Grave Secrets (8 page)

Over and over I chastised myself for failing to examine the bones. Was my initial impression of the skull correct? Would Xicay’s photos be adequate for establishing a biological profile? Would I ever see the bones again? What was behind Díaz’s hostility?

I was troubled by thoughts of how far from home I was, geographically and culturally. While I had some understanding of the Guatemalan legal system, I knew nothing of the jurisdictional rivalries and personal histories that can impede an investigation. I knew the stage, but not the players.

My misgivings went beyond the complications of policework. I was an outsider in Guatemala, with a superficial grasp of its inner soul. I knew little of the people, their preferences in cars, jobs, neighborhoods, toothpaste. Their views toward law and authority. I was a stranger to their likes, their dislikes, their trusts, their lusts. Their reasons for murder.

Their nicknames.

Bat? Bartolomé Galiano? Bat Galiano? Bat Guano?

On that note I finally drifted off.

Saturday morning began as a replay of the day before. Galiano picked me up, shaded and bearing coffee, and we drove in silence to police headquarters. This time he led me to a second-floor office. Though larger, it was decorated in the same style as Thursday’s conference room. Mucous-gray walls. Bile-green floor. Fluorescent lighting. Engraved wooden desks. Duct-taped pipes. Institutional folding tables.
Nouveau cop.

Hernández was removing boxes from stacks at the back of the room and placing them on a dolly. Two men were stapling items onto bulletin boards on the left-hand wall. One was slight, with curly black hair that shone with oil. The other stood six foot six and had a shoulder span the size of Belize. Both turned when we entered.

Galiano introduced the pair.

Two faces scanned me, as though worked by one puppeteer. Neither looked thrilled with what it saw.

What
did
they see? An outsider cop? An American? A woman?

Screw it. I would make no effort to win them over.

I nodded.

They nodded.

“Pics here yet?” Galiano asked.

“Xicay says they’ll be ready by ten,” Hernández said, tipping the dolly and pushing it toward us.

“Taking these to the basement,” he puffed, steadying the load with his right hand. “You want the bags?”

“Yeah.”

Hernández wheeled past us, face raspberry, shirt damp as at the septic tank.

“The space was being used for storage,” Galiano said to me. “I’m having it cleared.”

“Task force?”

“Not exactly.” He gestured to one of the desks. “What do you need?”

“The skeleton,” I said, tossing my pack onto the blotter.

“Right.”

The men finished at the first board, shifted to the next. Galiano and I moved in. In front of us was a map of Guatemala City. Galiano touched a point in the southeastern quadrant.

“Number one. Claudia de la Alda lived here.”

He shook a red-tipped pin from a box on the board’s ledge, pushed it into the map, and added a yellow pin beside it.

“De la Alda was eighteen. No police record, no history of drugs, doesn’t profile as a runaway. Spent a lot of time working with handicapped kids and helping out at her church. She left the family home for work last July fourteenth, and hasn’t been seen since.”

“Boyfriend?” I asked.

“Alibies out. Not a suspect.”

He pushed a blue pin into the map.

“Claudia worked at the Museo Ixchel.”

The Ixchel is a privately owned museum dedicated to Mayan culture. I’d been there, remembered it looked vaguely like a Mayan temple.

“Number two. Lucy Gerardi, age seventeen, was a student at San Carlos University.”

He added a second blue pin.

“Gerardi also had no prior arrests, also lived with her family. Good student. Aside from a lousy social life, she appears to have been a normal college kid.”

“Why no friends?”

“Father kept a tight rein.”

His finger moved to a small street halfway between the Ixchel and the American embassy.

“Lucy lived here.”

He added a second red pin.

“She was last seen in the Botanical Gardens—”

He inserted a yellow pin in a green-shaded space at the intersection of Ruta 6 and Avenida la Reforma.

“—on January fifth.”

Galiano’s finger hopped to Calle 10 at Avenida la Reforma 3.

“Familiar with the Zona Viva?”

A stab of pain. Molly and I had eaten at a café in the Zona Viva the day before I left for Chupan Ya.

Focus, Brennan.

“It’s a small enclave of upmarket hotels, restaurants, and night clubs.”

“Right. Number three. Patricia Eduardo, age nineteen, lived just a few blocks away.”

Red pin number three.

“Eduardo left friends at the Café San Felipe on the night of October twenty-ninth, never made it home.”

Yellow pin.

“She worked at the Hospital Centro Médico.”

A blue pin went in at Avenida 6 and Calle 9, just a few blocks from the Ixchel Museum.

“Same story, clean liver, boyfriend a candidate for canonization. Spent most of her free time with her horses. Was quite an equestrian.”

Galiano pointed to a spot equidistant between the Lucy Gerardi and Patricia Eduardo residences.

“Missing person number four, Chantale Specter, lived here.”

Red pin.

“Chantale went to a private girls’ school—”

Blue pin.

“—but she’d just returned from an extended stay in Canada.”

“What was she doing?”

He hesitated a moment. “Some sort of special course. Chantale was last seen at home.”

“By?”

“The mother.”

“Both parents check out?”

He took a long breath through his nostrils, let it out slowly.

“Hard to investigate a foreign diplomat.”

“Any reason for suspicion?”

“None that we’ve found. So. We know where each young woman lived.”

Galiano tapped the red pins.

“We know where each worked or went to school.”

Blue pins.

“We know where each was last seen.”

Yellow pins.

I stared at the pattern, realizing the answer to at least one question. I knew Guatemala City well enough to know that Claudia de la Alda, Lucy Gerardi, Patricia Eduardo, and Chantale Specter came from the affluent side of the tracks. Theirs was a world of quiet streets and mowed lawns, not one of drugs and peddled flesh. Unlike the poor and homeless, unlike the victims at Chupan Ya or the addict orphans in Parque Concordia, these women were not without power. They were missed by families that had a voice, and everything possible was being done to find them.

But why such interest in remains uncovered at a slum hotel?

“Why the Paraíso?” I asked.

Again, that hitch of hesitation. Then, “No stone unturned.”

I turned from the map to Galiano. His face was expressionless. I waited. He offered nothing.

“Are you going to level with me, or do we have to go through some elaborate pas de deux?”

“What do you mean?”

“Suit yourself, Bat.” I turned to go.

Galiano looked at me sharply but said nothing. Then his hand closed around my upper arm.

“All right. But nothing leaves this room.”

“Normally I like to float my cases in a chat room, get a consensus of who’s thinking what.”

He released his grip and ran a hand backward through his hair. Then the Guernsey eyes locked onto mine.

“Eighteen months ago Chantale Specter was arrested for cocaine possession.”

“Was she using?”

“That was unclear. She dropped a dime and was released without testing. But her buddies came up positive.”

“Selling?”

“Probably not. Last summer she was busted again. Same story. Police raided a candy party in a low-rent hotel. Chantale turned up in the net. Shortly after, Papa shipped her off to rehab—that spell in Canada. She reappeared at Christmas, started school in January, vanished a week into the term. The ambassador tried searching on his own, finally gave up and reported her missing.”

His finger moved to the maze of streets making up the old city.

“Both of Chantale’s arrests took place in Zone One.”

“Some kids go through a rebellious phase,” I said. “She probably got back home, went at it with Daddy, and took off.”

“For four months?”

“It’s probably coincidence. Chantale doesn’t fit the pattern.”

“Lucy Gerardi disappeared January fifth. Ten days later, it was Chantale Specter.”

Galiano turned to me.

“According to some, Lucy and Chantale were close friends.”

CRIME SCENE PICTURES PROVIDE A CHEAP PEEK INTO THE SECRETS

A shattered window. A blood-spattered kitchen. A woman spread-eagled in bed, torn panties covering her face. The bloated body of a child in a trunk. Horror revisited, moments, hours, or days later.

Or even months.

At nine-forty Xicay delivered the Paraíso prints. With no bones to examine, these shots offered my only hope of constructing an accurate victim profile, of perhaps linking the septic tank skeleton to one of the missing girls.

I opened the first envelope, afraid, but anxious to know how much anatomical detail had been saved.

Or lost.

The alley.

The Paraíso.

The dilapidated little oasis out back.

I studied multiple views of the septic tank before and after uncapping, before, during, and after draining. In the last, shadows crossed the empty chambers like long, bony fingers.

I replaced the first set and switched to another envelope.

The top print featured my ass pointed skyward at the edge of the tank. The second showed a lower arm bone lying on a sheet in a body bag. Even with my magnifier, I could make out no detail. I laid down the lens and continued.

Seven shots down I found a close-up of the ulna. Inching my glass along the shaft, I scrutinized every bump and crest. I was about to give up when I spotted a hair-thin line at the wrist end.

“Look at this.”

Galiano took the lens and bent over the print. I pointed with the tip of a pen.

“That’s a remnant epiphyseal line.”

“Ay, Dios.”
He spoke without raising his eyes. “And that means?”

“The growth cap is fusing to the end of the shaft.”

“And that means?”

“It means young.”

“How young?”

“Probably late teens.”

He straightened.

“Muy bueno, Dr. Brennan.”

The cranial series began halfway down the third stack. As I viewed image after image, my gut curled tighter than it had in the septic tank. Xicay had shot down on the skull from at least six feet away. Mud, shadow, and distance obscured every feature. Even the magnifier didn’t help.

Discouraged, I finished envelope three and moved on. One by one, body parts spread across the sheet. Fusing growth caps on several long bones supported the age range suggested by the ulna.

Xicay had taken at least a half dozen shots of the pelvis. Soft tissue held the three parts together, allowing me to note a heart-shaped inlet. The pubic bones were long, and met above an obtuse sub-pubic angle.

I flipped to the side views.

Broad, shallow sciatic notch.

“Female,” I said to no one in particular.

“Show me.” Galiano returned to my desk.

Spreading the photos, I explained each feature. Galiano listened in silence.

As I was gathering the prints, my eye picked out several oddshaped flecks on the belly side of the right iliac blade. I pulled the image to me and raised and lowered my lens above it. Galiano watched.

Tooth fragments? Vegetation? Gravel? The tiny particles looked familiar, but try as I might, I couldn’t identify them.

“What is it?” Galiano.

“I’m not sure. Maybe just debris.”

I returned the photos to their envelope, and shook out another set.

Foot bones. Hand bones. Ribs.

Galiano was paged to his office. The two detectives plugged away at their boards.

Sternum. Vertebrae.

Galiano returned.

“Where the hell is Hernández?”

No answer. I imagined two shrugs behind me.

My spine ached. I raised my arms, stretched backward, then to each side.

When I resumed my perusal, a miracle.

While I was overseeing evacuation of the tank, Xicay had returned to the skull. The last series of photographs showed top, bottom, side, and front views, taken from approximately one foot away. Despite the muck, I could see plenty.

“These are good.”

Galiano was immediately at my elbow. I pointed out features on the facial view.

“Rounded orbits, broad cheeks.”

I shifted to a shot of the skull base, and indicated the zygomatics.

“See how the cheekbones flare out?”

Galiano nodded.

“The skull is short from front to back, broad from side to side.”

“Sort of globular.”

“Well put.” I tapped the upper palate. “Parabolic shape. Too bad the front teeth are missing.”

“Why?”

“Shoveled incisors can indicate race.”

“Shoveled?”

“Scooped-out enamel on the tongue side, with a raised border around the edge. Kind of like a shovel.”

I exchanged the basal view for a side view, and noted a low nasal bridge and straight facial profile.

“What’s your thinking?” Galiano asked.

“Mongoloid,” I said, thinking back to my last fleeting view at the scene and correlating that impression with the photos in front of me.

He looked blank.

“Asian.”

“Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese?”

“All of the above. Or someone whose ancestors came from Asia. Native American—”

“You talking old Indian bones?”

“Definitely not. This stuff ’s recent.”

He considered a moment, then, “Were the front teeth knocked out?”