The Lords of Time

by Eva García Sáenz

  The priest and my colleague appeared before my eyes, laughing conspiratorially as they reached inside the glass case and stole the oars. The impish Alvar also took a pretty white-embroidered parasol from the wall. I don’t think they even noticed I was there; like fish in an aquarium, they were oblivious to being watched. Estí and Alvar slipped out of a door behind the cases and disappeared.

  Ten minutes later, I said goodbye to the guide at the tower’s pointed arch. I didn’t want to call Estíbaliz in case she was obtaining useful information during her tête-à-tête with the intriguing Alvar.

  I was crossing the tower’s lawn when I saw them.

  It was like staring at an old print—the scene so anachronistic that it didn’t seem possible that it was happening in present-day. A boat, gliding along the moat, powered by Estíbaliz’s lazy rowing, and a resplendent priest holding a parasol. Estí was laughing, enjoying the outing.

  When they saw me, her rowing grew stronger, and the old-fashioned craft floated alongside me.

  “I’m afraid we have to get back to work. Many thanks for the trip,” said Estí, stepping out onto dry land.

  “That’s how we’ll leave it then,” Alvar said, smiling gently.

  The fact that Alvar did not have the copy of The Lords of Time that I had lent him did not escape my notice. I waited for his promise to return it, but he said nothing, so I filed away the information and we said goodbye.

  At that moment, my cell phone rang. I took it out, without considering that we were still close to Alvar.

  “Peña, what is it?”

  “You have to get here quickly, boss. The two sisters…I think they’ve been walled in.”

  Hearing that made my blood freeze. I shouldn’t have repeated the information out loud. I know I shouldn’t have. But you’re a person before you’re a cop, and sometimes horror catches you completely unaware.

  “What do you mean, the two sisters are walled in? Did you find the bodies…behind the walls?” I finally managed to ask.

  Estí looked quizzically at me. I walked away from her and Alvar. My world had been turned upside down.

  “No, no! They’re alive. Milán and I have been in the apartment ever since we responded to that call about the bad smell. There’s a brick wall in the unit that appears to have just been built. When we came in, a girl’s voice began crying for help. She identified herself as Oihana Nájera, the younger sister. The fire department and an ambulance are on their way. We’re going to knock down the wall.”

  “Call forensics as well,” I ordered. “Hand out gloves and shoe covers to anybody who goes near the apartment. This is a crime scene: a kidnapping, maybe even an attempted murder.”

  “Understood. How long will it take you to get here?”

  “We’re in Ugarte, forty kilometers away. But you have permission to demolish the walls. Our priority is to save those girls’ lives.”

  11

  LA CUCHILLERÍA

  UNAI

  September 2019

  We drove back to Vitoria as quickly as we could within the speed limit. Both of us were tense, immersed in somber thoughts, yet we were hopeful. Finally being able to remove the photos of the missing girls from our wall would be a weight off our shoulders.

  I had to break the wall of silence.

  “What did you get out of our young pope?” I prodded Estíbaliz.

  “Absolutely nothing; he’s very evasive. He wouldn’t tell me anything he didn’t want to. I tried asking direct questions, but he simply changed the subject or didn’t answer. We’re not going to get anything out of him as long as he’s comfortable and confident, in his own element. He’s in his natural habitat, where he has full control of the situation. We’re only there as onlookers.”

  “So what do you suggest?” I asked. “His publisher says he never leaves his tower.”

  Estí shrugged.

  “We’ll have to lure him out of his lair.”

  “Can you do that?” I wanted to know. “Do you have something in mind?”

  My colleague said nothing for a while.

  “What are you thinking about?” I insisted. I’d had enough of her silence. It was especially maddening because I needed her to distract me. I didn’t want to think about having to face the terrified sisters stuck between the walls.

  “The Nájera sisters,” she lied, clearly avoiding a topic she didn’t want to discuss. “Thank God, they’re alive. What kind of animal traps two girls behind a brick wall?”

  “Haven’t you read the novel, Estí?”

  “There you go again. No, Kraken, I haven’t had time.”

  “You’ll understand what we’re dealing with a lot better if you do. It’s top priority. Start reading it tonight if possible. Will you do that?”

  “All right, but can you leave the damn fiction aside and concentrate on the two cases we need to solve?”

  What if it’s only one case? I thought. I considered asking, but didn’t. How could I explain my fears to her? It was too soon.

  “I don’t think he wrote the novel,” she said eventually.

  “I’m not sure he did, either. Of course, he could easily have done the research using his library. But did you notice how he reacted when we asked him about the book?”

  “Yes, it was odd,” she said. “At first it didn’t interest him. I could’ve sworn he was on the verge of getting rid of us. Then he came across something in the novel—he marked a page with his finger. When we came downstairs to pick up the oars, he left the novel on his desk, stealthily putting a letter opener in the book to mark the spot. That’s why I don’t think he wrote it. If he had, why keep our copy and why mark a passage? He would have had more than enough copies, or drafts, or manuscripts, whatever you call them.”

  He hadn’t kept just any copy; he kept my copy—although that gave me a good excuse to return.

  “Okay, let’s say he isn’t the author,” I conceded. “Something still attracted his attention.”

  “Yes, and then he concentrated on me, because there was no chemistry between the two of you. So he tried to seduce me, or whatever that was, to worm information out of me.”

  “And did he succeed?”

  “He asked me the dead businessman’s name, but I didn’t tell him. I want to see if he keeps asking, how important it is to him. Besides, he could find out by reading the paper. It’s not a secret. So let’s suppose he’s the killer, not the author. Does he have the right profile, Kraken?”

  I had been expecting this question for some time. “I can’t create a profile based on a single meeting.”

  “But you can share your initial impressions.”

  “He has narcissistic tendencies. He believes he is superior to others culturally, socially, and intellectually, at least according to his own values. He even reinforces his power by calling us ‘young,’ when he’s younger than we are. He keeps the real world at a distance. My guess is that he doesn’t feel the need to relate to anyone. He’s a hedonist, he surrounds himself with beautiful things, and he loves food. He enjoys and seeks the company of women, and he has the means to pursue them. He’s arrogant, and I saw no empathy in him.”

  “So he fits the profile of a narcissist. I’ve been working with you long enough to know that a small percentage of narcissists can eventually cross the line and become criminals if their conscience is anesthetized and someone gets in their way. But why would he want to kill anyone?”

  We were always asking ourselves this question, as though there were a single answer. There wasn’t. Not a simple one. Not a logical one.

  “Narcissistic psychopaths get bored,” I recited from memory. “They tire of people and things easily, like spoiled children who throw away a new toy after a few minutes. They don’t think about the consequences. Their only concern is how to manipulate those around them to achieve what they want. But we�
��re assuming too much. Alvar has narcissistic traits, but there’s a whole world of possibilities between that and him being a psychopath. Psychopaths have no empathy. Although they’re incapable of understanding someone who’s suffering, they’re very good at presenting the emotions they’re supposed to have in almost every situation. They’re emotional chameleons. We’ll need to have many more conversations with Alvar to reach any conclusion about whether or not he’s a psychopath.”

  “I’m going to do something you’re not going to like,” she said, her eyes fixed on the road.

  “Yes, you mentioned it already. You’re going to lure him out of his tower.”

  “He intrigues me. You don’t meet someone like him every day.”

  I raised an eyebrow and looked across at her.

  “Are we still talking about work?”

  “Why? What did you notice?”

  “The electricity in the way you two looked at each other…He deliberately brushed against you three times. Twice he touched the back of your hand, and then he grazed the nape of your neck while you were standing at the window next to him.”

  “I’m watching him, okay?”

  Your pupils were saying something else, I thought.

  “I know, Estí. I’ve seen you deal with dozens of seductive men over the years. You wanted nothing to do with Ignacio Ortiz de Zarate, and you weren’t reeled in by Tasio or by Saúl Tovar’s charisma. You’re not easily swayed.”

  “I’m glad you noticed,” she said. “But to change the subject, he doesn’t have a cell phone. He uses a landline.”

  “The publisher suggested that might be the case. It’s useful information. I’ll ask Milán to look into it.”

  “I can’t help asking myself why someone who is uninterested in the outside world would complicate his life by killing a prominent businessman?”

  “Antón Lasaga owned lots of properties in this region. Maybe there was a dispute over land.”

  “Yes, that’s possible. Here we have two extremely rich men: one with no family, the other with five children who aren’t his. But I’m struggling to find a motive, a link. Even if he did write the book, we need something more than cantharidin and the crime scene, and I can’t see it.”

  “You can’t see it because we haven’t conducted a full investigation. We need to find out what properties they own, if there were any land disputes…and one other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We need to find out if the fashion king is part of a family that was considered important in the Middle Ages.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “His name was Antón Lasaga Pérez. In Álava, many people called López, Martínez—any of the patronymics—lost their double-barreled surnames generations ago because of parish priests’ errors on their birth or marriage certificates. Get Peña to talk to Lasaga’s daughter and collect all the information he can about the family name and its origins. Then ask him to contact a genealogy company in Vitoria specializing in Álava surnames. We need to uncover a motive, and everything seems to point toward this region’s past. But you haven’t asked me the most important question: Where is Ramiro Alvar?”

  “Didn’t we just meet him?”

  “No, Estí. That wasn’t the person the publisher told us about. Prudencio described a timid Ramiro Alvar, who wasn’t going to have any descendants, so where is he?”

  “Why are the descendants so important?”

  “Because Prudencio can’t have met the Alvar we just met, at least not while the man was wearing a cassock. If he had, he wouldn’t have mentioned the possibility of offspring. Besides, the man we just met presented himself as Alvar, the twenty-fourth Lord of Nograro, not as Ramiro Alvar.”

  I had further suspicions, but they were still too vague, and I didn’t want to share them until I had checked a couple of things over the course of the next few days.

  “Understood.” Estí left it there. She pretended there was nothing more to discuss, but she had probably filed it away for a future talk.

  The car pulled up at the first set of traffic lights at the entrance to Vitoria. Now was the moment. “There’s something else….Nieves fell down the stairs at my apartment.”

  The light turned green, but Estí didn’t move.

  “What did you say?” she asked anxiously. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s being operated on. Alba says it’ll take three hours and that there’s nothing we can do at the hospital before she gets out.”

  “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I’ll go to the hospital, that way I can at least keep Alba company,” she said resolutely. “You go to the apartment and coordinate the operation: the superintendent will be beside herself if all three of us are at the hospital when there are two girls trapped behind a wall.”

  “I’d rather be the one to stay with Alba,” I said.

  “You’ll be more useful at the crime scene. You can cover her back. You’ll still have time to go to the hospital before Nieves is released.”

  I didn’t like the idea, but Estíbaliz knew as well as I did that if I went to the hospital Alba would just be angry that I hadn’t gone to check on the two sisters.

  * * *

  —

  When Estí dropped me off near La Cuchillería, it was easy to spot the apartment I was looking for: an ambulance and several police cars had blocked off the street from pedestrian traffic and the doorway was cordoned off.

  Curious onlookers were crowding around the barrier, but if they had known what lay at the top of the stairs, they would have run home and hidden under their beds. I flashed my badge and went up.

  The apartment was being remodeled. There were sacks of cement and other building materials everywhere. I stepped past several buckets full of rubble and found the room Peña had mentioned. The firefighters were about to take a sledgehammer to the wall.

  “Why didn’t you start earlier?” I asked Milán.

  “We heard Oihana’s voice, but it took us some time to figure out where we could knock down the wall without hurting the girls. The firefighters didn’t want to use a battering ram in case there’s not enough room on the other side. They were afraid they might crush the girls. We haven’t heard their voices for twenty-three minutes. It doesn’t look good. We have paramedics standing by. I just hope we’re not too late and that we don’t end up hurting them even more.”

  Two of the firefighters called out to the sisters, but there was no reply. They started to hammer at the wall, and with each strike, my nerves frayed a little more.

  Come on, you have to be alive, I thought, as though my eagerness to rescue them could help us get to them any faster.

  The blows echoed throughout the room.

  Bits of brick cascaded to the ground near my feet. I should have moved away, but I was desperate to get to the sisters. I wanted to leap through the hole and get those poor girls out as quickly as possible.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had read recently on the so-called vow of darkness. Who could have thought of something like that?

  I had studied the worst aspects of the human soul for years as a criminal profiler, but there had been no case of immurement, or walling in, in the recent global history of criminology. There was no mention of it in terms of a modus operandi, or a macabre act, in the past hundred years. Nobody killed like that. Why now? Was it a copycat effect from the novel?

  It couldn’t be. That was impossible: the dates didn’t fit.

  The Nájera sisters had disappeared several weeks before the novel was published. That fact was tremendously helpful for a profiler. It ruled out everyone who had read the book after it was released. If the crime was linked to the novel, the suspect pool could only include the much smaller number of people who might have read the manuscript before publication.

  Finally, I could no longer bear it. The d
amned noise. The damned slowness.

  I picked up a hammer and went to help the firefighters. I don’t know how many voices called for me to stop, told me not to get involved, that it was dangerous for the girls, that…To hell with it.

  Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

  There was a body smothered in red dust at my feet. Once a starving girl, it was now a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition.

  The stench was unbearable. The apartment suddenly stank like rotten eggs, the unmistakable odor of cadaverine. She had probably died several days earlier. I ran to the unfinished bathroom and threw up. Not even the strong scent of camphor could trick me into thinking the smell of death wasn’t everywhere.

  Despite my revulsion, I took a deep breath and went back to the hole in the wall. The two firefighters were still busy chipping away. A doctor had arrived, but there was no need for him to take the dead girl’s pulse.

  It seemed there was some good news, though. The flashlight’s beam fell on a girl in the corner. I thought I saw her move.

  I ran toward the shape huddled against the wall. She seemed to be made of nothing but clothes and thick, matted, waist-length hair. She was trying to cover herself with a couple of rough plastic sheets. It was Oihana, the younger sister.

  We pulled her from the crypt filled with excrement and urine. The paramedics began resuscitating her right there on the floor of the apartment, while the seven of us looked on in horror. The bundle of bones was not responding to our efforts to revive her. It seemed we were too late.

  But then a miracle happened.

  The skeletal little girl, covered in red dust from the crumbled bricks, began to cough and breathe very softly, almost imperceptibly. The paramedics fitted her with an oxygen mask and lifted her onto the stretcher. She was so thin that any one of us could have picked her up with one hand.

  After she was carried out, we were left with a thick silence and the smell of her sister’s body. There we were, half a dozen desolate professionals, with almost no strength left to keep working in that tomb.