by Jerold Last
Chapter5 . Forensics, strategy and job assignments
Suzanne and I walked a few blocks over to where we were meeting Eduardo and Martin for a late breakfast at a local restaurant where we could avoid anybody overhearing our conversation. We had a booth in the back of the eating area and a lot of privacy. After ordering yogurt and granola and drinking my first cup of coffee, I started to feel like I was waking up after too little sleep and too much food and wine the previous night.
I looked directly at Martin. "We really appreciated your picking us up at the airport and getting us a place to stay at our favorite hotel here in Montevideo. I never got a chance to ask you an important question given what happened when we arrived at the hotel. Who exactly made our hotel reservations?"
"I specified the hotel, but made the reservations through the official travel department that the police department maintains at the Intendencia. That way you got a very cheap rate on your room and it was minimal hassle for me. If there was a leak it had to originate at the hotel."
“Was there anything interesting in the preliminary autopsy report that you got on Bernardo, Martin?”
Martin looked like he had slept even less than I had. That was almost certainly the case. “He died from the knife wound in his throat, as you could easily have concluded by the amount of bleeding he did. The knife was somewhat out of the ordinary. The Medical Examiner referred to the blade as a "mini-scimitar". It was had a curved blade like the swords we see Arabs carrying in the movies but the entire blade couldn't have been more than 12-15 cm (5-6 inches) in length. It was probably a pocketknife or a switchblade. It could have been a sheath knife. There were large amounts of a tranquilizing drug in his blood, and something else we haven’t identified yet from the analysis of the blood. It’s some kind of drug we don’t have an analytical standard for.”
“Where did it come out on the chromatogram in relation to a Valium standard and what was the molecular weight by mass spectrometry?” asked Eduardo.
Martin checked his pocket notebook where he kept his case notes. “It eluted about five minutes after Valium and had an apparent molecular weight of about 650.”
Eduardo nodded, as if he had been expecting that information. “We’ve been seeing something in the past year that looks like that used to make the victim totally compliant to your orders, so you can handle the tough guys easily. Was there a fresh injection site somewhere?”
Martin quickly looked at his notebook again. “Yes, directly into the jugular vein.”
Eduardo nodded again. “So now we know how they were able to get Bernardo into the hotel room without a big fuss and why there wasn’t any noise when his throat was cut.”
Martin looked thoughtful. “Can you tell us anything about this mysterious new drug, Eduardo?”
Eduardo appeared to be lost in thought for a moment. “It seems to have originated in Russia, and is now showing up in the middle east. It’s not readily available unless you’re in the spy business. Most of the people we’ve found with this drug in their blood have been dead, so we don’t have a lot of details. It’s obviously been used for interrogation and pacification, as well as making it easier to kill a victim in a situation where subtlety is necessary. The murders we know about where the drug was used involved Iranian agents.
“I think Suzanne’s suggestion that this whole mess is aimed at me just turned out to be right. There’s a spy, probably Iranian, involved in this murder and the creation of the whole scenario for reasons that we don’t know yet. Is there anything else you know about this killing, Martin?”
Martin thought a bit before he replied, “Bernardo was a cautious and cunning man. It wouldn’t have been easy for anyone to get close enough to inject him like that unless he knew and trusted the individual. His weaknesses were attractive women and fellow fascists. We may be looking for a suspect with one or the other of those attributes, if not both.”
Martin’s mouth got an interesting expression, like he’d just bit into something bitter. He looked directly at Eduardo. “Can you tell me what kind of a case you’re currently working on for, I assume, the Mossad? And may I also assume somewhat illegally here in Uruguay?”
Sometimes, if you ask a stupid question, you get an appropriate answer. “No, I can't tell you anything about what I am working on or for who or where,” replied Eduardo.
Martin’s entire face got that I just bit into something bitter look. Suzanne tactfully changed the subject a bit. “Who do you think lured Bernardo in to the trap Martin? Was it a femme fatale or a fascist?”
“I’m going to refer all questions on this topic to my Paraguayan colleague from here on. As a courtesy, please let me know when the case is solved.”
The rest of brunch was eaten around a discussion of last night’s party and dinner. Martin excused himself to get back to work. The three of us remained over more coffee to get back to discussing the case.
“Hey, Eduardo,” asked Suzanne, “Can you tell me what kind of a case you’re currently working on?”
“In general terms, of course I can. I may have to get a little vague about the specifics. And, of course, you have to promise me that all of this will remain confidential, which was something Martin could never have promised as it pertained to Uruguay.”
Both of us nodded agreement, which was the signal Eduardo was waiting for to continue.
"The Mossad sent me here to Martin's home country to interfere in whatever ways possible with the growing relationship between Uruguay and Iran. Both countries are being pushed by economic necessity into trade relationships despite whatever political differences they might have. Uruguay needs a market for its rice and it needs oil, preferably in exchange for rice rather than for hard currency. It has a long history of selling rice and beef products to Iran. Iran needs additional markets for its oil especially since it has been harder and harder to find buyers for the oil in the face of the sanctions the US and the UN Security Council have placed on trade with Iran. The Uruguayan foreign minister has visited Iran to promote closer economic cooperation between the two countries, despite pressure from the US to reduce their trade and other interactions. Former President George W. Bush actually made an anti-Iranian speech in Uruguay as part of the US campaign against this new relationship between the countries.
"The Mossad is concerned because drug smuggling in Latin America is financing several Middle Eastern terrorist groups like Hezbollah, which is supported by Iran. Israel is also worried about how Latin American countries like Uruguay will vote on several resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly. They're especially concerned about how Uruguay will vote on United States-sponsored sanctions designed to slow down Iran's nuclear weapons program. So, my job is to gather intelligence about any spies the Iranian government has here in Uruguay promoting their interests. I'm here in an unofficial capacity, but I'm expected to interfere with the spies' activities however I can. The Mossad also wants me to gather intelligence about the key figures in the Uruguayan government who are cooperating with the Iranians. I'm supposed to use this information to interfere with their activities however I can. If Martin knew all this, he'd rephrase what I just said as my job is to kill the spies and blackmail the politicians to destroy the relationship between Iran and Uruguay, and have me thrown out of the country."
"Is that really what you're here for, Eduardo?" asked Suzanne thoughtfully.
"This is where I have to get a little vague about the specifics, Suzanne."
Suzanne mulled over what we had heard for almost a full minute. Then she appeared to make a decision. "OK, that makes a perfect motive for the Iranians to want to discredit you and get you thrown out of Uruguay, Eduardo, so we have a working hypothesis about who killed Bernardo Colletti and why we found his body in our hotel room. Now we have to prove it. Have you identified any of the Iranian spies here in Montevideo yet?"
Eduardo leaned towards us and lowered his voice. "I just got to Uruguay a day before you two, so the answer is no. Unless we include al
l of the personnel at their embassy, which is a good place to start looking for spies anywhere."
Suzanne looked directly at me for tacit approval as she formulated our response. "Roger and I were thinking that the weak link in the chain is the individual who leaked the information about our travel plans to the killer. We think it's possible that it was one of the three police captains at our table last night. Suppose we take that trio of "persons of interest" and run with it as a starting place while you concentrate on the embassy staff? How can we find out which one we want to put some pressure on?"
Eduardo sipped some cold coffee as a prop while he thought it through. "I can check out bank records for all of the embassy staffers who have checking or savings accounts in Montevideo, which should be all of them since they need access to Uruguayan pesos to live here. I can do the same for the three captains here. Then we can see if anything matches, which it will if one of them is dirty and betrayed Martin for the money. What's the full name for each of those three police captains, Roger? And just in case one of them is smarter than we might think they are, what's the name of each of their wives just in case they're using an account in the spouse's name?"
Out came the little pocket notebook with all of the little details related to this case thus far that might some day be important. I flicked through the pages until I found what the information I was looking for.
"Flores, Eloy, wife Graciella Amarillo; Fortunato, Andres, wife Maria Verde; Blanco, Juan, wife Carla Rojas."
Eduardo sipped a little bit more of that coffee. "Roger, can you ask Martin for copies of the complete personnel records for all three of the captains? We probably want to know as much as we can about their history to see if any of them might have had a previous connection with any Iranians in the course of duty."
I made a note on the first clean page of my notebook.
Suzanne had been listening to all of this with a pensive expression. "Eduardo, do you think the Mossad computers would have the names and dossiers on all known Iranian spies operating in South America? Martin told us that Bernardo would be on high alert around any stranger unless he was confident that they were fellow fascists or were a beautiful woman. I doubt that any contemporary Iranian would be too credible as a fascist by Bernardo's definition, which leaned towards blonds with swastikas, given the current government there even if they are technically Aryans. So let's look for a beautiful seductive spy and cherchez la femme as we review those files."
That earned another entry in my notebook.
Suzanne continued. "I have one more idea. Bernardo's ex-wife Patricia is a friend. Why don't I visit her and tell her that I know the detective working on the case and ask her what she knows about Bernardo's life in the past few months? There may be some information lurking there that we can use. After all, Eduardo, Montevideo would be a pretty boring place for me to visit if you were declared persona non grata in Uruguay."
The waiter looked relieved when we paid the bill and left the restaurant, the only customers still at a table keeping him from going off to his next job. We agreed to meet Eduardo for dinner at the hotel that evening. Suzanne and I split up with bus rides in opposite directions to do our assigned tasks, Suzanne headed for the university and me back to the police station.
Chapter6 . We do some detecting
Suzanne went directly to the Facultad de Quimica, where her friend and colleague Patricia Colletti, Bernardo's ex-wife, was a professor. After abrazos with Patricia and the entire laboratory group, and being served the inevitable cup of over-sweetened coffee, she sat down in a corner with her friend and got down to business.
"Patricia, I promised the detective in charge of Bernardo's murder investigation that I'd get some information from you. He's a good friend of ours and was comfortable with this arrangement. I thought it might be a whole lot easier for you to discuss some of the more personal stuff with me. If you think you'd be more comfortable with a formal interview at the Intendencia with Captain Gonzalez instead of talking to me about Bernardo just let me know and we can talk about Roger and Robert instead."
Patricia gave Suzanne a very Latin shoulder shrug and took a small sip of her coffee. "Thank you for thinking about my feelings. Ask me your questions, then let's talk about your family."
"Do you know whether Bernardo was still active in the Uruguayan Nazi Party?"
"Yes, he was. That's the biggest reason I divorced him, that and his ongoing cheating on me before our divorce last year."
"I'm sorry about this next question, but I have to ask. Do you know if he was seeing any particular woman or women recently?"
Patricia took another slow sip of the coffee while she formulated her answer. She lowered the coffee cup to her desk and absent-mindedly picked up a pencil and fidgeted with it. "This may seem strange to you, but I continued to see him platonically since we broke up. We were married for almost 15 years and knew each other most of our lives. Our monthly dinners together were like being a brother and sister and let us keep up on what was happening in each of our extended families.
"Yes, he was seeing somebody. I don't know much about her, but I do know that her first name started with 'L' because I saw a note in his pocket calendar to buy flowers for 'L'. And he said a few things that made me think she wasn't Uruguayan. He had been seeing her for at least a month or two. I'm sure there were other women in his life, but I wouldn't know who they might be. Bernardo was never monogamous."
"Is there anything else you can tell me about Bernardo that might be helpful?"
She took another sip of coffee, followed by more pencil play. "If he was serious about 'L', and I believe that he at least thought he was, she would have to have been young and beautiful. Given Bernardo's views about ethnicity, she was more than likely to be Aryan. Given his age and lifestyle, she would almost certainly have been attracted to his money, or else she was using him in some way. And I think that's about all I can tell you."
We spent another half-hour chatting about Roger, Robert, our scientific collaboration, a couple of different scientific meetings we had attended, and our recent papers. Then it was a few more hugs and time for me to go. I walked a block across a broad plaza containing the Palacio Legislativo, where the Uruguayan congress met, and caught a bus back to the hotel.
While Suzanne was visiting the university, I was at the local cop shop visiting Martin in his new office. He kept me waiting five minutes to let me know he was still pissed off at Eduardo, then found the time to see me. He sat at his desk surrounded by piles of paper and made a vague gesture towards a chair in front of the desk where suspects usually sat while he was interrogating them. I picked up the chair, moved it to the side of his desk where a friend might sit, and sat down facing him. He was wearing his usual dark suit and starched white shirt with tightly tied tie, but still managed to look slightly unkempt.
Martin made a face at me to maintain his dignity, then broke down and smiled his forgiveness. "What do you need from me?"
"How about copies of the complete personnel files for your three fellow captains, Flores, Fortunato, and Blanco?"
I'd never seen Martin lose his professional demeanor before, but he looked at me with a shocked expression. "I certainly wasn't expecting that answer. Why on earth would you want those files?"
I moved my chair closer to his in a gesture of intimacy. "Because Suzanne and I are suspicious that one or more of them might have been the individual who bribed the hotel clerk, Jose, and set up that whole scene at the hotel."
Martin gave me a very official look and sat up straighter in his chair. "What evidence do you have against any of them?"
I tried to look completely honest. "Absolutely none. That's why I want the files, to go fishing in."
That earned me another shocked look. "Do you have any idea what you're asking me to do and what would happen to me if anyone ever found out that I'd given away the personnel files for three of the highest ranking police officers in Uruguay to a civilian? Is this your idea or Eduardo's? And I need
your assurance that these files aren't related to whatever Eduardo is doing in Uruguay that he can't tell me about. I owe Eduardo a great deal for his assistance in the past, but I'm also first and foremost a citizen of Uruguay."
I tried to keep the honest expression on my face and send body language signals that I could be trusted implicitly. "The idea was originally Suzanne's, and she has my complete agreement. Eduardo isn't involved in our suspicions of your colleagues. And I don't know any details about Eduardo's mission here in Montevideo so I can't give you that assurance, but I sincerely doubt that he would deliberately do anything to compromise your integrity."
Martin thought things over for a bit. "I'd have to copy the files when Juan Blanco wasn't around. I can't leave them lying around anywhere. Suppose I call you when I get them and we can have a drink together at a bar somewhere far away from here while you look them over. Would that be good enough?"