by Rodolfo Peña
“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.”
“All right, I will make some inquiries.”
“By the way, another reason I called is to inform you that I am ordering the Public Ministry to forward this case to the federal people.”
“Why? Is that better for us?”
“Yes, I think so. You see, if it is a federal case and it is thought to be drug related, it will, uh, you see, as I’ve said, our concern is that his help in the project might come out. And, I don’t trust the state people; I think that half of them are on the Gulf Cartel’s payroll. When I say ‘our concern’ I don’t mean just this office, or myself, but rather to let you know, Dean Herrera, that the ‘concern’ comes from higher up.”
“But, if we do that it might reflect rather badly on the poor young man and his family,” said the Dean rather meekly.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. The case will probably get filed among the many unresolved cases they have up there. And, the steps you’ve taken to recompense the family…you have taken steps, have you not?”
“Yes, yes,” the Dean replied, “we’ve told the family that the University would give the widow an extra, uh, compensation on top of the regular insurance, and we made it clear that the child would get scholarships, medical care, and so on.”
“Fine, good, well, let me know what you find out about the information, and be sure to use this phone from now on when you call me.”
“I will, Governor.”
“Good-bye, then.”
“Good-bye.”
As soon as he snapped the secure phone shut, the Dean buzzed his secretary and asked her to locate David López.
As he waited for his secretary to locate David, he called his home.
“Hello, Gilberto, is that you? Listen, I just had a call from the Governor. Yes, I know what you have said a dozen times about trusting the man. You know I’ve never trusted him completely. He is a politician and politicians are not to be trusted, ever! They’ll throw you to the sharks in a minute if it serves their purpose, if it will save their skin, or if you are no longer useful to them. What? Well, I think I’d better have some sort of security just in case. Yes, I am going to do that right now. What I want you do to is to get things ready in case we have to…yes, that’s what I mean, have cash in hand, a couple of open tickets, and so on. Yes, look we will deal with that later when I get home, OK? Bye.”
His desk phone buzzed. “David López is on the line, sir.”
“David, how are you?” said the Dean feigning a jolly tone.
“Fine, sir,” said David.
“David, I need a favor from you: Victor, you see, was doing some work for us, uh, testing to see, I believe, if the University’s data could be made more secure. Do you know, or, are you aware of how his, uh, testing was going?”
“Well, I know he was testing some encryption software but I don’t know if he had finished his tests or had decided if we were going to use it, and so on.”
“Yes, I think that’s it. You see, I have a memo from him,” the Dean lied, “asking for budget approval so I was wondering if that should be, that is, if I should sign it so the thing could go ahead.”
“I see,” said David, “well, I could look into it, if you wish, sir.”
“Yes, please, do that and let me know what you find.”
“I will, sir.”
“And, if there are any files, or, uh, software, or anything he might have been working on, please secure them and I will bring the subject up in our next Security meeting, and we will decide what to, uh, where to go from there, all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, have a good day, David, and thank you.” The Dean hung up.
David picked up his cell phone and sent a text message in English. “Locked pkg knt cpy.” He had been laboring all day trying to get around the security locks Victor had put on the email files. Having failed, he sent a text message telling someone he couldn’t make a readable copy of them.
Chapter 13: No Rest for the Dead
Lombardo came out of the cool SEMEFO building into the bright, cloudless day. He liked these late autumn days: the heat had abated and the cool northern winds cleared the sky and blew away the smog.
He woke up the taxi driver and told him to take him to the Department. He ordered the driver not to take Madero Avenue but to go through the neighborhood streets in back of the hospital and the medical faculty. He wanted some time to read the copy of the notes Dr. Figueroa had made and write a few notes of his own.
Dead bodies have many things to say to the living; their language is physical and visual and only understood by those who know how to look, where to look, and can interpret what they see.
Dr. Figueroa said he had had little time to examine the corpse before the PM agents showed up. They had the young man’s father with them and the identification forms already filled out and signed, so the body had been turned over to a funeral director
who had been appointed to prepare it before the family could see it.
But in the couple of hours that Dr. Figueroa had it, he had examined the head, opened the chest cavity and extracted the trachea and lungs, examined the heart, and secured contents of the stomach and some of the intestines.
There had been no time to open the skull but the Doctor had noticed two dark spots at its base. He said that torture or blows may cause unconsciousness and cause a victim to fall, so the victim’s head might have received a blow as a consequence. But there was no cut on the scalp or dried blood around the head or neck. In his opinion, the dark spots were evidently caused by blows with a blunt instrument or the fist of a very strong man—the spots were large. The Doctor speculated that the blows had probably caused some hemorrhaging in the brain.
In his notes, Dr. Figueroa stated that he had noticed that the skin pallor of the body and head was bluish and pale, especially around the lips—that sort of hue is usually associated with oxygen deprivation.
Although the head had been severed and afterward had rolled a few meters down the track, Dr. Figueroa said that the signs of choking were evident so he had looked into the victim’s mouth but seeing nothing he opened up the trachea to look into the victim’s air passage. There he had found the paper.
But the paper was not the only thing there; the lungs also contained water.
The liquid was muddy and had black particles, which were probably wood ash. Since more of them were found in the bronchial tubes it proved that the young man was still alive when his head was put in that dirty water.
“It’s possible,” Doctor Figueroa noted further, “that the perpetrator or perpetrators saw the victim faint and they put his head in the water to revive him. The cold water woke him up; he panicked or reflexively opened his mouth to breath and aspirated both water and the paper into this trachea.”
“The person or persons who did that to him probably weren’t aware of what was going on when he started to choke and even if they had been, there was little they could have done.”
“Anyway,” concluded Dr. Figueroa as a matter of fact, “if the obstruction in the trachea had not killed him, I am sure the blows to the back of the head would have, since it is more than likely they would have caused fatal hemorrhaging in the brain.”
Although he was sure that asphyxiation was the cause of death, he had nevertheless sent samples of blood, urine, bile, and other fluids to the lab to rule out any possibility of drugs or any substance being the cause of the victim’s demise.
“What about the plastic the forensic medics found around his neck?” Lombardo had asked. “No,” the Doctor had said, “that had nothing to do with his death.” Maybe they had tied a bag around his head so it wouldn’t bleed or spill water when moved. The Doctor could only speculate on that because he had seen drug war victims covered with large plastic bags so they would not bleed on the cars or trucks where they were transported to be dumped elsewhere; but he was sure that the blows to the skull, which had not broken the skin, were probably delivered by a fist or a nonmetallic instrument—perhaps a billy club or truncheon.
The body bruises, in his opinion, were caused by the same instrument and maybe fists. One thing was obvious: he had not been tied but rather held in such a way that one of his shoulders was dislocated.
As he had stated, the organs were turned over to the funeral director when the family claimed the body but he had been able to have a close look at some of them. He said he had been especially intrigued by the type of water the lungs contained.
To Dr. Figueroa it was interesting because the liquid was very dirty. It had mud, tree leaf particles, and that black substance—probably charcoal ashes. Water such as this spoke volumes about where the victim had died. Of course it was on the shore of a river, lake, pond, or reservoir—the leaves were a clear testimony of that since they were obviously from trees that grew near water’s edge. The muddy, fine sediment was evidence that the water was shallow and still so it was more likely to be a pond or reservoir. And finally, the black particles, when viewed under the microscope had proved to be wood charcoal, the kind people use to grill.
“Look for a place near a pond or reservoir where people go for picnics or weekend fishermen go for beer parties,” he had said and Lombardo had dutifully noted it down.
Lombardo was even more convinced now that the Zetas, or any of the killers hired by the cartels, had nothing to do with this death. They were pretty consistent about the way they did things: abduct the victims, bind their hands, have them kneel by the side of some dirt road or clearing in the desert, then a bullet in the back of the head. Outside the city, in the vastness of the desert, one could hear the gunshots, which carried a long way in the still, dark night. The Zetas didn’t care about being quiet; they knew no one was going to rush to investigate what was going on. And, when they wanted to make a statement, they did something particularly gruesome, like lop off heads or members.
These killers, on the other hand, had been quiet. No guns were used on the victim. The plastic bag might have been applied only after the fact but before it too. Near suffocation with a bag was a tactic to terrorize a victim, but it was also a way to muffle screams or groans.
Then there was the business of the paper. Lombardo took out the small plastic bag that Dr. Figueroa had given him. The wad of paper had been chewed but not to the point where it had been destroyed. It had been carefully unfolded so Lombardo could see the long series of numbers and letters that had been hand written on it with permanent ink.
Since Dr. Figueroa had suggested looking for some pond or reservoir shore as the scene of the crime, that meant that Victor had been taken out of town by his killers. Most likely toward the south where all the city’s reservoirs were.
Lombardo had also made notes about the shoulder separation, which suggested that there had been at least three of them: two to hold him, one by each arm, and a third to deliver the blows. They beat him for a while, perhaps trying to get something out of him; according to Dr, Figueroa’s examination, most of the blows had been delivered where they would be painful but not cause serious injury. If the blow to the back of the head had not been deliberate, it could have been caused when they let go of him for a moment and he had passed out, fallen to the floor, and possibly hit his head against something. He believed that Dr. Figueroa was right when he suggested that they might have tried to revive him by putting his head in the cold, muddy, water and that Victor had aspirated water and the paper when he revived.
Lombardo wrote another note: “Perhaps when they saw he was dead, they put the bag on his head and dumped him by the railroad tracks. They might have been trying to lay him on the tracks so when the train came by at four in the morning it would crush the boy so much the traces of torture would be erased.”
Someone, a passer-by, or a police cruiser, might have scared them away and they didn’t have time to place the body in such a way it would be completely mangled. Either by accident or by design only the neck had rested on the railroad track.
About the unknown perpetrators, Lombardo wrote: “These were not amateurs; they were not drunks trying to steal hooch money, or muggers, or gang members. These were pros used to the ways of interrogation.”
Sometime during the interrogation or perhaps even before it started the victim had put the piece of paper in his mouth—a last foolishly heroic act, which tried to protect something or somebody.”
Finally Lombardo wrote into his little notebook: “Questions: What did these letters and numbers mean? Why was he trying to hide the paper and why was it so important that he gave his life for it? Did the killers know about it and is that why they beat him half to death? What was the damned paper about?”
Dr. Figueroa also wrote about the young man’s heart: it was healthy and strong; it had not given out even under the stress of the beating. The young man had been small and a bit frail in life but he had taken it and not said a word!
Although the lab reports would take a few d
ays to complete, Dr. Figueroa wrote that in his view the stomach contents showed no sign of anything unusual. The stomach was mostly empty. Obviously, the young man had not reached home to have his dinner. Dr. Figueroa’s final comment was that he would forward the toxicologist report on the fluid samples he had sent to the lab.
Dr. Figueroa’s suggestion that he look for a spot near one of the large reservoirs formed by the many dams that surrounded Monterrey was not a trivial task.
The city was very large and demanded a lot of water during the long, hot summers, so there were half a dozen large reservoirs within a half-hour drive. Also, a lot of the ranchers in the area kept ponds for their cattle and the desert to the south and southeast was riddled with stagnant waterholes left over from the rainy season.
When the taxi stopped in front of the Investigations Department’s building Lombardo exclaimed, “But, there were those ashes! I’ll have to think about that.”
