by Jerold Last
“I think I’ve read about the salar,” Suzanne said thoughtfully. “Is that where there are the huge flocks of pink birds?”
“You’ll see,” replied Vincent.
And we did see. The salar is an enormous salt flat that forms a crust over the Chilean equivalent of the Dead Sea. Huge salt crystals are abundant everywhere you look. It's like walking on a giant jigsaw puzzle, with a "watch your step" rule so you don't go through the salt into the water. At that altitude, it is very cold water. Random aggregations of salt form rock hard mounds in the form of waist-high super crystals, and shallow solar evaporation ponds are the basis for a local industry. But what makes this particular salt flat so spectacular is tens of thousands of resident and migratory flamingoes feeding on brine shrimp in the water. Two differently colored species abound there, the Andean flamingoes with light pink bodies and yellow legs and the darker pink Chilean flamingoes with grey legs and pink knees.
"I'm sorry you won't have time to see the most touristic spectacle here," explained Vincent, "when all of the flamingoes fly to their nighttime resting areas and are visible in silhouette flying towards the orange setting sun against a backdrop of craggy mountains that surround the salar. The mountains themselves put on a light show at sunset, turning from a pale sandy yellow color through deep orange and ochre, to a rich purple before the night sky turns into pure black with millions of specks of light from the stars that shine brightly in a sky with no light pollution, no water vapor, and not a lot of atmosphere between you and them."
As we watched, a brightly feathered flock of flamingoes flew upwards towards heaven. Most of the remaining birds continued eating their lunch, undisturbed by our presence. After enough time spent flamingo watching, we went back to the jeep to drive a short distance to the moon. Well, The Valley of the Moon anyway. The Valle de la Luna is a vast windswept landscape of sandstone rock sculptures and craggy cliffs painted by an artist using the wind as her paintbrush. The craggy mountain peaks reached for the sun in a deep blue cloudless sky that was an inverted alpine lake. No water is visible anywhere and we might as well have been on the moon as far as spotting living things, plant or animal, other than tourists.
"The white areas of the valley contain dry lakes, which get their color from salt covering the lake area," Vincent told us. "The stone and sand formations are natural, formed by wind and ancient water erosion, even the ones that look like man-made sculptures. The valley is part of the National Flamingo Sanctuary and is one of the places the flamingoes fly to when they're not munching brine shrimp at the Salar de Atacama. This valley is probably the driest place in the world. There has been no recorded rainfall in hundreds of years. This is the place NASA chose to test its Mars Rover vehicle before it was sent into space to do the real thing. Now, let's have lunch and enjoy the view."
We settled down on a blanket with Eduardo's basket of lunch items, sandwiches, wine, and lots of bottled water.
"OK, Suzanne, it's your turn to show these police persons and spies how to use deductive logic to find the Surreal Killer," I challenged her. "How did I know it would be Felix under the mask?"
"For the benefit of our friends here, Roger challenged me to work it all out logically as he had done a few days ago. I think I've got it. I'll preface it with one comment and a question for our manipulative host here. Why didn't you point us in the right direction at the start of all this? If only you had told us to focus on the pilots, we would have saved a lot of time and effort sorting out the sharks from the guppies."
"I wasn't sure," answered Vincent. "And on top of that I think I was still harboring the fantasy that it might be someone else. Remember that Felix, Romero, and Pedro were my protégés and I really didn't want any of them to be the serial killer. This way you didn't get too influenced by my own biases at the outset, which seemed to be a good idea just in case."
"OK then. Now it's my turn to play Sherlock Holmes, which is usually Roger's role in our detective work.
“Once Roger had figured out the linkage between being a pilot and being a CIA agent or one of the new trainees, he could obviously narrow the suspects down to six possibilities. He tentatively ruled out you, Francis, and Eugene based on the thorough psychological screening you had when recruited and based on the chronology of the killings. There was nothing to indicate any murders with this M.O. anywhere in the region prior to the ten killings we knew about over the last three years. So they began at the right time to implicate the trainees rather than the old guys. Eduardo checked that very carefully. I think Roger left an outside chance that one of the three of you was working with the killer, but the odds and the M.O. favored a single murderer, not a team effort. So that takes us down to three suspects on Roger’s list, Romero, Pedro, and Felix. Am I doing OK so far, Roger?"
"Yes, you are. Your interpretation of my logic is exactly the way I had worked it out so far. Now you get to the hard part in this exercise. Why Felix and not one of the other two trainees?"
Suzanne continued, "This was where I had to step back and look at the big picture a little bit more closely. What did we know, or what might we reasonably guess, about the Surreal Killer? Well, it seems obvious, at least in retrospect, that he didn't like women. That logically might predict that he didn't get married and live happily ever after. Romero and Pedro had stable long-term marriages and intact families with wives and kids. Felix was a bachelor living a Playboy Magazine life style: lots of sex and no real relationships. Romero and Pedro both seemed like very nice guys when we spent the day flying with them, but that's the problem when you have to identify sociopaths with no sense of guilt or remorse. They seem just like normal people. So being a nice guy in a social situation didn't rule anyone out. I thought about Jaime as a possible murderer, but ruled him out because he wasn't a pilot so there was no obvious CIA connection, and because he seemed to be getting involved in a normal long-term relationship in Arica according to Felix when we first met them. I also thought about Huberto Rojas, who was divorced and had a low opinion of women.
“When we left Cuzco, my primary suspects were Vincent and Huberto Rojas. I’m sorry about that Vincent, but I suspected you because all of the help you were offering us seemed too good to be true. The more I found myself liking you, or perhaps more correctly your persona, the more suspicious I got. Some instinctive process in the back of my mind, which you might call ‘women’s intuition’ if you’re a sexist, kept reminding me that you were telling us what you thought we wanted to hear, and that some of it just wasn’t true. At the same time I also suspected Huberto because of his attitude towards women. During ‘boys night out’, when some of the men went out to cruise the local bar scene, he was the one who objectified women by telling everyone who would listen that they were sluts and druggies. When Huberto took us snorkeling and spear fishing in Iquique and hacked a fish to pieces with his spear, I was sure he was our Surreal Killer. I remember thinking that Huberto must have decided his fish was a female while I watched all of the blood coming out of a dozen or more spear wounds as I snorkeled on the surface.
"Until we finally had Vincent's true confessions on the day of his party I was pretty sure Huberto was the killer. He fit the profile of a woman hater, he vividly demonstrated overkill with an edged weapon when we were spear fishing, and he was far from being a likeable person even when he was taking us out for a run and to have some fun in the ocean. I'd met the younger CIA trainees over lunch or dinner in Iquique, and spent some time with all three of them in Cuzco and Machu Picchu, but none of them had made much of an impression on me that they should be at the top of my suspect list.
“All of that particular line of suspicion finally changed when Vincent told us about training the new CIA trainees to kill during one of the meetings. The way he told the story, his body language, and the sense I got that he was truly remorseful about his part in all of this mess, well for the first time I believed everything he told us that day. That took Vincent off my list of suspects. When I believed what Vincent told us
about the trainees and I focused on the pilots as the suspects, Huberto moved down a bit on my would-be killer list. I assumed that it was possible that he said and did the wrong things at the wrong time in a couple of places I was in a position to hear and see them happen. When we went flying with Pedro and Romero my instincts told me that Romero couldn’t be the killer. I was sure that he was being sincere when he complemented me on my piloting skills, especially in comparison to Roger, a man. That’s not what a ruthless serial killer of women, who obviously hated women, would have done. Pedro seemed OK with Romero’s being genuinely nice to me on the flight so he moved down a few slots on my suspect list. That left me with a short list of suspects that included Felix, Huberto, and Pedro in that order, and with a pretty big gap between Felix and the others. That’s about the time that I got my own deductions in sync with Roger’s logical analysis of who our serial killer was.
"Anyway, the odds favored it being Felix under the mask since both of us got to the same conclusion starting from different places, and I strongly suspect that Roger worked it out several days before I did.
"It's also striking that Eduardo couldn't find any killings with this kind of M.O. of mindless brutality before three years ago. I find myself thinking that something in Vincent's little training exercise with the new agents in Bolivia set the Surreal Killer off. I'm not a psychologist, but I'll bet a few dollars that when you dig deeply into Felix's childhood you'll find it wasn't a particularly happy one. These kinds of monsters are created at a young age, and almost always start out as badly abused kids."
Roger looked at Suzanne thoughtfully, leaned over, and kissed her. "I think maybe we'll have to promote you to Sherlock's job and keep you out of fights for a while. You followed a different logical trail than I did, but you got the same answer. How about you, Eduardo? Does that answer your question about how I guessed who would be under the mask?"
"It does indeed," he answered.
We flew back to Iquique that afternoon so Eduardo could pull some strings and get us on a flight from Iquique to Santiago the next morning, connecting to an American Airlines-Lan Chile code-share flight to Los Angeles that night. Our long layover gave us most of a day to be tourists in Santiago, which was interesting enough to make us promise ourselves to return there at our first good excuse. Eduardo did his magic and the international part of the trip included a complementary upgrade into First Class, which allowed us to eat, sleep, and watch movies during a very long flight. We got back just in time for Suzanne's next regular appointment with her Obstetrician, a delightful young doctor named Helen. Everything was fine with mother-to-be and baby. Eduardo promised to be back in touch next time he had a tough case, and Vincent promised to visit us as soon as he got back to the United States. He also threatened to become a neighbor if he could work out the logistics.
THE END
If you want to read Suzanne and Roger's previous South American mystery novels "The Ambivalent Corpse", set mostly in Uruguay, and "The Empanada Affair", set in Salta in Northwest Argentina, are available wherever you bought this book. The next book in this series is planned for publication later in 2012. Look for it from your E-book distributor in time for Christmas, if not sooner.
A Free Excerpt from Chapter 1 of "The Ambivalent Corpse" follows:
We found the corpse on a rocky stretch of beach in Montevideo, about a mile east of the harbor. Pieces of the body were apportioned equally between the Graf Spee Memorial and the Holocaust Memorial, which are side by side on a grassy knoll overlooking the Rio de la Plata shore facing Buenos Aires to the south. Because of her strategic location shared between two antithetical monuments, one to the German warship scuttled near Montevideo Harbor in 1939 and the other to the victims of Nazi genocide in World War II, the Uruguayan press named her “The Ambivalent Corpse” (“El Cadáver Ambivalente”). But I’m getting ahead of myself in telling this story.
Early the morning after Suzanne and I arrived in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, we began a long run to start adjusting to the 4-hour time difference from California. Hopefully, the run would help us make up for only 4 hours of sleep. When dinners end at midnight as is typical for Uruguay, people sleep as late as they can the next morning. Thus the streets were mostly deserted. I better understood why the tradition of the siesta, or noon-3PM nap, became institutionalized in Spain and Latin America hundreds of years earlier.
After walking south and east from the hotel to the Rambla as a warm-up we ran east towards Punta Carreta at a pretty fast pace. Traffic at this hour was light. The Rambla was deserted at this hour except for a few older folks walking their dogs. Since everybody in Montevideo lived in an apartment, the dogs were small. So were most of the people at the end of the leashes.
Our run lasted only as far as the park with the lake on our left and the Maritime Museum, the Graf Spee Memorial, and the Holocaust Memorial on our right. Beyond the Museum was the Rio de la Plata. Far out of sight across the river was Argentina. Suzanne and I were the only live people visible anywhere in this area. It was impossible not to see the pieces of dead body lying by the two Memorials so we stopped and checked things out. Pieces of body were apportioned half and half between the Graf Spee Memorial and the Holocaust Memorial. The victim was a young woman who had almost certainly been murdered.
The Graf Spee Memorial features a six-inch cannon salvaged from the wreck and an explanatory plaque. The body parts were carefully placed around the concrete base the cannon is mounted on. Beside the Memorial was almost half of a dismembered corpse: a jean-covered leg beside an arm covered by the sleeve of a sweater, and the top half of the torso minus its head. The half-body was dressed in what was left of a turtle-necked sweater and obviously had belonged to a woman. She looked to have been young and in pretty good shape. There was very little blood visible, just the body parts.
The Holocaust Memorial is a large inscribed chunk of rock sculpture pulled away from a 350-foot long wall. The rest of the body parts were placed symmetrically around the base of the plaques. Next to the Memorial was the remaining half of the dismembered corpse: the other jean clad leg, the other sleeved arm, and the bottom half of the torso from the waist down to the groin area. This half-body was dressed in what remained of her jeans and matched the top half in gender and size. The parts would fit together like the pieces of a life-sized jigsaw puzzle.
Lying precisely between the two halves of the corpse was its head. The victim had long dark hair and was mid-20s to 30-ish and good looking. From the overkill brutality it seemed that the murderer was really pissed off at her.
Despite my years as a homicide detective in Los Angeles and the many dozens of murder scenes I've investigated the brutality and the cold-blooded theatricality of this murder scene caused my stomach to lurch. Years of training kicked in to make me seem a lot calmer than I actually was.
Suzanne turned a pale shade of green. I turned her gently away until she was no longer looking at the body.
This excerpt is from "The Ambivalent Corpse", available from wherever you downloaded this E-Book.
