The Butterfly Effect

by Luis A. Santamaría

She stepped forward, took Banbury Road and didn’t stop, didn’t even look away, until she found the first phone booth. Well, it was free. She slid inside, inserted a two-pound coin, and dialed a number by memory. At the third tone, someone picked up.

  “Ámber Health Center, what can I do for you?”

  Sara sighed relieved to hear a voice from her comfort zone. It was possible that it was Loreto, a grant student who had been hired at the center to attend the reception area and who had not yet been presented to her. She decided to get to the point:

  "My name is Sara Mora, and I'm a doctor in the center, neurosurgery department. I need to talk to the doctor Encinas, please,” she said, as politely and professionally as possible that her state of anxiety allowed her.

  “The psychologist?”

  "Yes, tell him it's urgent."

  "I'll put him on with you," said the new receptionist, very polite, as if trying to look professional. “Don’t hang up.”

  Inside the booth, she felt like an easy prey. What an absurd feeling, she thought as she surveyed the street through the glass. Why would anyone want to take her? Luckily, a male voice emerged from the other side of the connection rescuing her from her paranoid fantasies.

  "Sara, is that really you?"

  The one who spoke was Dr. Luis María Encinas, the only psychiatrist on the payroll with whom Ámber's clinic counted. He had three years left to retire, and although his office was only one floor above Sara's office, until October 12th, they had exchanged no more than a formal greeting when crossing in the elevator or the corridors of the building. From that fateful day, however, they came to see each day, about an hour each day, in the old psychiatrist's office.

  "Luis, I need your help. I'm desperate," she pleaded, not wasting time.

  "Take it easy Sara, and take a deep breath. Let's see, where are you calling from? Are you still in Oxford?”

  “Yes. I'm calling you from a pay phone. Something terrible has happened.”

  "I'm listening, Sara. What has happened?”

  "I saw a man die yesterday." She paused to breathe, it was the first time she had heard herself uttering such a strong phrase. “In his own house. There was a shot that the whole neighborhood heard, and I was the first person to hold him in my arms. But he was already dead, Luis, he was already dead...”

  A new pause to breathe, fast and choppy.

  "Sara, you're suffering from an anxiety attack, you have to calm down. Tell me, do you know who the victim was and why they shot him?”

  In the midst of uneasiness, Sara preferred to ignore her relationship with Lennard. After all, she didn’t have so many coins for such a long story. She decided to address the issue for why she had called him:

  "Luis, last night a police officer put me inside his car and interrogated me. Me! What is happening lately with me? Am I going crazy?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Let's see, I told you that the therapy was working, every day that passed you look better, and when you told me about taking a few days off to go to Oxford, I thought it was a fantastic idea.” Encinas' calm voice seemed to Sara the best restorative she had. “Now, you have simply had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You have experienced another trauma, just as unpleasant as the previous one, which has caused anxiety to explode in your body like a rocket. Apparently, girl, you have a knack for getting into trouble, but you're not going crazy, and you won’t die because of this.”

  “I get it. But then, what do I do?”

  "Well, you have to do your best to reassure yourself. Are you still taking the pills?”

  "Not for the last couple days. You told me to stop taking them.”

  Sara clung tightly to the receiver, as if it were all she had left in her life.

  "Yes, but that was before this whole story. Continue taking them, for a while at least until you get better.”

  "I understand, I'm going to take the medicine again today."

  "One more thing: I think you should come back to Ámber. Here we can resume the therapy.”

  Sara bit her fingernails as she pondered her answer in silence.

  "I can’t, not at least until I have done one more thing." She reached into the pocket of her jacket and saw that there were no more coins left. “Luis, I'm out of time for the call. One more thing.”

  "Tell me."

  "I have to ask you for one last favor. Can you call the La Paz Hospital in Madrid and ask about the Neurosurgeon Jaime Vergara? It’s very important that you locate him.”

  "You say Jaime Vergara? Wait a minute, let me write it down.” Sara imagined her psychiatrist with his round, wide glasses, leaning over his old office desk and writing in pencil and in exaggeratedly large handwriting. “It’s done. What’s the message?”

  "You must introduce yourself as my psychiatrist, he knows me well. Tell him I lost my cell phone with all my contact information, but it's very important that we talk. For him to connect to his Skype account this afternoon at 6 pm peninsular time. I'll be waiting for him online. Did you get it?”

  Luis María Encinas repeated his patient's orders as he carefully scribbled them down on his paper.

  “Important... to connect to the Skype account... today at 06:00 pm...”

  “You got it?” At that moment, the balance of the call was zero, and the connection was cut off. “Luis? You got it? Shit!”

  Sara slammed the phone with rage. Hoping that her old psychiatrist had written down the message, she left the booth and headed for the city center. She had a date at six in the afternoon, but before that she wanted to stop by to check something out.

  Chapter 9

  "Allow me to meddle, Morgan. Do you and your wife love each other?”

  "Of course, doctor. What’s the question?”

  "I don’t see your eyes twinkling as you answer. When you love someone, your soul must shine.”

  "Of course I love my wife, Salas, don’t be picky.”

  "Don’t make the same mistake I made, my friend.”

  "Be more specific."

  "I mean, getting up early when it's dark at night to go to work at the hospital was a hell of a bitch, but it cost me a lot less when someone else was doing the same thing on the other side of the bed. Two cups of coffee are better than one. That when the varnish wears off at the beginning of the exciting stories, the real person comes to the surface, and that's where you must decide if the unvarnished person is for you or not. That in the end, she is always going to be the fire in your eyes, she is also extraordinarily gutsy, and you are the championship asshole, only with one small difference: she will be your chain and ball, and you, the asshole. And that's when, with luck, you'll be able to build a rocky eternity but not enough to end up in court. Fourth lesson.”

  Friday, November 10, 2006

  The unlikely pair of officers composed of Alfred Horner and Thomas Carroll, waited in the autopsy room for the coroner to appear. They were dressed in the same clothes from the night before, and their tired looks showed that fatigue was beginning to make a dent in them. In a desperate attempt to regain strength after the incidental night, Carroll had managed to get a nod for less than two hours in the back seat of the patrol car. Horner, on the other hand, had not even tried.

  The autopsy room of the Oxford forensics was small, cold, and so meticulously clean it almost made him nauseous. It was situated in the basement, so that the sunlight did not reach it. Stainless steel skeletal tables, all free except the one in front of the policemen, occupied the dungeon. Above it, inside a sack of cloth and fastened through its center by a zipper, hid the inert mass of what a few hours ago had been the living body of Mike Lennard.

  The two men grimaced, each according to their style, when the coroner entered the room twelve minutes late: Carroll gave a sigh to one side, while Horner, less given to staying in line, gave the newcomer a more sullen gaze "Shit, the Buddha has touched us," he commented under his breath to his companion, who couldn’t suppress a childish chuckle.

  The Bud
dha (a nickname that Horner had just picked from his sleeve, as he did from time to time) was Kurt Payne, the Police Chief of Forensic Science in the City of Oxford. In a small white dressing gown, he was a man with a disproportionate face. He could not be said to be a monster, but the fact was that both his eyes, as his full lips, occupied most of his facial surface, creating the strange effect that something was not in place. It was as if someone had misjudged the scale of certain elements at the time of his conception. Carroll used to say that he was a giant in the body of a human. He had his hair shaved (including his eyebrows), and although he did not lose the rehearsed smile from the door until he reached out to the pair of policemen, the truth was that he did not fool anyone: Payne was a strange man. He rarely interacted with other policemen, collecting unpopular weapons (one day Carroll saw him take out brass knuckles and a collection of ninja stars), and since a few months ago he was associated with some kind of Buddhist sect that had managed to soften his bipolar character in exchange for contributing to enlarge his fame as an strange bird). Horner and Carroll simply did not like him.

  They didn’t waste their time in formalities and they went directly to the point: Horner requested to see the body, to which Payne obeyed without resisting by opening the zipper to the neck.

  "Fuck..." Snowflake snapped at once, as if it were the first time he saw the grayish mass typical of a corpse to which an autopsy had just been carried out. Alfred swallowed.

  The coroner began reciting the findings of the autopsy as if he were in an oral test and he had studied and memorized it the night before, all in a surprisingly high-pitched voice (a giant in the body of a human and with a whistling voice):

  "The victim, according to the facts around the hole that pierced the skull when we did the analysis, was killed shortly before midnight yesterday. It was by a firearm that is evident, almost certainly of a small size. A single bullet shot was enough to make him drop dead.

  "When you say facts, do you mean...?" Horner asked, betrayed by a subtle gleam of fear in his eyes.

  “Larvae.” The coroner rushed to finish the question with the answer, with a tone that made them think he was enjoying the two policemen’s discomfort. “It’s a joke. I was teasing you. These bugs take a minimum of 48 hours to appear in a decomposing body.”

  The detectives glanced sideways to confirm their irritation at Payne's caustic sense of humor.

  "All right, go on," Horner snapped.

  "As you can see, once the body was cleaned of its own dried blood, we found a deep groove in the throat.” He added the comment to the damaged area with his index finger. “Despite being an important wound, it doesn’t reach the trachea, so it appears that the homicide tried to strangle the victim before shooting him with the gun.”

  "Let us take care of rebuilding the scene, and you go and look for insects, will you, Kurt?" Alfred took the first opportunity to leap against the coroner.

  Carroll broke the tension with police philosophy:

  "Fuck... we cops live the worst twenty minutes of other people’s lives.” He couldn’t stop looking at the gap that almost split the victim's head in two.

  After a few seconds of almost ceremonial reflection, Horner asked the usual question in cases of murder by gun:

  "When will we know the model of the gun?"

  "I'm afraid we won’t know exactly," Kurt said mechanically, wanting to make it clear that he didn’t care at all.

  “Like what...?” Carroll was within a tenth of a second of losing his temper when his companion stepped forward.

  "It's because they haven’t found the bullet.” Alfred confirmed, more than just said, and then sought confirmation in the coroner's round eyes.

  "Exactly," said the Buddhist. “Without the bullet that was fired you cannot know the model of the weapon with precision. Ballistics don’t work miracles, you know.” He let this last remark spill from his tongue. “Let's see, we know it was a small weapon, like a revolver or a small-caliber pistol. In addition, because of the shape of the gap, it is very likely that the shot was projected at a short distance from the target, maybe a meter and a half, or even less. It is all I can say.”

  "Then we'll find that bullet and give some work to the ballistics," Carroll promised. “Sometimes we do miracles, did you know that Kurt?”

  After the declaration of verbal war, a provocative wink of the policeman's eyes that the coroner received without the slightest symptom of offense in his expression.

  "There is something else," he added, with the classic power of the class nerd when a bully pleads for his homework minutes before a surprise test.

  Horner's eyes narrowed as if he were blinded by some sunlight, and he paid close attention; something told him that the Trojan horse of the case was about to be revealed.

  “Go for it, Kurt.”

  The man opened the zipper more, leaving the torso of the corpse in full view, and refrained from commenting, for the image spoke for itself. The agents looked worried as they stared at it. In the area of the chest between the nipples, marked in the same flesh as one carving an inscription in wood with a chisel, you could read a clear message:

  OJO x OJO

  The calligraphy was irregular, trembling, like that of a child learning to write. The furrows, in this case, were not as deep as the one in the neck. They all came to the conclusion that the murderer, once he murdered his victim, had paused for a few seconds to leave the message on his skin.

  Horner gave Carroll a nod with his head and they turned to speak more privately.

  "It's in Spanish," the blonde said in a whisper.

  “I know.”

  "You're thinking about Sara Mora, am I right?" Thomas lowered his voice a little more. He knew that, although Kurt Payne was moving around the corpse, he didn’t really lose detail of their conversation. They noticed that when he heard the name of Sara Mora, his huge, blue eyes opened wide. He said nothing. He turned and continued to move as if he were pretending to do something.

  "Well, of course it's more evidence against her," Horner said with extreme caution. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the coroner and grimaced uncomfortably. “We'll talk about this later, Thomas, when we're in private.”

  He had whispered it with just enough force to make sure Payne heard the hint.

  The couple bid farewell to Kurt with formal handshakes and left the claustrophobic room, not before Carroll took some photographs of the body focusing most of the shots on the mysterious message on the torso. When they surfaced the room, both of them took deep breaths and unbuttoned the first button of their shirt. So much dead flesh and verbal grief had upset their stomachs.

  Sitting in the last row, Marcos Tena listened almost without blinking all that was said in the press conference of the court of Torrelavega. Judge José Miguel Callejo was the lead speaker; it was not usual for a judge to appear before the press, but Callejo considered that this exceptional situation required it. He explained that the investigation concerning the murder of Miguel Lennard, committed that early morning in Oxford and of which the motive was not yet known, was directed entirely by a police unit from the British city. However, Callejo himself would manage the rest of the investigation, that is, everything related to the search for Alyssa Grifero and he reported that the Police Chief Julián Barreneche (on his left on the podium), and his team would be in charge of this case. Grifero, therefore, Alyssa was the main suspect of the murder of Miguel Lennard, at least from the point of view of the Spanish justice. Nothing was said, however about Carlos Rubial’s suicide or of Don Rafael Salas’ falsification of medical information.

  While Callejo was speaking, Tena glanced at some files he kept in a corporate folder. It was a five-page report that had been used by the judge to summarize the important points of the press conference. The young policeman was glancing swiftly through the pages for a very simple reason: he had written them himself that morning, and he knew every word by memory. In it, he had explained chronologically the fraud committed by Dr. Rafael Sa
las and given the circumstances that led to his son-in-law, Alfonso Morales, to collapse and perish on the sand of the beach. He had also described how the police found Carlos Rubial's body on the rocks at the foot of the cliff as well as the mysterious murder of his lost brother, the British Miguel Lennard. He had spent more than a full page explaining why Alyssa Grifero was a prime suspect, trying to omit everything the press had written about her and her addiction to sex and drugs, a fact that was not even minimally proven. Proud of the good work, he closed the folder and set all his interest in the podium again.

  Judge Callejo explained to those present that, although he was not accustomed to making such appearances, he had decided to call them in the wake of the headlines with which they had opened the newspapers and news reports that morning. The main reason for the press conference was none other than to cool the minds of the journalists and to deny certain information treated as irrefutable which was unfounded, for which he had already received numerous calls.

  “With what we know at this time, I dare say that the young suspect Alyssa Grifero, who, as you know, lived under the protection of Carlos Rubial, and that we are searching to detain for being one of the main suspects in the Lennard’s case. However, based on the information that is in my possession, I cannot affirm with certainty anything beyond a mere suspect.”

  “Does the girl have any relationship to the death of Carlos Rubial?” Shouted a Spanish TV reporter.

  "She lived with him, but she is not suspicious of that death. We can assure you that Rubial took his own life without anyone's help.”

  "Does she have any ties to Miguel Lennard?"

  “We don’t know. Lennard was the twin brother of Rubial, but we have no evidence that he and Grifero ever met, for not even the brothers had a relationship since they were children. At that time Alyssa Grifero wasn’t even born, and therefore, unlikely to ever coincide.”

  "Then what are the motives as to why she is guilty?"

  "Suspect, I repeat, not guilty.”