by Mark Pryor
“This is a crime scene, so don’t go back in,” she said. “The crime-scene unit is on the way. We’ll need all of your prints and DNA, now that you’ve probably contaminated the place.”
“No problem,” Hugo said. “I’m pretty sure we didn’t touch anything, we’ve done this before.”
“What, broken into someone’s apartment to find a dead body?”
“Fair enough. But like I said, no problem.” Hugo nodded toward Bart Denum. “What are you doing with him?”
“He’ll be taken to the station and interviewed, possibly charged with murder. Most definitely with breaking in, unless he can show he had permission.”
“I didn’t kill that guy,” Denum said. “Why the hell would I?”
“I can think of several reasons,” Silva said. “You might have believed he’d kidnapped your daughter. Or at least persuaded her to disappear with him. Maybe you killed him out of anger, or maybe you were asking him for information about your daughter, and he died while you were torturing him.”
“That’s insane.”
“No, it’s actually perfectly logical. And add to all that,” she cut her eyes sideways to Hugo before looking back at Denum. “I can see how the strain of your daughter’s disappearance might cause you to act in a way you normally wouldn’t. Act desperately, violently.”
“No, that’s ridiculous. Hugo, tell her.”
“It is ridiculous,” Hugo said. “There’s just no way Bart would have done something like that.”
“Please,” Denum said. “Take the cuffs off. I’m not going anywhere, not until I find Amy. But we need to be looking for her.”
“He’s right,” Hugo said. “If the dead guy in there is Rubén Castañeda, then we can be pretty sure Amy is in trouble. And the more people we have looking for her, the better. Bart’s a good investigator, really good. And for heaven’s sake, this is his daughter we’re talking about.”
“There is no way in the world I’m releasing him,” Silva said. “Not now, not today.”
“She’s right,” Tom said.
Hugo looked at him, startled. “Seriously?”
“Look,” Tom said, “I’m the first to ignore authority, rules, protocol. The law, even. But we need to work with these guys to find Amy. We’re out of our depth here. If he didn’t do it, they’ll find out soon enough and then he can pitch in. But in the meantime, the entire Barcelona police force is a lot more useful to us than he is.”
“Assuming you have any role in the investigation from now on,” Silva said. “Which I sincerely doubt.”
“Fine,” Denum said. “Hugo, I didn’t kill that guy but . . . I’m OK.” He turned to Silva. “I’ll do whatever you want, ask me anything. I’ll cooperate, of course. But you have to let Hugo stay on the investigation. Please. He’s the best there is, and if anyone can find Amy, it’s him. That’s my little girl out there, and I’m begging you to do everything you can to find her and bring her home to me.”
“It’s not my choice,” said Silva, “but you’ll get your answer soon enough.”
“What do you mean?” asked Hugo.
Silva’s phone buzzed, and she glanced at it before replying. “Chief Inspector Garcia will decide who gets this case. And whether you play any part in it.”
“Then can you please call him?” Hugo said.
“No need,” Silva said, showing him a text on her phone. “He’s on his way right now. You can ask him yourself.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hugo and Tom watched as two officers led Bart Denum in handcuffs to a police car and placed him in the backseat. Denum threw a look back at Hugo as he stopped to get in the car, and Hugo was struck by how pale and desolate his friend looked. For all the years he’d known him, Denum had been the jokester, the happy one in any group, using his sense of humor to suffer through the pain of losing his wife. Or maybe just masking his pain. But even in his worst moments, Hugo had never seen him looking so fragile and so vulnerable.
Tom put a hand on Hugo’s arm. “Hey, we’ll figure this out.”
“He didn’t do it, Tom. I know you don’t know him, but I do. There’s just no way in the world.”
“Honestly, I wouldn’t blame him if he did. A touch of overkill, you might say, but if someone had kidnapped my daughter—assuming Amy was kidnapped, of course—I’d probably do pretty much anything to find out where she was.”
“Maybe in theory, but I’m pretty sure even you wouldn’t make that much of a mess of another human being.” Hugo paused. “Plus, it’s not exactly a smart move to kill the one person who might know where she is.”
“Fair point. Which leaves us with an interesting question.”
“Yeah. If Bart didn’t kill that man, who did?”
“Rubén Castañeda has to be the prime suspect, no?”
“I still think that’s him in there.”
“The guy you saw had hair. The photo in the business profile had hair. That poor fucker was bald as a coot, and not because his killer hacked it off for a laugh.”
Hugo grimaced. “True. We’ll know soon enough.” He straightened as a police car came to a halt in the cobbled street. “All right, Garcia’s here. Do us a favor and let me do the talking, okay?”
“I’ll try. But if he’s a jerk—”
“Come on, Tom, he’s got every right to be a jerk. Just because we were friends with his brother doesn’t mean we can break every law in his jurisdiction and ignore every instruction he gives us.”
“When you put it like that,” Tom said. He pointed to a low stone wall in the shade, about fifty yards away. “How about I stand over there while you men hash things out?”
“Good plan.”
Tom started to move off, but one of the uniformed officers with Silva trotted over, calling and gesturing for him to stay put. Tom put the back of his hand on his forehead, as if he were faint, and pointed to the wall. Unsure, the officer looked over at Silva, who nodded. Her main concern was her boss, Hugo guessed, currently stalking toward the little gathering. Everyone watched him approach, but Garcia didn’t pause as he passed Silva, making straight for Hugo, gesturing for her to follow.
“Spare me any excuses, Hugo,” he said. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
“Officer Silva dropped us off at our apartment and we went for a walk. We knew the address of Rubén Castañeda, thanks to your file, and thought we’d take a peek at the place while we looked for a lunch spot. The door was open so we took more of a peek than we’d intended.”
“And found a murder scene.”
“Looks like it.”
“From what I hear, it doesn’t look much like an accident or suicide,” Garcia said wryly. “Well, I suppose I could waste some time yelling at you, but most of my annoyance earlier was that I didn’t think you had any reason to break into that business. Seems like maybe you did.”
“Looks like it,” Hugo said. “Unfortunately.”
“Not that I approve of or condone your actions,” Garcia went on. “My city, not yours. My rules apply, not yours.”
“Got it,” said Hugo. “And we only went in because of the open door and . . .”
“And what?”
Hugo sighed. “It sounds a little cowboy and your brother made fun of me for it. But sometimes I just get a bad feeling, and when I saw that open door, I got that bad feeling.”
“Feeling, eh?” Garcia looked skeptical. “Well, it’s not like this guy can insist we prosecute you for burglary, is it?”
“Assuming that’s the homeowner, Rubén Castañeda.”
“You don’t think it is?”
“That guy’s bald, I don’t know if Castañeda is. When I saw him, he had hair.”
“We’ll find out,” Garcia said. He smoothed his mustache and turned to Silva. “Where are we with the investigation?”
“The crime-scene unit is in there now. One already left with the victim’s fingerprints and DNA to try and get a match. We need to find someone who knew him, get them down here for an identific
ation.”
Garcia looked over at the police car containing Denum. “And him?”
Hugo said, “That’s Bart Denum, it’s his daughter who’s—”
“I know who he is,” Garcia interrupted, “Silva filled me in. What I want to know is whether he killed the man inside.”
“Not a chance,” Hugo said. “I’ve known Bart for many years, and he wouldn’t do that.”
“He’s killed before. A simple Internet search gave me that much.”
“Yes. But so have I, both of us in the line of duty.”
“Debatable in his case. And one could say it’s his duty to find his daughter,” Garcia said.
“You could, but how does killing that guy help? Whether or not it’s Rubén Castañeda?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll ask him.
“He’s not your killer,” Hugo said firmly. “But if you act like he is, you’re giving the real killer a chance to get away. And maybe take Amy Dreiss with him.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Right now he’s all I’ve got.”
Hugo shook his head. “Things aren’t always what they seem. But fine, take him to HQ and put him somewhere safe. Don’t talk to him until I get someone from the embassy down there, a lawyer. Will you do that much, Chief Inspector?”
“Please, call me Bartoli. And don’t worry, we’ll put him on suicide watch, take his belt and laces and keep eyes on him all the time.”
“He’s not going to kill himself, not as long as his daughter is missing.”
“I expect you’re right about that,” Garcia said softly. “But what if he believes that she’s dead?”
Garcia and Hugo moved away from the crime scene and found a bench in the shade of a plane tree. Someone nearby was cooking, filling the street with aromas of garlic and onion. Tom seemed to have settled into his stone wall, and if he’d been within earshot, Hugo would have made reference to a gargoyle.
“I think we have to assume Amy’s been kidnapped, don’t you?” Hugo said to Garcia. “There may be something else weird going on, but at this point we have to assume the worst.”
“Agreed.” Garcia sat and gestured for Hugo to do the same. “Tell me about her.”
“About Amy?”
“Of course. I’d like to know something about the young lady I’m looking for.”
“Well, physically she’s very attractive. Someone recently described her as your typical pretty American cheerleader type, rather than an exotic beauty. I think that’s a fair description.” Hugo took out his phone and pulled up the photo. “See for yourself.”
Garcia studied the picture for a moment. “And you know her because Señor Denum is your friend.”
“Yes, but it’s more than that.” Hugo took a breath. “Bart’s wife and my first wife, Ellie, were good friends. Very good friends. We never had kids, so when they went places, Joanna and Ellie would take Amy with them. One day they took a trip to the mall, like they’d done a hundred times before, and some guy decided the light wasn’t red enough for him. Ellie and Joanna died immediately. Amy survived, obviously.”
“I’m sorry about your wife, Hugo. Raul didn’t tell me you’d lost someone.”
The mention of Raul Garcia, Hugo’s friend and the chief inspector’s brother, felt like a bridge to Hugo. Not just a connection to this man, but a way for him to move away from this conversation, because Bartoli Garcia already understood what it was like to lose someone to violence; there was simply no need to explain. No need to try and convey the utter shock he’d felt when the uniformed officer met him outside his home, the disbelief when he’d heard the words, and the numbness that had surrounded him in a black sludge of sadness and inaction. That had been one of the hardest things, the knowledge that there was nothing he could do—to bring Ellie back, to punish her killer, or to alleviate the scorching ache that woke him in the morning and tortured him at night. The white-hot arrows of remembrance that came every day at the slightest suggestion of her: a whiff of perfume, a glimpse of a photo, a song on the radio.
The anger had lessened over the years, and the searing pain of their shared memories had dulled to a glow, an ache that he could bear and even nurse. At a dinner party one night, more than a year after Ellie’s death, he’d been talking about . . . something or other with a woman who’d said she was some kind of therapist. She’d remarked in rather an off-hand way that when someone dies, our memories of them are the best that we have left, as though everyone should realize that. She’d not been talking about Ellie, she had no idea, but the thought had struck Hugo hard and made him think deeply about his grief. If the woman was right, if it were true that the memories were all Hugo had left of Ellie, he needed to hang on to and cherish them, not hide from or bury them.
So that’s what he did. He still didn’t talk about her very much, except sometimes to Bart, because he wanted to keep her to himself, and talking seemed to dilute her presence somehow. His memories of her seemed dreamlike now, familiar but hazy, but he was clear of the nightmare he’d lived with for too long. The sadness was still there, but he didn’t share that with anyone, either. That was his, and like the memories, he knew that as long as he had that, Ellie would still be with him.
“Anyway, I suppose you could say that Bart and I doted on Amy after all that. Bart especially, of course, but I did when I saw them.”
Garcia smiled. “I’m sure.”
“She and I developed a few traditions. Habits. Bart was always trying to get her to read, but she didn’t have the attention span, or just didn’t enjoy it. So I brought over a stack of what today might be called graphic novels. Comic books. She liked Tintin a lot but immediately latched onto Asterix and Obelix, so every time I went over there, I brought her a new one and we talked about the one she’d just read.”
“I adore those books!” Garcia said.
“We do, too. And it was such a good way to expand her vocabulary, the funny names of the characters, learning what they meant. At first Bart wasn’t too pleased that she was reading comics instead of novels, but I think he came around. We still treated it like it was her and my naughty little secret, like I was sneaking her chocolates or ice cream, but . . .” Hugo shrugged, then looked Garcia in the eye. “We have to find her, Bartoli. She’s a precious girl and if anything happened to her, it would destroy Bart. And me, too.”
“Hugo, you know that we will do everything in our power to find her.”
Hugo raised an eyebrow. “Who exactly is ‘we’?”
“The Barcelona police, of course.” Garcia said stuffily. Then he winked, adding, “And Hugo Marston. I think it would be best for you to stay on the case.”
“Thank you. And Bart?”
“No, first we have to exclude him as a suspect, and then we can cut him loose.”
“How do you plan to go about that?” Hugo asked.
“We’ll see what he has to say, and also work the crime scene here. The same way we handle every murder.”
“How many of those do you have every year?”
“Not as many as you. By quite a margin, and we’re thankful for that.”
“I’m sure. So what happens now?”
A breeze rustled the branches of the tree above them and a shaft of light painted Garcia’s face white. He squinted and looked at Hugo. “What would you do?”
“We need to search Castañeda’s place for any signs of her. Not just for evidence of the killer but specifically for signs of Amy.”
“Muy bien, they should be finished with the murder scene in an hour or two. We can search it then. What about the media?”
“Not yet. I don’t imagine she’s out where anyone will spot her.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“We need to talk to everyone who works at Estruch. Find out all we can about Castañeda and whether they’ve seen Amy.”
Garcia looked at this watch. “Let’s go there now.”
Hugo stood and waved Tom over. “Good plan.”
The three men started toward Garcia’s
car but paused when Grace Silva strode out of the house.
“What is it?” Garcia asked.
“We found the entry point. A window into a pantry by the kitchen,” she said. “The glass was broken inwards and,” here she smiled, “we found some blood.”
“The intruder’s?” Hugo asked.
“Looks like it.” She looked at Garcia. “From where the blood is, it looks like he cut himself on the way out, not the way in.”
“Which means Bart Denum isn’t your killer,” Hugo said. “He was still inside when we showed up and didn’t have any cuts on him.”
“Maybe,” Garcia said. “He could have had an accomplice. Or perhaps he was cut and we didn’t see it yet.”
“That’s absurd,” Hugo said.
“Look.” Garcia stopped close to Hugo, his face reddening. “He is your friend and you believe him to be innocent, I understand that. And I can assure you that if he is, we will find out and let him go. But at the very least, he was trespassing at a crime scene and almost certainly contaminated it. We will talk to him and find out why he was there, what he did inside, and then, if the evidence indicates he is not responsible, he will be released. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you would allow us to do our jobs in the way we do them every single day.”
Hugo nodded. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I just . . . I’ll back off and let you do it your way.”
“Gracias,” Garcia said. “At least we have some DNA to collect and analyze. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be in the database.”
“Yeah,” Tom said, “And we’ll find out in a week. Can we interrupt this verbal siesta and go grill those nice people at Estruch?”
Garcia threw him a look. “You are here because I need Señor Marston’s assistance. I am not convinced I need yours.” He turned on his heel and strode toward his car.
“Tom, for crying out loud,” Hugo said.
“What? You guys were over there holding each other’s peckers like they were made of gold.”
