Smaller and Smaller Circles (13 page)

20

The room is
windowless, with walls painted a drab institutional grey. There are two fluorescent rods in the ceiling, but only one of them is working, and it emits only the faintest glow. There is a small wooden table in the middle of the room, with two wooden chairs on opposite ends of it. Two other chairs, side by side near the door, are the only other furniture in the room.

“Looks promising,” Jerome says, his lips set in a grim line. “What did they say his name was?”

“Ricardo Navato. Carding for short.”

Saenz takes his place quietly in a corner of the darkened room.

The door opens again and two officers escort a young man in handcuffs into the room. Jerome waits until he has been seated at the table and the two other men leave. Then he takes the second chair.

The suspect is young—
perhaps too young
, Saenz thinks to himself—in his late teens or early twenties. He is thin, with spindly legs and arms, narrow shoulders, curly, close-cropped hair. Both eyes are almost swollen shut, and his upper lip is split in two places. Evidently he found himself on the receiving end of that brand of tender loving care for which several quarters of the Quezon City police are known before he was transferred to NBI custody.

“Hello, Carding,” Jerome begins cautiously. “How are you?”

The young man doesn't say anything. He shifts in his seat, his expression difficult to read because of the injuries to his face.

“My name is Father Jerome. Father Emil sent me to see you. You know him, right?”

Carding shrugs, then slides lower in his seat.

“How are they treating you here?” Jerome asks.

“Just fine.” He is cold, still, suspicious. In the dullness of the young man's eyes, Jerome can imagine the cramped space in which he lives; the tacky, plastic matting laid over a dirt floor; the empty containers of PX cheese balls and chocolate gathering dust on wooden shelves. The octopus wires that hook up electric fan and lights and battered old refrigerator to an illegal connection. Outside, there would be well-worn clothes—yellowed whites and fading colors—hanging dripping from wire clotheslines or collapsible space-saver hangers made of cheap plastic.

Jerome knows the mingled smells of infrequently washed bodies and stale food and bar soap and old cooking oil that hang over Carding's days and nights like frayed mosquito netting. He knows there is a store not far away where the young man can buy cigarettes and chewing gum and single-serve packs of three-in-one coffee. He sits there at night drinking cheap gin and beer with other jobless dead enders, in what passes for a social life, muttering about their lack of money and the better-looking girls in the neighborhood in the same numb monotone he speaks in now.

“Do you know why you're here?”

Another shrug, another refusal to meet his gaze. Jerome folds his hands together on top of the table and leans forward. Then, a curious thing happens: the young man looks down at the priest's hands, at the ring on his right middle finger, a heavy but beautifully wrought gold band surmounted by a small disc of onyx, the onyx inlaid with a golden Greek cross. His eyes stay on the ring; it is something Jerome picks up quickly. The priest adjusts his hand ever so slightly, and the other man's eyes follow, glued to the ring.

Beautiful thing, isn't it?

“They tell us that you killed all those children.”

“I did,” he says dispassionately.

“How many?” Jerome moves the fingers of his left hand and covers the ring, casually, a test; when he looks up, he sees that it has also disappeared from the other man's consciousness and that his attention is now focused on the priest.

“I can't remember.”

“Five or six?” Jerome prompts.

Fidgeting in his seat now, wary of a trap. “Six.”

The priest raises an eyebrow. “You must have been very angry.”

No response.

“Have you lived in Payatas a long time?”

“All my life.”

“So you knew those children. You'd seen them around.” Jerome glances at Saenz and is mildly puzzled to find him staring intently at Carding's feet. “Maybe you can tell me why you chose them.”

Carding shifts again, masking his growing unease with impatience. “Why are you asking me? You just answered your own question. I knew them; I'd seen them around.”

Jerome waits. “Father Emil says he knows you. He says you're a good kid and that he knows your mother.”

At the mention of his mother, the young man's shoulders droop slightly. Jerome feels a shift from defensiveness and suspicion to anxiety and fear.

“Did you ever talk to him about the things you did?” he asks gently.

“No, I couldn't tell anyone.”

Jerome lowers his voice. “Why did you kill them?”

“I was angry.”

“About what?”

Jerome feels that the younger man is on the verge of crying, but the tears do not come; he holds them in check with fierce self-control. He may be frightened, but he is also tough, a veteran of dump and slum: he will not cry in front of a man, even if that man is a priest. “Look, you'd be angry too, you know? Living like I do. No job, no money. My mother is sick. The doctor told me that I have to take her to live somewhere else, that being near the dump is not good for her. Where will I take her? We have nowhere to go. We have to live on what I make from the dump. There are no steady jobs for people like me.”

“So how do you get by?”

A small, bitter laugh escapes him. “Don't you know, Father? People are so generous here. Politicians, rich people, the Church. Everyone is so eager to help people like me.”

Jerome says nothing, only waits until Carding grows uncomfortable with his silence.

“I do odd jobs occasionally. Carry this, lift that. Every once in a while I help to load and distribute food and groceries from the local government.”

Without looking, Jerome knows Saenz has leaned forward to listen closely. “Distribute food—you mean like the free meals for the parish church on Saturdays?”

“I help load; I help unload. In, out. Sometimes I get twenty pesos. Sometimes all I get is one of the meal packets. Hey, better than nothing, right, Father?”

Saenz stays in the shadows, listening.

“When you killed the children—what did you use?”

“A knife.”

The lack of detail is telling, so Jerome presses him. “What kind of knife?”

“A small one.” When Jerome says nothing, the young man tries once more to fill in the gap of silence. “I would offer them something—a soft drink, a cigarette, a snack. When they came with me, I would do it.”

“What exactly did you do?”

“I would
. . .
” He hesitates, and Jerome notes that sweat is beading on his forehead, above his upper lip, along his neck. “I would take off their faces.”

“How?”

There is a soft, hesitant rapping on the door. He glances up in time to see Saenz open it a bit, a slice of light coming through the crack. There are whispered questions and answers. The door closes again.

Jerome turns back to Carding. “How did you take off their faces?”

“I would cut them off.”

“Using what?” Jerome is pushing harder now, trying to imagine pounding heart, warm, quivering organs, the smell of blood, comparing what his mind conjures up with the reality of this neighborhood tough, with his flat voice and his dispassionate, too-ready answers.

“The knife. I sliced off their faces. I took their hearts; I cut off the boys'
. . .
things.”

“The
boys'
things,” Jerome repeats thoughtfully.

But they were all boy
s
.

“And the girls? What did you do with the girls?”

Suddenly Carding sits up straight. He clears his throat and tilts his head to one side, as though measuring Jerome. “But they were
all
boys, Father.”

It's as if he'd momentarily forgotten what he was told to say or how to say it and has just now remembered.

Another interruption, but this time there is someone else outside the door: Arcinas, banging angrily on the wood with his fist. “All right, that's enough.” The lawyer's voice is muffled, but there is no mistaking the anger in it.

Jerome nods, then stands up. “Okay, Carding. Thank you for talking to me. I'm sorry I took up so much of your time.”

“It's okay, Father.”

Jerome moves away from the table, then seems to remember something and turns back to the young man.

“Do you realize how serious this situation is, Carding? How much trouble you're in?”

The swollen eyes blink once, twice. Arcinas bangs on the door again.

“I mean
. . .
You know you could get the death penalty for this, don't you?” There is urgency now in Jerome's voice. “Regardless of what they promised you—you know that it could happen, right?”

The young man swallows, lowers his eyes, stares at the tabletop. “Yes, Father.”

Jerome turns around, and although he cannot fully see Saenz's expression in the shadows, they have exchanged the same look of unease. Seconds later, the door is unlocked from the outside, and Arcinas pushes his way in, his face livid.

“What took you so long?” he demands of the priests, as two other men following close behind him take Carding and hustle him out through the other door.

Jerome bites one side of his lower lip, gives Arcinas a look filled with all the scorn and disgust he can muster. With one final glance at Saenz, he brushes past the lawyer and into the hallway without saying a word.

Saenz looks dispassionately at the lawyer.

“The truth, Ben. Sometimes it takes a while.”

Then he eases out of the room and leaves Arcinas alone, fuming in the semidarkness.

Jerome shoves a
cassette into the tape deck of the car as they drive out of the NBI grounds. Saenz grits his teeth and braces himself for some extremely reckless driving. The powerful
presto
movement of the Summer concerto from Vivaldi's
The Four Seasons
blasts through the car's interior.

“You want to tell me where we're going now?” Saenz says, trying to make himself heard above the music.

“We're paying Councillor Mariano's caterer a visit.”

At the nbi's
parking lot, Joanna Bonifacio has been sitting in the car, waiting for the two priests to leave the building. She watches as they come out the side entrance and proceed to their car, grim faced.

“How come we didn't ambush him?” Leo asks.

A network grunt for over a decade now, having moved up from driver to light man, assistant cameraman to cameraman, Leo is a veteran at shoving microphone and camera lens in the faces of unwilling newsmakers. Murder suspects, government officials involved in various scams, pregnant starlets who only months before were professing their virginity—Leo has hounded these and then some, all in the line of duty. And Saenz is just famous enough to warrant an ambush interview.

But after almost a year of working with Joanna, he knows the ambush is not her style. She finds her own way and usually ends up with footage of raids being conducted, arrests being made, hostages being rescued or released.

“It's not the right time,” she says. Joanna can be infinitely patient.

21

The catering company
operates out of the home of Mrs. Erlinda Salustiano. With large sections of roof tile missing and its
white paint now a dingy grey in places, the blue-and-white bungalow has seen better days. It's in the Fairview area, straight down Commonwealth Avenue and
not too far from Payatas. There's a makeshift
carinderia
set up in front of the gate. It's shielded from the elements by a canvas awning; beneath it, a glass-fronted wooden counter displaying trays of tired-looking pastries. Four sticky, grease-stained plastic tables and their diners take up most of the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to step down from the curb to get past.

When Saenz and Jerome get there, they find Mrs. Salustiano herself manning the chafing dishes. She's a thin, middle-aged woman with a hard face and greying hair cut in a severe pageboy bob. When they introduce themselves, she looks at them warily but continues to serve customers. Jerome notices she takes an inordinately long time to dole out portions, counting every chunk of meat, every cube of carrot and potato, every chickpea and raisin, every last teaspoonful of gravy, until she is satisfied that she has maximized the cost-profit margin of each serving. Only then will she grudgingly hand it over to the customer. Jerome glances at Saenz to see if he's noted this as well, but Saenz is already grinning at him mischievously. The older priest presses his lips tightly together to keep himself from laughing, because they're here for a serious reason.

It's not a very large operation, she tells them—for sit-down events, they can only handle around one hundred fifty guests. But providing meal packages is much simpler, requiring fewer materials and less manpower.

She's a cousin of Councillor Mariano's assistant, so she often gets first dibs on any informal catering jobs the councillor's office needs to outsource. The provision of free meals at the parish church on weekends is one of those jobs.

“Why are you asking all these questions? Was there a problem with any of the meals we prepared?” she asks guardedly, looking from one priest to the other and back again.

“No, no,” Jerome says reassuringly. “Not at all. But we do need your help with something.” He draws a folded piece of paper from one of his shirt pockets, unfolds and then refolds it in a different way so that she can see. It's a copy of the charge sheet against Carding, with a picture of his face on one side, and Jerome is careful to show her only the picture. “Have you ever hired this man to help with your deliveries?”

She sets down the ladle she is holding and squints at the photograph. After a few seconds, she shrugs and says, “I don't know. I don't go with the van when it makes the deliveries; I'm far too busy. But my son does.” She turns and yells in the direction of the glass-fronted counter. “
Oy!
Rommel! Come here.”

From behind the counter rises a head, then the shoulders and, finally, the torso of an enormous man—just around five feet eight inches tall, but easily three hundred pounds if he's an ounce. He looks to be in his late twenties; his eyes, tiny and black, are set in a pale, doughy face; his body is nearly as wide as the counter, and he has no neck to speak of.

He looks at his mother in irritation. “What do you want?” he whines.

“I said, come here,” she says, more shrilly this time. “Lazy clod,” she complains to the priests as Rommel lays a handheld video game down on the counter and ambles over to them. “Nothing but video games all day, all night. Never helps with either the cooking or the customers.” She turns to face the jiggling mountain of pale flesh that is her son and waves the piece of paper in front of his face. “Look at this. You seen him before? At the church?”

He studies the photograph, then looks at her and then back at the photograph, his mouth open and lower lip slack. “Who's he?”

“How should I know?” she asks, her voice rising even higher. “They want to know if he's ever helped you with the deliveries.”

Rommel turns to look blankly at the priests. “Why do you want to know?” He reaches out for the paper with sausage-like fingers, but Saenz takes it from Mrs. Salustiano's hand before he can unfold it and study it more closely.

“We just need to talk to him, that's all. We're checking if his family is eligible for the church's Christmas gift-giving program just a few months from now.”

It seems to take a moment or two for this to register in Rommel's mind, and while they wait, they are treated to the sound of his loud breathing, his lungs straining to expand against the pressure of his excess weight.

“That looks like Carding,” he says. “First few deliveries, he was always hanging around the church gates. So me and Mang Omy, we told him to help unload the boxes from the back of the minicab.”

“Who's Mang Omy?” Saenz asks.

“Our driver,” Mrs. Salustiano says.

“And Carding—he's been helping you with the deliveries ever since?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you pay him?” his mother asks in dismay, pinching his fleshy arm hard. “Out of our profits?”

“He gets a free meal or some pocket change every now and then, Ma,” Rommel wails in protest, even as his mother continues to poke and pinch his arm. “Stop that.
Stop.
”

“You lazy—you stay in the minicab, don't you? You let Omy and whoever it is you yank off the street do all the work while you stay in the minicab and play with that stupid thing. You're just like your good-for-nothing father, leaving me to do all the work while you—”

“Maaa,”
he bleats woefully, and he turns to Saenz and Jerome with a look of supplication. “See what you've done? We were just having a quiet day. Please go away.”

“We just want to—”

“We already told you what you want to know, so you'd better leave,” Mrs. Salustiano screeches. “We're running a business here.” She turns on her son again. “Something which you don't seem to understand. You pick up some layabout hanging around the church and you
. . .
”

Saenz looks at Jerome; there's nothing more to learn here. They thank Mrs. Salustiano and excuse themselves, but she doesn't pause even once in her rant.

Jerome remains silent
throughout the drive back to
the university, knuckles white as he grips the steering wheel, the
car weaving in and out of traffic in near-suicidal bursts of speed. Saenz tries to relax in the passenger seat; from the corner of his eye, he can see the concentration in the other priest's face, knowing only too well that it is devoted to matters other than driving.

When they pull into the parking lot outside the building that houses the laboratory, Saenz gets out of the passenger side, but the younger priest remains in the car, thinking.

Saenz moves to Jerome's side and motions for him to roll down the window.

“You think Arcinas took the path of least resistance.”

“He's not a complete idiot. They would have chosen Carding well. They haven't told us much about him other than that he's confessed to the killings. But I'm sure if we checked into his background, we would probably find a repeat offender, someone with a string of sex-related crimes. Molestations, maybe. Flashing.”

“We can't ignore the facts. We now have confirmation that he's connected to the meal deliveries.”

“But you said it yourself—the community is a closed system. Carding has lived there all his life. Why is he killing now? What has triggered it that wasn't there before?”

“We don't know everything about him, Jerome. His history, the pressures he's under. It could be anything.”

Jerome looks up at him sharply. “You mean, you actually think he's our man?”

“I'm not saying that.” Saenz leans against the hood of the car, near Jerome's window. “I'm saying, let's look at everything that we have and don't have. He fits our physical profile of the killer, the height, the build—he even has about a size-six foot, as far as I could tell. Remember the imprint of the rain boot? And then let's consider the things he knows about the killings. He knew what kind of weapon was used. He knew about the faces. He knew about the genitalia.”

“But think about it, Gus. They wouldn't even have had to coach him, really. All they had to do was ask stupid questions that gave the details away, coupled with some expertly administered police brutality.” Jerome stares down at the steering wheel, trying to organize his thoughts. “But even without that, it's the grey areas that make me wonder.”

He pauses, long enough that Saenz has to prompt him to continue. “Grey areas?”

“He kept looking at my ring. That tells me he wants things, material things, a shot at something better in life. He said he killed those kids because he was angry. But his anger was about general things: poverty, his mother being sick, not having a regular job. You don't kill kids because life is hard. You might steal; you might attack a cop. But you don't kill the way our kids were killed: in a highly specific, organized way.”

“So what you're saying is
. . .
”

“I'm saying our man is focused. There's nothing random about his choice of victim. He remembers how many times he's killed. He does it the way he does it for a reason. He sees himself as a victim, sees the killings as some kind of redress. And he's smart too. You said it yourself—the way the weapon was handled, the way he left little that could be traced back to him, the way the faces were removed—there's a precision, a symmetry to his work.” Jerome looks up at Saenz again. “Gus. Do you honestly think Carding is capable of all that?”

Saenz shakes his head sadly. “You already know the answer to that.”

At this, Jerome throws his hands up in the air. “Then what do we do?” He looks out beyond the almost-empty parking lot, beyond the street and the buildings, beyond the chicken-wire fences and the traffic on the road outside. “And you know what? We're just days away from the first Saturday of August.”

And Saenz finds himself staring off in the same direction, thinking the same thought.

If Carding is the wrong man, another victim is going to turn up soon.