by Rodolfo Peña
Lombardo’s silence irritated the Fat Man so he said, “The Director sounded pretty pissed off this morning when he called to say you were assigned to the investigation. So, what did you do? You didn’t refuse the little Christmas present again, did you? The one they say narcos sent over?”
They say. People always used that little formula to justify spreading rumors and innuendo. The latest one said the Gulf Cartel had sent a briefcase full of dollars to the Investigations Department of the Public Ministry and that the money had been spread around so the cops could go on Christmas vacation while the Cartel went about its business undisturbed.
Lombardo stopped, threw away the cigarette stub, and lit another Delicado.
“Did the kids take everything?” he asked the Fat Man.
“Huh? What kids?”
“You said there were some kids hanging around when the sergeant got here. Did they take anything?”
“What? From the corpse, you mean? How would I know? We didn’t want to touch anything until you arrived.”
“Look, you fat bastard. You told that poor, old cop to say that kids were rousting the guy. If you took anything, I mean any goddamned thing, money, a watch, anything, I will see to it you are found among the next batch of narco executions, you understand, you lazy, fat pig? Now go back there and see if there is something in his pockets that will help us identify the victim. Do you understand me?”
Fat Gonzalez wasn’t smiling anymore when he went back to “search” the corpse.
“I’m sure you’ll ‘find’ something,” Lombardo said. The PM agents looked at Lombardo with a smirk on their faces. “They’re thinking we’re going to mess this up just like we mess everything up,” he said to no one in particular, “and they are probably right.”
He walked over to the two young forensic medics that were preparing the container in which they were going to place the head.
“Good morning, boys,” he said.
They looked up and said, “Good morning, Captain.” They knew him from other cases and he vaguely remembered them, too.
The two young forensic specialists seemed merely boys to him. They usually sent out newly hired people on these unimportant cases. They were probably trainees. There was no swarm from SEMEFO, the forensic services, on this one as there was when the bodies of dead cartel soldiers were found in some field. In those cases, the newspapers needed good photos of the “authorities in action.”
Whenever something especially heinous happened, all the politicians would show up at the scene of the crime to declare their will to fight the lawlessness. “Those responsible for these terrible deeds will be punished to the full extent of the law,” the Prosecutor would tell the press. “We will pursue this matter to the highest level, whoever may fall as a consequence,” the Governor would tell the press. But the press, and the public, and the Prosecutor, and the Governor would forget about it the next day when another brace of corpses was found in a field or in the desert. A week or two later, when an even more atrocious murder scene was discovered the same charade would be repeated.
Lombardo looked down at the bloody, muddy ball that had once been someone’s head. “The train didn’t kill him, did it?”
“No,” said one of the boys while placing a plastic bag over the head. “He wasn’t shot or stabbed either. There seem to be pieces of plastic around his neck so he might have been suffocated, or strangled, but there’s not much of his neck left for us to tell at this point,” said one of the boys.
“I lifted his shirt, Captain. His body looks like he was well worked over. There are plenty of bruises,” said the other boy.
“Did you guys get a chance to go over the area before that crowd over there trampled all over it?”
“Yes,” said the one who seemed the older of the two boys. “But there was nothing—no bullet cartridges, no blood, no cigarette butts, nothing. I think he was dumped from a car.”
“Any tire tracks, footprints?”
“Nope,” said the boys in unison.
“Hmm,” said Lombardo puffing at his cigarette and sipping the last of the coffee. He went back to the body and looked at the young man’s hands, turned palms up, like a baby sleeping on its stomach. There were no marks of his having been tied up. “It doesn’t make sense; too clean.” he said aloud.
He came back to where the boys were now putting the head in a container with blue ice bags.
“Too clean,” he said again.
“What’s that, Captain?” one of the boys asked.
“This was not a robbery and this is not the style of the cartels.”
“What makes you think it was not a robbery, Captain?” asked the other boy.
“Oh, I have a hunch,” he said and turned to the sound of the Fat Man’s approaching footsteps.
He was smiling again and waving a billfold, shaking it as if he was trying to dry it. “Look what I found in the bushes,” he cackled. “And I found his rings, and watch, and other stuff. They were in those bushes over there.”
“You’re a great cop, Fatso,” said Lombardo. “I knew you’d find the stuff if anybody could.”
He turned to the boys again. “How long do you think it will be before you send the body to the SEMEFO?”
“About an hour. We’ll be putting the body into the ambulance in a few minutes. The Public Ministry people are already writing up the report.”
“Mm, I guess they’re in a hurry to go get some breakfast,” said Lombardo dragging on his cigarette. “Tell Doctor Figueroa I’ll come by the University Hospital tomorrow.”
He had always trusted Dr. Figueroa, the Director of SEMEFO’s forensic services. The good doctor would tell him all the things that the body had revealed about how it met its violent death. Dr. Figueroa and his staff were a small island of honesty in a sea of official corruption.
“I am evidence of the resiliency of the Mexican people,” he told Lombardo once. “No matter how corrupt the political system, how brutal the drug wars get, how much larceny, mayhem, natural disasters, economic crisis, are thrown upon us, we bend and sway but never break as a country.”
“I don’t know, Doctor,” Lombardo had responded. “There is just so much people can take. Look at the revolutions in France, here in Mexico, and Russia; look at how tough the Jews have gotten and how tough the Arabs are getting. You can push people just so far.”
“Send me a copy of your report, boys,” Lombardo said to the young forensic doctors and he went back to his lamentable heap of a car.
Chapter 3: The Three Foreigners and the Car
The three men arrived early in the morning at the garage where they had been instructed to go. They honked just one time, and the garage door opened. Two men in dirty overalls were waiting inside.
The men in the car got out; the driver threw the keys at one of the men in overalls and said, “Límpialo bien y luego deshazte de él.” The man’s Spanish had a slight foreign accent, but the orders were clear: clean it up and then get rid of it.
A second man, a black man, threw another set of keys at them. “Y este también. Está en la Presa de la Boca,” he said indicating that another car, that was somewhere near a reservoir, had to be gotten rid of, too.
The three foreigners went out the back door, which they closed gently. The sound of a car’s motor told the men inside the garage that the three foreigners were now gone.
The first thing the two men in overalls did was take out the back seat. They stripped the blood-soaked cover and stuffing from the seat’s frame and one of them took them outside to burn. The other man got some rags and bottles of naphtha.
When the other man came back, they both went over every surface of the car, cleaning conscientiously, carefully wiping away any possible trace of fingerprints or palm prints. Then they vacuumed it and washed the tires and wheel wells.
After they were satisfied that the car was clean, they proceeded to dismantle it, expertly taking care not to damage the parts because they would be worth a good amount of money
in the used car parts market, where the parts would disappear—after having lost their provenance—into the dozen of junk yards that bordered the northern suburbs of the city.
Anything with a serial number or any sort of identification was put into a large wooden box that would be given to the man that came and carted things off to be sold as scrap iron. The identification numbers would disappear under the thousand degree electric arc of a smelting plant.
The work took most of the morning. Early that afternoon a truck rumbled up to the garage. Two men got out of the truck and after greeting the two men in the garage proceeded to load the car parts into the closed back of the two ton truck.
The two men from the garage sat in an old car seat drinking beers and watching the two men load the truck.
After the loading was done, the driver of the truck said, “We will be back for the rest tomorrow.”
“No,” said one of the men from the garage. “You have to take it away today.”
The driver of the truck shrugged. “OK, I’ll be back for it later, then. This old bitch can only carry so much, you know” he said and got into the truck. One of the men in the garage used a remote control to open the garage door and the truck rolled away.
After closing the door, the two men continued to drink beer in the quiet of the garage until they fell asleep. The only sound disturbing the deep silence now was the snoring of the two men.
In the middle of the chop shop, as if it were the skeleton of a horse that had died in the desert, the chassis of the dismantled car lay stark, naked, stripped of all usefulness, as it waited for the truck that would take it to its final resting place, the smelter’s furnace.
While the garage men slept, the three men who had brought them the car to be dismantled checked out of their hotel and left in another rented car. Their first rented car, the one that had been dismantled, would later be reported as missing by the car rental company, and upon trying to contact the gentleman who had rented it, they would discover that the credit card that had been used to rent the car was created for a man who died in a small town in the state of Oregon some years ago.
On their way to the airport, the three men stopped to have a late lunch at a roadside restaurant.
They ate in silence until the black man said, “You should have let me drive the guy’s car to that garage. I don’t trust those two fools to go get it right away.”
“It was too risky to let either one of you drive it back,” said the oldest of the three.
“It’s just as risky relying on those two clowns,” insisted the black man.
“Look,” said the older man who, if anybody was watching them, would have been easily identified as the leader of the three, “if a cop had stopped you it would have been hard to explain what you were doing with the car and if he got suspicious, who knows what would have happened.”
“A cop might also stop one of those guys when he drives it back.”
“Maybe so, but he has a better chance of getting away with it. He can speak the lingo, he knows the local customs and how to bribe these guys, and even if they run him in, he won’t know a thing. He can just say he stole it.”
Again there was silence. But a few minutes later, the black man spoke up again, “I still say we should have…”
“Shut the hell up,” said the leader angrily, “what’s done is done.”
Other people in the restaurant turned to look their way and the leader lowered his head. The last thing he wanted was to be remembered by the other patrons.
Chapter 4: The Governor Gets a Phone Call and Makes a Phone Call
At ten in the morning that same day, Governor Platón Sanchez Reyes, Constitutional Governor of Nuevo León, had been dictating orders to his personal assistant when his secretary buzzed his telephone: Dr. Filiberto Herrera, Dean of the State University, was calling.
“Put him through,” said the Governor.
“Governor Sanchez, good morning,” said the Dean.
“Dean Herrera, good morning.”
“Governor, I hate to bother you with bad news so early in the day, uh, but, uh, one of our employees, a young man named Victor Delgado, was found dead by, uh…it seems he was, uh, found dead on the street, and, uh, I believe it was near or on the portion of railroad tracks that go by Cervecería del Norte.”
“Hmm, yes, terrible news. Well, Dean Herrera, I am very sorry to hear that one of your employees has died but I don’t see…”
“The reason I called, Governor, is that Victor, the young man who died, was helping us in our, uh, ‘project.’”
The Governor paused before he spoke. “And, you think that maybe…”
“I don’t know. That is why I am calling. I thought maybe you…”
“No, I don’t get reports from the Public Ministry or the Secretary of the Interior until noon.”
“Also, I was wondering if you might, uh, talk to your press people and have them, I mean the media, keep this a bit quiet, until we find out more, you know.”
“Yes, yes, that’s a good idea. I’ll tell my press secretary to call people and say that, uh, well, we would like, you know, to not make things worse for the family making a big thing or showing pictures or, uh, you know, something of that nature.”
“Yes, that would really help, Governor.”
“I’ll also make some phone calls to the people at the Prosecutor’s office to see if they know anything,” said the Governor.
“Yes, yes, that would be helpful, too.”
“Meanwhile,” said the Governor forcefully, “you’d better get your people ready for this. The media or the people from the Investigations Department might come around, you know, to do their job, investigate what happened, and so on. Tell your people to keep a low profile, to just do the minimum, don’t get involved. Let’s find out first what this means. It could have been just an accident but we should make sure.”
“OK, I’ll do that,” said the Dean,” I’ll call Dr. Delgado, the head of the Computer Center first.”
“Keep me informed if anything comes up and I’ll let you know if I hear anything that might be of interest to you, OK?”
“Yes, Governor,” said the Dean.
“Goodbye, then.”
“Goodbye, Governor.”
As soon as the Governor hung up, he buzzed his personal assistant, “I want to talk to the Prosecutor, the Director of Investigations, and the Director of the Public Ministry Agency. I don’t want them on the phone, I want them in my office as soon as possible.”
“You have several appointments this morning and you are to go to…”
“Fine, but find me times when I can see them today. The first person I want to see is the Director of Investigations, and tell my Press Secretary to come up here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“OK, make the phone calls, but before you get started bring me my secure cell phone.”
“Yes, sir,” said the personal assistant jumping up from his chair.
The assistant took a cell phone that was recharging in its cradle and brought it to the Governor. He placed it on the Governor’s desk and quietly walked out of the office.
The Governor bit his lip and stared at the cell phone for a moment before he picked it up and punched in a number. It took a few seconds for the call to go through. The cell phone he had called rang four times before it was answered.
“Why are you calling?” said a gruff voice.
“There’s been an incident that I thought you should know about.”
“Yes?”
“Uh, a young man, from the University, who was helping us on the project, was, uh, found dead this morning.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I just thought that, since this is so sensitive, that, you should…”
“So, they found a man dead who was helping us on the project?” asked the voice.
“Yes, and…”
“What are the circumstances? How did he die?”
“I don’t know; I, uh, just thought I woul
d let you know, because…”
“Look, don’t call me with half-assed information. When you have all the facts, and, if they are important, I mean, important to the project, let me know; otherwise, don’t call me. I am in the middle of something here.”
“Uh, yes, OK, I will find out more and, uh, if there is something you should know…”
The Governor heard a click. The other phone had ended the call.
His desk phone buzzed and his secretary said, “The Press Secretary is here, sir.”
“Right, tell him to come in.”