More people were dispatched to town to bring large plastic sheets, which they laid out on the scorched earth. The mattresses and pallets were numbered off and lifted out of the basement and laid on the plastic. Falcón conducted a minute search of the walls of the empty cells.
In the second cell he noticed a dark stain on the floor, coming from the back wall out into the centre of the room. He chipped out a piece of concrete and bagged it. In the fourth cell he found a one-euro coin behind a loose piece of mortar. He bagged that.
Outside they started work on the mattresses, peeling back the outer fabric and working through the stuffing. The mattress from cell two had a shard of curved glass in it, a section of a broken wine goblet. The mattress from cell three had the real treasure: a used Gillette II razor blade, still with some bristles attached.
At 3 p.m. they broke for lunch. Felipe and Jorge had arrived in Almonaster la Real and, over pork chops, chips and salad, Falcón told them to concentrate on the interior of the house before they moved on to exhuming the bodies.
'Square metre by square metre. Photographs all the way. Dust everything for prints, even if they look completely burnt out - all televisions, video recorders, remotes. There's a lot of congealed plastic in there, which might be from videos; see if there's one centimetre of tape available. We're also looking for personal items - money, jewellery, clothing. People come to a place like this, they lose things. I want a finger search of all the land around the house. Be meticulous, do everything by the book. Nobody, and I mean nobody, who has been to this house and been involved with what's been going on here should have the slightest chance of being able to get away with it on a technicality.'
A grim determination settled over the lunch table. Calls were made to the neighbouring towns of Cortegana and Aracena for more people to help with the finger search of the land. By the time they returned to the finca there were thirty people. Falcón put twenty-six on to the finger search and four to help Felipe and Jorge lifting things out of the house.
All findings were photographed in situ, logged in a school exercise book with the photograph number and bagged. Any large items with discernible prints were wrapped in plastic. Falcón asked Elvira to have two lab technicians standing by to receive the material and process the evidence.
By 7 p.m. they had completed the finger search of the land and about two-thirds of the house interior. Ramírez called.
'I've found your arsonists,' he said. 'I'm putting a squad together to go and pick them up now. They live out in Tres Mil Vivendas and I don't want them getting away from us in that little hell hole.'
'That was quick work, José Luis.'
'I got lucky,' he said. 'I reckoned they'd be doing this at night, so I started with all the late-night garages on the road out to Aracena. I thought they might not be stupid but, in this heat, they could easily be lazy. I reckoned they wouldn't fill all the jerry cans up at one petrol station and draw attention to themselves, but they might want to do it on the way. Two of the garages remembered a pick-up with two guys filling plastic jerry cans, but neither of them had close-circuit television. I worked back from there until I found a petrol station with CCTV, and this was where I got lucky. The guys came back twice to fill up. I went out there to view the tapes. Both guys were wearing hats, so they knew they were vulnerable to CCTV, and I didn't get a sight of them or the vehicle because it was parked on the other side of the pumps. But the second time there was a truck parked where they wanted to be, so they had to come into the light between the shop and the pumps. The CCTV cameras were pointed so that they picked up the activity on that part of the forecourt. Their registration number just slid beautifully into view.'
'Have you got names?'
'Yes, and they've both got police records for petty theft and burglary, and one of them picked up an assault conviction too, but neither of them has been done for arson.'
'I'm on my way back with the first vanload of evidence.'
He closed down the mobile, which rang again instantly. Alicia Aguado told him she could find a friend to take her out to the prison for her next session with Sebastián Ortega.
One of the Aracena police officers with a relative in Seville volunteered to accompany the vanload of evidence. Falcón headed back to the city alone at speed, as if he was rushing towards a brilliant conclusion. He had to pull over to take three calls on the way back.
The first was from Cristina Ferrera, saying that she'd been through Maddy Krugman's prints and hard disk and come across two shots of Marty Krugman sitting with a different stranger in each. In one he was animated and talking, in the other he seemed to be waiting. In both shots he was either in the background or off to one side. The one in which he appeared in the background had been taken from the hard disk and she'd had to blow up that section of the shot to confirm it was him.
The second call was from Ramírez, confirming that they'd arrested the two arsonists and he was conducting a search of their apartment.
The third call came from Elvira just as he was about to hit the main road into Seville. The Comisario wanted to see him as soon as he arrived back in the Jefatura.
Falcón went straight up to Elvira's office. His secretary had already left. The Comisario's door was open. Elvira sat at his desk, staring into it as if contemplating a terrible loss.
'Something's going on,' said Elvira, pointing him into a chair.
'Whatever it is it doesn't look good.'
'There's political pressure coming from… unseen powers,' said Elvira. 'That article published in the Diario de Sevilla this morning…'
'You didn't seem too concerned by that earlier today.'
'The extensive obituary alongside it was a very care- ' fully angled piece of writing. There were no reasons given for Montes's suicide, and the piece didn't make any claims, but people who "know" were in no doubt when they came away from that article that there were implications - serious ones. There has been a reaction to those implications from senior people at the town hall and important members of the Andalucían parliament. They want to know the state of our… house.'
Falcón started to say something and Elvira held up ; his hand.
'I've just heard two other reports, which could be interpreted as unfortunate holiday accidents or sinister coincidences. Dr Alfonso Martinez, a member of the Andalucían parliament, is now in intensive care after his car left the road on the motorway from Jerez de la Frontera to Cadiz and crashed into a bridge. And the wife of Enrique Altozano found her husband's clothes in a pile on a beach between Pedro de Alcántara and Estepona and alerted the authorities. They are currently searching the coast, but he has not been found. He was the man in the planning department of the Seville town hall who was responsible for awarding licences to new building projects.'
This time Falcón didn't try to say anything.
'Powerful people are like jackals on the prairie. They put their noses to the air for the smell of scandal, and the faintest whiff carries to them from kilometres away,' said Elvira. 'The job of the politician is to always maintain power. He does not necessarily want to deny that something disgraceful has occurred, but he does want to contain it, so that institutions don't completely disintegrate.'
'You're preparing me for something, Comisario,' said Falcón. 'I hope it's not going to be a disappointment in those institutions, or the people that run them.'
'I am telling you how it is, so that we can develop this case in a way that maximizes the number of convictions and minimizes the serious political damage,' said Elvira. 'If we show that we are only interested in taking down everybody involved, we will be prevented from doing that. We have the example of our own government. That, if you remember, was how Felipe Gonzalez survived the death squad scandal.'
'Are you concerned that I might be a fanatical zealot?'
'It would be understandable, given what we know so far of the unpleasantness of this case.'
'Let me get this straight,' said Falcón. 'Two powerful people have either been
killed or attempted suicide. This has alerted other powerful people, who have hinted to the Jefatura that, should we want to press this case to its logical conclusion, we will suffer an in- depth examination of the state of our own force. In other words, if we show their corruption to the world, they will show ours.'
'Comisario Lobo said you would understand perfectly.'
'Our problem is that the crucial conviction in this case is the one that will bring down the whole house of cards,' said Falcón. 'I'll tell you what I think has happened, Comisario. Ignacio Ortega took over the procuring work for the paedophile rings from Eduardo Carvajal as he had a connection to the Russians. That connection is strong enough that they were able to award him contracts without consulting Rafael Vega, j Montes was already corrupted at the time of the death of Eduardo Carvajal. He was forced into further incrimination by the purchase of this finca near Almonaster la Real, which Ignacio Ortega helped to restore. As a result of Montes's involvement in the finca, the authorities never bothered to investigate how the house was being used. I'm nearly sure that Rafael Vega was a client. We'll do a few tests which might confirm that to us. Mark Flowers gave us an indication of Vega's tastes when he told us his nickname at the time of the Chilean coup. These two latest casualties you've just told me about could mean that Martinez and Altozano may have been clients, too. To completely stamp this out we should, ideally, take out the Russians, but I don't know how we can get to them. The next rung down is Ignacio Ortega. The problem is that he is not a character who will go down quietly. He will demand from his friends that he be saved, or he will bring down the individuals in these highly valued institutions of ours.'
'Don't allow any of that bitterness to creep into your words,' said Elvira. 'I understand why you should feel like that, but outside people will dismiss you as "difficult" and you will never get what you want. What have you got on Ortega?'
'Very little,' said Falcón. 'He came under suspicion because of his behaviour around the death of his brother. I interviewed his son, who is a heroin addict, and he reluctantly told me about the systematic sexual abuse that he and his cousin had suffered, as well as a number of his friends, when they were children. Favours were being done in the building trade between Ignacio Ortega, Vega and the Russians. The minimum Ortega did was to install the air-conditioning units in Montes's finca. Inspector Ramírez has caught the arsonists who set fire to the finca. We're hoping they will provide a more concrete link to Ignacio Ortega. That will give us the minimum option of holding Ortega on "conspiracy to arson" charges. The next step might be more difficult.'
'The sexual abuse charges against his son don't have much hope, given his drug problems. I know it's wrong, but that's the perception.'
'He said he wouldn't testify against his father, anyway.'
'And Sebastián Ortega has been convicted of a serious crime.'
'Which we are hoping we can prove that he did not commit, but that won't help us with Ortega. We need more time.'
'All right,' said Elvira, sitting back, tired and exasperated. 'See if there's a link between Ignacio Ortega and the arsonists. If there is, we have to plan our next move. And, I don't need to tell you, but you can't talk to Virgilio Guzmán about any of this.'
* * *
Chapter 28
Tuesday, 30th July 2002
In the outer office Cristina Ferrera was sitting at a desk, feet hooked round the chair legs, looking at the two paper printouts of the shots of Marty Krugman down by the river. She turned the two A4 sheets round on the desk for Falcón to look at.
The first shot showed Marty off to the left of the frame, sitting on a bench by the river. He was not the focus of the shot. The man sitting next to him was a stranger to both Marty and Falcón.
'The second shot is a blow-up of the background of a larger shot,' said Ferrera.
In this shot Marty Krugman was turned sideways on the bench and was talking to a man Falcón immediately recognized as Mark Flowers.
'And these are off the hard disk?' said Falcón. 'No film negatives?'
She handed over a CD in its box.
'She used two cameras. If she saw something she thought she liked she used 35 mm film. If she was just snapping people generally she used a digital camera.
The only record of these two shots are on this CD and in her laptop.'
'I can see this took a lot of hard, boring work.'
'I know it would have been better to have had negatives,' she said.
'This is good enough,' said Falcón. 'None of this is going to end up in court. Where's Inspector Ramírez?'
'He's downstairs, setting up the interrogation rooms,' said Ferrera. 'He's very excited. He found something good in the arsonist's apartment.'
'I want you to take this to the lab,' said Falcón, handing her the used razor blade he'd found in the finca. 'There are bristles on the blades. It's a long shot, but I want them to run a DNA test on it and make a comparison with Rafael Vega.'
'By the way, Sra Krugman's laptop is in the evidence room,' said Ferrera, 'but I left everything else at the house.'
'What about the keys?'
She pushed them across the desk at him.
'One other thing,' said Falcón, giving her the paper with the Cyrillic script. 'You remember the Russian translator we used with Nadia Kouzmikheva? Ask her to translate that for us. Tomorrow will do.'
Ramírez was sitting in interrogation room 4, with his elbows on his knees and his head hanging down. Smoke rose from the fingers of his right hand. He didn't move when Falcón entered the room. He didn't move until Falcón touched him on the shoulder. He sat back slowly, as if in pain.
'What's the problem, José Luis?'
'I've been checking a tape.'
'What tape?'
'I've revised my opinion of the arsonists. They were bloody idiots, tontos perdidos. They went in there with the minds of petty thieves and before they torched the finca they stole a TV and video recorder. And inside the video recorder…'
'… was a tape,' said Falcón, galvanized by the development.
'And it was what I thought it would be - child pornography. But what I didn't expect was to recognize one of the participants.'
'Not Montes?'
'No, no - thank God. That would have been too. terrible. This was a guy from the barrio. You remember I told you about the one who'd done very well for himself, but it was never enough? He had to come back and tell us all how rich and important he had become… ram it down our throats. He was the cabron on the tape.'
'So this tape is a recording of events filmed in the finca?'
'I presume so, but I didn't get beyond the first minute. I started feeling sick.'
'Elvira's going to have to know about this,' said Falcón. 'But is there any way we can make a copy of it before we send it upstairs?'
Ramírez gave him a long hard look.
'Don't tell me what I think you're going to tell me,' he said.
'Elvira is on our side.'
'Sure he is,' said Ramírez. 'Until someone starts treading on his balls.'
'That's why we make the copy - because they're already treading,' said Falcón. 'But they're in ballet shoes at the moment.'
'You wait,' said Ramírez. 'When they hear about this tape, especially if there's someone important on it, they'll be down here in their cuban heels.'
Ramírez drummed the floor of the interrogation room with his feet.
'Who knows you've got the tape?'
'Nobody. The TV and video recorder were dumped inside the arsonists' front door. It was only when I got them back here that I thought to look and see if the video was loaded.'
'Good. Then we copy the tape, hand over the original, and see what happens.'
'Do you know how to copy tapes?'
'I know you need two VCRs.'
'And we can't do it here,' said Ramírez. 'And we can't ask anybody to explain how it's done in small, easy to understand words, or the whole Jefatura will know.'
'You've got
a machine at home and so have I,' said Falcón. 'Get one of your kids to explain to you how to copy a tape and bring your machine over to my place where it's quiet.'
Falcón set up the video ready to show the interviewees what they'd stolen. Ramírez gave him the vehicle details, the record of its sightings in the garages, a copy of the CCTV tape and the hat worn by one of the arsonists, who was called Carlos Delgado.
'Have we got a photo of Ignacio Ortega to show them?' asked Ramírez.
'Not a clear one,' said Falcón. 'But they'll know his name and they'll be very scared to say it, I'm sure. Knock on the door when you need to use the tape.'
'First one to get a confession. Loser buys the beer,' said Ramírez.
The two arsonists were brought down. Ramírez took Pedro Gomez. Falcón sat down with Carlos Delgado and made the necessary introductions to the tape recorder.
'What were you doing on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, Carlos?'
'Sleeping.'
'Were you with your friend Pedro?'
'We live in the same apartment.'
'And he was with you that night?'
'He's in the next room, why don't you ask him?'
'Was anybody else there?'
Carlos shook his head. Falcón showed him a shot of the pick-up.
'Is this yours?'
Carlos looked down, nodded.
'Were you using this vehicle on Saturday night or Sunday morning?'
'We went to see Pedro's aunt in Castillo… about eleven o'clock on Sunday morning.'
'Do you know who was using your vehicle on Saturday night, Sunday morning?'
'No.'
'Is this your hat?'
'Yes,' said Carlos. Then, after a few beats: 'Who are you guys with? You ask about my car… my hat. What the fuck's all this about?'
'We're investigating a very serious sex crime.'
'A sex crime? We haven't committed any sex crime.'
Falcón asked him to come over to the TV screen while he played the CCTV tape from the garage. The screen revealed the grey images of the pick-up arriving, Carlos getting out, filling up the jerry cans and going to pay in the shop. Javier froze the frame.
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