"Okay, okay, I get it.”
"In my case, I got used to wasting my little great achievements generating the illusion that the best was yet to come. And in the meantime, I complained. I gave more time to the people who are passing by, than for those who would die for me. The bills and reports heaped on the desk ended up burying letters of love, congratulations, and drawings, but then I couldn’t explain why the hell I was alone.”
“And this is lesson number... yes, I think it's number five.”
Friday, November 10, 2006
Jaime Vergara found himself face to face with Alyssa Grifero and his knees began to falter. In a reflex act, he stepped back.
"Good day, sir," said the visitor, in a strange good humor. “I know you were expecting someone else. Still, can I come in?”
Without waiting for the answer, Alyssa crossed the threshold and closed the door, pushing it with the heel of her boot. She looked curiously at a framed laminate that occupied almost the whole wall of the hall. Positive slogans such as to be inspired is great; to inspire is incredible. Then she took a quick glance at the still-unmade bed of the little bedroom while. Jaime's universe went upside down. What the hell? What is she doing here? What has she done to Sara?
"Is there anyone else on the floor?" She went on talking as she walked into the kitchen like Peter Pan in his house.
Vergara stood petrified until he saw Alyssa go into the bathroom and look behind the shower screen. He approached her without thinking.
“What are you doing?” He shouted, and immediately realized his high tone and lowered his voice.
Alyssa, who was checking that Jaime was in effect alone, stopped, turned her head, and met his eyes.
"We have to talk," she said dryly.
Sara felt a chill creep up her back as she stopped a block away from the brick townhouse at 219 Cowley Road. The appearance of the street was calm, almost familiar. The patrol cars had disappeared, there was no trace of the neighbors and no man lay on the floor of his apartment with his head destroyed. Nor was there any trace of the journalistic army, which she no doubt feared to be found; Apparently at that time they was no more carrion left over to pick at. Although the gray clouds were giving way to uneven sunlight, the temperature was around 13 Celsius degrees, which, added to the typical British humidity, and caused an uneasy sense of discomfort in Sara.
She looked at her wristwatch for the fifth time since, less than an hour earlier, the telephone conversation with her psychiatrist had ended. It was 2:40 in the afternoon, which meant that she still had more than two hours to find a cybercafé and go on time for her virtual meeting with Jaime. At that time she also planned to go into the first pharmacy she could find to buy the pills that Luis María Encinas had prescribed.
But all that, the pills and the call, would be after she went back in the mouth of the lion.
Her teeth chattered, not only from the cold, but also from the stress of watching the scene of her last nightmare. From her position, a few steps from the liquor store, she could see that a yellow plastic tape sealed the house around its perimeter until disappearing through the alley that separated the liquor store from the house itself. The building seemed to Sara as a sinister fortress, and in her mind even the bricks, once reddish, seemed to have darkened.
She gathered courage, whispered several times, just a house, and took a breath to take the first step. She didn’t get to take the second, however, because she detected something out of the corner of her eye that drove her to hide behind the corner of the liquor store like a delinquent.
A patrol car was approaching at moderate speed with the emergency lights off at the other end of the road. It slowed down and parked in front of the house. Sara felt the blood rise to her head when she saw two men get out of the car.
Shit, it's them! She lamented inside, at the same time hiding behind the side facade of the building. Her heart was racing.
Sara glanced a second and that was enough to identify the two policemen of the other night: the blond platinum and the arrogant handsome police. "Well, I’ve not been found." She risked another sneaky turn of her neck and managed to see them both crouch under the seal. They were about to enter Mike Lennard's house.
They had gone ahead of her by seconds.
Vergara closed his eyes tightly, wishing it were a horrible nightmare. He was in a state of rational paralysis. The situation seemed surreal, almost paradoxical, and his mind refused to function. He had never been face to face with a fugitive. How could she know where I live? It was the only thing he could think of. Then she said something that Jaime, at first, didn’t understand.
"Do a body search on me," she repeated. Then Alyssa stepped in front of him and raised her hands with her palms open.
"What-how are you saying?"
"On your face, I gather that you have recognized me from the news. Clearly you're in full panic attack. However, I need to talk to you, and I can’t do that if you're afraid of me. Come on do a body search on me. I'm not armed and I'm harmless.”
She went a step closer, and Jaime stepped back a few inches when he felt the touch of her t-shirt against his arm. He realized that it wasn’t right for him to argue with a dangerous stranger, and on the other hand, it would not be too much to make sure that she wasn’t carrying weapons on her, so that, submissively, he obeyed.
Trying not to stare into her eyes, he stood in front of her. He had never body searched anyone, so he remembered and visualized in his mind some scenes from his favorite police film: Lethal Weapon. He started at the top, grabbing Alyssa's wrists and slowly lowering her arms. He overcame her breast area with great care not to touch her breasts, a movement that caused a silly and spontaneous smile on the young woman. She kept her eyes on the wall, however. When he reached her waist, Jaime experienced a contradictory sensation: for the first time he was aware that he housed a ruthless, unarmed murderer in his hall, totally at his mercy, and he seemed morbid. He was surprised to take a few seconds to feel the area around her waist and examine Alyssa's body as a whole. In that posture, with arms raised, the T-shirt was stuck to the skin, molding her narrow figure, especially in the area of the breasts, and still with his hands on her waist, let his black pupils absorb her.
He cleared his throat, and time went by.
“Checked. You're clean,” he coughed as he took a step back.
"You forgot my legs."
Jaime stared at her like a fool as he pondered a coherent response; although the reality was that there was nothing coherent about the situation itself.
“Hey, what are you doing?" His spirit of survival had suddenly awakened. Once assured that she was unarmed, Jaime's fear gave way to anger. “Do you know that I can call the police right now and they'll take you in?”
"It's not going to be necessary," she said quickly.
As they spoke, he glanced around the corners of his apartment for something he could use as a weapon if things got dangerous.
"I did not come here with bad intentions, I swear. If you want me to go, you just have to tell me. But I assure you that you need me as much as I need you.”
“But what are you saying?” Now it was Jaime who took a step toward her and cornered her against the corner of the hall. He realized she was much shorter than he. “What have you done with Sara? You said I'm going to need your help, how can that be if I don’t even know you? Are you crazy?”
He put his index finger to his temple and began to tap like a lunatic.
"Don’t worry about Sara for now," she said, ignoring Jaime's gesture. “Look, it's no secret I know you're not in your prime professional moment. You have problems with the justice and I can help you but first we must talk.”
There was silence.
Jaime was more than surprised. After a second's reflection, he decided that the young killer was telling the truth, so he nodded. Stammering, he offered her a cup of coffee in the cafe below, where there are witnesses.
"No, not at all. I can’t leave the house, let alone
go into a public place, man. Have not you heard? At the moment I am being looked for in half of Spain. It will have to be here.”
Not convinced, Jaime waved his hand to the room’s sofa. Then he went into the kitchen, filled the Nespresso with water, and heated up two coffees. After a few seconds, he offered one of the cups to Alyssa and sat in the chair in front of her, expectantly.
"Okay, let's see what happens in this venture and find out where all this nonsense takes us."
While Grifero poured the sugar and stirred the coffee with the teaspoon, Jaime examined her carefully. She dressed like an adult woman and her body was fully developed. Her lips were a deep red. And in spite of all this, she was still a child. She didn’t seem to be capable of killing a full-fledged man, much less squeezing the trigger of a pistol. She was not, in short, the prototype of a serial killer. Her eyes, however, were those of an adult: calm and expressionless.
“You're scared of me?” She said suddenly, breaking the ice with only four words.
"No," said Vergara.
"Well, I didn’t come to kill you, or to hurt you, or anything like that. On the contrary, we need to be friends.”
There was a new silence.
"Perfect, I'll give you a quarter of an hour to convince me. After that time I'll call the police," he snapped.
“Fifteen minutes? I warn you that my story is complex.”
"Cut short and simplify, you look like a smart girl. Fourteen minutes.”
She raised her hands, making him see that she had caught the idea.
"Now, why are you here?" He demanded.
Grifero changed her face and became serious. Her eyes were tired and sad. All the security Jaime had sensed when she stepped into the apartment had vanished, and he understood that the preliminaries had ended. He couldn’t even begin to guess what was going to happen next, but he felt a gray cloud flood the atmosphere.
Officer Thomas Carroll gazed with appreciation at the cracked tiles on Mike Lennard's bathroom wall, and was shocked at having been so slow-witted that he had not examined them the other night. Horner was imperturbable at his side.
"Well, you were right: there's definitely a whole bullet hole in the wall," Thomas said with crossed arms. “That rules out that the shooting occurred with the victim already on the floor.”
The room was the same as they had left it, except for the pool of blood on the floor, which had been scrubbed (although traces of blood clots could still be seen in the joints of the tiles), and, of course, the corpse, which at that time lay in the autopsy room of the anatomical forensics as they had already seen. Otherwise, they were inside a normal single man's bathroom, with his toothbrush and anti-plaque toothpaste, his only shampoo bottle and his generic white deodorant.
Carroll gave a weary sigh, as if he had just realized how complicated this investigation could be.
"I don’t see any sharp things here, so the wounds on the chest must have been made with an object that he brought with him, or he took afterwards," he said, looking around.
"I'll bet it was something personal, a kind of letter opener or something," Horner said, and then explained, "If he had used a machete or a sharp object, the prints would be deeper and more bloody right?”
"Actually it could have been anything that was found around the house, like a razor or a needle."
“I really doubt it.” Horner expounded his theory with such confidence that he crushed his companion’s arguments one after the other. “Clearly, writing that message on the victim's skin was the culmination of a well thought out plan, so the tool would normally be part of a ritual.”
The blond grimaced. The word made him shiver. Ritual...
Tired of lacking evidence, he went to the window and looked out at the inhospitable alley. He noticed that there was nothing of interest and returned to the room.
"Come on, let's inspect the rest of the house," Horner said, clapping his hands enthusiastically. “We'll split up to go faster, if that's okay with you.”
Snowflake nodded.
"What exactly are we looking for?" he asked.
"Anything that gives us any extra information about Lennard. Papers, articles, photos, videotapes... Someone killed him for revenge and we have to find out why. You'll check the first floor and I'll check the top floor. Let’s start!”
That day he preferred to work alone. In fact, and no matter how much his partner liked him, since he had interrupted his day off with that morning call, he had felt Carroll as a constant pain in his ass.
He went upstairs, located Lennard's bedroom and closed himself in it. He looked at the room with defiant eyes, as the class nerd looks at the blank questions at the beginning of a test.
He didn’t know what he was looking for, but instinct told him that among so many drawers and in his wardrobe he would find something to give him more information about who Mike Lennard really was. He did not expect to be faced with the definitive clue that the murderer's name and his motives for committing the savage crime would be handed to him on a platter; that was a utopia. But he was aware that he had many options to find some interesting document.
The first thing he did was to peer under the bed (following instinct more than logic), but all he found was a thin layer of dust. Opening the largest closets served to confirm that Lennard was fashionable, perhaps something modern for his taste, but he imagined him, in short, as a dashing man.
Horner was moving quickly from furniture to furniture, which caused him to slam the door of a music box that was used to hold watches, he hit his right arm with the wooden edge. A deep pain invaded his extremity, for it was the same arm that he had cleaned and bandaged the night of the accident.
He gave a hollow, mute grunt.
He inspected his forearm and checked that there was no blood on the bandage, which meant that the wounds had not been opened. The pain waned almost disappearing; however, the shadow that had sifted over his figure when he discovered that someone had entered his house wrapped him again. What was most disconcerting to him was to have the supposition of having struggled with someone (because of the furrows that had appeared on his forearm), and yet not remember anything. It seemed obvious that someone was playing with him, torturing him and adding new pieces to the puzzle every time. He pondered the idea that his abuser was directly related to the murder of Mike Lennard. He felt uneasy.
It was when he opened the first drawer of the nightstand that he discovered something that made his dark thoughts fly from his head. It was the kind of tip he was looking for. And it was disconcerting. Under some papers for old contracts and bills which gave him no information other than that Lennard rented and spent very little on water and electricity he found a blue plastic box filled with handwritten letters in Castilian and with an exquisite calligraphy. What seemed most peculiar to Horner was that the letters weren’t addressed to Lennard. All the correspondence contained in the folder was affectionately dedicated to the same person:
"Diana."
He took the first letter and noted that it actually corresponded to the last one to be received. It had been delivered on Monday, October 16, that is, less than a month ago. It was an irrefutable fact that at that time Mike Lennard was living in that house, which opened a range of possibilities: Had Lennard received all those letters by mistake? Did he live with a woman named Diana? Where was she now?
Intrigued, he spent a few minutes reading the letter, which took up a page and a half. It took only a few lines for him to be aware of it being an important discovery within the investigation. The person who had written the letter told Diana with total confidence a series of misfortunes that had happened to her in the last few days. She was talking about an attempted rape in her own home, the resolution of a case about a patient who had a tumor (at that point Horner assumed that the sender was a doctor), and that in the end it turned out to be her husband who ended up dying. It was obvious that the lines were written as a therapy and dedicated to someone very special. He raised his eyebrows as he read the
following paragraph:
Diana, what I'm about to tell you is very strong: Charley, the bastard who tried to rape me, committed suicide the other day. They found him on the rocks, on the cliff. I'm in shock right now.
He felt a shudder as he recognized the suicidal name. Lennard's twin brother! Could more casualties occur in such a few days? He then wondered if everything that had happened in Spain could be related to the murder of Cowley Road, and immediately materialized in his head the figure of his main suspect. He continued reading:
I made the decision to travel to Oxford next week. I think that's what's right for me right now. Actually, I need to see you.
He raised his eyebrows even more. The energy in his whole body altered, however, when he finished reading the farewell that was signed:
With all my love, Sara.
The folded page trembled in his hands. Sara. Sara Mora. S-A-R-A M-O-R-A. A torrent of questions with no apparent answer crowded his head. Who the hell is Diana? Why did Sara write all this correspondence and why did she send them to Lennard's address, if they were not really meant for him? Or was it? The image of Sara and Lennard leaving the other afternoon under the Bridge of Sighs shot back into his head.
Horner grimaced.
Then the agent's mental questionnaire jumped to the night of the crime. Sara Mora was there, and it was not a coincidence, as he had sensed right from the beginning. There was a certain connection between Mora, Mike Lennard, and the enigmatic Diana. Now the puzzle contained another piece that made it more complex. But in turn, he had found one more point to investigate. He had to find Diana any which way.
A familiar voice sounded in the background in the form of a cry, interrupting Alfred in his thoughts. It was Carroll, who informed him that he had found nothing of interest on the floor below and urged him to continue the investigation. Still shaking with emotion, Alfred folded all the letters twice in half and tucked them into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he closed the drawer, left the room and met his companion. He didn’t say anything about what he had discovered.
The Butterfly Effect Page 14