Sitting with a large cup of coffee, and with her red hair covering a large portion of her face, nobody suspected that the woman was in the police force. That was exactly what she was aiming for. There, she would be able to think in peace, and organise her thoughts, with the exception of the huge commotion on the next street. She looked at the sign: ‘Café Ultreia”, the Galician equivalent of ‘Keep Going’. The perfect place, she thought.
Antón had not asked her where she would be waiting for him, but he knew her well enough to know how to find her. He arrived just over an hour later, holding up a transparent airtight bag, the kind in which they keep evidence for examination, and inside it was a small bottle. It was tube shaped, and originally must have contained perfume or, failing that, some sort of cooking spice.
“Poison,” he said, nearing Eva’s table. She was not perturbed. “From what can be seen, she’d planned on poisoning him but, for whatever reason, she had access to the handgun, and didn’t pass up the opportunity,” he explained as he sat down. “I’ve also checked his mobile. He had received your call and, shortly before, one from a phone box. There were holiday brochures on the table and two cups of coffee. My guess would be that Emma found out that he was planning on going away on holiday and she called him with the excuse of changing or finalising some detail about the trip.”
He then left the bottle on the table and continued:
“I’ll bet it’s Tetrodotoxin,” he said, “but we’ll have to analyse it to be sure.”
“Tetrodotoxin?” Antón’s interest in the most diverse poisons was famous down at the station.
“Yes. It’s the venom from the puffer fish; you know, from the Japanese dish ‘fugu’,” he explained. “You’re conscious the whole time as it paralyses your muscles. Death is caused by asphyxiation after only a few hours. A tough end, as much physically as psychologically, because there’s no antidote for it, and what usually happens is that you are aware the whole time that you’re dying.”
Eva smiled, not without a certain amount of sarcasm, as a waiter, alerted by Antón’s presence, came up to the table:
“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
“Yes, a black coffee please.”
As soon as the man left, Antón turned back to Eva, but this time with a more personal tone:
“How are you?” he asked, looking her in the eye.
“I’m okay,” she answered slowly. “I knew he was lying to us, but I never imagined that he was also in Emma’s sights. I suppose I didn’t get to work it out because, amongst other things, he himself didn’t want me to.”
“Do you feel up to carrying on?”
“Of course,” answered Eva, reaffirming the statement with a smile. “More than ever, I assure you. If I abandon it now, she’ll have won. And don’t get me wrong, I can concede defeat for one battle, but not for the war,” she declared.
Then she tied up her hair and added:
“I just needed a moment to get my head together. I’ve hardly slept at all the last few days, and I suppose it’s beginning to show. But I’m ready now.”
The conversation paused when the waiter left Antón’s coffee on the table, next to the receipt. Antón picked it up, took two coins out of his wallet, and gave it to the man.
“Keep the change,” he told him.
“Thank you.”
Alone once more, he resumed with the details of the case:
“The weird thing is that she killed him with his own regulatory weapon, and then left it on the kitchen table next to the poison. That’s what’s strange, even more so when I had a hunch, and it occurred to me to look for his badge, thinking that I would find that as well. But I didn’t find it.”
Eva sat up in the seat:
“His badge isn’t in his flat?”
“No,” he answered, shaking his head. “I looked for it in the living room, the bedroom, and in the kitchen, but there was nothing. Bearing in mind that he lived alone, I don’t think that he’d leave the handgun in plain sight and yet put his badge away in some secret hiding place.
“We need to have a good search for it to be sure. For a moment, I’d thought that Miguel could be the final victim. It made sense,” she reasoned. “But if she has taken his badge, that’s surely because she’s planning to keep killing, and needs it to gain access to the next victim.”
Antón was now talking on the radio to the patrol officers who were still in Miguel’s apartment. The order was clear to all: search for the badge right down to behind the last cushion. Then he turned his attention to Eva:
“And you don’t think she could be showing off? I mean, she shoots him dead, but leaves the gun at the crime scene along with an unused bottle of poison, before sending to our station her personal mark, so that we find the body. The badge could simply be a trophy.”
“No, for that, she would needed a certain extra level of nerve, and if that were the case, she would have done it before.”
“Maybe the news coming out in the press has inflated her ego?”
“No. For a man yes, but not for a woman. If something drives a woman to draw up a plan as meticulous as this: impersonating people, and studying her victims in detail, then she wouldn’t just abandon it because everything was going well. When it comes to things like this, we’re more cerebral.”
Eva paused her explanation, leaned back again in her chair, and stared blankly at the pavement, searching for inspiration. Then she continued:
“Emma is cold and methodical, and will continue to be: that, I’m sure of. It’s the only way she could carry out four almost perfect murders in four days, without us having a decent opportunity to catch her. She’s thrashing us. But in practice, however, not only has she studied to the letter the way she was going to kill, but she’s also born in mind how to deal with the victims’ reactions, and ours, in order to be able to keep doing it. And we hadn’t taken that into account until now.”
Antón didn’t really understand what his partner meant, but before he could ask her to clarify, she anticipated the question:
“In other words, I suspect that she has organised the victims in such a way that when killing one she is, in turn, procuring the opportunity to access the second, and it goes along like that. Have you finished in Miguel’s’ flat?” she asked, standing up.
“Yes. All that needs doing now is taking a written statement from the neighbours,” he answered as he finished off the last drop of his coffee, “but I’ve told the officers to take charge of them because everyone’s already told us that nobody saw anything.”
“Well then, let’s go to the station. I need to make some calls to confirm some details. You can leave me there, and in the meantime take the opportunity to pay a visit to the Guardia Civil, to see if they can hurry up with that report.”
“Perfect.”
Antón also stood up.
“Miguel is the key lead,” Eva stressed, now on the way back to the car. “He could just be seen as simply her next victim, but in reality he isn’t. I suspect that for Emma he was the most complicated to include in her plan but, for us, this is the one that tells us how to interpret the information we have.”
The two of them got into Eva’s C4 and set off back to the station, without stopping by Miguel’s flat. It wasn’t imperative, and they could not afford to waste any time. There was a lot of work ahead of them.
At the first hour of the afternoon, Eva was still in her office. She had been holed up in there for three hours, making telephone calls, jotting down dates, drawing up charts. Many times she would stare blankly and indefinitely at the wall, before beginning to write compulsively on a sheet of paper which, a short while later, she would throw in the bin, to start from scratch on another. As a result, the bin was almost full, her head on the verge of explosion, and the telephone on top of her table was now being used for the last time.
“Mr Álvarez, I’ve finally found you. I’m Inspector Santiago, and I’m in charge of investigating Sebas’ murder.”
“Y
es, I remember you. Tell me, have there been any developments?”
“At the moment, no. We’re still investigating, which is why I wish to ask you something relating to the case.”
“I’m listening.”
“If I remember correctly, when I arrived at the factory on Tuesday, you were in the entryway with your two other colleagues, and a policeman was asking you insistently about the physical appearance of the woman who had visited Sebas that morning.”
“I remember, but the fact is that none of us had looked at her enough to be able to give a very detailed description.”
“No, I’m not calling about that. Now try to remember, because this is important. Was this policeman trying to get you to say how she looked, or was he wanting you to confirm an appearance that he already knew?”
The man thought for a minute on the other end of the line. Then, he answered doubtfully:
“Well, to tell you the truth, now that you ask I don’t think he had the slightest idea how she looked until we told him.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Thank you very much, and we’ll keep you informed of any progress.”
Eva noted down on one of the sheets of paper in front of her, and a hint of a smile appeared on her lips. It was sly, and the kind of smile that materialises unconsciously when we believe we’ve discovered some piece of information available only to a very small number of people. Then she looked at her watch. In his last call, Antón had announced to her that he would be no longer than half an hour in arriving, and that time was almost up. She got up and walked to the coffee machine in the foyer, with the papers in her hand. There she took her coffee and went outside to drink it, where a timid sun was trying to warm the cold Ourense Maundy Thursday.
She had barely begun to stir her coffee when Antón arrived:
“What did the Guardia Civil tell you?” asked Eva as soon as she saw him.
“Not much. They’ve asked me for one more day. They can’t find the report on Emma’s accident because, as we don’t have the exact place or date, they can’t know which detachment covered it, as that stretch is covered by several of them.”
“Well, whatever. Let’s go inside and see if the superintendent’s free, and we can relay the situation to him. He’s been wanting to speak with us all afternoon.”
They walked to the back of the corridor and knocked on Míguez’s door. Behind them, the entire station was like a funeral parlour. From inside the office, the chief’s unmistakable voice answered:
“Come in.”
First Eva walked in, followed by Antón, and they sat down simultaneously at the two chairs in front of the desk, under Míguez’s attentive gaze. The superintendent remained silent. A silence that, as soon as they were settled in their seats, he broke without any sense of compassion, with a look in his eyes that would freeze the blood of even the most composed mortal:
“I hope you have something, and something good. That woman has killed one of our own.”
He took a breath, and then reasserted:
“One of our own, and right under our noses too. I want her now, dead or alive. Eva, from this moment, you will have all of the officers at your disposal, to do with whatever you need to. But I want to see what woman locked in a cell ASAP,” his tone rose with each word, “and if needs be I will go out after her in the street myself. But nobody, and I mean nobody kills one of my men and then goes home to sleep soundly in their bed, understood?”
The two officers both nodded in unison. Then he continued, although now somewhat calmer:
“Tell me that you’ve found something relevant...”
Eva took the lead:
“Sir, Miguel’s death affects us all, and we are completely sensitive to the situation,” the superintendent continued to wait expectantly. “Regarding the case, I think that we should keep a cool head, and if we do, we’ll see that this latest murder reveals a lot of interesting information. Miguel is a key victim, because he’s the only one that we knew both dead and alive.”
“You have my attention.”
“I think that we’re now ready to pinpoint the murderer’s modus operandi and, in turn, part of the motivation that drives her to do it. It’s possible that we may be mistaken somewhere along the line, but that’s a risk we have to take. If we want to catch her, we need to sketch out some conclusions now. Otherwise, she’ll escape before we can even get close.”
Eva took a moment to look through the papers she had brought from her office and which, up until that point, she had kept on her lap.
“We know that Emma’s the murderer, and we think that, surely for reasons of revenge, she has spent years designing a plan with the aim of killing seven particular men during Holy Week; all of them in Ourense, and one a day. In that sense, I interpret the fact that she’s sent the golf ball to mean simply that Miguel is the victim for Thursday. There’s no other meaning. Just think that if she hadn’t sent it to us, he wouldn’t have been discovered until Monday or Tuesday. And I say seven men because by Monday she will have already carried out her plan, given that Miguel was thinking about returning to the city on that day.”
The chief listened attentively to his inspector’s reasoning without trying to interrupt her.
“So anyway, in this plan,” she continued, “Emma has organised the victims, and planned out how she was going to kill them in such a way that not only is she able to access them but also so that she can continue killing the rest. As such, Javi was the first. She killed him by surprise on Monday. He had to be the first one because every Monday at the start of the holidays he would go to Lugo. Besides, she needed to keep him there until the dawn, because that way she could kill Sebas, the second victim, the following morning whilst avoiding him finding out somehow that she was there. Miguel still didn’t know, and even if it came out in the press, because it happened at dawn it wouldn’t be published until Wednesday. For that reason, and also because he could have been warned by Miguel, she felt out the situation with Marc in the café. Disguised as a student, she checked out whether he suspected anything. If indeed he did suspect, she was carrying around the poison as a plan B, but in the likely eventuality that he wouldn’t recognise her, she would use plan A, which was ideal for her and consisted of an accident when he got back to his car at mid-morning. Because he thought that the supposed student was amusing to him, and he hadn’t been forewarned, she had a clear path. The poison, on the other hand, really was plan A with Miguel who, as a policeman, was in the know. Yet once she was in his flat, Emma attacked when she saw the handgun. For that to be the case, she needed for us not to know that Miguel was a possible victim, so that we couldn’t monitor him. Therefore she was careful to disguise Javi’s murder as a crime of passion, and the second and third murders as accidents.”
She now turned to Antón:
“You told me, when we found Miguel’s body, that I couldn’t have known. If you think about it, I couldn’t have known because she’d got us believing that for her plan to work, the victims mustn’t know they were in danger. How could we have imagined that he was one of them?”
Antón nodded. Eva proceeded:
“My deduction is that after committing a crime, she immediately starts focussing on the next one. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to find out about Miguel’s holiday. I managed to speak with the sales assistant at the agency, and Emma was there just a few minutes after him. But be careful, because I don’t think that she would have brought Miguel forward in her plan just because he wanted to leave. I think it’s more the case that he was always the fourth victim, because she needs his badge in order to access the fifth victim, who I fear will be killed tomorrow.”
“Who’s the fifth?” asked Míguez, afraid of the answer he was about to hear.
“Unfortunately, we don’t know yet. But then again, we do now have more information than we did before, and the search and protection of the three future victims will be the only line of investigation we’l
l follow from this moment on. At least we now know that it’s not the entire city that’s in danger.”
“If the victims were chosen at random,” noted Antón, “she would never have gone for a policeman who, on top of that, was not even investigating the case.”
“Are you both sure you want to discard the possibility that she could be a serial killer that’s just turned up and is choosing her victims at random?” the chief wanted to assure.
“Yes, her attacks are too elaborate,” Eva answered. “She’s not a serial killer, but one who kills for a specific reason. Surely, it’s for vengeance.”
“Yes, I think so too,” said Míguez, backing her up.
“Besides,” she added, “even if we have any doubts, we don’t have the sufficient time or staff to cover two lines of investigation. And, if we had to choose one, it’s clear which one it should be.”
Míguez took that point as the end of that topic, and moved directly on to the next:
“What information do you have about the identity of the next victims?”
“First and foremost,” Eva answered, “it must be said that if our predictions are correct, we need to think in terms of the fifth victim facilitating access to the sixth, and the sixth to the seventh. That being so, theoretically these future victims need to be informed of what’s coming their way. Furthermore, I would venture to say that the fact that she always leaves a golf ball has the aim of terrorising them. If they hadn’t warned Miguel, he would have found out through the press. And, importantly, she left the handgun and the poison in Miguel’s home because she doesn’t need them in her plan and, in turn, could make us believe that she’s all finished. It could be that she wants to make sure that they don’t try to leave like Miguel. In my opinion, we should publicise the latest murder in the press.”
“I agree,” Míguez interrupted with much gravity. “At the end of the day, it’s not like it’s possible for there to be any more pressure on us than there already is right now. And if we can save somebody’s life with it, then it’s worthwhile.”
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