An Inconsequential Murder (10 page)

Lupe wanted to know w
hy Lombardo was so interested in Victor’s job. Lombardo had said that he could only think of three things that could have led to someone wanting to rough up and eventually kill the young man: something to do with his job, something to do with drugs, something do to with a love affair—a crime of passion. Since this last was out of the question, he was starting to look at the other two possibilities.

He had said that his
instincts and experience told him that it was probably not a drug-related case—not in the traditional sense, anyway. He was not killed in the usual way, was not left in the usual spots, and so on. A love affair? A crime of passion? Homosexuals gone rampant? Jealous husband that hired goons to work him over and kill him? Not from what everyone kept telling him; nice guy, normal, quiet, a simple technocrat. Jealous lovers kill in the bedroom, in the hotel room, even at work, like that woman who walked into the corporate offices where she worked and shot her boss. Those were the easy cases. Not much to do—gather the facts, let the Medical Examiner do his job, the judge took care of the rest.

No, there was something about this case that did not fit. It was too cruel for a simple murder. Was this a message? Was someone sending a message? But, who, to whom? What was being said? Who was being warned? Why would the killer or killers leave the body in such an obvious place and his wallet and things on his body, which would make it easy to identify him? Was the severed head a mistake? Or was it intentional? When cartel killers severed heads they made sure that the act made the headlines, like those poor seven bastards, the soldiers they had rounded up in a whorehouse and executed by the highway. Heads neatly severed and put into sacks, hung on the fence near the bodies, just to show the Army that if they came into the drug wars, it was in for a tough fight.

Then there was the speed with which the story had disappeared from the media. Who had squashed it? This bullshit about the University being embarrassed—they had had riots on campus, for Christ sake! Someone had called his boss to get him to wrap up the case, be done with is as soon as possible. Why was this little guy’s murder so important behind the scenes, yet made to look unimportant publicly? Why did it matter if the media made a big thing out of it or not. No one seemed to care to muffle stories of the thousands of cartel members, soldiers, and innocent bystanders that died every year in the drug wars, so why was this one different? Nothing made sense. Nothing—including those cigarettes.

Lombardo put away his notes. He had arrived home.

Part 2
: Day 2

Chapter
11: A Visit to the Medical Examiner’s Office

Lombardo had no
hangover the next day because he had learned from his father that to avoid one you had to take two Alka-Seltzers and an aspirin before going to bed.

As he shaved, he frowned at how his face seemed even more haggard and worn of late. “Damned cigarettes are killing me,” he said aloud and put out the one that was burning in the ashtray on the toilette’s lid. He looked at his slight, thin frame with its too prominent collarbones, and light brown, leathery skin. When he was a student in the University they had called him
La Agonía
, the agony. Everybody had a nickname, which one usually got around secondary school or a bit later. It usually stuck for life. Lots of conversations started with questions like “Do you remember
La
Güera
? or, “Have you seen
La Marrana
lately?” The blonde one or the sow—funny how most nicknames were of the feminine gender. He moved his shaving mirror so he could look at his back. There were red spots where the shoulder strap of the holster rubbed against his back. He reached back to dab some of the antiseptic cream he had bought at a discount pharmacy. “It’ll ease the itching,” the young woman behind the counter had said, “but it won’t cure anything.”

A couple of years ago he had relented and gone to see a doctor in the Social Security Health Center. He had had a nagging cough for weeks and wanted something to get rid of it.

“
There’s no medicine that will cure it,” the doctor had said, “it’s just your lungs protesting against all the filth you insist on putting into them. You’ll have these fits of cough the rest of your life—what little there will probably be of it if you keep smoking and eating badly the way you do.”

“
Well, thank you, Doctor,” he said aloud and relit the stubbed out cigarette.

Lombardo went into the bedroom to get a fresh set of underwear. He looked at his body in the full-length mirror on the closet door. “It certainly does show the wear and tear,” he said. He looked at the ugly scar on his left shoulder—a hastily sewn rip that a piece of shrapnel had made in Viet Nam; his right knee had scars on both sides, too—souvenirs from a car crash he had suffered as he and a former partner chased two suspects. He had survived it, his partner had not. The skin of his upper arm was starting to sag as was the skin on his neck. He had a small pot belly in spite of his overall thinness. He said, “Not too many kilometers left on this old wagon.”

After his shower, he dressed slowly, putting on a fresh, white shirt over his V neck T-shirt. He put his suit into a bag which he would drop at the cleaner’s on the way to the Department. His other suit was the same as the one he had taken off. They were interchangeable in style, in the worn look they had, in the same dark-gray color. No wonder people thought he always wore the same clothes.

He called the Department’s garage. Yes, they had retrieved his car. Yes, they had changed the tire, the oil, filled the tank. OK, he’d take a taxi to the Department and pick it up.

He called the
Medical Examiner’s office. Was the doctor there? “Doc, have you got anything for me? OK, I am on my way.” He told the taxi driver to go by the cleaner’s on Garza Sada Avenue and then to take him to the Medical Examiner’s office.

After he dropped off his suit at the cleaners,
he sat back to wait for the taxi to thread its way through the usual morning rush hour traffic. He thought about his boss
and again wondered why people wanted this case to go away as quickly as possible. “There’s something wrong, something’s not right,” he said aloud.

The taxi driver looked at him through the rear view mirror. “What’s that, sir?”

“
I said that the dry cleaning is getting very expensive,” he said and laughed.

“
Dry cleaning, sir?”

“
Yeah, but never mind.”

The taxi exited from Gonzalitos Avenue and turned into Madero Avenue. At the red light it turned into the University Hospital. He showed his badge to the guard so that the taxi could go into the reserved parking lot.

“
Wait for me,” he said to the driver whose face stiffened thinking he was out of a fare. Lombardo said, “Keep the meter running. Don’t worry; you’re going to get paid.”

He went into the stark white building whose only features were the glass entrance doors and a few small windows, which were curtained with white cloth. A sign above the entrance simply read, “Servicios Médicos Forenses” to announce the Forensic Medical Services.

A girl in a white lab coat, sitting behind a beige counter asked, “Yes?”

“
Dr. Figueroa, please.”

“
Do you have an appointment?”

“
He’s expecting me,” he said.

The girl, without taking her
eyes off of him picked up the phone, spoke into it, and then pressed the buzzer, which sounded unusually harsh and loud.

“
You may go in,” she said. “Do you know where he has his office?”

“
You’re new here, aren’t you?” he said to the girl and opened the buzzing door without waiting for her to reply.

Dr. Figueroa was standing by
the door to his office, with one foot out of it, and speaking to someone inside. He made a motion to Lombardo to stop, and said to the person inside that he would be right back.

He made a motion for Lombardo to follow him and they walked quickly down a hall and into another office. A sign on the door said that this office belonged to a Dr. Pineda but Dr. Pineda was not there.

Dr. Figueroa closed the door and without any preliminaries said, “The body you came to see is not here anymore.”

Lombardo furrowed his brow but did not ask the question.

Dr. Figueroa sighed. “The family had an order signed by a judge. It allowed them to take the body away without further, uh, abuse to it, as the father put it. We had to stop the autopsy, return the organs, and forget about including the lab reports in our write-up.”

Lombardo nodded and was about to ask him something when the Doctor reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag, the kind reserved for evidence. There was a wet and crumpled piece of paper in the bag. “I found this deep in his trachea.”

Chapter
12: The Governor Calls the Dean

In the
Dean’s office at the University, his new cell phone rang.

“
Yes?” said the Dean tentatively.

“
Ah, Dean Herrera. I see you have installed the cell phone I sent you. Well, from now on, I think we should use these phones exclusively when communicating.”

“
Yes, thank you Governor; I was…”

“
The reason I called,” interrupted the governor, “is that I spoke recently to the Head of the Public Ministry and he gave me some very disturbing facts about the demise of that poor boy, what was his name?”

“
Victor Delgado,” said the Dean.

“
Victor Delgado, yes,” said the Governor. “Well, I am sorry to say that the reports are pretty gruesome. It seems that the young man was tortured and beaten, as if they were trying to find out something.”

“
I can imagine what it was,” said the Dean.

“
Yes, yes, I do, too. The, uh, consensus is that, uh, these men, whoever they are, are most likely professional thugs, people who are used to this sort of thing.”

“
How do they know this?”

“
Well, from the way that they, uh, delivered the blows and other nasty evidence, you see.”

“
I see,” repeated the Dean.

“
My concern is that the case reveal things, or, circumstances, if you will, that might, uh, lead people to find out about our project.”

There was a small pause as the Dean considered this last statement and what the Governor was implying. Then he revealed, “The day before, Victor, or rather, Victor’s unfortunate, um, the incident that, uh…well, I had asked him to see to it that all of the files and communications be encrypted such that…”

“
Encrypted? What do you mean encrypted, Dean Herrera?” asked the Governor somewhat alarmed.

“
I mean that all of the information concerning the project be converted to such a state that only persons with the right key could have access to it, and, uh, be able to read it, actually.”

“
And, who has this key, Dean Herrera?”

“
That is the issue, Governor; he was working on that the night he disappeared, so I never had a chance to confirm if he had done what I had asked.”

“
Is there no way of knowing? I mean, this information shouldn’t lay about…”

“
It’s not,” said the Dean mildly irritated. “It is in a secured file in a secure computer. I just thought that it would add an extra layer of security to also encrypt it.”

The Dean did not say that what had prompted his concern was the series of intrusions that Victor had reported—
that
had prompted the decision to encrypt the files.

“
OK,” said the Governor in a tone that betrayed his discomfort with the Dean’s disclosure. “But, what about any present communications?”

“
The idea,” explained the Dean, “is that a program he was to install would take anything that dropped into our special mailbox and encrypt it into that file.”

“
What about the stuff on our individual computers?” asked the Governor nervously.

“
There is nothing in our individual computers. Our emails went through what we call a web service, all the emails that have gone back and forth are here, stored on our web server. We thought it was safer having everything in one spot rather than spread all over.”

“
I see. Well, if you can find out, discreetly, whether the information was, uh, encrypted as you say, let me know. In all cases, I think it should be destroyed but I’ll have to ask the others what they think.”