Saenz considers this a moment. “You mean, you don’t live in Payatas?”
“We live in Manggahan, with my brother and his family.” Manggahan is one of the nearby barangays.
“And Jon-jon’s friends—they’re from Payatas?”
“We don’t know. Maybe. Jon-jon used to go there almost every day.”
“To visit his friends?”
The man shakes his head. “No. To dig through the dump.”
He says it matter-of-factly, but the reality of it stings Saenz: the boy was a scavenger.
“He worked in the dumpsite.”
The man nods. “He collected bottles, scrap metal, anything that he could sell.”
Saenz must choose his words carefully. “Did he go to school?”
“Only up to grade four.” The man touches his wife’s hand. “We couldn’t afford any more schooling. A few years ago my wife had to stop working because she has a lung condition. I can’t hold a regular job because I’m an ex-convict. Nobody wants to hire someone like you. So I do odd jobs here and there—some basic carpentry or plumbing or electrical jobs. But they don’t pay very well.”
“I see. So Jon-jon helped with the family expenses?”
“Yes. We depended on his earnings to get by. Often, he would bring food from the dump.”
Saenz’s eyes widen. “From the dump?”
“If he couldn’t find metal or wood or paper to sell, he would look for food—anything thrown away that could still be used. If it was too spoiled or rotten, he would mix it together for pig slop and sell it. If there were scraps that could still be eaten, he would bring them home. Vegetables, fruit. Moldy bread. Pig fat, animal skin. Bones to make soup.”
Saenz says nothing for a few moments, trying to take this in, and the man tries to fill the awkward silence. “It’s still food, you know. We just put it all in a pot and boiled it so that we wouldn’t get sick. Most of the time, that’s all the food we had.”
Saenz isn’t naïve; he’s always known that this is the sort of existence that the country’s poorest live from day to day. But to hear about it firsthand, told with such apathy and resignation, is a different thing altogether.
“Do you have any other children?”
“Five. Jon-jon was the oldest. He just turned thirteen in January. The rest are too young to work.”
Depended on his earnings. All the food we had. Too young to work. Saenz does not want to be angry, but he is: not at the hapless parents, who probably could not have done any more for their children under the circumstances, but at everything else.
“Jon-jon’s friends—do you know any of them? Can you give me some names?”
Again the father and mother look at each other, trying to remember. But they come up with nothing. “Jon-jon didn’t talk about them much. We never met any of them.”
Saenz nods. “Did he get into any fights that you know of? Did he have any problems with anyone?”
“No. He never told us anything. He was always very tired when he came home, you know? Rain or shine, he would go to the dump after breakfast. He only kept away if he was sick or if there was a typhoon.”
“If he didn’t go, we didn’t eat.” It’s the woman talking now, her voice soft and sad. It is as simple and as complicated as that: this family lives hand-to-mouth. Isang kahig, isang tuka, one scratch, one peck: a day’s work for a day’s food.
Saenz has to force himself to put his anger aside, to focus on getting more information. “Did Jon-jon say where exactly he was meeting his friends?”
“No. But he used to go to the parish church there once in a while. He said they gave out free food on Saturdays.”
Ed raises his hand like a schoolboy to catch Saenz’s attention. “We can ask around the parish, see if they knew Jon-jon.”
“Yes, Ed. Please do. That would be most helpful.” Saenz glances back at the couple. “Where did Jon-jon sell his goods?”
They pause to think about this, and the mother says, “He and the other waste pickers just went to any of the nearby collection stations along Commonwealth.” Saenz has seen those—filthy, decrepit structures with mounds of scrap metal, and wood, and cardboard, and bins full of discarded bottles.
“Did he have any trouble with anyone there?”
“No. No trouble.” The mother bites her lower lip, thoughtful. She continues: “But he didn’t tell us much. He just worked and worked. He didn’t complain, but he was always very quiet anyway. He didn’t like his cousins, but he couldn’t avoid them—we live in a small place, just a shanty, and there are fifteen of us. So he just went to work. It gave him a reason to be out the whole day.”
Saenz leans forward. “He didn’t get along with his cousins, then?”
“Just the usual stuff between boys.”
“How old are they?”
The mother seems surprised. “About his age, or younger.”
The father adds, “The oldest is Sonny. He’s thirteen.”
Too young, Saenz thinks, statistically unlikely to have been involved.
Saenz asks a few more questions about Jon-jon’s routine and activities, but the parents can’t give him much. Overall, they give him the impression of a family fragmented by poverty, drifting numbly through days and nights of hunger and deprivation. There is love there—he doesn’t doubt it; it’s in their eyes when they talk about their dead son—but there isn’t the full engagement in, or awareness of, the boy’s life that might give Saenz the information he needs.
He concludes the interview and rises to his feet. Ed stands too and opens the door, ready to usher the couple out of the room.
“Thank you for coming to talk to me,” Saenz says.
They nod, mumble their thanks and begin to walk to the door. But the mother turns back to face Saenz.
“You’re a priest. How can you possibly help us?”
Saenz is momentarily stumped by the question. It would be useless to tell them that he’s done this before, that he’s been trained to assist in cases like their son’s.
It’s a humbling question, and one he doesn’t have a suitable answer for. “I don’t know yet,” he says at last, and it’s the truth.
She doesn’t look satisfied, but his honesty is enough for now. She nods and follows her husband out to the corridor. Ed smiles at Saenz sympathetically; he knows what it’s like to be asked that question and to not know the right thing to say.
When he leaves the room, Saenz notices Ben Arcinas waiting outside the door, a paper cup in his hand.
“Nice answer, Father,” he says, his tone mocking. Then he ambles off down the corridor, seemingly without a care in the world.
W
Saenz1911: You’re probably out.
Saenz1911: But the boy’s been identified.
Saenz1911: Spoke with the parents today.
Saenz1911: He worked the dump, picking waste.
Saenz1911: He was pretty much the breadwinner of the family. At thirteen.
Saenz1911: Something not very not right in that alone.
Saenz1911: Anyway.
Saenz1911: Will email details.
Saenz1911: Night.
Saenz leans back in his chair and tilts his head up toward the ceiling, hoping to relieve the strain in his neck and shoulder muscles. He slips his feet out of his shoes and then starts to remove his socks using his toes.
He sits in the dark for a minute or so, then decides to get ready for bed and get some sleep. He stands, yawns, stretches his arms and bends from side to side.
Then the chat program pings him.
JLucero: You still there?
JLucero: When I was thirteen, I was in school.
JLucero: I wasn’t very happy, but I was in school.
JLucero: Well, you know that.
Jerome had been a high school freshman a
t thirteen and Saenz a young priest. Their paths crossed first when Saenz had signed up to teach a biology class at Jerome’s school while wrapping up his MA at the university. Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law had been in place for nearly a year, and Saenz was quietly active in the opposition against him.
Saenz1911: Hey. You’re there.
Saenz1911: You had your own cross to bear.
Jerome was one of the quietest boys in Saenz’s class. And yet, as his tests and papers would eventually show, he was also one of the brightest. He sat by the windows, and Saenz would often see him staring out at the trees. At other times, he would fall asleep at his desk. He did not have many friends; his parents hardly ever turned up at parent-teacher conferences. Moving about on campus, he tended to keep his head down, avoiding eye contact. He walked with a limp; some days it would be more manifest, and the boy would be, by turns, listless, distracted or easily startled. Saenz knew almost immediately that he came from a troubled home, that he bore the brunt of the trouble in it, and that the limp was not from any congenital condition but had been acquired.
JLucero: Did the parents give you any leads?
Saenz1911: Not much that was useful.
Saenz1911: At least, not useful yet.
Saenz1911: Maybe some of it will make sense down the line.
JLucero: I suspect none of it will make sense however far down the line we go.
Saenz knows this to be true. Even though he’s done this many times before—tried to understand the complex interactions between power, poverty and crime in this country—in the end, none of it makes any sense.
Take Jon-jon, for example. He was young and small, just the perfect weight for foraging in the unstable mounds of rubbish. He would have been light on his feet and fast, able to pick through a load of freshly dumped garbage quickly, in constant competition with other trash pickers for the most valuable finds. His life and health would have been in perpetual jeopardy: from rival scavengers, from disease, from infection by medical waste or poisoning by industrial waste, from the toxins produced by the ceaseless ferment of the landfill.
In a different kind of society—a better kind—he would have been in school, would have had a chance to play, would have had better food to eat and cleaner air to breathe. And if he still died the way he eventually did, society’s guardians, its authorities and lawmen, would have left no stone unturned to find out who was responsible.
Saenz1911: But we’ll keep going anyway?
Saenz1911: In spite of that?
JLucero: You lead. I’ll follow.
Nearly twenty-five years earlier, Saenz had tried to befriend the young Jerome, tried to understand what had been going on in his life and his home. But while the boy responded in small ways—he became more active and attentive in Saenz’s classes—he never fully opened up to his teacher, nor gave a complete picture of the troubles in his family. The school year ended, and Saenz was soon caught up in other things, eventually leaving the country to begin doctoral studies in France.
When he returned to Manila to research and to teaching several years later, Saenz was pleasantly surprised to encounter Jerome—now a young man—in his theology class at the university. He was even more pleased to learn that he was now a Jesuit novice.
Saenz could tell that Jerome was still working through many issues from his past and did not trust people easily. They built their friendship slowly—at first, mostly through study and work. As mentor and student, they found common ground in their intellectual curiosity and their thirst for social justice. By the time of his ordination, Jerome had already chosen clinical psychology as his field of study. When Saenz began to do volunteer work to help identify the murdered victims of the dictatorship, Jerome was drawn in as well, providing free counseling for the families left behind. From there, their individual work took deeper turns into the study of violent crime. Jerome is now a clinical psychologist and at thirty-seven has already written a number of landmark papers on sexuality, violence and crime in the Philippines.
The friendship between the two has deepened significantly; they have developed an extraordinary rapport more closely resembling the tie between father and son. Although no two men could be more different in character and temperament, they find themselves on either end of a baffling mutual affinity. It is so strong that sometimes they startle themselves by finishing each other’s sentences and thinking similar thoughts almost simultaneously. In the last two decades, they have become each other’s consciences and sounding boards.
Jerome shares Saenz’s views that serial killing is not a solely Western phenomenon and that the inadequacy and sloppiness of local police methods and intelligence techniques stand in the way of its detection.
Saenz1911: Thanks.
Saenz1911: These boys—it’s almost as though they don’t matter.
Saenz1911: Nobody is watching.
JLucero: “Could you not watch with me one hour?”
Saenz1911: Matthew 26:40?
JLucero: I’ll watch with you.
7
The sky is overcast, and the puddles on the streets reflect thick piles of clouds, rolling slowly where the winds take them.
Green is the only color that rain intensifies; the grass and the trees look as though they have been retouched with a giant brush by some great, invisible hand. Natural smells are heightened: the scent of flowers, of turf, of moist, peaty soil.
After the rain, life—earth, foliage, frogs—momentarily reclaims human attention from those things which are not life. Everything else—the cars, the buildings, the dingy shop signs and crumbling waiting sheds, the garlands of electrical wiring that line the streets, the rusting metal and concrete and plastic that jut out singly or in masses to stab the city air—everything else recedes into a damp and quiet dullness.
The dead things know their place.
In the laboratory, a watery daylight weaves through the vertical blinds. It settles on the floor and the furniture in an uneven wash of gray.
Gus Saenz slides a computer chair forward on its casters and motions for Jerome to sit down.
“Let’s go over it again, Jerome.” The older priest now begins taking notes on a fresh pad of ruled yellow paper.
“Okay.” Jerome takes the chair, straddles it and leans forward so that its back cushions his chest. He tilts his head down and closes his eyes, beginning the latest in a series of nightmare journeys through the Payatas of his mind.
“Statistically, the odds are that it’s a man. And it’s a safe bet, given that he’s apparently not afraid to go into the landfill, that he knows the area well and probably lives or works in or around it. Since he doesn’t seem to have aroused any suspicion after all this time, it’s also likely that he’s a familiar figure in the community.”
“Or has made himself one,” Saenz fills in. “He’s no longer a stranger to anyone; he’s become part of the everyday pattern.”
Jerome nods.
“Go on.”
“He waits for victims of opportunity. The watching and the waiting are as important to him as the act itself.”
“What about the time of the attacks?”
“Given what we now know of the days and the dates, he strikes on the weekends—most likely Saturday evenings. Most of the men are drunk on Saturday evenings—those paid their wages at the end of the week still have money to burn.”
Saenz shifts in his seat and taps his pen against the pad. “Victims?”
“All boys, eleven to thirteen years old. Small for their age; he likes them small. He stuns them first, just one heavy blow on top of the head, most likely with a rock. Maybe he’s not very strong. Maybe he needs to immobilize his victim first, and quickly; if the boy were able to call for help or fight back, he might panic and run.”
Saenz turns to look at a sheet of paper taped up on the upper right hand corner of the huge whiteboard;
it’s a photocopy of a partial impression of a shoe. It was found and correctly processed by a particularly sharp SOCO officer in the mud near the site where the sixth victim’s body was discovered. Saenz had made certain the man’s superior knew he had done well.
“Men’s size six,” he says, nodding. “Ordinary rubber rain boots.”
“Very cheap, very common.”
“And very washable.” Saenz rolls his chair over to a nearby desk and rummages through a pile of papers, photocopies of police reports for the Payatas area in the last seven months. “No reports of any unconsummated attacks on boys in our age group. He’s been really lucky so far.”
“Not so much lucky as skillful. His timing is excellent, and so is his choice of victim and circumstance.” Jerome opens his eyes but does not look up, and then rubs his chin with his thumb—something he does when deep in thought. “He probably doesn’t find them in the dump, and he doesn’t kill them in the dump, that’s almost certain; it’s too open, too accessible. Wherever he catches up with his quarry, he immobilizes him and then takes him away, somewhere he’s certain he won’t be disturbed.”
“And the injuries?”
Jerome pauses. “He stabs the victim. Once or twice; that’s all he needs to finish him off. The evisceration, the mutilations—are all postmortem. He’s not torturing them. He works neatly around the heart, the other organs, the genitals. We haven’t found any of these at the scene; it seems likely that he’s keeping them as trophies and probably has a container or two ready to hold them.”
He rolls his chair over to Saenz’s desk and, without standing, reaches for the pile of case folders they’ve compiled on the killings. He opens them one by one, each time focusing on one of the photographs in them. He swivels the chair around so that he can see Saenz. “Six killings so far. Given what we’ve seen of the last three, and if we’re to believe the case reports on the first three, the bodies bear no physical evidence that the killer obtained some sort of sexual gratification from them.”
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