"How did you know they're dealing drugs there?" Tena asked in a sudden good humor.
"I've been at this for a long time, kid.” The eldest sketched a vain smile as he answered.
"So shouldn’t we close the premises immediately and arrest the fat guy?"
"Do it if you want," the chief said wearily. “That's the job of the incompetent Drug Unit. I won’t waste my time on things that aren’t for me.”
As soon as he finished speaking, he turned to Tena, put his hand on his left shoulder, and said his last words of the day:
"Listen to me: Alyssa Grifero will be your first assignment as my trainee. Find her.”
The next day, Barreneche met with Judge Callejo in his office to review the case. It was lunchtime. The judge had been informed of the dismaying aspect of the suicide's home. He was also informed in detail of the "quiet" conversation with Max (as described by Barreneche, who wanted to avoid the issue of backhanding his cheek and the beer shower).
Callejo, attentive, nodded his head.
He asked, "have you collected any information about that Alyssa?" and the policeman told him about the girl.
"We're on it," Barreneche said. “I have ordered Tena to investigate. I spoke to him a moment ago on the phone and he told me that he has tracked the last calls made or received with her cell phone.”
“And?”
"The last calls are from a couple days ago, and they came from Ámber. I don’t think she’s very far,” said the policeman, who wanted to finish as soon as possible to go eat.
Callejo frowned and sighed. Then he asked the question he had been wanting to ask for the last few minutes:
"Why did you send Tena to investigate her alone? For me it's a very serious matter, Julian.”
"Don’t you trust him?" Protested the man visibly offended.
“No, I trust you!” He lifted the tone of his voice and the reply echoed in the room.
An uncomfortable silence prevailed in the room. The ring tone of Barreneche's cell phone sounded. He picked it up and held it to his ear while still watching the judge. It was Tena.
"I know where Alyssa Grifero is, sir!" Shouted the young man, more than he spoke, from the other side of the connection.
Barreneche stood up in the chair like a spring.
"Great, Tena, good job," he said, and immediately gave some orders. "Listen, tell me the exact address and go on there. I'll join you as soon as I get there.”
"Impossible, sir!" Marcos Tena continued to scream. “The girl just took a plane to London! And she has made a reservation at an Oxford hostel!”
Alyssa Grifero came down the flight of stairs with a backpack dangling from her shoulder and dragging a small blue suitcase. The blizzard that had risen that morning made her hair fly in all directions, so she decided that when it was all over and she went home, she would cut her hair. She tensed as she entered the terminal and felt the difference in temperature. Without stopping to glance in any store or even for a quick coffee, she went outside, where a car was waiting for her. With only a breath of fresh air, she climbed into the vehicle.
"Long time, Dorian. I'm glad to see you," she said as she bent to give the man in the driver's seat a kiss on each cheek. The ten-day beard stubble was as usual, and his hair was longer than she remembered. The arrogant gesture wasn’t lost on her either.
The vehicle started and left the airport lanes dedicated to the collection of passengers.
"You've grown up since the last time I saw you," the driver said with a sharp English accent and still looking at the road.
"You’ve changed too, you have more wrinkles."
Dorian let out a half smile.
"May I ask, why are you in Oxford?"
“Business.”
"Hell, you're just as mysterious, that's the usual Aly."
Grifero smiled unwillingly and changed the subject:
"How's it going? Do you keep earning your life intimidating people?”
"It's more than that, but yes," Dorian said with a tense gesture. “Right now I have nothing on my hands, so if you know about anything...”
"I'll keep it in mind."
"I know about Charley," he said after a pause.
“I know.”
“You're good?”
“Perfectly.”
Dorian let out a snort that broke the tension that was just building inside the car.
"You really won’t tell me anything, will you?"
"Maybe some other time."
A little more than half an hour later, they arrived at their destination. Dorian pulled Alyssa up to the door of her hostel, where they said goodbye with a hug. They promised to keep sending messages, where they both felt more comfortable.
That evening, Sara Mora sat down to dinner with her new British family and, as usual in that house; a slight disorder reigned from appetizers to dessert. Claire Connor, who was the one who did as she pleased at home, had prepared a spinach, corn and pea salad that Sara struggled to finish. For the main course, they had an overly fried fish, chips, broccoli and carrots. The doctor had forgotten the industrial flavor of fish & chips. The dessert was the best. Kurt, the Buddhist, forensic and second husband of Claire who was not eating with them because of work, had bought a tray of different flavored cupcakes that morning. Sara would have been delighted to try the carrot cake, her favorite, but Nick lunged at it even before the tray touched the table. That impossible boy had gotten ahead of her.
At seven-thirty Sara's cell phone rang. She got up from the table in a rush and almost missed her call before getting the phone out of her corduroy jacket, which Mrs. Connor had most assuredly put on the hook at the entrance because it was proper. It was Mike Lennard.
The cell phone sounded, "ding", and Alyssa opened her eyes in a reflex act. It took her less than a second to orient herself and remember where she was. She sat up, and settled herself on the sheet with her legs crossed, and inspected her Blackberry. She had a new email, which caused a crooked smile to be drawn on her face.
From «Jasper» to «A.G.»
Hi,
Remember. Cowley Road. Number 219.
Tell me everything in detail when you're done. And be careful.
Jasper
Sigh. Then she locked her phone and went to the dresser, where she had left her wristwatch. It was 6:35 pm. She had plenty of time.
She spent the next hour and a half eating something (she had bought a vegetable sandwich and yogurt with raisins that didn’t look too bad at Tesco) and she enjoyed a hot, foamy bath.
As she massaged her soap-bubbled thighs, she came to the firm conclusion that she was more nervous than she had imagined at first. She had nothing to fear, but traveling alone in a foreign country where the language that was spoken was so alien to her, added to the uncertainty of not knowing what was going to happen in the following hours, it caused annoying butterflies in her stomach. Alyssa became more nervous after Jasper’s cautious e-mail he had just sent her. "Fuck! Jasper, always so brilliant and careful."
She wanted to remove the dark thoughts from her mind by playing with the foam that billowed around her knees. About ten minutes later, when the water began to cool, she decided that she was relaxed enough to come out of the tub. She dried herself off and put on black jeans, boots of the same color, and a hooded gray sweatshirt big enough to conceal most of her face. Before leaving the room, she looked out through the window. From the ground floor of the poor hostel, the stamp of the Rawlinson Road could not be more depressing: the small parking lot of the building looked empty, wet and covered largely by dead leaves falling from the trees in the street bordering the area, an old stonewall invaded by moss. When the first drops of what would eventually be a dense storm started falling onto the glass, Alyssa threw an airborne scowl. No matter, I’ll walk anyway. It didn’t matter that she had to cross the city while the sky fell on her head; catching a bus was not an option. The last years of her life had forced her to adopt the irritating habit of letting herself be seen in p
ublic as little as possible, regardless of whether she was in another country, let alone in such a degree of excitement. She hung her backpack on her right shoulder and slammed the door.
Mike Lennard spoke in an uneasy tone of voice on the other side of the phone:
“Hi, Sara, did I call you at a bad time?” He said, listening to the background noise.
“Hi Mike!” She greeted him, happily surprised. “Not really, I'm having dinner with my lunatic host family. How are you?”
"Just two things. I want to invite you to have a drink tonight at my house. I promise we'll have a good time.”
"Mike..." Sarah, indecisive between what she should and what she wanted to do, pondered her words well. “I told you I couldn’t today.”
"No, that was two days ago. You told me you couldn’t because you were visiting Cambridge yesterday. What's up today?”
Sara rolled her eyes at being so stupid as to not count the days.
"Mike, I just don’t think we should see each other at your home for now. We just met. It's too soon, don’t you think?”
"All right, I accept," he said with resignation.
“All right.”
"The second thing I want to tell you, I don’t think you’ll like it.”
Sara frowned.
“I’m listening.”
"I didn’t tell you the whole truth about me," he said suddenly.
“What did you say?” She raised the tone of her voice.
"There are some things I haven’t told you, though I will, don’t worry," he said. “But it must be in person. That's why I wanted to see you today.”
Sara didn’t answer. This time she was more furious than intrigued, so she hung up without saying goodbye. Completely disgruntled, she returned to the living room, where she apologized to Claire and Nick, she refused a cup of tea with milk the woman was preparing, and escaped to her room.
"Shit!" she repeated in frustration, "Shit! Shit!"
She paced the room from side to side with no apparent sense, trying to focus her thoughts. She was having a little anxiety attack, another one in a few days.
"Let's see, Sarah, focus," she ordered sternly. “What was the meaning of the call?”
Still walking in circles, the young woman thought of different possibilities, reasonable problems that Charley’s twin wanted to share with her.
Sara gritted her teeth. She couldn’t believe that she was again involved in an affair with...
Nosey Charley!
She paused for a moment, took a deep breath and forced herself to see everything from a more optimistic perspective. And if what Mike had to tell her wasn’t bad, she wondered. Had she noticed if his tone was cheerful or worried? Remember, Sara, remember. Her inner dilemma shifted toward a more disturbing thought: And if... she asked again, what if this man was not really Charley's twin? Is that what happened? On the driver's license, he was identified by the name of Mike Lennard, not Rubial. He had assured her that he had changed his name, but what if he had lied about it? Impossible, concluded Sara, whose brain was overcoming anxiety in favor of her own performance, he was identical to Charley! She cried aloud now. They have to be brothers! So what now?
She sat on the bed and hugged her teddy bear, Golden tightly. She wanted to cry. She missed Ámber and Diana. She couldn’t believe that she had left her home to flee her past, and in three days she was already living with four lunatics, showering in the company of spiders, and making plans with the twin brother of her almost rapist who, to cap it off, was lying and stalking her.
Could it really be considered harassment?
Mike was a nice man, with good conversation, and he also respected her. It wasn’t fair to judge him for being his brother. He just wanted to see her one evening and tell her something more intimate. What was wrong with that? She relaxed and opened her laptop in order to think of something else. She had not used it since the bus trip that brought her to Oxford, so the news in "PDF" of the Diario Montañés news remained on the monitor as it had been left on that day. Sara stared at the screen for a while, staring blankly, not thinking about anything concrete.
Wait a minute! She was just coming to a conclusion, and it was alarming. Mike said that he had read the news of this newspaper and it spoke about Alfonso, Verónica and her pregnancy. However, she moved the cursor from the top to the bottom of the news, looking for words that she knew she wouldn’t find, for in the news there was no mention of the pregnancy anywhere.
She was absorbed. That man knows more things than he told me. She got up suddenly and began to dress. She didn’t like the situation at all. Why would he hide something like that? On second thought, she told herself as she pulled on a white cotton sweater, it had all been very strange from the first moment. Coincidentally we’re in the same country, same city and same bar. And who recognizes someone that he hasn’t seen in his life except for a simple photograph published in a small space of digital news? The reality was that nothing made sense; everything seemed improbable.
Before leaving her room, she looked out the window and noticed that the dark sky threatened rain. She grabbed the umbrella and left the house without saying anything to anyone else.
The first thing that Alyssa did as soon as she headed south on Banbury Road was check the time: 8:35 pm. The storm had already fully awakened, and within fifteen minutes, the young woman was soaking wet.
With every step she took, the fluttering in her stomach grew and rose to her chest. She insulted herself for being so stupid, but in the depths of her being she knew that she was in some way facing the moment that would determine her future and would make her, perhaps, a totally different person. She urgently needed a change of course in her life, to define herself, to eliminate her inner ghosts and to cling to some sign that would make her reconcile with the planet.
She reached the historical center, and as she passed St. Giles, her teeth clenched, not only because of her nerves, but because the cold had already reached her bones and made her teeth chatter. She sped up, for she was less than a fifteen-minute walk away.
Cowley Road became eternal. As she progressed, single-family brick houses with billiard roofs were being replaced by foreign businesses of all kinds, mainly fast food. The number 219 was a dark brick townhouse a few square meters built next to a liquor store. It was an exact, if rather coquettish, replica of the houses that stood next to it along the avenue. From the other end of the street, Alyssa saw no sign of life inside. She looked at the clock again. 09:37 pm. In fact, she had arrived a few minutes in advance. She smoked a couple of cigarettes to make time. Then, with her clothes dripping, she bought a kebab in the Turk store behind her and ate it there, standing on the sidewalk. The awning of the premises sheltered her from the rain.
Suddenly a light went on in one of the rooms of the house. Alyssa shuddered as she identified the silhouette of a person behind the window. A strong feeling awakened within her.
I found you.
She dropped half of the kebab in a garbage can, and, illuminated by the warm light of street lamps, she crossed the street. She did not reach the door, however, for halfway there she discovered a dubious alley less than a meter wide separating the number 219 from the liquor store. She decided to spend a couple of minutes inspecting it. She found a small window in the sidewall of the building, possibly the bathroom, which Alyssa thought would be perfect for information on what was happening inside.
At that moment another light turned on inside the building that partially illuminated the alley. The young woman lunged to the side praying softly that she had not been discovered. Once she recovered her breathing rhythm, she crouched in the rain and found an angle of vision from where she could see through the window everything that was mirrored in the mirror of the bathroom.
Then something happened, and Alyssa felt an intense discomfort in her gut.
A few minutes later, the dry sound of a gunshot sounded like thunder at 219 Cowley Road, breaking the night's calm and alarming the entire neighborhood.
Chapter 5
"There are more fish in the sea, everyone told me when I divorced Violeta. Fucking ignorants.”
"Isn’t that what the phrase implies, doctor?"
"Please, Morgan! Nobody wants to eat a fillet of hake fish when they just put a couple pounds of prawns in their stomach, right? I wonder who was the first to say that horrible phrase that everyone repeats but nobody ever wants to hear.”
Thursday, November 9, 2006
The complaint had already been filed, and nothing that could or had not been done was of importance. He had no doubt that he held all the cards in his hands, at least, to be the main suspect. He was between a rock and a hard place. The formal complaint had come to the police that morning; he was only waiting for the trial, and, after that, to know the sentencing.
Jaime Vergara looked at his superior, Dr. Ángel Fuenmayor, through the office glass, and paused for a moment. He did not want to discuss the case with him, but he knew the conversation was inevitable. There was still one thing that needed clarification. I'm about to take the first step towards a free fall, he thought, deeply depressed. He knocked, turned the knob, and went into the study, and with his head down he forced himself to smile. Dr. Fuenmayor returned the greeting and invited him to sit down.
“Well let's see. The last time you called me to your office was to tell me about your divorce. What have you done this time?” Jaime teased, trying to sound unconcerned.
"Jaime, don’t upset me. Don’t tell me you don’t know why I called you.” The head of neurosurgery, more sullen than usual, shifted in his chair. "I have received the complaint," said the superior solemnly. “Didn’t you ever think to tell me?”
"Look, what do you want me to say? I suppose all this shit is my problem,” he replied, aggravating the tone of his voice.
“No, obviously it’s not!”
Jaime kept scrutinizing his boss's eyes, but he didn’t add any comment. He refused to rush the moment of his crucifixion.
“Buddy, what did you do?" Asked Fuenmayor with a paternal air.
The Butterfly Effect Page 6
