Three loud raps on the front door elicited a spontaneous jerk from the inebriated Garza. “Ay, Dios!” he muttered.
He stumbled back through the living room. Pulling open the front door, he raised an eyebrow at the stranger who stood in the dark shadows. “Yes?” asked Garza in his native tongue.
“Hello, I have an important message for Alejandro Garza,” said the stranger with an odd intonation, as if not speaking in a natural voice. “I was told he was here.”
“I am Alejandro Garza. What is the message?”
“The man who will give it to you is there, on the street,” said the stranger, pointing across a tiny courtyard to an avenue running outside a cast-iron fence. “He didn’t want to come to the door.”
“You want me to come to him?” asked Garza.
“If you could, please.”
“Let me get my beer,” said Garza. He took an unsteady step into the house, then decided not to bother for such a long journey. He turned back in time to see the stranger brandishing a knife overhead and stepping forward.
“Help me!” shrieked Garza, flinging his arms in front of his face and stumbling backwards into the house.
He turned to run, but a lance of white hot pain shot through his right side. Garza fell to the floor, writhing in agony. “Help,” he cried, now in a weaker voice.
“Shut up!” hissed the stranger, stepping through the doorway and landing a kick on Garza’s ribs.
“What’s going on, Alejandro?” called a sleepy voice from the back of the house.
Garza tried to cry out, but the intake of breath to do so elicited an explosion of pain on his side. He couldn’t utter a sound. The world began to spin, and Garza’s vision darkened.
Garza could hear Carlos shouting, but his friend’s voice possessed a muffled quality, as if it were underwater or far away. “Who are you? What are you doing?”
The sound of the stranger’s footsteps receded, and a different set of heavy footsteps approached.
Garza could just discern Carlos’ beefy feet next to his head. “Alejandro, it will be okay, my friend.” He clattered across the floor and placed an emergency call, then returned to slip a thin blanket under Garza’s head.
“Ay, Dios,” said Carlos as Garza’s last glimmer of consciousness winked out.
CHAPTER 51
Alton and Fuentes had not experienced any luck interviewing the family of Urbina, the other murdered fisherman. His relatives had witnessed vague indications of an influx of money, but the victim had not mentioned how he had acquired his funds or who had paid them.
The investigators had agreed to reconvene at the research facility at eight o’clock the following morning, and broke for the night.
They met as scheduled in Summit’s lab. Rays of warm sunlight streamed in through the room’s large windows, and the morning song of half a dozen species of wild birds set a cheerful tone, one at odds with Alton’s diminishing hopes of finding Summit alive.
Pavia had just passed out pastries and fruit for breakfast when Fuentes’ cellphone rang. He said little during the conversation, instead furrowing his brow and pacing the room with a worried expression.
Fuentes ended the call and exhaled a long sigh.
“What is it?” asked Mallory.
“Alejandro Garza, a man on San Cristóbal Island, has been attacked.”
“‘Attacked’—so that means he’s alive?”
“Barely. He’s was transported to a medical clinic a few hours ago.”
“He’s a local guy?” asked Alton.
“Yes.”
Alton shifted the weight off his bad leg. “You just said Garza lives on a different island from the murder victims. We need to be sure we focus our time on information most likely to yield quick results, and it doesn’t seem likely this attack is related to any of the other crimes, does it?”
“Probably not,” said Fuentes.
“Wait,” said Mallory. “Remember how Withers at the FBI forensics lab said the gunk on Summit’s office door was Yellow Fin Tuna? And remember how we wondered if fishermen could have been hired to do the dirty work of attacking this site?”
Alton nodded, following his wife’s train of thought.
“Is Garza a fisherman, too?” continued Mallory. “We know three men attacked the lab the night Summit was abducted, but we’ve only identified two dead men who might have been involved. Could Garza be the third attacker? The one we were hoping to find before the guy who hired the hit squad tracked him down?”
“Is a good question,” said Fuentes. “I’ll ask Rios to run a background check on Garza. It will only take a few minutes.”
After a brief flurry of calls between captain and lieutenant, Fuentes gathered around the investigators around. “Alejandro Garza is a cousin of Héctor Urbina, the second victim.”
“So they knew each other,” said Alton.
“All three of them knew each other. Urbina and Diego Soto, the first victim, worked on the same fishing boat. They sailed out of Puerto Ayora’s harbor.”
Alton began to pace, accompanied by the continuous sound of birdsong outside. “So if you were a criminal recruiting local help, you could have started with any one of the three victims. Once you had an agreement with one of them, you could ask your new flunky if he had any friends who might be interested in some easy cash.”
“That seems reasonable,” said Fuentes.
“Has the scene of Garza’s attack been preserved?” asked Mallory.
“No,” replied Fuentes. “It happened at a friend’s house. It appears the friend woke up and scared off the perp before he or she could finish the job. Emergency Services rushed Garza to the clinic, where they’re working to save him. And he was attacked with a knife, just like the others.” He paused to think. “We should go visit the crime scene. And talk with Garza, if he wakes up. Dr. Tuttle, you might be able to help us collect forensic evidence from the man’s clothes and the nature of his wounds, like you did at Gromov’s crime scene. Can you come with us? ”
The allergist looked flustered. “I’m happy to go, but I can’t make any promises about how much help I’ll be able to give.”
“Fair enough,” said Fuentes.
Alton turned to face the NSA team. “Time is of the essence. Let’s divide and conquer. Mallory and I will accompany Captain Fuentes and Dr. Tuttle to San Cristóbal. Cragmire, you keep working on your review of the file I decoded yesterday. Review it all—both the scientific and non-scientific sections. Gooch, Captain Fuentes has already assigned Lieutenant Rios to look for Quintana and Lieutenant Torres to interrogate our persons of interest to see where they were when Gromov was killed. Why don’t you go with Rios and see if you can find our top suspect?”
Everyone nodded in assent.
“Let me know if you find anything significant. We’ll update our game plan throughout the day as we learn more. And one last thing. The person we’re looking for attempted to kill Delaney and may be responsible for more deaths. Don’t take any chances, and don’t go out alone. Any questions?”
No one spoke.
“Okay, let’s roll.” Alton turned and strode out the door, his step determined despite his ever-present limp.
Alton, Mallory, and Tuttle joined Fuentes in his police SUV.
“We’ll take my patrol boat to San Cristóbal,” said Fuentes, turning off the Lexington property onto the main road. “It will get us there quickly.”
“Do you know where to go once we get there?” asked Tuttle.
“There are only six thousand people on the island, so there is only one clinic. That is where we will go.”
After loading into the police speedboat, the investigators pulled out of the harbor and set off for San Cristóbal Island. A sergeant Alton hadn’t met before piloted the craft.
Alton settled into a seat located between Mallory and Fuentes. “You said you’re originally from Guayaquil?” he asked Fuentes.
“Yes. I moved here when I was twenty-two, a year after I finished my police training.”
“That’s quite a transition, isn’t it?” said Alton. “Moving from a city with a population of millions to a group of sparsely populated islands in the middle of the Pacific?”
“Yes, it was,” said Fuentes. He fell silent, as if reliving for a moment a pivotal time in his life. “I like Guayaquil. It is my home. But there are parts of the city that are dangerous, just like any big city in America, I think.”
Alton considered his reluctance to walk the downtown streets of Washington or Atlanta at night. “That’s true.”
“When I became a policeman, I saw even more of the bad side of the city: the violence, the drugs, the prostitution. There was one particular case…” He stopped. In the interval, Alton noticed the engine’s roar.
“Anyway,” continued Fuentes, “that was a long time ago. I decided that kind of police work wasn’t so good for me. So I moved here.”
“And have done well,” said Alton, nodding to the captain rank ensign stitched to the man’s uniform.
“And have done well,” agreed Fuentes, “for my career and for my heart. I am happy here. There is a lot less crime—at least, most of the time.”
“Let’s try to get your islands back to their peaceful ways.”
Speeding across the waters, the patrol boat reached San Cristóbal Island just shy of three hours later. Rounding the western side of the island, the speedboat passed the rusted remains of a fishing trawler run aground in deceptively shallow waters. Alton hoped the depth sonar on Fuentes’ vessel was in working order.
The sergeant throttled back as they approach the shore. He pulled alongside a pier constructed of a base of stacked stones topped with concrete. Alton found himself closest to the pier. He climbed ashore first and tied the vessel to a mooring post, then helped the others out.
The Americans looked around. To the south, sea lions lounged on the sand in serene contentment, basking in the sun. Directly in front of them and to the north, a small village sprawled into the distance. The town’s buildings presented an initial appearance of Spanish architecture that soon gave way to structures of bare-bones, cinderblock utility. Quaint streets lined with paver stones transformed to pock-marked asphalt. Apparently, the tourist veneer built on the shoreline ran only a few dozen yards deep before the reality of poverty set in.
“Have you ever been here?” Alton asked Tuttle.
“No, never,” replied the portly allergist. “But I’d sure like to come back and check out the sea lions in the future. That is, if I’m still here.” He wore a dejected look.
“The clinic is a few hundred yards from here,” said Fuentes. “We’ll walk.”
They set off down a main road leading away from the pier, then turned left onto an avenue of equal size. They passed bodegas selling snacks, alcohol, cigarettes, and tires. The sidewalk’s deteriorating condition rendered the passage treacherous, especially for Tuttle, whose girth blocked his view of the surface directly under his feet.
Fuentes entered a clinic that could have acquired its equipment from a 1950s Midwestern hospital. Only thin drapes separated two exam areas from a tiny waiting room filled with sparse furniture. Despite the meager accommodations, the room’s immaculate floor and conspicuous order—not to mention the strong aroma of antiseptic cleanser—lent the impression of medical proficiency.
A woman wearing white scrubs rose from her seat behind a small oak desk and greeted the visitors in English. “I am Carolina Delgado. Dr. Salazar told me you were coming.”
“I’m Police Chief Rodrigo Fuentes. Is Dr. Salazar here? We’d like to speak with him…and with Garza, if that’s possible.”
“Just a moment,” replied Delgado. “The doctor is with another patient. I’ll let him know you’re here.”
A minute or two later, a tall, thin man wearing dark slacks, a white lab coat, and steel-rimmed glasses entered the room. His coal-black hair matched a set of equally dark eyes that assessed them with a kindly yet tired gaze. “I’m Dr. Salazar.”
Fuentes introduced his companions. “How is Alejandro Garza?”
“He died,” said Salazar in a matter-of-fact manner.
“Crap,” said Alton. “What was the cause of death?”
“Garza suffered a stab wound on the left side of his abdomen. He received treatment from our emergency worker about twenty minutes after the incident, and I started working on him myself around an hour later. I performed emergency surgery to repair the damage. I thought I had caught it all, but I must have missed something. He bled out and died just a few minutes ago.”
“He had just the one wound?” asked Alton.
“He also had a serious contusion on his left side, probably from a kick. The impact broke a rib, but that’s not what killed him.”
“I’d like to examine the body,” said Fuentes.
“Okay. Just take a seat and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”
“It’s not ready now?”
“His body is in a patient bed, where my other patient can see him. I use the exam room in the back of the building as a makeshift morgue. I’d like to move the body there, out of the way, but it’s not a one-man job, and Nurse Delgado is still trying to get an IV started on my last patient.”
“Why don’t I give you a hand?” said Alton.
“Okay.” Salazar led Alton down a short hallway. He closed the door to a room on the right, then turned into a room directly across the hall.
Garza’s body lay on the bed, its countenance a pasty white. Salazar removed several tubes from its left arm and slipped a sheet over the head. He moved a gurney into position next to the bed and turned to Alton. “I see you have a limp. Why don’t I carry the head, and you grab the legs?”
“Sounds good,” agreed Alton, happy to give his overexerted limb a break from undue stress.
Alton grabbed the body’s legs and grunted with the effort of lifting. “You just have the one nurse?” gasped Alton as he helped manhandle the body onto the rolling table.
“Yes,” replied Salazar with a grunt of his own as he lifted his end of the body.
“Do you have another doctor?”
“No. I am the only one.”
“That must be tough on you,” said Alton.
Salazar adjusted the corpse on the gurney and kept a steady eye on it to ensure it wouldn’t fall off. “It is. My biggest challenge is convincing another doctor to come to such a small practice. We can’t pay much here.”
“That’s understandable.”
“I’ve been running advertisements,” said Salazar as he pushed the gurney into the hall and headed for the back room.
“They haven’t helped?”
“I thought they had. A few weeks ago, I received an email from a potential candidate, a Dr. McCorkle.”
“That’s encouraging.”
Salazar reached the back exam room and stopped. “Well, not really. I asked him to send me a completed application and copies of his medical license, but he never replied. He probably got a better job.”
“That’s too bad.”
“It’s happened before—usually because of better pay somewhere else. I have a phone interview with another doctor scheduled for next week. I hope this man will actually take the job.”
“Indeed.”
The two men lifted Garza’s body and placed it on a long steel table. Overhead, an array of ancient medical lights stood ready to illuminate the corpse.
“Now,” said Salazar, “let’s bring your friends in here so you can see what secrets this body will reveal.”
CHAPTER 52
Alton, Mallory, Fuentes, and Tuttle looked on as Salazar peeled back the levels of clothes from Garza’s body.
“I am not a medical examiner,” said Salazar, “but I can tell you what conclusions I reach.”
“And I’ll help if I can,” added Tuttle.
Salazar started his exam at the head and began working his way down the body, an approach that to Alton seemed quite thorough.
Salazar reached the bruising on
the left side of the abdomen. “This is pretty bad. I think it was caused by a kick, but it could have been an impact from some heavy object—‘blunt force trauma,’ I think you call it.”
“That’s right,” said Mallory.
“You know,” said Tuttle, raising his glasses and squinting at the corpse, “I think your first guess was right. The bruise looks like the front half of a shoe, don’t you think?”
Everyone crowded around to look closer.
“I think you’re right,” said Salazar.
“Too bad there’s not any more detail, like the tread pattern or length,” said Mallory, “or we might have been able to use it to track our perp.”
Salazar finished the exam but didn’t note anything remarkable.
“Let’s take a look at the clothes,” said Fuentes.
Alton emptied the pockets of the dead man, setting a wallet, a few coins, and a comb on a countertop. Fuentes studied the wallet’s contents.
“This doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know,” he said. “We already knew his identity, and there isn’t much in the wallet besides his ID and some money.”
“Let’s check out the crime scene,” said Alton. “Maybe something will turn up there.”
Twenty minutes later, a taxi pulled to a stop outside a ramshackle house located a hundred yards or so from a deserted beach. Flaking gray paint peeled from rotten siding, and a cracked concrete sidewalk fronted a tiny yard. The restless sea provided a nautical soundtrack to the somber occasion.
“This is the house of Carlos Delgado, the friend Alejandro Garza was with when he was attacked,” said Fuentes.
A policeman stood guard in front of the house. He nodded at Fuentes as his commanding officer approached.
“What evidence have you recovered?” asked Fuentes.
“Not much,” replied the policeman. “I cataloged the broken door. I dusted for fingerprints but haven’t found any that don’t belong to Delgado or Garza.”
“Did you happen to find any shell fragments?” asked Mallory. “The tortoise kind, not seashells.”
“No,” said the policeman. “There wasn’t much here—except the wounded man.”
The Evolution of Evil (The Blackwell Files Book 6) Page 21
