sorry for but because she…loves me.”
“I’m sorry, son.” The Chief picks up his pen. “You were headed to the Howe residence when you found her? At seven fifteen in the morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Early visit for a Saturday,” the Chief says.
Cruz drops his head onto the table and starts crying. The Chief gives him a minute, then says, “Where were you exactly when you first saw Ms. Howe? Walk me through it.”
“I was coming from my house so I took that soft left onto Kingsley and I saw…a person, Vivi, lying on the ground. She was almost to the bike path but not quite. I thought she’d hurt herself,” Cruz says. “I knew right away it was her. She runs that road every single morning. I thought she’d sprained her ankle so I pulled over and hopped out. And when I reached her, I saw…it was bad. I called 911.”
“Wait,” the Chief says. “Let’s go back. You were coming from your house? You’re sure about that?”
Cruz nods, but he’s staring at his hands.
If Falco saw Cruz run a stop sign at the end of Hooper Farm Road, then Cruz is lying. Joe and Cruz live over on Delaney, just off Cliff. It’s possible, he supposes, that Falco was mistaken. Or maybe Cruz was coming from someplace he wasn’t supposed to be. His girlfriend’s house, for example. If the Chief has seen it once, he’s seen it a thousand times: when you investigate one crime, you often uncover a bunch of unrelated things that people are hiding.
“Cruz,” the Chief says, and the kid looks up. Behind his glasses, his eyes are terrified. The Chief reminds himself that even good kids, even great kids, make mistakes. “Did any cars pass you on Madaket Road before you noticed Ms. Howe?”
“I don’t think so,” Cruz says. “Not that I remember.”
“Did you pass any pedestrians on Madaket Road?”
“No.”
“Did anyone other than you see what happened? Were there any bikers or joggers out?”
“If they saw what happened, wouldn’t they have stopped?” Cruz says.
“Did you notice anyone on the bike path, Cruz?”
“No!” Cruz says. “I didn’t notice anything except Vivi lying on the ground! I called 911, I waited for the ambulance to get there, and then I ran to the house to tell Leo what happened.”
“But you didn’t call him from the scene?”
“No.”
“You didn’t call your best friend to tell him his mother was hurt?”
Cruz removes his glasses and sets them down on the table, and it’s only then that the Chief notices one of the lenses has a crack in it and there’s the start of a bruise under Cruz’s left eye.
“Leo and I got into a fight last night,” Cruz says. “I didn’t think he’d answer if I called.”
A fight, the Chief thinks. That could explain the glasses, the eye, Cruz racing over to the Howe residence at seven in the morning.
“Did you see anyone in front of you on Madaket Road?” the Chief asks. “Maybe a car that pulled over?”
“No,” Cruz says.
The Chief will need to look at the scene himself, but if he’s understanding it correctly, whoever hit Vivian Howe would have been turning onto Kingsley, as Cruz would have done. There’s no chance that a car driving on the Madaket Road would have hit someone who wasn’t even on the bike path yet. But if a driver took the soft left onto Kingsley going too fast and not paying attention, he could have hit a pedestrian. Then, if he knew Kingsley was a dead end and he wanted to get away cleanly, he most likely would have backed up and continued down Madaket Road.
It must have been a local, the Chief thinks. And his day gets even worse. “So you called 911 and then what happened?”
“I waited with Vivi,” Cruz says. “I held her hand and tried talking to her in case she could hear me. A couple of cars stopped; one woman asked if I was the one who’d hit her…”
“But you weren’t?” the Chief asks gently. He knows that frequently in hit-and-runs, the person who did the hit is the one who calls it in, pretending to be a bystander. Is that what happened here? Did Cruz turn onto Kingsley too fast, did Vivian Howe appear in his path so suddenly that he couldn’t react, was the sun in his eyes, was he upset about the fight with the son, was he, maybe, going over to apologize? The Chief had raised his own two kids and then he’d raised Tess and Greg’s kids, Chloe and Finn. He has experienced enough teenage drama to write a six-season Netflix series. Any one of his kids could have taken an eye off the road to text or change the radio station—and unintentionally mowed someone down. “You weren’t the one who hit her? If you did or you think you might have and not realized it, now is the time to tell me. I know you have a bright future ahead of you and you want to preserve that—”
“Chief Kapenash,” Cruz says, and suddenly the kid is clear-eyed and earnest. “I didn’t hit Vivi. I didn’t see who did. I didn’t see anyone until after I called 911. Vivi was on the ground when I found her.” Cruz closes his eyes, and tears stream down his face.
The Chief sighs. He knows he shouldn’t necessarily believe the kid, but he does. “We’ll need to impound your Jeep until forensics can check it out, son, I’m sorry.” He stands up. “Call your dad, have him come get you. I’m sorry this happened. I know you lost someone important to you in a tragic way. I’ve been there myself.”
The boy is crying so hard now it sounds like he’s choking. “She was like a mother to me,” he says. “I was her favorite child.”
Vivi
She rises, higher and higher. She supposes this is a good thing—up and not down—but she feels like she’s heading to the grocery store without her wallet. Which is to say, she’s not prepared. She has unattended business, big and small, back on the ground, in her life.