the Stop and Shop. He was a friend of the deceased’s son, and that morning he was driving over there to talk to the son.”
“Do you think that’s who hit her?”
“No,” the Chief says. “Forensics found blood on his car but only on the handle, not the bumper. The woman had a gash on her leg, so it stands to reason there would be blood on the bumper.”
“Don’t assume,” Nick says. “She could have sliced it on a rock when she hit the ground.”
“He’s a good kid, Nicky,” the Chief says. “I know him, I know his dad, Joe. Joe’s an Iraq vet—”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I think someone is trying to frame the kid,” the Chief says. “The sneakers turning up at his place of employment indicate that. But who is it and why?” The Chief clears his throat. “The kid, Cruz, is Black, so it has occurred to me that race might be a factor.”
“Might be,” the Greek says. The Greek is Black as well—his mother is Cape Verdean. “Still, you can’t discount the kid because you like him, Ed.”
“I’m stuck,” the Chief says. “And I’m late for dinner.”
“Hit-and-run homicides are hard to solve.”
“We live on an island, Nicky. Nobody can get away, that’s the thing.”
“You checked with the body shops?” the Greek asks.
Yes, that was Dixon’s job, but he’d come up empty. All front-fender bodywork repairs since Vivian Howe was killed have corresponding accident reports. It’s entirely possible that someone is just driving around with a dented fender. It’s also possible that hitting Vivian Howe didn’t even leave a dent. “We did, yes.”
“You spoke to the son?”
“I’ve been saving that for last,” the Chief says. “The kid lost his mother.”
“Well,” the Greek says. “Sounds to me like the time for that conversation has come.”
Leo
When Leo finally bumps into Cruz, it’s in the place he least expects: on the docks.
Leo is working at the Nantucket Boat Basin, where he’s a glorified trash collector and errand boy. He has a golf cart and a walkie-talkie and he zips around from slip to slip, bringing ice and taking people’s trash. Leo likes his job, though some of the boat owners try his patience. Still, he knows he’s lucky; the boats are gorgeous, the people are friendly and grateful (most of the time), and he’s not only outside, he’s on the water. Lots of people would kill for this job.
He has just loaded four bags of trash and one bag of recycling (glass, mostly champagne bottles) into the back of his golf cart when he sees Cruz stepping off a seventy-foot flybridge yacht called Queen Bee.
What?
Cruz has textbooks under his arm. He must have been tutoring a kid on that yacht. Leo thinks about throwing his cart into reverse, but that would look cowardly. Leo feels like he’s being controlled by some outside force as he rolls the cart forward and stops in front of Cruz. He’s not sure what to say.
Leo swallows. “Hey.”
Cruz stares at Leo a second, his face unreadable. “Hey.”
“Were you the one who hit my mom?” Leo asks. “Because if you were, you need to admit it, man.”
“I didn’t,” Cruz says. “I found her on the ground. You can ask me a thousand times, and my answer isn’t going to change, because that’s the truth. If I’d been the one to hit Vivi, I would have told you. There’s no way I could live with myself if I killed Vivi and then pretended I didn’t. I have integrity.”
Integrity might as well be Cruz’s middle name, Leo knows. Adults always use that word when describing him because he’s “an achiever,” because he looks people in the eye, because he was nice to the kids at school that nobody liked, because he never swears and doesn’t complain, because he thinks of other people before himself. And hasn’t some of this rubbed off on Leo? Hasn’t he tried to be a person of integrity too?
“I couldn’t even keep quiet when we stole the street sign from Hulbert Avenue,” Cruz says.
Leo bites his tongue; he won’t give Cruz the satisfaction of smiling. The summer between seventh and eighth grade, Leo and Cruz used to sneak out in the middle of the night on their bikes. They once lit a campfire in the bamboo forest between Vivi’s house and the Madaket Road and roasted hot dogs. The only reason they hadn’t burned the forest down was that Cruz had thought to bring water. They skinny-dipped in the pool of some house on Cliff Road.