Shadows Across America Page 27

  “Listen, I think maybe you might be right. It would be best if I found your computer and maybe any paperwork you have related to the girls. Where is it?”

  “Please, just look around, and you’ll see I’m right. You’re making a big mistake with an honorable man who—”

  But Suarez didn’t seem very interested in their conversation. He left the room, heading for the kitchen. He came back almost immediately with a couple of dishcloths and the Beast’s toolbox. His toolbox!

  “What are you going to do with that? Take it with you if you like.”

  Suarez answered distractedly as he looked inside, paying more attention to the objects than their conversation. “Well, I searched the place from top to bottom, and what do you know? You’re telling the truth. I didn’t find anything.”

  “Because there’s nothing to find—because I’m not lying. Why don’t you let me go? Or at least my little fingers. They’re hurting very badly.”

  Instead of that, Suarez, who seemed to have forgotten all about the box, brought over a damp, rolled-up dishcloth. The Beast closed his mouth and moved his head away, knowing that if he was prevented from talking, it would be easier for the man to objectify him. His many years of experience as a kidnapper had taught him that it was the worst thing that could happen to a victim: it reduced them to speechless bodies devoid of humanity. The perfect puppets with which to fulfill their tormentors’ desires. The memory almost made him feel better. Suddenly the situation seemed to have turned in his favor. His captor appeared to give up. Winning back the initiative made him feel strong, but then he saw the man come back with a chisel, and before the Beast could ask what he was planning to do with it, the man had pulled back his hair with one hand and used the other to shove the gouge between his teeth and lever them open. Frightened by this unexpected turn of events, not to mention the pain, he opened his mouth to stop the man doing any more damage.

  “OK! OK! Fine, I’ll open up—don’t hurt me. When you realize that you’re hurting an innoce—”

  Suarez wouldn’t let him finish. He shoved the damp cloth into his mouth. It leaked water every time he bit down, giving the Beast an unpleasant choking sensation that made him gag, forcing him to keep his jaw almost completely straight. Then Suarez tied the gag viciously tight so that it cut into his cheeks and tightened the restraints around his thighs almost as tight as the rope around his little fingers. He put his face right under the man’s nose and spoke to him once again in a measured tone that was rapidly turning colder and colder. The old man’s breath stank of alcohol.

  “I see that you still don’t get it, so I’m going to have to teach you a lesson. I have all the time in the world to get what I want, and you’re going to help me. That God you keep mentioning knows very well that you’re going to help me. And when you do, I’ll let you go free. Meanwhile, however, you’re going to be afraid of me, and that’s how I’ll know that you’re really helping me.”

  He picked up the toolbox again. The Beast was unnerved by the unnatural sound of the last phrase. He was afraid that the man might be suffering from delusions of grandeur and let things get out of control while the Beast grew more and more vulnerable. Suarez turned around with a hammer and chisel, and the Beast instinctively shut his mouth, making himself swallow water again before he opened it.

  “It’s not that I care about the noise. Screaming is a release; that’s why we do it. You’re about to find out how nasty it is when you can’t.”

  As he spoke, he placed the chisel upon the medial meniscus of his captive’s right knee. “I’m sorry for doing it like this, but I don’t want to miss.”

  Then he calmly brought the hammer down as hard as he could. It hit the chisel full on, and the tool sank between the two bones in the joint until they separated. The knee came apart with a pain as sharp and intense as anything the Beast had ever felt, but his scream was thwarted: his tongue was pressed down by the cloth, and the pressure from his jaws sent more water down his throat. This created a sensation that was absolutely new to him: the need to cough blocked by the flow of water. He started to squirm in panic. Overcome with animal fear, he was scared that he’d choke to death. Then Suarez cut off the gag, helped him to take out the cloth, and then went on unperturbed.

  “It feels like you’re drowning, but without the cloth, it isn’t real; it’s just fear. Now, I’m going to get your computer from the truck while you think things over. The more you help me, the easier this will be on you. Thus far, you’ll just have a limp for the rest of your life. I don’t know whether you’ll be able to drive.”

  Then the Beast was alone, with the chisel still sticking out of his leg. It was right in the gap, which grew wider with every involuntary contraction. He was filled with primeval fear. My God, he thought. He’s sick, crazy—how am I going to get out of this one?

  Andrés paused to take another sip of water before returning to his story.

  “After I left, Oliver’s career with the police went well. He knew the streets, and he joined the Criminal Brigade. You probably haven’t heard of it.”

  Ethan shook his head.

  “It was a special elite force. They worked against organized gangs and the like. During the dictatorship they played a major role in the repression. Oliver was very useful to them. He had contacts. He never told me what they did during the early years, but I know they went to indigenous reserves, supposedly to quell uprisings. All he said was that it was soul destroying. His exact words: soul destroying. They did things that could only be done if you didn’t have a soul. Sadly, that was a fair description of almost all of his colleagues. He went back to the capital and asked to be transferred to a desk job, but he was too useful to them. Although they never sent him back to the reserves, he stayed in the field for the rest of his career. He took refuge with his beloved Patricia, but Tavo grew up stubborn and angry, just like him. He was a troublemaker. That was when Oliver began to lose his way like his father, but he didn’t want to turn out that way, so rather than lay a hand on his boy, he went out into the street and gave some miscreant a beating. But there was no saving Tavo. Now that Oliver had gone up in the world, they went to live in an expensive condo and started mingling in wealthier circles: with captains, lawyers, and public attorneys. You could get ahead quickly in the Criminal Brigade. The nature of the job meant you had power. When peace and democracy returned, Oliver was well set up, and he sent the boy to the best private schools. But the kid wasn’t interested.

  “Patricia, in contrast, was his polar opposite. The girl was like a Disney princess, always dressed in pink and purple. She wanted to be a ballerina, and she took music lessons. I don’t remember what instrument, but she was good. She was the perfect daughter, the kind any father would want. You should have seen the photos he sent, and she also got top grades at school. Her teachers predicted that the girl would go far. She was an example for all the other children.

  “But that’s not to say that Oliver didn’t love Tavo. Of course he did, more than anything, and the boy made him suffer as a father has never suffered. He had to restrain himself to keep from hurting him, but the boy just got worse and worse. When he went to high school, he started to mix with a bad crowd. One of them was the son of the public prosecutor or something. That kid was bad news, a little thug. He started to get mixed up in drugs; he’d tried everything before he’d even turned eighteen. Oliver wanted to send Tavo to boarding school, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. The thug kid was twenty-one when Tavo wasn’t yet eighteen, and Patricia had only just turned thirteen. The older kid took a liking to her and came on to her shamelessly when Oliver wasn’t around. He was terrified of Oliver, so he waited until he was out of the house before coming over. And the little shit of a brother, instead of protecting her, was attracted to the older boy’s rebellious nature. He wanted to be his best friend. Poor Patricia. Oliver never told me this, but I heard when I got back. The poor, innocent girl was dazzled by all the attention. The kid would turn up in a brand-new convertible br
inging gifts and making promises, and she allowed herself to be seduced. She was just a little girl in love, but the kid was already letting Satan talk through him.

  “So one weekend, the parents went to a wedding at the beach, but their children didn’t have to go because they had exams. Tavo had become such a good-for-nothing that they weren’t expecting him to pass anything. That very weekend Oliver went on and on to his wife about setting him straight before he did something really terrible, and she finally agreed. They came back planning on sending him to a boarding school outside the country, even if they had to sell everything to pay for it. Accounts of what happened next vary—even Oliver still has his doubts—but when they got back, both children had gone. The maid had been there with them, and she swore on everything that was holy that they were still there on Saturday, which was her day off. But when she and the parents came back on Sunday, the apartment was empty.

  “The first thing they did was look for them in the condo building, running from one apartment to another. Then they and the security guards searched the public areas. Oliver got into his car and searched the whole area while the mother called all their friends’ houses, but no one knew anything. Both children had told their friends that they were going to the beach with their parents. Oliver spoke to his police friends, and they organized a major search, but it didn’t turn up anything. When they searched the apartment, they found that the pair had packed clothes and stolen credit cards, money, and jewels. Tavo, who’d learned from his dad, had used the cards to take as much money as he could from the ATMs two days in a row and then had disappeared. On the CCTV recordings, he looked to be acting alone, but it was enough to issue an APB for burglary as well as a missing person report. Patricia had disappeared completely. Oliver always said that she’d been kidnapped, that her brother had sold her for drugs and forced her to go, but later I heard from her friends that the evidence pointed to her leaving voluntarily. The guards hadn’t seen her leave and hadn’t noticed any strange cars, so they must have planned ahead and jumped over the wall in the middle of the night. No one had heard anything.

  “That same night, deeply anxious, Oliver put two and two together and went to the public prosecutor’s house. All hell broke loose. You should have heard the different accounts of the scene. The guards at the house were unable to stop him coming in and throwing around all kinds of accusations. He demanded to know the whereabouts of their son: he knew he was responsible and swore that he’d kill him if he didn’t return his daughter safe and sound right away. There was a huge commotion; people said that he was drunk, very drunk. Eventually his colleagues came and tried to calm him down, saying they’d look for them together. You can imagine what effect the terrible things the public prosecutor—or judge, I don’t remember what he was—said back, saying that no one could insult his son like that and especially not threaten him like a gangster. Worse, he said that his son didn’t live with them anymore, that he was a good boy who’d been living on his own for two years. They had lunch every Saturday; he had his own business. He’d sweet-talked his parents into thinking that he was the perfect son!

  “Oliver told me several years later that that was the worst mistake he’d ever made. He’d never been so lost, crazy, or distraught. The feeling never went away. He never found out what happened to Patricia. She was never seen again.”

  The Beast had no idea how much time passed before he heard the returning footsteps. The pain had died down a little into waves that rose up from his leg in peaks and troughs, clouding his mind so he couldn’t think clearly. He hadn’t wasted his time crying out, but now he realized that he hadn’t used it to make a plan either. He was simply trying to process his confusion and the bleak scenario. Suarez sat down in front of him, ignoring the pool of blood forming under the Beast’s leg.

  “You were right. I didn’t find anything.”

  The Beast started to talk, but his voice broke. “I . . . I told you. Please, you’re making a mistake. Don’t hurt me anymore. I forgive you, but—”

  Suarez shoved the cloth back in his mouth, which the Beast snapped shut before he could get it halfway in. However, when he saw the gouge, he opened up again in terror.

  Suarez praised him. “That’s better. That’s the way to do it. Now I don’t care if you talk anymore. You only tell lies.”

  The Beast shook his head anxiously.

  “The lies are why I’m gagging you. I just need to know once and for all: Are you going to help me?”

  The Beast nodded, trembling.

  “Where do you keep the computer and the girls’ papers?”

  The Beast shrugged and made guttural noises that sounded as though he were asking a question back. Suarez pushed down on the chisel, causing more pain, which only grew more intense when he roughly took it out again.

  “Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhh!”

  “This is only going to get worse for you until you realize that you have the power to stop it.”

  As Suarez spoke, he freed the Beast’s little fingers by cutting the cords around them. The relief mingled with the fire raging in his knee, which he could feel more clearly now that the throbbing in his fingers had subsided. Meanwhile, Suarez was rummaging around in the toolbox. He was clearly allowing the tools he found to determine his next move. He came up with wire cutters.

  “I don’t know if this will work. I’d rather have a pair of . . . what do you call them? Shears.”

  The Beast felt him place the wire cutters at the base of his little finger, just as he was beginning to feel it again, and when he realized what was about to happen, he shook his head as hard as he could, lifting his tongue in desperation but choking on the cloth. The more liquid he swallowed, the more room was left in his mouth. Suarez ignored him and got ready to make the cut, although it turned out to be much harder than he’d expected. He pressed down with both hands and got through the flesh easily, releasing more spurts of dense, dark blood, but the bone itself refused to snap. He ignored the moans and shudders of the Beast as he tried to wriggle free from his ordeal and focused on his work with all the concentration of a born perfectionist.

  “You’re not going to get the better of me,” he mumbled, clearly referring to the bone rather than the Beast, to whom he wasn’t paying the least bit of attention.

  Suarez took a break for a few seconds and inspected the red marks the handle had made on his hands. Then he returned to his task with renewed vigor. This time he concentrated on the joint between the second and third knuckle, assuming that this would make the task easier. He proved to be correct: the blade cut through fairly easily. There was a loud popping sound, indicating that he’d severed the joint, and with some satisfaction he managed to work the final third of the finger free until it fell to the floor. The victim’s expression of horror and despair as his body shook in spasms didn’t seem to bother him at all. He took the cloth out of the Beast’s mouth again.

  “That was harder than I thought. I’m going to have to wet the cloth again.”

  The Beast didn’t answer. He could only gasp as the waves of pain spread up from his knee and finger with every heartbeat. He was finding it hard to think rationally.

  “Now, let me explain again: I’m not going to leave you alone until you tell me what I want to know. As soon as you do, I’ll let you go.”

  The Beast raised his puffy head. “B-but I’m innocent . . .”

  “Then I’ll keep going until you die. It’s up to you.”

  “No, no, no, stop, stop. I haven’t done anything to anyone, but I’ll tell you whatever you want. Just stop, please.”

  “Very good—it seems that we finally understand one another.”

  “Promise that you’ll let me go? That I’ll walk away?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “I swear I won’t do anything. I just want to get out of here.”

  “You don’t know who I am.”

  “Yes, that’s true. It’s true. I don’t know you.”

&nb
sp; “Where’s the computer? Where’s the information about the girls?”

  “Please, please, I just want to explain. I’ll tell you, but first I want to explain.”

  Suarez immediately shoved the cloth back in his mouth. The Beast, stunned, tried to say something, pleading with his tormentor to stop for a moment, to listen for the love of God. He’d said that he was going to help. Why this again? To his horror, Suarez picked up the chisel again, sizing up the other knee.

  “I told you. I’ve come to teach you a lesson. You need to obey. If I ask you a question, you answer that question. Do you understand?”

  The Beast nodded as hard as he could, his eyes bulging as they tried to find a hint of compassion in those of the other man.

  “I think you understand.”

  The Beast nodded his head in desperate hope.

  Suarez picked up the chisel. “But this time, that understanding has come too late.”

  Ethan was speechless. He gulped and nodded to Andrés to continue with his story.

  “Oliver always remembers that night. He was very drunk, but he swears he can remember every minute as though he were reliving it. He still wakes up thinking that he’s back there and goes to bed still agonizing over it.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “I’m not sure. Thirteen, fifteen years ago? Patricia would be almost thirty by now. Oliver was always hard on himself, saying that he’d been stupid. If only he hadn’t gone to look for the kid at his parents’ house. If only he’d put out a search for the car’s license plates, they’d have found him in time. But it wasn’t God’s will; he slipped away. Also, his colleagues told me that the kid had already had a day or more to get across the border. That along with his money and contacts and if the girl was willing, there was nothing they could have done. But who knows whether he would have had time to cross the border, if thanks to God Almighty she could have returned alive. We’ll never know.