Shadows Across America Page 29

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that. Oliver went there, but he was unable to find her. He had his contacts and wasted a lot of time and money, but he never told anyone what he saw or did. He came back empty handed. After that he was suspended several times, and his colleagues covered for him, as did his superiors because, they say, of what he knew from his years in the Criminal Brigade. Eventually, they gave him an office to sleep in until he was pensioned off. By then he was refusing to talk to me or anyone else. I think he just wanted to die. But then we came back, and I went to look for him. You can’t imagine the state he was in or how he was living. At first I don’t think he even recognized me, but I prayed hard to God for strength and started to go to see him after work. Finally, I persuaded him to visit us at home and then to stay the night. He was living in a motel; it wasn’t good for him. Then he started to come to church with me, although he never came to believe in anything again. That’s what he told me at least, but my wife and I prayed for him every night, and if a man is good, God must listen even if he isn’t pious because God knows and forgives all. After many months he eventually agreed to move in with us. At night we could hear him crying in his bedroom. Our hearts were filled with grief, but we prayed to God to give him succor, and in the end he heard us. I told him that if he wanted to stay with us, he had to stop drinking. So he started to go to the meetings.”

  Ethan couldn’t believe his ears. “Andrés, you took him into your home? A drunk? With your wife and children there?”

  “My children stayed in the States—you know they live there. They were grown by then. And my wife and I had to help someone in need. Oliver always took care of me and helped me. He took me into his home when I had nothing. And the Lord says that we must share and give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty. If I had abandoned him, what would that make me? Cain, that’s who I’d be, Don Ethan.”

  “I wasn’t criticizing you. I’m in awe.”

  “After a while he rented a house, and although his life had lost all its spark, at least he’d started to live it again. That, Don Ethan, is why he wanted to help us and why, although I know he can be difficult and he sometimes comes off crazy with his obsessions about security and everything, he’s the best man you could ever hope to meet. We can’t let him relive his past. The enemy is waiting to exploit his weakness and make him fall back into his old ways.”

  But when they went to see Suarez, he’d left a few hours before. What was to come was now inevitable. These were the moments that defined their fate: one’s entire life could be decided by a matter of a few hours. The destinies of both Suarez and the Beast were fixed during the conversation between Andrés and Ethan, because it happened then and not before.

  Suarez came out of the bathroom. He’d wet his hair several times to wake himself up, but he was fading. Each splash of water revived him a little, but the effect was lessening every time. The small bottle of alcohol was now nearly empty. Just a sip more, he told himself. He was afraid of getting careless and leaving behind clues. He filled a bucket with cold water, went back into the living room, and put it on the floor. Slumped in the chair, his legs free and twisted like a vine, his bare feet tenderized by the hammer, his toes missing a couple of nails, and his bloody hands, one of which was missing part of its little finger, tied behind his back, the Beast was panting. His mouth gaped open, his lips were torn apart, and his eyeballs rolled back into his skull, as though he was asleep. Suarez went over and poured the bucket over him. The Beast woke back up immediately and choked and coughed several times. He started trying to get away, but Suarez ignored him. He was concentrating on removing the sheets of plastic he’d placed on the floor and putting them in trash bags. Then he started to scrub the floor before the blood, which had spread a long way, congealed and left a permanent mark. He wasn’t satisfied with his efforts.

  “Hmmm. We’re going to have to cover that up with something.”

  He thoughtfully spread out some new sheets and then dragged the body on top as though he were moving furniture. The Beast passively allowed himself to be moved, moaning in pain. Once the cleaning routine was complete for the second time, Suarez looked down at his shirt with a frown, unbuttoned it, and threw it away with the rest of the trash.

  “Look, it’s all covered in shit. Oh dear!” He looked at his body with genuine surprise. His string vest was also spattered in different shades of crimson. “Oh dear, you’ve ruined my vest too! I’ll have to change later.”

  Under the cotton was a once-toned but now very run-down body. It was wide shouldered, but his chest was drooping, and he had a slight belly that stuck out over his lower half. This provided a contrast to spindly arms that didn’t appear to have any musculature at all. Of course, his audience was entirely oblivious to all this, struggling as he was to stay lucid amid the different sources of pain and constant fear that accompanied each of his captor’s movements. His torturer appeared to be behaving erratically, ever more drunk and unpredictable. Suarez approached again but this time without any of the tools. Nonetheless, the Beast recoiled at what might be in store, the terrible mystery of what might come next.

  “Listen, are you tired? I am. Things have been much more difficult than they needed to be, haven’t they? You need to accept the fact that I know who you are, and there’s no point denying it anymore. The only thing you’re achieving by denying it is to make things worse. I’ve already got all the information I needed about this case, but now I need to know about the others. I’m going to ask you a question, and if you protest your innocence again and say you know nothing, I’ll cut off your thumbs. Right now you can still pick things up. After that, you won’t be able to. You’ll be like a dog, which doesn’t have a thumb. That’s what they call opposable apprehension. Do you understand?”

  The Beast, who had instinctively closed his fists around his thumbs even though he knew it was futile, nodded hard.

  “Fine. So I’ll ask again: How many girls have you attacked? How many women have you raped and killed in your life? Not for the clients, for yourself. I know what you do—don’t give me any shit.”

  The tortured man didn’t answer for a few moments. Before he could speak, tears came to his eyes. “I—I . . . I . . .”

  Suarez was generous.

  “Yes, yes, it’s easy, isn’t it? You’re getting there. You’re on the way to the truth. See? It’s hard to learn, but if you do what I say, it’ll make up for all the suffering. When you let it all out, you’ll be free, and your suffering will be over.”

  “I . . . don’t know how many I’ve attacked. I try to forget afterward. It’s not me; it’s the demon that takes possession of me. I try to fight it, but I can’t. Then I feel so sorry and want to disappear from the world. I don’t want to remember, so I never counted.”

  “Yes, I understand. But how many have you killed? That’s not the kind of thing you forget.”

  “I . . . I . . .” Before answering, he looked into Suarez’s questioning face and gave in. “Two,” he said, starting to cry in earnest. “I killed two, but they were mistakes, accidents—I never meant to. They were accidents . . .”

  “Of course, of course. I know how things can happen. You see? Now your suffering is going to come to an end because you’re telling the truth, and I’m going to let you go. Now I want you to give me their names and where you killed them. And where you left the bodies. That’s not the kind of thing you forget either. Is it? You know that as well as I do. Their names are somewhere in there. Come on—tell me.”

  The Beast hesitated. He wasn’t sure; now he was worried that sharing the information might get him in trouble with the police.

  After a tense silence, Suarez carefully put the cloth back into his mouth. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. I gave you a chance, but you took too long. You know it’s your fault, don’t you?”

  The Beast wriggled around and tried to protect his hands.

  “I don’t want to do this, but you’re forcing my hand. You’re making me do things I don’t want to d
o.”

  The Beast tried to get up in vain. Suarez took a firm hold of his head.

  “Listen, I don’t want you to lose your way on the path to the truth, so I have to punish you. It’s your fault; you know that. I want you to think about what you’ve done so you can learn from it. I’m going to cut off your left thumb. It’s the hand you don’t use so much, and if you tell me what I want to know, your other one will be safe. But you must remember that lying or refusing to speak is the wrong way to go. Lies won’t get you anywhere.”

  Ethan determinedly continued his methodical search, convinced that the lack of news from Suarez meant that he’d met a dead end. One of the things that he’d learned in his time as an investigator was that people revealed much more about themselves on social networks than they thought. Even very basic security precautions were forgotten the moment they turned on the screen. With Johanna’s WhatsApp and Facebook accounts, he was able to completely reconstruct the lives of almost all her contacts: work, home, relatives. He augmented this information with data from other networks. In most cases he was able to get useful information just by typing their names into a search engine. Investigations that used to take weeks and required a lot of movement and risk now just took a few days sitting in his bedroom. So in spite of his apparent lack of progress, he kept on cross-referencing his information and searching through thousands of conversations, messages, and posts. Ethan knew that he wasn’t looking for a well-lit road but rather a flash of light that might appear at any time. And so, after he’d spent four days typing in different names and staring at deathly dull profiles, his patience was rewarded. In some photographs of a party, someone he recognized from a couple of comments by Johanna’s boyfriend about a payment they hadn’t been able to track down appeared: Marlon Figueroa, who identified himself as a lawyer. He seemed to have a relationship with her but not since the dates Johanna had given them for Michi. Several comments on different walls about the pleasure of doing business and bad inside jokes led Ethan to believe that this lawyer was a promising candidate. A visit to his LinkedIn account identified him as assistant at the firm Smit & Betancourt and provided a work address. The profile also said that he was the representative of “important European businesses” whose activity had begun in the city just a few months ago. After having had to rule out dozens of other suspects, Ethan was jubilant. This was the thrill of success.

  Suarez forwarded the emails with the information he’d obtained to Ethan and Ari. Names, photographs, and in some cases, the addresses of families with the same rendezvous location, always in the state of Paraná, near to Curitiba with no obvious link to the much smaller town that the Beast claimed was where his employers, “Europeans from the north, like Fins or Greeks, one of those countries where they have gays,” lived. It worried him to hear that they kept an eye on the email account. When they discovered that he’d disappeared, they’d soon make the connection to the emails he’d exchanged with Johanna, and then it wouldn’t take them long to work out that she was dead. He was amazed at the idiocy of the bastard—telling her to contact him via a channel monitored by third parties—but still, he assumed that he had plenty of time. After the recent delivery they might not need him again for several months. By then, it would be too late.

  Suarez thought about his victim and the torture he was inflicting upon him. He hadn’t thought that he’d be able to do it. It scared him to find out that he was still capable of such savagery. He thought that he’d reformed. But he didn’t regret his actions or what he still might do in the future. Everything this piece of shit, this low-down scum who didn’t deserve to breathe, said reminded him of his past. Every lie and excuse, every protest of innocence, every plea for mercy made Suarez want—need—to see him suffer more. Every pleading word, every scream of terror goaded him into unleashing all the anguish that had built up within him over the years. We all have an assassin sleeping inside us. It’s better not to wake him up.

  He stood up and realized that it was dawn. He’d been up all night. He was exhausted and would have to wrap things up pretty soon. In his tired state, he might make basic errors, and although he knew that it was unlikely, there was a remote chance that someone might come by. He came out of the kitchen and walked back to the living room, where the specimen awaited him. The tipped-over chair was to one side while the toolbox was on the table. Five feet away, the Beast’s deformed body had gotten free of its restraints, and now he was trying to crawl to the exit. Given his condition—broken knees and elbows, amputated thumbs and little fingers, and four toes smashed in—Suarez wasn’t particularly worried about him getting away. These were skills he’d been taught a long time ago. With his hands tied behind his back and limbs dislocated, the victim looked like a huge worm. He even left a crimson trail along the wooden floor. Suarez walked over and put a foot on his head.

  “What have we said about escaping?”

  He heard the inhuman moan, and a smell reached his nose. He’d pissed himself. Again. He bent down and unblocked the Beast’s mouth.

  “This time, I’ll give you another chance. How many girls was it? How many girls have you abused in your life, and how many have you killed?”

  The Beast, his mouth in pain, his body falling to pieces, mumbled as though he were stoned. “I don’t know. I told you. Dozens, hundreds maybe, but I killed eighteen. I know that for sure. I’ll never forget them. It’s an impulse, like a force I can’t control. I know it’s wrong. If you let me go, I’ll go to a doctor. I’ll tell the police so they can put me in jail. I’ll do therapy to get cured. I swear on everything that’s sacred, please—I’ll pay for what I’ve done. I’ve given you all my money.”

  “Twelve thousand dollars. You lied about that too.”

  “But not anymore! I told you that’s all I know. I’ve given you my money—that’s all I can do. You have to let me go. You promised.”

  Suarez knelt down in front of him and took his head in his hands. “Why do you keep kidding yourself, you coward? I now believe you completely, but you know very well that I lied to you too.”

  The Beast, so close to this strangely intimate but cold, objective man whose breath stank of alcohol, started to cry in despair. “I-I told you everything. I helped you. Why? Why did you do this to me? Why did you make me believe I could be set free?”

  “I’ve already explained this to you, but you didn’t believe me. I came here to teach you a lesson. I had to show you what those poor girls went through. You had to feel what they felt: the disorientation and denial. They believed that they would be safe if they went along with it. The realization that it was all a lie only makes everything worse. You had to learn about denial and anger, impotence and desperation, but above all horror and fear. The horror of what is still to come, fear because we still haven’t finished. And terror, which I see in your eyes when you hear me speak: the terror of knowing that you’re going to die. That’s why I’m here. Everything you never bothered to think about before. You needed to learn about the suffering they went through. Take it as life’s final lesson. And after going through all that, you’re going to die. I’m going to witness you shitting yourself with fear when you discover that even your ability to breathe has been taken away from you. When you realize that there’s nothing to be done. You’re going to be reduced to nothing. The only thing you have to look forward to now is the sight of me enjoying myself as I make all this happen.”

  The Beast sobbed uncontrollably, bloody mucus running from his nose. His brain had frozen up in terror now that the end was nigh. Suarez quieted him so he could go on.

  “We’re getting to the end. I need to tidy up and leave. Just so you know, I’m going to wrap you up in those plastic sheets and dump you close to your trailer where I’ve made a little hole to bury you in. It’s good that your yard is a jungle. No one’s ever going to fucking well find you. It’s not big, but you’ll fit nicely, all smashed up like you are. There’ll be plenty of air trapped in the plastic and nothing you can do. Your lungs will keep on
filling until the last breath. You have no control over that. You’ll see. Get ready: that’s when you’ll really be clinging on to life. I’ll sit and wait for you to go. I wanted you to have a really good understanding of what’s going to happen. I don’t want you to miss a thing. The important part is that you know all this so you’ll be prepared for everything that awaits you. As you know, I’m in no hurry.”

  The SUV bounced along the steep, curving road, spitting out rocks on either side. The bodyguards looked disinterestedly out the windows, their view filtered by their sunglasses and the layer of dust that had gathered on the glass. When they finally got to their destination, they stopped and honked twice. When this was met with no response, they got out. A tall, thin, pale blond dressed in a full suit as though he were on his way to an office meeting rather than a wasteland in the Colombian outback took out a packet of cigarettes but before lighting one asked permission of the man in the back seat.

  “Do you mind, Don Armando?”

  “Not at all, so long as it’s outside.”

  When he heard this, the driver got out as well, dressed similarly, but he had dark hair, a thick head, a square jaw, and a broad back; he was built like an athlete, but his movements were rough and clumsy. They both opened the gate. The tall man cradled his tobacco as the car passed through the barrier and drove onto the property. He followed them, inhaling with pleasure. A hundred and fifty feet on, they came to the house, and the driver asked him for a cigarette. They climbed up onto the porch and knocked on the door. They waited, knocked some more, and started to call out.

  “Hello? Helloooo! We’ve come to see you! We have your money!”