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

by Jerold Last

  "You've spent a lot more time with him than I have, Roger. I don't know. But I would trust your judgment."

  "Since I think he's playing us, I thought I'd play him a little bit. He obviously wanted me to tell him that I'd killed someone when we were discussing what made a shark a shark. So I told him what he wanted to hear. Every cop learns the rule of thumb is that if you want to be a good liar, tell some truth with every lie. I did have a partner named Harry, who was a total jackass and a lousy cop. That was the true part of my confession. All the rest of that sad story was created for the occasion. No gun battle, no dead partner, no lawsuit, no medal, and no being shunned as a bigot. But I thought it was a pretty good story considering that I had to make it up on the spur of the moment. And it explained how I could look like a cop, act like a cop, and actually be completely harmless and no threat to him in case he turns out to be our Surreal Killer."

  By mutual nonverbal understanding we deferred any further discussion of my past to the indefinite future. But we did take a bad joke break.

  "Suzanne, are you the famous agnostic biochemist they warned me about who thought about having twins so she could baptize one and keep the other as a control?"

  "No Roger," she replied sweetly, "But I am planning on twins. I was thinking we could name one of them Roger Junior and keep the other one as a control."

  Chapter 11. Killing Suzanne, The Fantasy

  This meeting had been a little different from the others. It was larger than usual because of Lima being the venue, so that a lot of the local Peruvian scientists had come for one or both days. There were a couple of scientists from the United States who had been there, one of whom presented a poster. From the photo on her web page, she had looked pretty hot when he checked her out before the meeting. He daydreamed a bit about what she would look like after an injection, when she knew what was going to happen next but was powerless to do anything about it, and liked that image. He thought about it for what seemed to be a long time.

  He stared more closely at the now familiar photo on the web site. In color, head and shoulder shot, facing him directly. In the snapshot Suzanne had long blond hair down to her shoulders, blue eyes, Nordic features, and a serious look. She was beautiful. The face said good breeding and radiated an aura of success. It looked like everything she touched would turn to gold. The eyes seemed to be looking directly at him, and even through him. His immediate and visceral reaction to her photo was pure hate on first sight. She would almost certainly be pushy and aggressive, two traits he hated in a woman. Her obvious academic success as a scientist was probably due to the preferential hiring practices for women in the USA, just like all the new presidents and prime ministers in South America were suddenly women. Even in Chile! None of the new women leaders deserved it. It wasn't like El Presidente Augusto Pinochet, who had a distinguished career in the army before he ever thought of politics. And like Pinochet here he was, stuck in a mediocre career in the middle of nowhere rather than being recognized for his abilities while all the women at the university kept getting promotions.

  He tried to match the photo to what Suzanne seemed to be like in person. She had given her poster presentation at the meeting in Spanish, so she demonstrated her ability to speak and understand the language. That didn't seem to fit with her gringa image of near perfection and inaccessibility. She was a well published, in the best journals, biochemist whose research work had given her international stature. What was she doing in a crappy little meeting like this one? Maybe it was an excuse for her taking an all expenses paid vacation in an exotic locale supported by her research grant? Or maybe she was here to recruit future collaborators and graduate students. He allowed himself to briefly consider the possibility that someone suspected what he was doing and who was doing it. Could Suzanne or her husband be hunting him? His rational mind said no, quite firmly. He hadn't left a trail; there wasn't any way they could link the killings together, much less link him to the killings. He willed his imagination to calm down and relax.

  Then there was the other American at the meeting, her husband. Roger knew only the bare rudiments of Spanish, what Chileans called "survival Spanish" in tourists. He wasn't a real scientist but seemed to be a patent lawyer. Obviously he was a real lightweight who followed Suzanne around and lived in her shadow. A real man like his father would know how to handle a pushy woman like Suzanne. Roger was only half a man if he let a woman dominate him like that. If Roger was some kind of a man hunter, he had nothing to fear from him. With all of my advanced training in hand-to-hand combat and regular exercise, he thought, Roger couldn't last for a minute in a real fight with him. The thought pleased him greatly, and helped him to calm down.

  He thought again about what Suzanne would look like after an injection and realized what a very bad idea it would be to try to find out. The international furor if a top American scientist was killed here in an obscure corner of South America would blow his cover of anonymity to smithereens. Killing Suzanne was a lovely fantasy, but would have to remain just a fantasy for now.

  Chapter 12. Machu Picchu: The Breadcrumb Trail Leads Us to a Shopping List of New Suspects

  Machu Picchu suffered a major earthquake several years ago, with extensive damage to the railroad and highway infrastructure. Since then the Peruvian government has limited access to the sacred city to 2,500 people per day, admitted only by tickets purchased in advance. Our prepackaged tour handled all of the travel logistics for us. The tour allowed us about four hours at the ruins themselves plus eight hours of travel to and from Cuzco. There would be more than enough time to get to know everybody in the contingent from Iquique, and to try to separate some more guppies from the sharks on our suspect list.

  We left Cuzco at 7 A.M. for the train station at Poroy. A 20-minute bus ride followed by a 3-hour train ride followed by a second 20-minute bus ride took us up the mountain to the ancient sacred city of the Incas. Along the way Vincent introduced us to all of the members of the Iquique contingent. We had a chance to talk to all of them in small groups along the way on our four-hour trip from Cuzco to Machu Picchu. This was a great chance to get first impressions of a lot of would-be suspects, but clearly our impressions would be superficial. We would have to spend time with each of them in Iquique to sort out who the real sharks were in this group.

  The first bus ride was next to two of the older couples from Iquique, Letitia and Eugene Colon and Roberta and Francis Roberts. All four were fluent in English. Both men were Americans with a similar CIA background to Vincent's, which was off limits for any discussion as Vincent had told us firmly the previous night. Both men were about the same age as Vincent and in pretty good physical shape for their age, as well as easy to make small talk with. Both wives were about ten years younger than their husbands, also easy to chat with, and attractive. Our first meeting with everybody was mostly restricted to small talk to break the ice and get some first impressions. We'd get to know them each better over the span of a long day together in Machu Picchu and on the flight to Chile. We discussed what to see and do at our destination, as we were all first-time visitors to this sacred city. My initial impressions were that Eugene and Francis were sharks, while the wives were not on my list of suspects. No surprises there.

  The long train ride was a chance to chat with six more of the Iquique contingent and two other scientists from Arica, all men and all professors from the University who were native Chileans. Our social secretary Vincent had arranged for us to meet Manuel Obregon, Romero Sanchez, Pedro Elleman, Pablo Pinochet (yes, he was a distant cousin of Augusto), Norberto Neruda (another distant cousin of a different famous Chilean, a poet and writer), and Huberto Rojas on this long leg of the trip. The Aricans were Felix Figueroa and Jaime Alarcon, who we had already met. With Vincent's sponsorship and Suzanne's credentials we didn't have to do much to keep the conversation flowing. In a mixture of heavily and lightly accented English they asked Suzanne about her work, and both of us about our life in Los Angeles. All of them had seen LA in
the movies, but none of them had ever been there. Only two, Manuel Obregon and Romero Sanchez, had ever been to the United States. They had taken their families together on a vacation to Disneyworld in Florida the only time they had visited the USA.

  They all told us with obvious pride that Iquique is a great city to live in and raise a family. My first impressions were that they were a mixture of tall and short, thin and fat, and introverted and extroverted. Strangely, my fish meter didn't work. I got off the train uncertain whom in that group was shark and who was guppy. That was an interesting and surprising deviation from the norm for me, and I was looking forward to some privacy later on the trip to share impressions with Suzanne.

  The second short bus ride allowed us to chat a bit with the last two members of our group, another couple. Jose and Francesca Molina were the youngest members of the group, both in their late twenties, newly married, both recent Ph.D.s new to the faculty at Iquique, and totally involved with each other. They had trained together in the same laboratory in biochemistry at the University of Chile in Santiago, fallen in love, and found in the rapidly growing northern city of Iquique the only professional situation where they could stay together. They were delightful young people who were totally involved with each other and the least likely serial killers I had ever met. My impression was two more guppies for the list.

  Machu Picchu itself is amazing. It is not just the engineering scope and scale, the artistry of the architecture, and the remote and inaccessible location. It's the serenity and spirituality of the place. That's why Machu Picchu is at the top of the list for international visits by New Age enthusiasts and affluent hippies. Almost five hundred years after the conquest of the Incas, a visitor can still feel this religiosity emotionally and consciously, even though it is a different religion than that of 99.9% of the tourists who visit there. Neither Suzanne nor I are particularly religious, but both of us felt this as strongly as the much more deeply observant Chileans we were traveling with, all of whom were Roman Catholic. Just standing on the mountaintop, silently looking at the ruins of the Temple of the Sun or the Temple of Three Windows, makes it impossible not to be embraced by the spirituality of Machu Picchu. The distant cousin of Norberto Neruda, Chile's greatest poet and writer Pablo Neruda, said it far better than I can in his work, "The Heights of Machu Picchu". "Machu Picchu is a trip to the serenity of the soul, to the eternal fusion with the cosmos, where we feel our fragility." Perhaps the strongest statement made by anyone in our group was the long silence as we looked at the ancient Incan ruins and thought our private thoughts.

  Suzanne reached over, took my hand, and squeezed. I'm reasonably certain that she was thinking of our child-to-be growing deep inside her at that moment. I know I was.

  “Let’s forget what we’re doing here for the moment,” she whispered. “Just listen to what all of your senses are telling you.”

  So, we tried to balance tourism with detective work for the rest of the day. It wasn't easy to do.

  We spent about four hours climbing around looking at the ruins with the aid of a bilingual guide who explained what it was we were looking at and what its original function was. No explanation was required, or indeed possible, for the intense blueness of a cloudless sky at 12,000 feet of altitude, the intense greens and browns of the surrounding mountains, or the intense silence of our surroundings. We compared notes with whomever we were closest to at the moment, and found ourselves bonding to the members of our group. Given that our group of Chileans all knew one another before this trip and we were strangers prior to the Lima meeting, this was an incredible opportunity for us to make progress on our mission for Eduardo Gomez. Perhaps because they were also semi-outsiders, from Arica, we found ourselves paired off with Jaime Alarcon and Felix Figueroa several times. The rest of the time we were part of a larger scrum containing most of the group except those taking a cigarette or bathroom break.

  Jaime and Felix took turns translating what the guide was saying, and occasionally sharing little gems of information of their own.

  We stood in front of a large rock with a curious zigzag pattern carved into its top surface.

  Jaime translated what the guide was saying. "The early Incas had to adjust to life high in the Andes, an area of steep cliffs, huge boulders, and mountainous terrain. They made unique stone formations into special objects for worship by imbuing them with spiritual properties. These rocks were thought to possess their own spiritual forces so they were truly 'gifts from the gods'. The carved rock you're looking at here in the Machu Picchu ruins is called Q’enko. It has a puma carving and zigzag channels carved into the top to allow the flow of llama blood after sacrifice of the animals during religious rituals."

  Felix continued, "The puma and other sacred animals like the condor or eagle are a recurring theme in all of the religious places found in this area. Here and in Cuzco the most sacred structures feature the puma image. The puma represents the Incan god responsible for our world and was worshiped by all of the Incas. The condor represents the gods of the upper world, which included the sun, moon, stars, lightning, and rainbows. The third kind of animal they deified was the snake, which represented the lower world, or inner earth. That was where the ancestors of the Incas, their great dead heroes, and the most important of their gods Pachamama, Mother of the Earth, lived."

  We moved onwards to another ruin of a rock wall.

  Jaime translated, "There are ceremonial showers at Machu Picchu (e.g., Tambomachay) where the nobility bathed in preparation for rituals. Apparently the nobles and the priests both participated in the important ceremonies, some of which included sacrifices of animals or humans. Human sacrifice was rare. It happened only during the most special occasions, like the crowning of a new King of the Incas or to try to get the gods to intervene in famines or epidemics of disease. Animal sacrifice, especially llamas, occurred a lot more often. The most common sacrifice was a small amount of food crops at the time of harvest to ensure a good yield for the next crop."

  There was a lot more to see, to hear explained, and to experience. We eventually thanked Jaime and Felix for their help and separated during a cigarette break for the guide.

  We had a moment of privacy to ourselves in front of the watchman's hut to one side of the ruins.

  I leaned against a convenient rock wall and asked Suzanne, "When we talked to the eight gentlemen on the train and during our tour, how many did you put on your list of guppies and how many on the shark list?"

  "Strangely," she replied, reaching over and taking my hand, "I didn't get any strong signals from any of them. None of them have made it onto my list yet. How about you?"

  "Exactly the same as you. That's why I asked. Let's try to focus on them for the rest of the day and on the flight to Chile tonight. It would be nice to get that list completed before we see Eduardo in Iquique. The default strategy is they all get listed as sharks with a question mark." I squeezed Suzanne’s hand and received a nice squeeze back in return.

  "So, has today been worth the effort for you despite our striking out on eliminating any more suspects so far?" asked Suzanne. "Machu Picchu has been a completely mind blowing experience for me. The only thing I've seen before in South America that even comes into the same conversation is Iguazu Falls."

  "To tell the truth, Suzanne, today has been a very productive day for me in several ways. It really surprised me, but I feel all of the same things you do here; it's a unique and special place. I think it's that special sense of solitude, serenity, and spirituality here at Machu Picchu that's enabled me do a whole lot of thinking and analysis about what we know and what I can guess about the Surreal Killer. I've got a plausible hypothesis about who and where he is now. Maybe I even got a little help from the Incan gods on this one. If I'm right, the answers are waiting for us in Iquique. But we still need to find proof that can stand up in a court of law, and we still need to sort through a tightly organized school of sharks to identify the specific shark with all of the blood on his fins. And on
e thing I haven't been able to figure out yet is whether some of the other sharks in that group are trying to protect the bad shark or whether they're trying to figure out who he is so they can eat him.”

  "Are you going to tell me who it is now?" asked Suzanne curiously.

  "Whoa, you're getting ahead of me here. I didn't mean that I knew exactly whom the Surreal Killer is literally, with a name attached. What I have in my head is a pretty complete profile of the Surreal Killer. I should know him when I see him and get enough background information about him. At worst, I should be able to narrow the field of suspects to a pretty small number."

  "Is that all you're going to tell me now?"

  "Yep. You know as much as I do. See what you can figure out. I'd feel more confident if someone with a fresh pair of eyes looked at all this and came to the same conclusions as I have. Can you do that?"

  "Of course I can," replied Suzanne with an amused half smile. "You do this to me all the time, so what's another day or two of working in the dark to me?"

  "OK, Suzanne. For now, it's time for us to get back to being tourists. But, you know what else? We seem to be going into a pretty small fish tank in Iquique with at least some sharks cruising around in it. Since the first week after we met and traveled to Salta together we’ve assumed that either one of us can take care of ourselves in a fight, but some of those sharks have had a lot more training in the serious kind of hand-to-hand fighting than either of us have ever had. I think this is a good time to start being very, very careful, careful about what we say and about what we do. Let’s not volunteer any information about who we are or why we’re here and let's not worry about being open and honest with anybody we meet after we get to Iquique until we finish sorting out who the good guys are and aren’t. For the moment at least, that includes our good friend Vincent, who already knows far too much about us, and I'm not at all sure that vice is versa. We know his public persona pretty well, but I defy you to tell me what he's actually thinking behind the affable mask he wears.”