“Wait, wait,” she says, reaching out to stop and rewind the tape.
“Why?” Leo asks.
She watches again as the scene is replayed. “There, look,” she says, tapping the screen with a forefinger. “Did you see that?”
“What?”
She stops, rewinds, taps the screen again. “There. That thing. Just before the camera moves to me.”
Leo knits his brows, still not seeing anything. “Try a slo-mo?”
She slows down the tape speed so they can view it frame by frame. Moving from the child’s head to the ground around the body. A rat comes into view. The rat rears up on its hind legs, snout in the air, whiskers twitching, beady, black eyes registering red.
Garbage, mud. The policeman’s voice, garbled to a low snarl by the much slower playback speed.
Then the glimmer of something in the mud. Less than twenty frames, then the camera whips to Joanna.
Joanna fiddles with the preview knob again.
There it is. Something thin and metallic, not too long, protruding from what looks like a black tube.
“What is it?” the cameraman asks.
“I don’t know. Could be just scrap. Seems pretty out of place there, though.” She sits back, frowning. Takes a sip of coffee. “Leo, can you dub a copy of that for me? I need to go and take a shower; then I’ll swing by and pick it up.”
“Sure. What are you going to do with it?”
She stands and heads for the door. “Go to confession, I think.”
Jerome is in the middle of routine paperwork for the university when Joanna stops by. She knocks on the door of his faculty office, then opens it without waiting to be acknowledged.
“Hey, Father Lucero,” she says.
He looks up. “Miss Bonifacio.”
“How’s it hanging?”
“Vertically, last time I checked. What can I do for you?”
She chuckles, pleased that the priest can give as good as he gets. She comes into the room, pulls up a chair and makes herself comfortable.
“Father Gus isn’t in his office, and he’s not at the lab. So I thought I’d come and see you instead. We were up at the dumpsite. Leo and I. When they found the body.”
“Ah.”
She unzips a capacious black backpack, retrieves a VHS tape from its depths and slides it on the desk toward him.
“We managed to get about four minutes of footage before the police kicked us off the dump. Leo picked something up on tape that I thought just didn’t belong there. Looks like some kind of pick or probe. Thought you and Father Gus might want to take a look.”
Jerome leans forward and picks up the tape. “Thanks. Can we keep this for a while?”
“It’s all yours. We have the original in the office.” She stands. “Tell Father Gus if the both of you figure out what it is, I’m buying lunch.”
Jerome stands up as well. “Thank you, Joanna. We’ll get on this right away.”
With a wink, she is gone.
Half an hour later, Saenz swings by Jerome’s office from a faculty meeting.
“Starving,” he announces in a booming voice.
Jerome picks up Joanna’s VHS tape and waves it in the air. “From Joanna,” he says, and Saenz scowls.
“I can’t eat that.”
“She stopped by. Wants you to look at this. It’s from the crime scene this morning.”
Saenz’s expression changes to keen interest. “So she was there. Where she wasn’t supposed to be.”
Jerome nods. “Said their camera caught something in the dumpsite that didn’t look like it belonged there.”
“Have you looked at it?”
“Thought I’d better wait till you got back.” He takes the tape, wheels his office chair toward the television and VHS player set up on one side of the room and slides the tape into the player.
The footage is raw, unedited, unaltered in any way, so when the camera first pans to the boy’s body, both Saenz and Jerome are jolted, even though they have been bracing themselves for the sight. They exchange quick glances, then continue watching. The camera moves slowly and smoothly at first, but then the motion becomes abrupt and jerky each time the cameraman moves to a different position around the body.
“Wait, what’s that?” Saenz asks, pointing at the screen.
Jerome looks. “What’s what?”
“After the rat. Can you rewind it?”
Jerome rewinds the tape, but the footage moves too fast for him to see what Saenz is pointing at. “What is it?” He rewinds again, cross with himself that he can’t make anything out. On third viewing, he catches a glint from the camera’s portable light bouncing off something half-buried in the mud. “Wait, was that it? What is that?”
Saenz is already halfway to the door. “Bring the tape. We’re heading to the NBI.”
About three hours later, they’re sitting across a wooden table from Ading Rustia; he’s just viewed the tape several times, and the look on his face is bleak. “None of my boys worked the scene last night. I mean, this morning. It was handled by Quezon City police,” Rustia says. He sniffs. “Not very good for you.”
Saenz nods. “I’ve already asked if they took photos or found anything at the site. No to both.”
Rustia snickers, a curious clicking noise. “Huh.”
“Can we do another search?” Jerome asks.
“We could try. But it would have to be done quietly. The QC boys get very annoyed when anyone steps on their turf.”
“Would you work it for us?”
Rustia’s hand glides over the desk, then pulls a clipboard over to him. “The earliest I could do it is early tomorrow morning. I think I had better do it alone, though. I trust my boys, but any leak could make life difficult for me.”
Saenz stands up and holds out his hand. “Thanks, Ading. I really appreciate it. Will you let the director know yourself?”
Rustia’s tiny hand is completely engulfed in the priest’s large one. “Yes. Maybe I’ll get a promotion. What do you think?”
28
At the laboratory the next day, the telephone rings as Saenz is examining the remains of a man believed to have been “salvaged”—summarily executed—by government troops some twenty years before. The man was a twenty-three-year-old community organizer and activist in the province of Nueva Ecija. Suspected of ties with the Communist New People’s Army, he disappeared after a lightning rally of farmers and students in Manila in the early 1970s and had not been heard from since. His family believed he had been rounded up by the Metrocom, along with a few other activists and students who had taken part in the rally. He was one of the thousands—fifteen hundred by one count, more than three thousand by another—who fell victim to salvaging. It was a term perverted by the regime’s goons to refer to the extrajudicial killings that had become a dirty open secret of the dictatorship.
Saenz had been involved in the mapping and exhumation of the man’s burial site in the hills to the east of Nueva Ecija a few months earlier. After several procedural and logistical delays, the remains finally arrived in Manila last week.
Saenz has spent most of the morning sorting, cleaning and laying out the bones into the framework of a human skeleton. He has arranged most of them in the same position in which they were found, cross-referencing his work with a series of photographs taken of the remains during the exhumation process. But there are still a few loose bones that he has yet to put where they belong.
At the sound of the telephone, he sighs, carefully laying a carpal bone to one side. “Great timing,” he grumbles. Seated on a tall stool with casters, he pushes himself away from the table where the man’s remains are laid out and strips off one rubber glove to take the call.
“Saenz,” he answers gruffly.
“Before you yell at me, you should know that I have food,” Jerome
says.
“Do you intend to bring it over?”
“Not if you yell at me.”
“You have my solemn word that there will be no yelling if food is brought over.”
“Ten minutes.”
Saenz hangs up. He puts the glove back on and returns to the table. At the time of the exhumation, it had seemed to Saenz that the man had been shot in the back of the head while his arms were tied behind his back. Looking at the skull now, it appears that the man had been kneeling; it’s an initial observation that Saenz will seek to verify when he examines the bullet trajectory later. There are green stains on the skull, mainly concentrated around the bullet hole itself—the patina of copper sulfate from the corrosion of a copper bullet. He reaches for one of the photographs to check the exact position of several strands of rotted rope that had been found with the remains. From what he can gather, the strands would have lain against the small of the man’s back, where his wrists had been tied together.
But before he can position the strands, someone knocks on the door.
“Ayayay,” he mutters in exasperation, then strips off his gloves and pushes himself away from the table again. He gets up and walks to the door.
“I thought you said ten minutes?” he says as he opens it. Immediately his nostrils are assaulted by the unwashed smell of Rommel Salustiano.
“Hello, Father.”
Saenz tries to conceal his surprise. “Rommel. Hello.” He’s immediately on his guard, apprehensive. “What brings you here?”
“Can I come in?”
Saenz casts a quick glance over his shoulder at the table where the skeleton is laid out. “Listen, I’m afraid that I—” he begins, but Rommel is already walking through the door.
“So this is where you work,” he says, running his fingers along the edge of a desk, then ambling over to one end of the room to stare at one of the da Vinci studies on the wall.
Saenz stands behind him, feeling a mounting sense of unease. “Sometimes, yes. Is there anything I can do for you, Rommel?”
The young man shifts his attention from the wall to focus fully on Saenz. “I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Right about what?”
“Carding.” He breathes heavily for a moment, then comes closer to the priest. “I asked you if you really thought he killed those boys.” He tilts his head, studying Saenz’s face with a smile. “But you never believed it, right? I didn’t think you did. And then, so soon after the NBI boasts about his arrest, another victim turns up.” By now the smile is gleeful. “Told you he wasn’t smart enough to have done all that.”
Saenz steps back, careful not to make hasty movements. “Rommel, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss any of these issues with you.”
Moving surprisingly quickly for his size, Rommel steps into Saenz’s personal space, his flabby face mere inches away from his own. “Just tell me, okay? Just admit you didn’t think he did it. You knew it was someone smarter, right? Someone who could plan and calculate.”
Seconds tick by as Rommel breathes onto Saenz’s face. His tiny eyes are alight with an unnerving intensity.
And then Rommel turns away and heads straight for the table where Saenz is working. Before Saenz can stop him, he picks up a bone—the dead man’s left femur—then points it straight at the priest. “Because if you didn’t know—if you believed that it was Carding—well, you’re not very good at what you do after all, are you?”
“Put the bone down, Rommel,” Saenz says calmly.
“What?”
“The bone. Put it down.” More firmly this time.
Rommel looks down at the femur in his hand as though he’s perplexed at how it got there. Then, he takes a few steps closer to Saenz with the bone outstretched. Saenz steels himself to parry a possible blow when he hears Jerome’s voice at the door.
“Pancit canton and—” he announces ceremoniously, holding his arms up with plastic bags of takeout in his hands. But at the sight of Rommel holding the bone to Saenz’s face, his expression changes, and he raises his voice sternly. “What the hell is going on here?”
Rommel’s face goes blank at once, as though a lightbulb has been switched off inside his head. Instead of hitting Saenz as he appeared ready to do mere seconds ago, he hands him the femur slowly.
“I was just returning this bone to Father Saenz.”
Saenz takes the bone and moves carefully away from the sweaty giant, eyeing him distrustfully.
“I think it’s time you left, Rommel,” he says.
Rommel nods, then lumbers toward the door, Jerome stepping aside to let him pass.
He’s already outside the door when he turns around to grin at both priests.
“I was right,” he warbles. “You know I was right.” And then he’s gone.
Jerome closes the door and locks it, then sets the food down on a desk and rushes to Saenz’s side. “Are you all right?”
Saenz nods, putting the femur carefully back in its place. “I’m fine. But two unexplained visits from Rommel Salustiano—”
“—is two unexplained visits too many,” Jerome says. “That was definitely a threat. Right?”
“I’m not sure if that was a threat, to be honest.” He heads to the desk and picks up the phone. “But after this second visit, I am sure of one thing: I’d be an idiot if I didn’t tell Arcinas to check on his background and his whereabouts last Saturday.”
A frown creases the space between Jerome’s brows. “He doesn’t fit our killer’s profile—at least, not physically.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Saenz shakes his head. “But that behavior just now? That wasn’t normal.” He begins punching out numbers on the phone. “And you know what? I would hate to be so attached to the profile that we won’t consider any other possibilities.”
29
Susan is rushing back to the department to get some papers photocopied when she bumps into Saenz; he’s emerged from his office in search of coffee.
“What are you doing?” she demands, eyes wide with alarm. “Why are you still here?”
Saenz looks down at her, equally alarmed by her expression. “Why? Where am I supposed to be?”
She lets out a tiny squeal of frustration and hustles him back through the door of his office, a woman barely five feet tall shooing a six-foot-something chicken back into its coop. Once inside, she begins to shuffle through the chaos on top of his desk.
“The Magic Flute!”
“The magic what?”
She finally finds what she’s looking for and fishes out an envelope from beneath a pile of correspondence. She spends another few seconds locating a letter opener, leaving Saenz momentarily concerned that she plans to bury it in his chest. Instead, she uses it to rip the envelope open. “You’re supposed to be at the CCP tonight! The Magic Flute!” She waves the envelope at him. “See? You’ve got tickets!”
“I do?”
“Hay, naku. Look,” she says, gesturing at a suit bag hanging from a hook on the whiteboard behind him. “Remember? I made you bring that extra shirt two weeks ago because I knew you’d forget to bring one today.”
“Was that supposed to be tonight?”
She rolls her eyes. “No, I’m just trying to annoy you for no good reason. Yes, it’s tonight! And don’t pretend you don’t know.”
“But I don’t even like opera,” he protests weakly. By this time, he’s already remembered that he was supposed to go and already figured that he can’t possibly bamboozle Susan.
She sticks her hand into the mess on his desk once more and yanks out from within it a CD of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. “Yes, you do,” she says, thrusting it under his nose as proof.
“I don’t like Mozart,” he moans, even more weakly this time.
She wags a finger at him as she might do with a spoiled child. “Mrs. Iwasaki from JapanConnect sen
t you those tickets, and she expects you to be there. I don’t need to tell you how much we need their sponsorship right now. Which reminds me, where’s Father Lucero?” When all she gets from Saenz is a blank look, she throws her hands up in the air and then picks up the phone on his desk. “Between the two of you, I’m going to have a heart attack,” she grouses. “Father Lucero? Where are you? Do you know that you’re supposed to be on your way to the CCP with Father Gus?” A pause. “What do you mean, ‘when’? Right now! It’s the gala premiere of The Magic Flute!”
Saenz scowls. “I have no clothes for a gala of any sort,” he mumbles, but loudly enough for her to hear. “And neither does he.”
She scowls right back. “A clean, well-pressed shirt will do,” she tells him firmly. “And as for you, Father Lucero,” she says into the phone, “you’re to bring the car around in ten minutes. Or else.” She puts the receiver down and circles around the desk to shoo Saenz out of his chair. “You have no time to just sit around, Father! You’ve got to change your shirt!” She yanks the suit bag off the hook and shoves it into his hands. “Now! Go!”
When he scurries off to the men’s room to change, Susan collapses into a chair, exhausted. “I swear, it’s like supervising toddlers,” she complains to God in His heaven.
Two hours later, Saenz and Jerome are standing behind the banister of one of the sweeping staircases at the main lobby of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The invitation says 6:30 p.m., but it’s past seven, and there’s no sign that the performance is about to start. Instead, they’re treated to a garish display of Manila’s wealthy and powerful—aging socialites and their offspring, politicians, members of the country’s business elite and movie stars, all powdered and perfumed, sequined and beaded and embroidered to within an inch of their lives.
“I should have brought a pair of sunglasses,” Jerome says.
“You don’t own a pair of sunglasses.”
“Keep dragging me to these things, and I’ll have to invest in one. Heads up. Mrs. Iwasaki’s spotted you.”
Smaller and Smaller Circles Page 16