Saenz glances at Jerome. “If we had more eyes and ears on the ground, we might be able to detect something out of the ordinary. But someone has to coordinate. And they need to be communicating with NBI and the police constantly, so if anything happens, response will be as quick as possible.”
“Jake and Ben will take care of that,” the director says. “Councillor, they’ll sit down with you after this meeting to map out plans and logistics. I imagine the highest deployment would be in the evenings and the closer we get to the end of the month, yes?”
“Yes, sir,” Mariano says.
The director looks at all the worried faces around the conference table. “All right, gentlemen. Let’s keep our wits about us. We don’t have a lot of time left before we add another name to that grid.”
On the way back to the campus, Saenz is extraordinarily quiet.
“Something’s bothering you,” Jerome says.
“Uh-hmmm.”
“Don’t you have a dental appointment soon?”
“Not today. Tomorrow.”
“So. Not the dental appointment. Share?”
“I wish I could, but I don’t know exactly what it is.”
Jerome gets to a traffic light just as it turns red, and he stops, so it’s safe to take his eyes off the road for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“It’s been nagging at me since Tuesday, when we received the envelope. I keep trying to grasp whatever it is, to hold it still and examine it, but it keeps dancing away from me, just out of reach.”
“What could it be? Something about the envelope, then?”
“Maybe. Or the envelope and the weekend we spent at the district health center.” Saenz shakes his head briskly, as if to waggle the tenuous thought loose. The light turns green, and they’re moving forward again. “It’s maddening, like an itch you can’t scratch.”
“Maybe it’ll come to you after a good night’s rest.”
Saenz looks out at the passing scenery: at the people in the buses and jeepneys, at the dirty buildings, at the garlands of black power cables that line the streets of the metropolis. “Maybe,” he whispers unhappily, and Jerome doesn’t even hear him.
36
The pounding at Jerome’s door will not stop. He sits up, fumbles for the clock on the bedside table and groans when he sees the time, dragging himself out of bed and into the receiving area of his small quarters. The hair on the back of his head sticks straight up, and he pats it down carelessly, without much success.
He peers through the peephole in the door.
“This had better be important,” he says, unlocking the door and stepping out of the way just as Saenz swings it open, waving a small Kraft envelope at him.
“I’ve made a terrible mistake, Jerome.”
Jerome scratches his scalp and yawns. “And a good morning to you too.”
“I failed to see the forest for the trees.”
Jerome shuffles toward one corner of his Spartan private quarters, where a small kitchen table holds an electric kettle and several mugs. Saenz follows close behind him. “Only God can see the forest at three in the morning,” the younger priest mumbles. “We ordinary mortals can barely keep our eyes open.” He turns on the stove, looks through the drawers for sachets of instant coffee
Saenz ignores Jerome’s crabbiness. “Listen. I was so excited about identifying the bodies that I missed the obvious.”
“Are you talking funny?”
“What?”
The younger priest scowls. “Your speech. It sounds funny. Like you have a bit of a lisp.”
“Oh.” Saenz scowls back. “I’m getting to that. Where was I? Oh yes. I missed the obvious.”
“Which is?”
“That our killer could be working in the mobile clinic himself.”
Jerome stops, the open flame of the gas stove forgotten for a moment before he sets the kettle over it and turns to Saenz.
“Possible. But—”
“Our mystery envelope came a day after we were seen at the district health center. My guess is, the staff at the center is the same, or almost the same staff that works the mobile clinic.”
“But Emil said the mobile clinic has been around for years. If we follow the same logic we pursued when we were considering the meal deliveries, why didn’t the killings begin much earlier?”
“I’m not sure yet, but what if there were personnel changes? Workers move and get replaced all the time.” Saenz pauses to think. “What if someone came to the clinic from somewhere else. Maybe he’s done this before; maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he’s under some kind of strain, or something about the community and its residents triggers that strain? What if the killings are, indeed, some kind of—”
“Weird inaugural ritual to start the month right,” Jerome breaks in. “So he takes advantage of his job in the mobile clinic—”
“To select his victims,” Saenz finishes for him. “Emil said the clinic comes to Payatas every Saturday. So he has time to choose, time to observe without drawing attention to himself. As you’ve said: there’s nothing random about his targets.”
Jerome is putting instant coffee into two mugs. “Of course. The precise bladework would indicate some medical training; the obvious intelligence behind the selection and the . . . But who?”
The older priest opens the envelope and takes out a set of negatives. “I’ll need your medicine cabinet.”
He has been in Jerome’s bathroom before and knows that the medicine cabinet has a small fluorescent rod perched above the mirror.
The two now squeeze into the tiny bathroom, and Saenz tapes a rectangular piece of acetate, backed with a sheet of onionskin, to the fluorescent rod, creating a makeshift viewing panel. Next, he tapes the ends of four strips of photographic negatives to the acetate.
“What do you see?”
Jerome puts a hand to his chin and rubs it for a moment. “Instrument marks on the chinbones.” He studies them closely, then taps the fourth strip. “Except for this one.” His eyes widen, and he turns to Saenz. “That’s the flap. The flap of the envelope you found in your pigeonhole.”
Saenz nods.
“But the marks themselves look so similar.”
Saenz smiles broadly.
“Complete dental restorative system.”
“Sorry, what?”
“There’s a packer for packing fillings into cavities, a dental explorer for probing into the nooks and crannies of a tooth . . . and this.” The older priest reaches into his envelope and takes out a metallic object with a rubber handle, about seven and a half inches long, with the metallic end curving into a slight, blunt hook. “An elevator. Used to pry up the roots of the tooth until they can be extracted with forceps.”
“Where did you get that? No, wait.” Jerome laughs, grabbing the dental instrument from Saenz. “I remember now. That’s why your speech sounds funny. I’m impressed.”
“She wasn’t. I was a wreck of a man when she was done with me.”
The younger priest raises an eyebrow. “Please, spare me the details.” He looks back at the instrument in his hand. “But wait—how can you be sure this is it?”
“I can’t. There are probably a few other things that can make these kinds of marks. But we have to start somewhere. I told you I’d measured the instrument marks. These things are made in several sizes, but this one seems to best match the marks, in the width—these have five-millimeter blades—and in the character of the grooves. And these rubber handles give you a good grip even if there’s a lot of blood. And then there’s this.” Saenz opens the envelope again. “That footage of the last crime scene from Joanna. I took the clip and fed it into the computer. That thing in the mud? Have a closer look.”
He hands Jerome a high-resolution printout of the strange black-and-metal object half-buried in the mud, caught by Leo’s camera lens.
Jerome lays the elevator against the printout. He compares the two for a few seconds. “But why on the chinbone?”
Saenz strips the acetate off the fluorescent light and leads Jerome out of the bathroom, back toward the kitchen table. The kettle has been boiling for minutes. Jerome switches it off, takes a quilted potholder from a hook on the wall and removes the kettle from its base. He pours hot water into the two mugs and begins to stir the coffee.
“We know from the clean incision at the neck that he would slit the skin under the chin first, from ear to ear. I think he needed help to peel the skin back from the chin, so he would hook this under the skin and flesh, using it much like you would use a chisel, and start to pull the skin upward. But it couldn’t have been easy. For an instrument so thin, these things are pretty tough, made from surgical steel or chromium; the skin and flesh would tear in places. So he’d hook in again and again, and in the process of pulling the skin over the chinbone, he would leave these marks.”
They both stare at the instrument, glinting cold against the dark wood of the tabletop. For Jerome, the nightmare journey seems clearer than before. In his mind, the scent of blood is stronger, the slippery viscosity of it, the tender resistance of flesh peeling back from bone.
“Gus. You realize what this could mean?”
Saenz nods. “We need to have a talk with Jeannie.”
I can feel them. Scurrying in circles around me, smaller and smaller circles like rats around a crust of bread or a piece of cheese. Waiting, waiting, waiting for the right moment. The moment when I slip up, when I make a mistake, when I get careless.
I can hear their feet. Some of them pass by the gate, on the sidewalk; they think I can’t see them. Some of them are brave enough to rattle the gate; they bring my mail, my bills; they ask for donations. Some of them get into the house while I’m sleeping, and I wake up, and I hear their feet on the stairs, yes I do.
I can hear their thoughts.
The priest knows. He’s coming for me.
Let him come, then. Let him come soon. And then all this will be over.
37
“I don’t understand. Are you telling me I’m a suspect?” Jeannie asks Saenz incredulously.
She had agreed to meet with Saenz and Jerome at the health center after hours on Monday, along with Councillor Mariano and Dr. Alice Panganiban. Now, her small face is pale with worry.
“We don’t have a suspect yet, Jeannie,” Saenz says, as gently as he can, because he can sense her rising panic. “We just want to understand how things work at the mobile clinic. How often it goes to the parish. How often you’re there.”
“The clinic is there every Saturday,” she says, looking to Alice for reassurance. “Alice and two nurses, plus a dentist and a dental assistant.”
“How long have you been working there?” It’s Mariano asking.
“Five years—isn’t that right, Alice?”
“Six here at the district health center, almost five at the mobile clinic,” Alice confirms.
Jeannie turns back to Saenz. “But now you’re asking how often I’m here. That must mean you think I’m involved.”
“We’re not saying that,” Jerome says. “But perhaps you can tell us—do you remember treating any of the victims?”
“No! I honestly can’t. I would have told you already, the day we identified those three, if I did.”
Saenz is quiet, and everyone looks to him for direction.
He turns to Jeannie again. “You said, that day, that you had an alternate. The one who always forgets to file records here.”
Jeannie nods. “Alex. Alex Carlos.”
“Is he regular staff here?”
Alice shakes her head. “No, he’s got his own practice, but he comes here Mondays and Fridays.”
“And he goes to the mobile clinic too?”
“Yes. Every first and third Saturday of the month.”
Jerome recognizes at once that familiar light in Saenz’s eyes. “Since when?”
“Well . . . almost since he started with us. Right, Alice?” When Alice agrees, Jeannie continues. “He’s been with us—what? Less than a year?”
“So he’s the newest on staff?”
“Relatively new,” Alice says. “He joined us . . . let me see. December last year. No, November.”
“Anyone else new?”
“There’s Joji, our dental assistant. She’s only been with us three months.”
Saenz picks up a pen and begins tapping Alice’s desk with the capped end. Then he springs out of his chair. “Jerome. My briefcase. In your car.”
“Sure. What is it?”
“I need the envelope.”
Jerome nods, runs out of the room. Saenz turns to Jeannie and Alice. “The records of the three boys we identified last Sunday: Vicente Bansuy, Noel Solis, Lino Alcaraz. We had them photocopied for the NBI, but we left the originals here. Please get them for me.”
The two women scamper to the records room, and Saenz is left alone in Alice’s office, feeling the vaporous threads of an elusive thought becoming more distinct, more concrete.
Jerome gets back first. “Here,” he says, slamming Saenz’s briefcase down on Alice’s desk. Saenz quickly unlocks it and fishes out the envelope, now encased in a resealable plastic bag. He lays the envelope, address side up on the concrete.
Jeannie bursts through the door, brandishing three sets of records, and Alice comes up right behind her. “Here,” Jeannie says, thrusting the papers into Saenz’s hands.
He pushes some of Alice’s papers and gewgaws away and then spreads the records out on the space he’s just cleared. All four of them stare at the papers for a moment or two. Alice and Jeannie have no idea what they’re supposed to be seeing, but Jerome picks up on it almost immediately.
“That’s it,” he says. “That’s what’s been nagging at you since you got the envelope.”
Saenz nods. “Jeannie.” He points to the dental records of the three boys. “Is that your handwriting?”
Jeannie glances at the records again. “No. No it isn’t.”
“Whose is it?”
“It’s Alex’s.”
Alice and Jeannie tell the priests that Alejandro Benitez-Carlos Jr. is thirty-four, a good worker, single and living alone in an apartment in Quezon City. He has a small private practice, although they don’t quite know where it is. On the days he’s on duty at either the health center or the mobile clinic, he comes to work early, lunches alone, and is always the last to leave at the end of the day.
They say he’s professional, reserved: a quiet man who keeps mostly to himself. He’s unremarkable, except perhaps for rare flashes of temper; not loud or explosive, but, as Jeannie describes it, unsettling. “He scares me sometimes, to be honest,” she says.
When Saenz asks what he looks like, Alice produces a small photograph from his personnel file. Saenz recognizes him immediately: the man who was seated at the reception desk when they finished the identification work on Monday.
The priests leave the health center with strict instructions for Alice and Jeannie to act normally around him. “We’re not law enforcers, Alice,” Saenz reminds her. “This all has to go through legal channels first.”
In the car on the way back to the university, Jerome asks: “So, what now? Do we advise Valdes and Arcinas to arrest him? Or do we ask them to conduct a background check on Alex Carlos first?”
Saenz doesn’t answer at once. His fingers drum a rapid beat on his thigh, and he’s restless in his seat. “I’m wondering if there isn’t another way. A possibly faster one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our friend the news producer, and her army of contacts.”
38
By Quezon City Hall, Toyang Bailon, Clerk II at Human Resources, waits at the fried squid ball and fish ball stand of the tian
gge, an open-air market with various stalls selling clothes, shoes, toys, processed food, rice and produce.
It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and people have started leaving their offices, dropping by the tiangge for any last minute cooking needs before making the journey home.
It is sweltering hot even in the shade, and strands of her hair are sticking to the nape of her neck. She buys a plastic cup of sago’t gulaman with ice and a stick of doughy squid balls at a snack stall. The vendor motions to a jar of sweet-and-hot sauce, and Toyang dips the stick into the jar, careful to tuck the file folder she is carrying under her arm so the sauce doesn’t drip on it.
She has just taken her first hot mouthful when someone taps her on the shoulder.
“Eating again, Toyang?” the tall woman says.
“Eh, Ate, how are you?” Toyang chews hurriedly, sets down her drink at the stall’s tiny counter, then dabs at her lips with some napkins from a plastic cup on one side of the counter.
“I’m okay. How about you? How are the kids?” the other woman asks.
“They’re doing well. Pinky is learning how to walk. How about you? When are you going to start having your own?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someday, Toyang. Listen, did you find what I need?”
Toyang wants to pursue the subject of kids a little more—she can’t help but be curious about this strange woman. But as usual, the other woman wants to push the topic out of the way and get on to business. It wouldn’t be the first time; talk of marriage and kids and family always seems to make her nervous.
The government employee takes the folder and hands it over.
“That’s his service record and some of the pre-employment requirements he submitted for his application. He hasn’t been in any trouble, no administrative cases or disciplinary action. Good boy,” she adds unhelpfully.
The other woman opens the folder and begins leafing through the papers inside, saying nothing. After a few minutes of reading, she looks up. “This is really good, Toyang. I appreciate your help.” The woman reaches deep into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out a five hundred–peso bill. “Hey, this is for Pinky.”
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