The Surreal Killer (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 2)

by Jerold Last

  “We hadn’t called ahead because we didn’t want her rehearsing her answers, since we didn’t know whether she might have been in on it with our suspect, the ex-boyfriend. We got to the house in our unmarked car, which any crook in Los Angeles could tell was an unmarked police car from a mile off since they all look the same, and rang the doorbell. All hell broke loose. The next thing we knew the former boyfriend, who turned out to have been there, had the murder victim’s wife at gunpoint in a hostage situation, and there were two babies in another room that could easily become hostages if we didn’t do something immediately. Harry and I discussed our options for about 30 seconds and then we charged in there with our guns drawn. John Wayne would have been proud of us even if the policy and procedure manual said we should have used the car radio to get local assistance and do it differently.

  “The former boyfriend looked like every other East LA gangbanger. Short, stocky build, young, wearing the official gangbanger outfit, a long-sleeved plaid cotton flannel shirt buttoned up to the neck and baggy, loose fitting chino pants. The gun in his hand looked like a 9mm semi-automatic, so probably held 15 rounds. The victim’s wife was short, wore an ultra-tight halter and jeans outfit, was obviously good looking, and was very well built except for a large belly hanging over her tight belt, as you might expect with a new baby in the next room. The gangbanger took one look at us and started shooting in our direction.

  “When the gunfire was over Harry was dead, the wife was slightly wounded, I didn’t have a scratch on me, and both of the babies were fine. I had shot the boyfriend 5 or 6 times and killed him. The boyfriend turned out to be high on some kind of drug so, in the words of the media and the lawyer representing the gangbanger's family in its wrongful death lawsuit against the LA Police Department and the City of Los Angeles, couldn’t be held responsible for thinking rationally in a stressful situation."

  "There were also a couple of felony warrants out on him for an assortment of crimes. I got a medal, a commendation, and recurring nightmares while my partner’s wife and three kids got a pension nobody could live on.

  "There was a three month long investigation by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office of whether my shooting of the boyfriend was an example of the Los Angeles Police Force’s racial bigotry because he was Hispanic. They declined to prosecute me on that charge because of 'insufficient evidence'. I also had a lot of trouble after that getting anyone from our detective squad to volunteer to be my new partner. Nobody wanted to be teamed with an accused bigot because that might have an adverse effect on a detective’s future career. I quit the police department about two months later when I got into law school. That was the last time I ever carried a gun.”

  Suzanne looked at me quizzically, both because of what I had said and what I hadn’t said. What I had said was new to her, which was a surprise since we had both talked a lot about our lives before we met. What I hadn’t said included a couple of additional killings that she did know about, but I didn’t feel any need to share my entire history with Vincent even if he was rapidly becoming a friend of ours. Suzanne and I would have a lot to discuss when we were alone tonight.

  Vincent thanked me for sharing my story, looked at me thoughtfully, stroked his chin a couple of times, and had no more to say.

  After lunch we walked over to the ruins of the ancient Inca fortress Sacsayhuaman and joined a group of six other biochemists, four from the Antofagasta campus of the university and the remaining two from Arica. Our new friend from Arica by way of Antofagasta, Manuel Velez, who was there, introduced us to the others in the group, which contained 2 additional men and 3 women. We walked around the ruins together, with a lot of discussion about what we were seeing and Incan history, which a couple of the group seemed to know a great deal about. Sacsayhuaman is impressive both for its beauty and the complexity of the construction, which rivals in many ways the much better known, at least in Europe and North America, pyramids of Egypt. The city of Cuzco was originally laid out in the form of a puma, or mountain lion, with the hill of Sacsayhuaman as its head.

  The fortress consists of three massive walls that are laid out to meander together for about 400 meters (four football fields, including the end zones, long). Strategically, any attacking army would have to expose its flanks at these walls. What makes this fortress so special is that despite their advanced (in some ways) technology, the Incas did not have cement, horses, or the wheel to aid in this massive construction project, and all of this construction was being done at an elevation of 3,399 meters (11,152 ft) on mountainous terrain. Individual blocks of solid rock over 8 meters high and weighing up to 300 tons were fitted firmly together and have stayed in place for over 600 years in a seismically active area. Blocks were transported over distances as great as 35 Km with only human labor, ropes, and wooden rollers. This was an enormous construction effort involving more than 20,000 men working over several years.

  One of the women from Antofagasta commented on the tremendous engineering skill of the Incas, and the huge amount of human labor needed to build this structure. She wondered aloud whether present-day Peruvians could build something on this scale that would work, much less survive for more than 600 years.

  Another of the Antofagastans suggested that the Incas who designed and built the fort must have come to Cuzco from Chile. Somewhat chauvinistically he added, "We Chileans can do anything if we work hard enough. We're very different from the rest of the people in South America."

  Sacsayhuaman includes not only its three massive walls, but also the ruins remaining from an inner fort with three towers. Our group spent over two hours walking around the ruins, with frequent stops to catch our breath due to the altitude. There was plenty of conversation, mostly in Spanish, but everyone knew enough English to indulge me. I learned a lot about the Incas as soldiers and warriors, and that they were by far the fiercest fighters the Spanish had ever encountered, in South America or in Europe. Warriors from the Incan nobility would take an oath to fight to the death and would either do so or commit suicide rather than allow the enemy to defeat and humiliate them.

  I also learned that all of the biochemists from Antofagasta were guppies, not sharks. When I compared notes on this bit of applied zoology with Suzanne and Vincent, we all agreed. That meant we could exclude the entire Antofagasta contingent from further consideration as suspects, and focus on just the Iquique and Arica groups for the rest of our fish classification on this trip. Vincent volunteered to organize an Arica group for dinner with us, so we could fish in different waters tonight.

  We decided to walk back to the hotel by way of a conveniently located bar that served much needed beer to dehydrated tourists. Over a couple of bowls of munchies, peanuts and olives, we had our late afternoon beers with a mixed group of five other scientists from the meeting, two from Arica and three from Antofagasta. Our chartered plane would first do a brief stop to let passengers off in Iquique, then another brief stop in Arica, and finally go on to Antofagasta, its final destination for tomorrow's flight. The two remaining biochemists from Arica, Felix Figueroa and Jaime Alarcon, were as fluent in English as Manuel Velez, so we four all sat together at the table and I did almost all of my talking with them. The other three women from Antofagasta preferred Spanish and Suzanne's company, so sat at the other end of the table in a group that included Suzanne and Vincent Romero. The discussion in Spanish was 99% about biochemistry. The remaining 1% was about how nice a place Antofagasta was to live and work in.

  In the meantime, we English speakers skipped over biochemistry to go directly to hunting, fishing, the Atacama Desert, the dating opportunities in Iquique, and what Arica was like. I had a lot of fun listening and learning as I got to see life in Chile's far north through the eyes of two handsome and available young bachelors, as well as one married Arican, Manuel. Felix and Jaime were in their low thirties, both good looking in a rugged way, and both looked like they shared the same barber who was still learning how to cut men's hair evenly. Felix was the one w
ith the dimple on his chin, while Jaime wore a well-trimmed beard that hid any dimples he might have had. Jaime also wore glasses, with thin frames and photo-gray lenses that darkened in the sun and lightened up indoors. Otherwise they looked a bit alike with dark hair and suntanned faces. Both men were significantly shorter than me and strongly built.

  Jaime and Felix were both hunters who told me that they had freezers full of venison, deer sausage, and Bambi-burgers. There was effectively no limit on the number of male deer they could shoot in hunting season, which lasted for the almost 8 months per year when the animals weren't busy making baby deer. Both men also were into hunting anything else they could shoot and eat like ducks, geese, quail, pheasants, rabbits, and doves. They asked if I hunted at home in California. I explained that with 20 million people crowded into Southern California, too many of them would-be hunters, it is problematical to find land to hunt on so I didn't hunt anymore. But I also mentioned that I had hunted with my father and uncles while growing up in San Diego.

  They also were enthusiastic fishermen, who went after game fish and the kind of fish that are more practical to eat, as well as shellfish of all varieties. I envied them the ease of catching and eating abalone, crabs, and other delicacies that were expensive or not readily available commercially at a reasonable price in Los Angeles.

  The Atacama Desert Jaime described was very different than the Hollywood image of a desert. He explained to us that, "It is literally the driest place on earth when measured by annual average rainfall, but that isn't the whole story. The Bolivian Andes are tall enough to block the movement of clouds from east to west in the southern part of South America, so large amounts of snow accumulate on the Andean mountain peaks when it rains in the huge basin from the Amazon River south to the Rio de la Plata. Locally, we call this 'Bolivian Winter'. When this snow melts, the water flows to the Pacific Ocean through vast subterranean rivers under the high deserts of Northern Chile and Southern Peru. The Atacama Desert is sprinkled with oasis areas where the underground water flows to the surface, or where the underground aquifer is shallow enough to draw water from wells that could sustain the needs of the population of a reasonable sized city. Thus, there are several small cities, three larger cities on the coast, and a lot of mining camps and mines scattered throughout the desert area, and a population of well over 1 million people living there. The scattered oases also support migratory birds and assorted wildlife, hence the hunting opportunities that many of the residents enjoy."

  Felix continued, "For single men living in Arica like Jaime and me, it is an interesting city with lots of tourists visiting en route between Chile and Peru by bus, car, or on bicycles passing through seasonally. But the big city around there is Iquique, which has a much larger base population, much more tourism, and big international cruise ships stopping overnight in the harbor all year round. Iquique is much better territory for hunting women for dating and hitting the local bars and clubs for company for the night. The anonymity of the here today, gone tomorrow tourists who visit a city half way around the world from their homes make for easy conquests. For the young men who live in Arica and Iquique it's easy to live out Playboy Magazine's fantasy of the ideal existence for the young bachelor. For the two of us, hunting season for attractive young women is open all year round, and Iquique is the place to do it. The students in Arica are strictly off limits for faculty dating, so we spend a lot of our weekends in Iquique.

  "Don't get me wrong. Arica is a great place to live. It's literally on the border between Peru and Chile, so it's a free trade zone and people don't feel tempted to smuggle stuff across the border. There are almost no taxes on things we buy, so the cost of living is low. There's an international airport, which is actually in Peru, so we can travel literally anywhere in the world from Arica without having to fly to Santiago on Lan Chile for a connecting flight. But it can get boring living there for single guys like us. Most of our colleagues like Manuel here are married with families, so they have a very different idea of what is fun to do on a Saturday night. Other than that, though, most of our time is spent working, playing, or socializing with our colleagues and their families. "Uncle Felix" and "Uncle Jaime" get invitations to an awful lot of birthdays for the almost infinite number of kids in the faculty families in Arica.

  "And there's also a pretty good social life for us in Arica. Just about every faculty wife has a younger sister or cousin she wants to fix up with Uncle Felix or Uncle Jaime. I'm sorry to say that Uncle Jaime seems to be getting pretty serious with one of those younger sisters, so there's a very good chance that he'll be getting married pretty soon and I'll have to find another hunting partner for weekends in Iquique. That's OK, there are a few good possibilities among the newer faculty members that I'm going to have to start checking out."

  By then it was time to go, so we continued back to the hotel.

  Back at the hotel we had an hour or two to rest before we connected with our group for dinner at 9 P.M. We'd been told to avoid restaurants in downtown Cuzco, which tended to be full of tourists and hippies drawn to Machu Picchu. The hotel dining room looked boring so we opted for an upscale restaurant a taxi ride away recommended by the hotel clerk. The eleven of us, distributed into three taxis, met at the restaurant where they had a table prepared for us. The main course for dinner was beef, pork, or the national dish of Peru, Cui, depending on the spirit of adventure of whoever ordered. Cui is guinea pig, prepared by barbecuing the intact animal in halves, including fur, teeth, and claws, so it looked like a guinea pig. We all tasted everything, except for Suzanne. For the record, Cui tastes like chicken if you can get past the normal aversion when you see the fur, and eat it.

  "I'm not normally squeamish about what I eat," Suzanne explained, "But Junior here in my uterus is pretty determined that he doesn't want to eat anything with fur on it. I think I'm going to let him decide, this time. Maybe next year when I can drink wine and beer again and Junior no longer has a vote, but definitely not tonight for me."

  After dinner the old fogies like us took two cabs back to the hotel and a pre-midnight bedtime. The remaining group, consisting of the younger faculty from Arica, took off in a third taxi into downtown Cuzco to tour the late night bar scene and try to pick up nubile young tourists and nubile hippies of any age. As we found out later, they met by prearrangement with several of the young men from Iquique for bar cruising and pickups. At this point we didn't yet know who were the lovers and who were the wingmen, but they all apparently had this technique well rehearsed and picking up girls late at night during the annual meetings was an important part of their regular routine.

  One of the group's leaders, Huberto Rojas from Iquique, was the oldest of this crew. He was divorced, with teenaged kids, and apparently held a very low opinion of the bar scene prey they stalked. He described the girls they picked up as "sluts, boozers, stoners, and crack whores." The annual rite of sexual passage for these bachelors (and a few who weren't bachelors) was just another form of hunting, which we were to find was the most popular activity to do in the Northern Chilean desert among the faculty members we would meet in the next few days.

  Suzanne pointed out the obvious. "This annual ritual may have a much more sinister purpose for at least one of these guys. He could be using it as cover to select the Surreal Killer's victims."

  We made a mental note to mention this possibility to Eduardo at our next meeting.

  More importantly for Suzanne and me, we got to play fish poker once again when we got back to the hotel. Of the eleven of us, eight were from Arica, six men and two women. We ruled out the women immediately as the wrong gender for serial killers, as well as being guppies. That left us with six men, who by my count were 5 sharks and 1 guppy. Suzanne also came up with five and one, but a different one for the guppy. Vincent came up with three and three, with the two guppies Suzanne and I had selected plus one more of our sharks as his guppies. That left us with three sharks by consensus, and one more possible shark based upon a majority vote.
Not too bad, all things considered. As of the end of the day we had three more names of would-be sharks by consensus, Manuel Velez, Felix Figueroa, and Jaime Alarcon, and one more name by split decision to add to Eduardo's list for in-depth checking out. We had ruled out the entire Antofagasta contingent of scientists as suspects. That left us with the group from Iquique to fish through for tomorrow's visit to Machu Picchu.

  It was late when we finally got to bed. I put my hand on Suzanne's slightly swollen belly and felt for movement. It was far too early to feel anything, at least from the outside. It was obviously time for me to say something.

  "I don't know what your impression of Vincent Romero is. Mine is that I like him a lot, and trust him just a little bit. I'm pretty sure he's playing us so he can get Eduardo and me to do some kind of dirty work for him. He keeps trying to point us at the administrators of the University of Chile as suspects, which is pretty disingenuous since none of them are scientists so they don't come to these meetings where the killings have occurred. I don't know what it is he's covering up, or why he wants to point us in the wrong direction, but I'm convinced that he's trying to hide something. And I'm not 100% sure yet that he isn't our serial killer. What do you think?"