Hungry Ghosts

by Peggy Blair

  He pulled the corpse’s mouth open and ran his gloved finger around the teeth. He lowered the lamp, shining its light into the cavity. “Petechiae are present also in the mucosa of the lips and mouth. No injuries to her teeth or gums. Nothing obstructing her throat. She didn’t choke on any apples.”

  “Then I guess her prince won’t be coming.”

  “I don’t think he’d want to kiss her this time.” The pathologist pretended to shudder. He stepped down and picked up a small electric saw from the counter. He plugged in the cord and clambered up the stepladder again. “Isn’t she the one who lives with all those dwarves? They aren’t in the Russian version.”

  “Yes,” said Ramirez. “Seven of them. Grumpy, Bashful, Dopey . . . I can’t remember all their names.”

  Apiro raised a thick eyebrow. “Hardly flattering.”

  He carved a line around the top of the skull. As he did, the lights in the room went out. He climbed down again and walked across the room, exchanged the saw for a scalpel, and returned to his original position.

  “If you could turn on your cell phone, Ricardo, and hold it up over the body, I’ll be able to see what I’m doing. You’d be surprised how many times we have to do this during operations on live patients.”

  Apiro had worked full-time as a plastic surgeon before he started doing autopsies for the Major Crimes Unit. For a while, he gave up surgery for a living altogether. But now that Maria Vasquez had moved in with him, Apiro was seeing private patients again. His salary without doing so was not enough to support himself, much less a live-in girlfriend, and a large one at that, thought Ramirez.

  Ramirez held up his phone. As the faint blue light illuminated the woman’s body, Apiro removed the top and back of the skull and then the brain.

  “The Grimms’ story that always terrified me was Rumpelstiltskin,” Apiro said. Ramirez knew the pathologist was trying to distract him. Ramirez always found it hard to keep his stomach contents down when Apiro was examining a brain. “He offered to pay a woman gold to have his child and ended up robbed of his money and his progeny. He jumped out a window and was burned to death in a frying pan. I used to toss and turn at night at the orphanage, worried I’d end up deep-fried if I even thought about having children.”

  Ramirez wondered if Apiro wanted a family. They had never talked about it. As far as Ramirez knew there was no biological reason to prevent it.

  Apiro had soldiered through life stoically, despite the enormous obstacles he faced daily. But he might not want to take the chance on having a child like himself, exposing a child to the ridicule, the taunts. And, of course, Maria Vasquez could never have children.

  The lights flickered on again. Ramirez put his cell phone away, swallowing hard as Apiro held the brain gently and turned it towards the fluorescent glare.

  “It was Rapunzel for me,” said Ramirez. “My mother told me she was really Santa Barbara and that it wasn’t her hair they cut off, but her head. Every time I went to church with my father, I was afraid I’d be decapitated for being Catholic.”

  “Rapunzel was pregnant in the original Grimms’ story, you know, although you won’t see that in the children’s edition.” Apiro stepped off his ladder and put the brain on a scale on the counter to weigh it. “Frankly, it’s the idea of heaven that I find offensive. The chief of the Taino Indians told the Spaniards when they first arrived here that he’d rather burn at the stake than go to heaven if it was full of Christians. I don’t blame him. The whole notion that the dead might be wandering around above us in the clouds somewhere watching us, is silly.”

  But Ramirez could easily imagine the dead woman wandering around his apartment, watching him. Disrobing. Lying down. Parting her legs for him. He would enter her smoothly, the way a silk scarf slipped to the floor.

  The deadly sin of lust would only be exceeded by that of murder, if Francesca found out he had strayed, even if only in his thoughts.

  Hector Apiro walked back to his stepladder, holding his scalpel. He leveraged himself against the side of the gurney and grimaced with effort as he sliced a straight line down the woman’s chest.

  “See here, Ricardo, these are the strap muscles.” Apiro pointed a gloved finger. “Just above them is a little bone in the throat that’s shaped like a horseshoe. That’s the hyoid bone; it’s superior to the thyroid cartilage. It appears to be fractured. That suggests manual compression. The cricoid cartilage is fractured as well, and there is froth in the trachea and bronchi. She was strangled.”

  “How much force does that take?”

  “Surprisingly little. Ten pounds of pressure is sufficient to obstruct the carotid arteries. A woman could do it. For that matter, so could a child.”

  Ramirez removed a cigar from his jacket pocket. The pungent smell of the badly decomposed body was getting worse.

  “Good idea.” Apiro smiled. Smoke helped mask the odour.

  The lights flickered again as Apiro climbed down and walked to the counter, the autopsy completed. He removed his gloves and set them aside for resterilization, then returned to his stepladder and sat on the second rung. Ramirez pulled over a wooden stool. It was his way of accommodating Apiro’s small stature. It allowed the two men to speak face-to-face, as equals.

  Apiro rooted around in his pockets for his pipe. When he found it, Ramirez lit a match. The pathologist leaned forward, holding the bowl of the pipe in his slender fingers. He drew on the pipe until the embers glowed.

  “This man is callous,” Ramirez said to Apiro. “He treats these women as disposable. He left them lying on the side of the road, like trash.”

  “I would guess he doesn’t see them as people anymore,” said Apiro. “He probably sees them as a means to a particular end. And by ‘end,’ I mean whatever it is that he thinks he needs. You just have to look at the atrocities of the past to know how easy it is to dehumanize any group of people. Look at the Jews in World War II. It’s always bothered me how quickly the Germans went along with the notion of Aryan superiority. I just have to think of all the dwarves Josef Mengele had killed and boiled so he could put their bones in their museum.”

  “Mengele did that?” Ramirez said.

  Apiro smiled sadly. “He collected dwarves for his medical experiments too. There was a family of seven dwarves at Auschwitz: the Ovitzes. They were lucky, I suppose. They survived. Dr. Mengele poured boiling water in their ears, even the toddler’s, to see how they’d react. He did terrible things to them, then humiliated them by making them parade nude in front of his colleagues.”

  Ramirez shook his head. “I’m not sure I could ever get inside the head of a man who could do something like that to people who were so vulnerable.”

  “Be grateful that you can’t,” said Apiro. “If you ever do, you’ll have lost something of your humanity.”

  19

  Charlie Pike took his time looking through the case files. The airline didn’t have any movies or magazines or snacks, but that was okay with Pike—he didn’t want any distractions.

  The photographs of the victims sickened him. Rita Desjardins. Gloria TwoQuill. Miriam Tobias. Sally Cardinal. Each woman had a stocking knotted tightly around her neck. The bodies were posed on their backs, arms crossed in front, eyelids closed. The killer left all their belongings behind: clothing, makeup, even their purses and ID.

  The only difference this time, if the body on the reserve was another victim of the Highway Strangler, was race. Maybe the strangler was changing his MO, expanding his pool of victims. That would make it harder to find him, although it was proving pretty hard already.

  There was something that caught his eye when he examined the photographs of exhibits. The nylon stocking tied around Gloria TwoQuill’s neck had a square seam at the back of the heel that he hadn’t noticed before. Pike made a mental note to find out if that was unusual.

  He put the photographs back and rested the folder on his kn
ees. He looked out the window and went over what O’Malley had told him about the most recent victim.

  A band member—a boy playing in the woods—had discovered the woman’s body that morning beside the gravel road, just off the exit from secondary highway 562, on the Manomin Bay First Nation Indian Reserve.

  Pauley Oshig was fourteen years old. Pike shook his head. Not even born when Charlie Pike ran away from home.

  The lab techs would be on the reserve now, processing the scene. They might have flown in from Winnipeg or Toronto, although Winnipeg was closer. Maybe they drove. Billy Wabigoon wouldn’t care whether they came from Manitoba or Ontario. He wouldn’t recognize either province as having authority on his reserve.

  Adam Neville should be there by now. That was good. Adam would know what to look for; he’d autopsied three of the other victims.

  According to O’Malley, the Manomin Bay First Nation had a bylaw officer guarding the crime scene until Pike released it. Bylaw officers were appointed by the band, but they weren’t trained policemen. They handled whatever bylaws the Federal Indian Affairs Minister let the band enact under the Indian Act. Those were pretty limited. Beekeeping, garbage disposal, wild dogs.

  Pike wondered if it was someone he knew. He hoped, whoever it was, that they knew enough to stay out of his way.

  The small plane bounced once or twice on the runway. Charlie Pike unfolded himself to stand up and made his way unsteadily down the metal stairs to the tarmac, legs stiff from sitting for such a long time. He retrieved his bag from the young pilot who apparently doubled as the baggage handler.

  Pike had arranged for a rental car before he left Ottawa. He was assured by the person he spoke to that an SUV would be left in the parking lot, keys tucked in the wheel well. But when he walked outside, the lot was almost empty—only two pickup trucks and a giant yellow snowplow. He checked the wheel wells of both trucks: no keys.

  It was already dark out, and charcoal grey clouds were moving across the sky. Pike walked back inside the airport building. “Do you know where my rental car is?” he asked the woman behind the counter. “I don’t see any SUVs out there.”

  “No idea, hon,” she said. “We’re closing up now. Maybe someone forgot? The roads are real icy today from the storm and there’s another big one coming. Lots of delays. Even the plows got stuck yesterday.”

  Pike reached for his cell phone.

  “That might not work here. No towers for miles. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But there’s a phone over there. Help yourself.” She pointed to a wall-mounted telephone.

  “Thanks,” Pike said. This was going to be an old-fashioned investigation. No cell phones, no gun, maybe no car. The kind O’Malley liked.

  “Geez, I’m sorry about that,” the Esso station owner apologized. “I’ve been trying to track down a rental that didn’t come back. Give me a half hour: I’ll be right out with another one.”

  “Thanks,” said Pike. He wondered if he should wait outside. The airport staff were packing up, anxious to get home before the heavy snow began to fall.

  “You stay right there,” the clerk said, reading his mind. “Just pull the door closed when you go. We’re finished for the day. Shut off the lights when you leave, though, will you?”

  Northern Ontario wasn’t too worried about terrorists sneaking across the American border, thought Pike. Unlike down south, where he’d been ordered by the security guards at the Ottawa International Airport to remove his shoes. He was patted down in front of Tim Hortons by a guard who snapped on his gloves with a little too much enthusiasm for Pike’s liking. Pike guessed he met the profile: long-haired, tattooed, visible minority. Even without a gun.

  He’d left his Glock in his locker at the Rideau Regional Police station. He figured otherwise he’d spend so long explaining to the airport security guards why he had one that he’d miss his flight. If they didn’t shoot him first. As it was, he could see the surprise on the guards’ faces that someone like him—a rough-looking Indian—was a detective.

  But Pike didn’t blame them. He was still kind of surprised by that himself.

  20

  Inspector Ramirez drove back to his office and looked for a shady place to park. The temperature had to be over thirty, the air thick and sticky with humidity.

  He walked through the iron gates and up the cracked path to the front door of the beautiful stone building that served as Havana’s police headquarters. The wisteria climbing up the walls was in glorious bloom.

  The dead woman stopped to admire the purple flowers. Ramirez wondered if she could smell their perfume; if she could smell his sweat.

  He looked around and saw no sign of her male counterpart, but that wasn’t uncommon. Ramirez’s ghosts usually appeared one at a time. They were courteous and well-mannered, almost eager to please. They communicated mostly through gestures, nods, raised eyebrows, occasionally a frown. Ramirez often found their silent messages hard to decipher, with the exception of a street mime beaten to death on Calle Obispo a few weeks earlier. The busker had been a pleasure to deal with; his murderer quickly identified.

  Ramirez nodded to the guard at the front reception. He strode up the stairs to the second floor and made his way down the narrow, dingy hall to the Major Crimes Unit. As soon as he sat behind his desk, Natasha Delgado knocked on his office door.

  “Hola, Inspector,” said the detective. “I went to that address on Antifona Conejo’s card with Patrol, like you said. It’s in Cayo Hueso. At least it used to be. But the building doesn’t exist anymore. It was demolished last October. No one knows where the families went.”

  Cayo Hueso was an inner-city neighborhood in Central Havana. A giant slum, or llega y pon, it had the highest population density in the country. But after decades of neglect much of the housing in Havana was considered uninhabitable.

  On a hot day like this, usually followed by thunderstorms, it wasn’t unusual for several buildings to disintegrate. Most occupants were evacuated in time, with surprisingly few fatalities. Perhaps because Cubans were so cautious in old buildings, thought Ramirez. They picked their paths carefully, the way the superstitious walked around ladders and avoided touching baby’s heads.

  “Rita Vargas is the local block captain of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution,” Delgado said. “She says the former resident was a yerbera named Mama Loa.” A yerbero was a traditional healer, a herbalist. “Señora Vargas says the police were called to the apartment a few times last fall for noise complaints. They must have been domestic arguments; I couldn’t find anything in our records. There are hundreds of calls like that each month from out that way. No one wastes any paper on them.

  “The only incident report I could find for Antifona Conejo,” she continued, “was filed by a foot patrolman on February 14. Señora Conejo was standing in front of the Hotel Nacional at 4:15 p.m. She was joined by a foreign woman. The patrolman asked her to produce her identity card and she did. The patrolman had no way of knowing the address on it wasn’t valid. Because she hadn’t actually entered the premises, he let her go with a warning.”

  Three warnings for talking to foreigners too often and Antifona Conejo would be sent to a rehabilitation camp or deported to another province. “That’s interesting,” said Ramirez. “Did she register a new address?”

  “I found nothing.”

  Ramirez nodded slowly. There probably were no official records for any of the residents forced to leave their homes. They could be anywhere.

  Demand exceeded available housing. People lived wherever they could find space. Shantytowns had sprung up at the edge of the city like puffballs after heavy rains. They lacked running water and electricity, and proper sewage drains.

  The last time the government had confiscated vacant spaces to assign as housing, it received over a hundred and fifty thousand applications for seven thousand units. These were eventually distributed
by trade unions based on need, job performance, and bribes. A jinetera would never have qualified, thought Ramirez. Prostitutes and escorts weren’t unionized.

  “See if you can track down Mama Loa. She’s our only lead.”

  “I’m on it, Inspector.”

  “Good work, Natasha. Keep me posted.”

  The dead woman leaned out the open window while Inspector Ramirez began to piece together a police report about her death. The late afternoon breeze caught her hair. For the third time in less than an hour, Ramirez adjusted his seating position, painfully conscious of her sexuality.

  Hector Apiro poked his head through the doorway. “I have some preliminary results for you, Ricardo, from this morning’s autopsy?”

  “Please, come in, Hector, sit down.”

  Ramirez reached for a cigar. Apiro patted his pockets and retrieved his wooden pipe. Ramirez struck a match. He stood up and leaned over, holding it to Apiro’s pipe until it caught. The ghost held her cigarette to her lips, waiting. She looked disappointed when Ramirez sat down again and lit his cigar.

  The pathologist seated himself in a wooden chair on the other side of Ramirez’s desk. His feet dangled above the floor like those of a child. He reached forward and handed Ramirez a piece of paper. As always, his autopsy report was neatly typed and precise. Apiro was meticulous about his work.

  “The bad news first,” said Apiro. “The histological card we found in the victim’s purse wasn’t the victim’s. I checked the tissue and blood samples against the information on the card. Nothing matches.”

  “The card is someone else’s?”

  “Apparently.” Apiro smiled. “Someone named Antifona Conejo.”

  Ramirez frowned. “Well that’s a galleta.” A slap in the face. “So we don’t know our victim’s real name?”