Hungry Ghosts

by Peggy Blair

  “Killer took his time covering things up,” said Pike. “Hard to see the ground in the dark, even with a flashlight. I don’t think he could do that at night.”

  “You think he killed her in the daytime?” said Sheldon.

  Most people were surprised to learn that it was easier to hide what you were doing if you committed your crimes in broad daylight. People saw someone carrying a widescreen television down the street in the afternoon, they assumed it was the owner. It was only at night that people thought thief. Pike knew; he’d stolen almost everything that wasn’t nailed down.

  Pike nodded. “Unless he dug that pit before he killed her. The edges are pretty clean. He could have used an axe.”

  The thought had never occurred to him until the words came out of his mouth. An axe gave the killer a weapon and a tool. It explained how he cut down branches. That wedge-shaped mark on the forest floor, that was where he dropped it. Freeing his hands so he could choke her.

  Just how organized was this killer? Digging a hole beforehand gave him what he needed most: time. He could have prepared the burial ground days, even weeks, earlier.

  This killer was no Willy Pickton, thought Pike. This one was smart.

  24

  Inspector Ramirez stopped to visit his parents on his way home. He tried to drop by every few days to see how they were doing. They were getting old. He worried what would happen to his mother if his father died.

  His mother, although still an American citizen, was more Cuban than most Cubans. Even so, the government might cut off her rations and kick her out of her own home. It had happened to other American-­born widows. His sister, Conchita, and her husband and teenaged children lived with them. If that happened, they would all be forced to find somewhere else to live.

  Ramirez tried not to think about it. There wasn’t enough room in his apartment to take his family in, and yet he might have to. Francesca would not be happy, but she would accept they had no choice. This was the reality of living in Havana. Overcrowding, terrible living conditions, people struggling to get by.

  “Ricky,” said Conchita, opening the door. She smiled as she peered around him. “You’re alone. Is Francesca back yet? I’m guessing not. You look like you’ve lost weight. Come in, come in, we’re watching television. An American movie, with Tom Cruise.”

  “It’s a silly movie,” said his mother, shaking her head. She sat on the old sofa, crocheting. “The clues are all Bible verses.”

  “It’s good!” said Ramirez’s father. “I like Tom Cruise.”

  “The Bible is as crazy as that Tom Cruise’s Church of Scientology,” his mother said. “After fifty years, you’d think your father would listen to me, Ricky. What kind of man believes in such nonsense?”

  “The Bible isn’t crazy,” said his father.

  “No, it’s stupid. You know how I know it’s stupid? There isn’t a single part that was written by women.”

  Ramirez smiled. Like Fidel Castro, his mother was raised a Catholic, but she had enthusiastically converted to atheism when official government policy required it.

  His father still believed in the church. His mother, Ramirez’s Yoruba grandmother, had followed Santería, a melding of Catholic beliefs with the animist religion brought to Cuba by Nigerian slaves. The Yoruba believed the dead returned, the Catholics in the resurrection. Ramirez’s mother, a former university professor, dismissed it all as nonsense. She said the invisible looked just the same to her as the non-existent.

  “I won’t stay long,” Ramirez said. He walked over to the couch and kissed his mother on the cheek, patted his father on his shoulder. “I brought this for you.” He handed his father the bottle of Havana Club he had retrieved from the exhibit room.

  His father’s face creased into a smile. “Gracias, Ricardo. We had only a few ounces in our rations this month and those are already gone. Imagine, living in Cuba and not having enough rum.” He shook his head sadly.

  “It’s the Bacardis’ fault,” said his mother. “If they hadn’t taken their yeast with them, we’d still have good rum.”

  “I think it’s the quantity that’s the issue, not the quality,” said Conchita. “It’s not really their fault their factory was nationalized.”

  “They could have stayed,” his mother said. She was a fierce defender of Communism. “Lots of people gave up everything they owned. It was the price of freedom.”

  Ramirez wasn’t sure he agreed, but he knew better than to take on his mother.

  Change would eventually come; after all, Fidel Castro wasn’t supernatural. At least Ramirez hoped he wasn’t. He was afraid Castro’s ghost would find a way to speak to him from the grave, and his longwinded speeches were legendary.

  Conchita rolled her eyes at this family debate that had lasted for decades and would never be settled. “Sit down, Ricky. Tell us what you’ve been doing. Have some picadillo. I had to make it with ground soy. That’s all we had.”

  “I’m sure it will be delicious.” Ramirez pulled over a chair. His father poured him a glass of rum; his sister brought him a plate of the dish traditionally made with tomatoes, olives, raisins, and ground beef instead of texturized protein. They chatted for a while, until the flickering images on the television lured them in.

  Mission Impossible was the movie. Tom Cruise played Ethan Hunt, an agent framed for the murders of his team by a mole within the CIA.

  His mother was right, thought Ramirez, yawning with fatigue despite the fast action. It really was a silly plot.

  25

  SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007

  When Inspector Ramirez pulled in front of police headquarters the next morning, Fernando Espinoza was waiting out front, two large exhibit boxes stacked beside him on the sidewalk. He leaned into the open passenger-side window. “I started looking through missing person reports this morning. Nothing yet. But it’s a very big pile.”

  Hundreds of Cubans tried to leave the island every year by any means they could find: pieces of wood, tires, inner tubes, small boats, even the shells of old cars, anything that could be made to float. Most of what they used didn’t.

  If they could get as far as Florida, they could apply for permanent residency, but only if they first touched American soil. Those who survived the dangerous journey across the Straits of Florida were usually intercepted by the American Coast Guard. Sometimes, the Americans used pepper spray to stop them from landing. Once returned to Cuba, they were jailed for the treasonous act of trying to leave the island without the proper paperwork.

  Many families said nothing for fear of retribution. As a result, missing person reports were incomplete. Even so, there were thousands.

  Ramirez got out and helped Espinoza put the boxes in the back seat. They drove to the Instituto de Medicina Legal, the Centre for Legal Medicine.

  On the way, they passed another billboard: VOTE FOR SOBRIETY! But Cuba was a country where no one could really vote for anything, thought Ramirez. And how many drunks would vote for sobriety even if they could? Part of being drunk was not always knowing when one was drunk, or being too drunk to care. It was one of those government slogans that preached, as religion so often did, to the converted.

  Ramirez leaned on the horn, startling a coco-taxi driver who had broken down in the middle of the road. The man pushed the small vehicle, which looked like a bright yellow tennis ball, out of the way.

  “Why all the interest in Luis Posada this week?” asked Espinoza, looking out the window. “Half the billboards in Havana have his picture on them.”

  “He will be appearing soon in an American court to face charges. That’s why Dr. Flores is here. He’s been working on Posada’s file for decades.”

  “You know him?”

  “Dr. Flores? We investigated the hotel bombings in the late nineties together. He developed a profile of the men involved. It was very accurate; both men confessed.”
r />   Two Salvadorans, Otto René Rodriguez Llerena and Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, had been arrested. Cruz Leon was interviewed on Cuban television. He said he needed the money. He had a few ex-wives and too many children.

  Ramirez pulled his thoughts away from the smell of burned flesh, the rubble, the mangled body of the young Italian tourist whose only crime was vacationing in Cuba.

  “We’re here to see Manuel Flores,” Inspector Ramirez explained to the security guard, as he and Detective Espinoza signed in at the front desk.

  The dead man walked over to the photographs that lined the wall. He waved at Ramirez to get his attention. He pointed to one of Manuel Flores posing beside Fidel Castro in the Sierra Mountains, both men grinning and cradling rifles. Ramirez glanced at the ghost briefly and gave him a look to indicate he should go away. He was too busy to deal with distractions. The ghost shrugged apologetically and walked out the main door.

  “What is this place, Inspector?” asked Espinoza. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “It’s a centre for forensic medicine. It has resources that far outstrip anything we have, and Dr. Flores is one of them. Or at least he was, before he left for the United States a few years ago.”

  “Do they do autopsies here too?”

  “Not many,” said Ramirez. “They used to handle all suspicious deaths in Havana, but now they work more closely with Cuban Intelligence than with us.”

  “Why the change?”

  Ramirez lowered his voice. “There was an incident a few years ago. A Danish tourist was shot dead by security forces. He was walking down the sidewalk on the Avenida Territorial behind the Ministry of Defence. He was on his way back to his hotel, a little drunk after a night out in the bars.”

  “Why did they shoot him?”

  “The guards said he was in a restricted military area, but there were no signs prohibiting access. The family’s lawyer managed to obtain a videotape of the autopsy. Their medical experts said it looked like he was executed. Our government finally admitted that a volley of shots was fired inappropriately. Denmark issued a travel advisory warning its citizens that they could be shot and killed here without warning. The Major Crimes Unit was established not long after. Dr. Apiro was contracted to do all our autopsies.”

  “Why? Because there are no videotape cameras in his morgue?”

  Ramirez smiled. Espinoza was smart. “Now listen, Fernando. We only show Dr. Flores the physical evidence we’ve gathered. We don’t tell him our theories. We don’t want to influence his thinking by pointing him in any particular direction.”

  Ramirez knocked on the psychiatrist’s office door.

  “It’s open,” Flores called out. “Good morning, Inspector Ramirez. My goodness, it’s been a long time. And who is this young man with you?” The elderly psychiatrist stood up from behind his desk to greet them, beaming.

  “Detective Espinoza. He’s new to my section, but learning fast.”

  “Hola,” said Espinoza. He shifted his box awkwardly onto one knee so he could shake hands.

  “You can put those down over there.” The profiler tilted his head towards a scratched coffee table in front of a worn sofa. Espinoza and Ramirez complied.

  “Did the inspector tell you that he and I worked together over a decade ago on the hotel bombings? He’s the one who discovered that the explosives were smuggled into Cuba in a shampoo bottle and in the soles of Cruz Leon’s shoes. It was excellent police work.”

  Ramirez smiled. “I wonder sometimes why shampoo and Salvadorans are still allowed in the country.”

  The unexploded bombs were now on display in a museum. If Castro could have, thought Ramirez, he would have stuffed the Salvadorans and displayed them there as well.

  In response to the bombings, Castro had recruited seven thousand new policías from the countryside. The policemen were poorly trained, bored, and trigger-happy. One shot the young Danish tourist.

  “Ramirez and I were assigned to the same team, although he was only a detective then. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘only.’ Ramirez has always been very good. But here we are again,” said Flores, grinning. “Imagine. It’s as if I’ve come back from the dead. Glorious day, don’t you think?” He nodded vigorously, rubbing his gnarled fingers together. “A sunny day makes me feel connected to the universe. There’s nothing like death to trigger thoughts of one’s mortality. El Comandante discovered this recently himself. He has reached the conclusion, a little late perhaps, that speeches should be short.”

  Ramirez laughed. He had forgotten how charming Manuel Flores was. And how tall. Even stooped with age and illness, Flores towered over the two detectives. They shook hands; Flores clapped Ramirez on the back.

  “Forget the universe,” said Ramirez. “Profile this for me. Why are dead bodies always discovered so early in the morning?”

  “Wait until you’re my age before you complain. It’s the worst part of getting old, being robbed of sleep. But that gives us more waking hours, yes? Not a bad compromise, given the alternative. In fact, at my age, I’m happy to wake up at all. Not that there’s much I can do with my free time. These days I’m softer than a man swimming in the Atlantic.” Flores chuckled. “So, Ramirez, I understand you need some assistance navigating the terrain?”

  Ramirez nodded. He knew what terrain Flores meant. Not the physical crime scene but the psychological landscape of their killer.

  “Please, gentlemen,” said Flores. “Sit down. Open your boxes and show me what you have.” He motioned to the sagging, lumpy couch.

  Ramirez and Espinoza seated themselves, careful to avoid the broken springs that strained the upholstery. Flores sat across from them on an equally lumpy chair.

  “Let’s start with the physical evidence first,” Flores said. He removed a pair of eyeglasses from his shirt pocket. “Then the photographs.”

  Ramirez opened the larger of the boxes. He handed Flores a clear plastic bag that held a cigarette butt. “This was found near the second body this week. It’s a Chinese brand. The name means Double Happiness.”

  Flores looked at it closely before he handed the bag back.

  “There was a cigarette butt found at the first crime scene too,” Ramirez said. “A British brand. Silk Cut.” Ramirez opened the second box. He riffled through it until he found the exhibit bag and handed it to the profiler.

  “Do you think the cigarettes mean anything, Dr. Flores?” asked Espinoza.

  The profiler shrugged. “It’s too soon to say. Everyone in Cuba smokes. The tobacco companies may be seeing their profits decline everywhere else, but never in the Third World. But still, it’s interesting that both are foreign brands.”

  “The women’s purses were left behind at each crime scene,” said Ramirez. “Their belongings were inside. Nothing obvious missing.”

  He supplied the pathologist with a pair of latex gloves, then put on a pair himself before bringing out the bright fuchsia bag that Sanchez had found at the Prima Verrier crime scene. He handed it to the profiler along with the plastic exhibit bags that held the items found inside. When Flores finished examining them, Ramirez passed over the remaining exhibit bags, including the remnants of the women’s clothing and their shoes.

  “May I see the photographs?” said Flores, after he had worked his way slowly through each item.

  Ramirez turned them over. Flores shuffled through the pile slowly. He laid a few of them on the table, like playing cards. He chose one shot of Prima Verrier’s body and placed a similar picture of the unidentified female victim beside it.

  “He poses them to look like they’re sleeping. I think this means he doesn’t want to accept the consequences of his actions. At some level, he feels deeply ashamed of what he’s done. Profiling,” Flores explained to Espinoza, “is built on a careful examination of the crime scene as well a close review of witness statements and expert reports.” He smiled. “Then a g
ood profiler ignores all of that and relies on intuition.”

  “Not to be rude, but I thought you had retired,” said Ramirez. He didn’t mention that he thought Flores had succumbed to his illness.

  “I’ve been asked to prepare material for the American CIA. Luis Posada’s trial will be held in Texas in a few weeks.”

  “We work with the CIA now?” said Espinoza, surprised.

  Flores shrugged. “When it’s in our interest, yes. Believe it or not, the Americans shredded all their evidence against Posada. They asked for our help to reconstruct it. I’ve had to go over all my notes from three decades. It brings back memories, I can tell you. But I’ve discovered nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Is the trial in Texas related to the hotel bombings?” Espinoza asked.

  “No,” said Flores. “Immigration charges. Posada asked the Americans for political asylum when he entered their country. He told immigration officials that he took the bus; they allege he came by boat. It’s like the gangster, Al Capone, being charged with tax evasion.

  “Posada lives very comfortably in Miami from what I understand. He tells everyone he sleeps like a baby. But most babies don’t sleep all that well. I sleep like a baby too. I wake up every few hours to piss.” The profiler grinned. “You’ve done well, gentlemen.” He leaned back in his chair, forming his long fingers into a tent. “You’ve learned a lot about this killer already. Technically, I should point out that he’s a multiple murderer, not a serial killer—we need at least three victims before we can call him that. But I’m quite sure it’s the same man.”

  He sat forward and tapped on a photograph. “In both cases, the cigarette butts were in almost exactly the same spot beside the body. The women were left fully clothed. Skirts were down, not hiked up. There was no apparent attempt to undress either of them. Was there any sexual interference?”