"But I've already told you everything you know," he sighed in resignation and resumed answering, in a tired tone. "Fine, I'll tell you the whole thing again. I'm not homosexual and, as far as I know, nor was Alex. He maintained several relationships with girls, but nothing serious, nothing that ever lasted more than a month.”
"And on the Internet?" insisted Carlos.
"For God’s sake, I've already told you... I don't have a clue what Alex did when he was online. I know he would talk with girls, but I guess edit would just be about trivial stuff. One time he did tell me he had flirted with one of them via a web chat, but it didn't seem to be anything serious."
"But you ended up with his computer. You would have been able to access all his information, and know who he was talking with."
"I already told you, I erased everything. It didn't seem right to me to snoop into the private life of my dead friend."
"Are you sure that was the reason? Are you sure you didn't have anything to hide?" asked Carlos. "You pushed very hard to get his computer."
"It was much better than mine, and he didn't need it any more. Is that so strange?"
"For someone who has so much respect for ‘his dead friend', yes," Carlos put out the cigarette, and decided to steer the conversation down another route. “Regarding the girls he would talk to via the Internet, you know where they lived?"
"How should I know... He talked to me once about a girl from Mexico, one from London, another from Argentina... But they were Internet flings, nothing for anyone to kill a person over.”
"And any Spanish girls?”
“He had a fair number of females friends throughout the whole of Spain, yes. But I wouldn't know what to tell you. From Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Seville..."
"None in Guipúzcoa?”
"Again, I don't know. He didn't take much notice of it either.”
“Eneko, I hope you understand that the only thing I'm trying to do is help," Carlos told him, in a conciliatory tone. "I imagine that you’ll also want the person responsible for what happened to Alex to pay for what he did."
"You didn't see what happened to Alex, did you?" answered Eneko, lifting his head and trying to keep the tone of his voice under control. “There's no way of paying for that. And it seems like you people didn't care much about it at the time. More than a year's gone by without you doing anything."
"We're doing everything we can."
"Yeah, sure. Like arresting me."
"If you try to co-operate, the whole thing will be easier for both of us, so try to think back.”
"All right. He didn't talk with anyone from Guipúzcoa,” he smiled, as he relived a memory. “He used to say he never wanted to flirt with anyone who could turn up on his doorstep.”
"Did Alex talk to you about anyone in particular during those final months?"
"I don't know... Like I've already told you, during the final months we weren't even talking. We were angry."
"Why?" asked Carlos.
"Alex had been going out for a while with a good friend of mine. In fact, I was the one who introduced her to him. It seemed the two worked very well together, and then suddenly one day she comes to me saying she's found out that Alex has been two-timing her."
"What do you mean?"
"That on the weekends, when he left her at home, he devoted himself to cheating on her with half the girls in San Sebastián."
"Did you get very angry about that?"
"Not enough to kill him, if that's what you mean,” the hostility returned toEneko's voice. “But of course I got angry. She was crushed, and she was also my friend. And I felt responsible for having introduced them to each other, so I went to see Alex."
"And what happened?"
"He made fun of me. He gave it no importance; he told me that the relationship with this girl wasn't working, and that he didn't understand why I was getting all worked up like that. The conversation got heated, and we ended up saying things we didn't mean, so, in the end, I left, and we didn't talk for weeks."
“And you didn't hear anything from him in all that time."
"No, until one day Alex called me and told me he couldn't bear us being angry over something like that. I was also feeling really stupid about it, so we agreed to meet up to make our peace, but when I got there..."
Eneko's voice broke. Carlos remained silent, giving him time to regain his composure. He was feeling guilty for the way he was pressuring the young man, but he had been the one closest to Alex. If he could not tell him anything about why he would have been murdered, nobody could. When he looked up, Carlos checked through his notes and resumed questioning:
“Okay. Did he have special friends online? Some man with whom he could have maintained a somewhat more intimate relationship?”
“Now we’re just going back over the same old thing,” Eneko seemed increasingly more exasperated. “I’ve already told you that Alex wasn’t gay, and if he was, he never told me.”
“The idea that Alex could have been gay seems to bother you too much. Do you have some kind of problem with it?”
Eneko stood up from his chair and struck the table with his fist, with tears of rage in his eyes.
“I don’t have any problem with homosexuals. I have a problem with you people. You haven’t even got a damn idea where the hell to take the case, and you’re all hoping to just sink me, even that means heaping a ton of shit all over Alex’s memory. He was my best friend, you know? And I have no desire to carry on remembering how I found him in his kitchen, covered in blood, torn apart... Shit, I almost didn’t recognise him; I still have nightmares about it... I just want to forget the whole thing. Is that so difficult to understand?”
The emotions that Eneko had been keeping contained rose to the surface. He broke down on the table with his head between his arms, crying like a little boy, suffocating on his own sobs. Carlos respected his pain for a few seconds, feeling guilty, even though deep down he suspected that Eneko had been hiding this anguish for months now; that he had tried to lie to himself, in an effort to come across as stronger than he really was. At the bottom of it all, he was just a frightened little boy who had lost his friend. Carlos stood up, ready to leave him alone for a few minutes and, on reaching the door, he turned around and said softly to him:
“You don’t know how easy it is for me to understand you. I would also like to forget all of this.”
***
Natalia tried to convince herself that no matter how many times she looked at her mobile screen, it would not make Carlos call any sooner. She had to find something to distract herself with until he called to say that he now had access to Eneko’s computer. She sat down on the sofa and opened the envelope containing the dossier from David, the young man who worked in the files department who had prepared it for them, with the information on all of the attempted suicides that had taken place since July of the previous year. On receiving it, she had been amazed by the enormous pile of papers comprising it, and imagined that David had really gone above and beyond, providing her with all of the information about each case that they were able to have access without needing a warrant. No sooner after starting the first page, her spirit hit rock bottom. There were no details, just a list of names with the sex, age, and date.
“My God... There are so many...” she whispered in astonishment.
“What’s that?” Gus asked her, twizzling around in his seat to look at her.
“The list of suicide attempts I asked Carlos for. I’d never have imagined that so many desperate people existed,” she explained.
“Look on the positive side. Now there’ll be much fewer,” joked Gus.
“Don’t be an arse. How am I going to know if one of them is Charon? I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start with those who did manage to kill themselves. I think their innocence is beyond a doubt.”
Natalia grabbed a ballpoint pen and began following Gus’s advice. On the list, there appeared eight hundred and seventeen suicide
attempts. Once the deceased were eliminated, the number was still overwhelming: six hundred and twenty-nine. Gus’s voice came back to distract her:
“Do you think Carlos will do a good job of it? It’s frustrating not being able to be there... I’d get the information we need with just five minutes’ access to Eneko’s computer, and yet I have to stay here, worrying that Carlos won’t be capable of doing something as simple as connecting to the Internet, running the floppy disk I’ve given him, and sending me a message via ICQ.”
“Of course he'll do a good job of it,” said Natalia, trying to put his mind at ease. "You explained it to him several times, and you even wrote it down for him on a piece of paper. I understood it perfectly."
"Yes, you understood it, but Carlos... Last night I was on the verge of giving up the job, and even the money you both still owe me, just to never have to talk to him again about IT for the rest of my life."
Natalia shrugged her shoulders. She would have liked to have been able to defend Carlos, but it was an irrefutable fact that IT was not his thing. She turned her gaze back to the list of names, not knowing what else to cross out.
“I’ve stalled again,” she confessed to Gus. "I'm afraid of starting to cross names out, and striking Charon’s off because of not filtering it out properly."
He got up out of his chair and went over to her, sitting down next to her on the sofa. Natalia handed him the sheets of paper and he looked at them in silence for a few seconds.
"Well, there must be something to get rid of. Carlos has already told you that you would have to make a choice, because you can't interrogate all of them," he leafed through a couple of pages whilst he thought. “I think he’s from Biscay. So you can eliminate all the ones from Alavese and Guipúzcoa.”
“And why do you think that?” she asked him, intrigued.
“Let’s see, how shall I put it... Alex says that he’s from San Sebastián, but it’s just not fitting for me. It gives me the impression that he’s using the thing about living there as an excuse to put off the dates until the time when they’re convenient for him. One moment, I had some notes around here...” he got up, shuffled through the thousands of sheets of paper surrounding the table and, a few seconds later, he extracted some rumpled and ash-stained pages. “Here it is, I went along noting down the things I found in the chat threads that could prove it. Firstly, all of the victims are from Biscay...”
“So far we can’t deduce anything from that information,” Natalia smiled at him, apologetically. “There have only been two murders, and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions from such an unrepresentative sample. He could be from anywhere. On the one hand, we could imagine that he is from San Sebastián, and that he prefers to carry out the murders far away from his home so that it’s harder for anyone to recognize him. Or we could imagine that he’s from Bilbao, because what reasons would anyone has to come from Guipúzcoa to kill people from Biscay?”
“Allow me to explain... As I was saying, all of the victims are from Biscay, they sometimes talk with him about cities around here, and he has no problem knowing where these places are, or talking about many of them. Whenever they mention it to him, he gives them an excuse about an aunt of his who lives in Biscay, whom he sometimes spends his holidays with. I’m not convinced,” Gus looked up from his papers to consult Natalia’s opinion. She nodded. “Besides, every time they ask him about San Sebastián, the guy passes the buck like he always does whenever he’s asked about anything personal. You know, ‘I’m tired of my city, the only thing I want is to be there with you’ and nonsense like that... I have tons of notes about that here. In summary, I think that Alex has not even seen a photograph of San Sebastián.”
“It’s pretty coherent,” acknowledged Natalia, “but I prefer not to rule out Guipúzcoa for the time being. At least this leaves us away from all the people in Alavese. Eighty-five cases fewer. It’s not much but, if we bear in mind that we know the killer is a man and that the majority of failed suicides are committed by women, we can eliminate three hundred and eighty more cases.”
“That’s quite a bit better, but the list is still fairly long. How many do we have left?” asked Gus.
“One hundred and four cases,” she replied, after counting for a couple of minutes. “If we pass this list on to Carlos, we’ll have to add one more suicide to the list: his. We need to keep cutting it down. We’ll cross out everyone under seventeen. None of them could be Charon, because they wouldn’t be able to drive. And also those over twenty-five. I don’t think the girls would feel confident going out with someone so much older. What do you think?”
Gus shrugged and nodded, not knowing what to say. Natalia realised that he would not be able to help her anymore; that, as much as it terrified her, the decisions that she took from that moment on would be her own responsibility. With every name she crossed out, her mind filled with anxiety at the possibility that she might be ruling out the real killer; of having before her own eyes the name and surname of the culprit, and not being able to see it. She tried to dispel those thoughts as she lit a cigarette. They could not investigate them all; she needed to filter through all of this information or the investigation would go on for eternity. And it would be no use to the next victim that the investigation was being carried out in a scientific and meticulous way if they did not manage to stop Charon quickly enough. She grabbed the pen once more and continued crossing out. The list was now reduced to sixty-six names.
“You said that Charon spoke daily with his victims from the 15th of May onwards, right?” she asked him.
He nodded, so she went along eliminating the hospital admissions that took place after that day, as it would have been impossible for him to have gone online if he had been an in-patient in a psychiatric facility for attempted suicide.
"Well, that reduces the list to 44 people," she said a few minutes later. "No matter how hard I think, I can't come up with a single other criterion to reduce it further. If I apply any further filters, there'll be a high chance of me eliminating the killer's name."
"There aren’t that many, though," said Gus. "Carlos will certainly scream blue murder at having to ask his sergeant for all these confidential psychiatric reports, but I don't see any other way either. In any case, as we suspect, if Alex's friend turns out to be the killer, we won't have to worry about this anymore. By the way, speaking of Carlos, don't you think he's taking a long time to call?”
***
Carlos quickly double-clicked on the program that Gus had given him on the floppy disk. Nothing happened. After the agonising minutes that he had endured the previous night to learn this thing that Gus called a 'double click', he still had his doubts about whether he had done it properly. The lad had told him that, when he clicked it, the program would not show anything, because it was designed so that the person using it never knew that somebody was accessing their computer, but Carlos had remained doubtful about how he was going to know whether he had done it properly if there was not going to be any visible result. He had not asked him, because he had seen in Gus's eyes that it could be dangerous to keep insisting. Now he was regretting not having clarified it more.
He went back to looking at the piece of paper, to be sure of the next step. He had to open ICQ and call Gus to tell him that he was going to send him a message. Good, the torment was now coming to an end. If all had gone as it should, in a few seconds' time the whole thing would be in Gus's hands, and he would be able to go back to keeping his distance from computers.
***
Natalia's mobile phone began to ring. Gus threw himself towards it whilst the two of them were sitting in front of the computer. He saw on the phone screen that the number belonged to Carlos, and he did not know whether to rejoice or freak out about it:
"Hi, did you do it all properly?”
"Well, I think so,” Carlos's voice did not sound as entirely sure as Gus would have liked. "You'll see for yourself now.”
"Okay, I'm also connected to the Internet. Have you
managed to get into Eneko's ICQ account?"
"Yes, he didn't have a password. We were lucky, eh?"
“Yes, very lucky," Gus sighed. It would have been much easier for Carlos to have looked up what the IP on his own computer was, but the previous night he had resigned himself to the obvious fact that it was impossible to ask any more of Carlos. He began typing, and left the whole thing ready so that, as soon as Carlos sent the message, his computer would search for the information he needed. "Okay, give me a few seconds and I'll have it all ready. There we go; send me the message."
"What do I put?"
"For God's sake, Carlos, whatever you want. Send it to me blank then, if it’s easier,” Gus tried to calm himself. The headache from the previous day had come back again after only a minute of talking on the phone. He waited for the message to arrive, but, instead of that, he heard Carlos's voice down the telephone.
"It won't let me send blank one. What do I do?"
"Put hello, just hello. Is that so difficult?"
"Look, don't you get shirty with me, I'm nervous all right?. You already know this isn't my thing."
"Okay, I'm sorry. Put hello, and send it like I explained to you yesterday."
At last the sound of the received message came through the computer’s speakers. Gus clicked 'enter' on his computer, and it began to follow the signal, before arriving at the source of the message. When it finished, Gus smiled, and picked up the mobile again:
"Carlos, the computer is mine. We did it.”
"I did it all properly? I can't believe it..."
“Me neither. I'll call you once I've taken out what we need. See you later.”
"Okay, good luck."
He hung up and began searching for the information. The headache had disappeared completely. Now all he had left was the excitement of knowing that they could well be very close to their target.
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