by Mark Dawson
No, Josie thought. This wasn’t going to be difficult. The only thing to do would be to find out the names of the killer and his victim.
15
JOSIE STEPPED back outside into the heat. The crime scene technicians had arrived and, after a quick explanation of what they would find, she surrendered the room to them and walked the short distance to the hotel office. It was a small hut on the other side of the parking lot, and by the time she had reached it she was sweating again.
There were three people in the office. The manager had met Josie when she had arrived. He was a nervous man, forever kneading his hands together and picking at the loose edge of a fingernail. A murder on his property was cause for concern; perhaps he was worrying about the effect it might have on his business. There was a woman next to him and, from the way she fussed and fluttered around him, Josie guessed that it was his wife. The third person was dressed in a maid’s uniform: a light brown jacket and loose trousers with flip-flops on her feet.
“I’m Officer Hernandez,” she said. She indicated the two women. “Could you tell me who you both are?”
“I am Mrs. Santos.”
“My wife,” the manager added redundantly.
“And I am Vilma Cruz,” the maid said.
Josie turned to the maid. “You discovered the body?”
The woman nodded.
Josie nodded back toward the room. “There must have been some party there last night. Two bottles of vodka.”
“I don’t know,” the manager said.
“Did anyone complain?”
“No,” he said.
“There was no noise?”
“No one has said anything.”
“Were the rooms on either side occupied?”
“Yes. The hotel is full. The holiday.”
Josie nodded. Tomorrow was Independence Day, the public holiday that marked the national Declaration of Independence. People descended on Rizal Park from all around the country so that they could join in the festivities. All of the hotels would be full.
She turned to the maid. “Tell me what happened.”
“I came to clean the room,” she said. “The door was open a little. I knocked and there was no reply, so I went inside. The man was on the bed. I saw him. Asleep. I was about to leave when I saw the woman…” She stopped, her lip trembling.
“And next?” Josie said. “What did you do after that?”
“I think I screamed. The shock. I…” She paused, swallowing as she tried to compose herself. “I have seen many strange things in rooms like these, madam, all across the city, but I have never seen a dead body before.”
“You ran?”
“As fast as I could. I went to the office and told Mr. Santos what I had seen. He called the police.”
“Did you go into the room, Mr. Santos?”
“No,” the man said. “Just to the open door. We went back and waited in the office. We could see the room from there. No one came in or out.”
Josie looked through the window to the row of rooms. She saw a camera flash through the open door. The investigators were collecting their evidence.
“When did he check in?”
“Yesterday,” the manager said. “In the afternoon.”
“What was he like?”
“Friendly.”
“You spoke to him much?”
“A little. He mentioned the weather. It was very hot last night.”
“Do you know his name?”
“He registered under the name of Smith. He’s English, I think.”
16
JOSIE PUT her notebook away and went back to the room where the body had been found. The dead woman had been zipped into a body bag and placed onto a gurney. Josie stepped aside as the gurney was wheeled out of the room, into the parking lot and toward the open doors of the waiting mortuary wagon.
The crime scene investigator was a middle-aged woman who was always disturbingly cheerful—strange, given the number of crime scenes and dead bodies that she was responsible for examining every week. She was supervising a young colleague, who was dusting the bathroom for fingerprints.
“Good morning,” the woman said as she noticed Josie standing in the doorway.
“What did you find?”
“Not too much to say about this one, really. We’ve got plenty of prints, but most of them will belong to people who were staying here before. It’d be a nightmare to try to track them all down.”
“You think that would be necessary?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Not really. Pretty obvious what’s happened. The two of them come back here with a couple of bottles of vodka, they get drunk, they fight, it gets out of hand and…” She let the sentence drift off and spread her hands expressively.
“Will they do an autopsy?”
“I doubt they’ll bother. The morgue’s backed up, and they’re only looking at ones that are important or where something’s unclear. That’s not the case here. This one is obvious. She was strangled.”
“You’ve taken your pictures?”
She nodded. “Of course. We’ve got everything we need. We’ll finish up on these prints and then we’ll hand the scene back to the hotel. The manager’s been waiting for us to finish. He says he can’t afford for the room to be left empty.” She laughed. “Can you believe that? He’s going to try to let it out again tonight.”
“Holiday tomorrow,” Josie said. “He says he’s full.”
The woman’s assistant shone a black light around the bathroom, satisfied himself that he had taken the relevant prints, and started to pack away his brushes and powders.
“I’ll have a report for you in a couple of days,” the woman said. “It’ll be short.”
“Thanks.”
Josie watched them as they loaded their equipment into their car. She noticed a small camera fixed to the underside of the ceiling of the veranda. She looked more carefully and saw that there were two of them, each pointing in opposite directions. She stood back and considered the arc that they would be able to cover. One of them was pointing almost directly at the door to the room. This case was so obvious that she didn’t need a break to solve it, but the footage would be useful for the purposes of confirming what she already knew.
The manager and his wife were watching at the edge of the crowd of ghouls who had gathered to observe the scene.
She went over to them.
“It is finished?”
“Finished,” Josie said with a nod.
“Is there anything else?”
“You said his name was Smith?”
“John Smith. He said he was from London.”
“How did he pay?”
“He booked online and paid cash.”
“Do you have his address?”
“No.”
“Anything else, Officer?” the wife said. “We are very busy. We’d like to get back to work.”
Josie pointed over to the cameras that she had seen.
“Do those work?”
“Yes,” Mr. Santos said. “We have had problems in the past. There were—”
“There were problems,” Mrs. Santos cut him off, presumably uncomfortable with discussing the prostitutes and pushers that Josie suspected were the reasons for the difficulties and the installation of the cameras.
“I’d like to have a look at the footage.”
Mrs. Santos sighed. “Is that necessary? I thought it was obvious what had happened.”
“I think it is, but I like to be thorough.”
“Can you do it?” Mrs. Santos said to her husband, her tone clipped and impatient.
“I’ll have to set it up for you,” the man replied. “Can you come back tomorrow?”
Josie had to come by the hotel on her way back to her mother’s house in Alabang.
“Get it ready for tonight,” she said. “I’ll be here at eight.”
LOGAN WATCHED. He had been listening to the police radio and had heard the report of the murder as it was called
in. He had arrived at about the same time as the responding officer. She was a woman and, he noted to his satisfaction, she looked young and inexperienced. That was good.
A small group of onlookers had gathered to gawp as Milton was hauled out of the room, taken to the police car and driven away. Logan had parked his rental at the other end of the lot. The sedan had tinted windows, and he knew that he would not be visible from the outside. He waited there for another hour, watching as the police officer went back and forth between the office and Milton’s room. The girl was wheeled out of the room on a gurney and loaded onto the back of the mortuary wagon. Logan waited. The man and woman who owned the guesthouse came out of the office and hovered at the fringe of the onlookers.
Logan was happy. Everything was as he wanted it to be.
He put the car into drive and slowly drove away.
JOSIE GOT into her car and set off for the station. She waited until she had merged into the heavy traffic and made a hands-free call to her mother.
“Hello? Josie?”
“Hello, Mama. How is Angelo?”
“He is good.”
“What time did he wake?”
“An hour after you left. He was asking for you.”
She drummed her fingers on the wheel. She knew that her mother meant well, that she was trying to say that Angelo missed her, but every reminder of the fact that she couldn’t be there for her son was a fresh wound.
She and her husband had decided that she would stay at home to look after the child for the first few years of his life, putting her own career on hold until he was old enough to start school. It was a sacrifice, but she wanted to be there and it was one that she was prepared to make. It was a fine plan, but life had taken a different turn. Her husband had run off just after Angelo had been born. He had told her that he wasn’t cut out to be a father, that he had too much life to live and wasn’t prepared to accept the changes that his son’s arrival would require. Josie wasn’t one for sentiment and had written him out of their lives as soon as he had moved out. She had guessed that he was cheating on her and, once he had confirmed it, her trust had died. She didn’t try to change his mind. Instead, she cancelled the rent on their tiny flat in Taguig and moved in with her mother in Alabang.
Her husband had been arrested shortly afterward on suspicion of drug offences. There had been insufficient evidence to charge him and he had been released. His body had been found in Pasay one week later. He had been killed by one of the execution squads; a note on his body said: “I am a pusher. Don’t follow.”
Her promotion had come shortly afterwards. It led to a small increase in Josie’s salary, but the extra money had not, so far, made up for the increase in her workload. She left her mother’s place at six in the morning, before Angelo was awake, and returned at eight or nine at night, long after he had gone to sleep. She would eat her dinner in his room, staring at him inside his crib as she ate the meal that her mother had prepared for her.
“What time will you be home tonight?”
“Late, I think.”
“Josie—”
“It can’t be helped, Mama. There’s been a murder—”
“There’s always a murder—”
“And I have to interview the suspect.”
“Don’t you think you should see your son?”
“I want to,” she said, her fingers tightening on the wheel as she tried to keep her tone civil. “But he needs me to make a living.”
“He hasn’t seen you for—”
“Look, it might not take long. It should be an easy one. This man was asleep in the same room as the victim. It looks like they’d both been drinking. I’ll speak to him. I doubt we’ll be looking for anyone else. Maybe I can be home in time to put him to bed.”
“Try, anak. He misses you.”
“I miss him, too.”
She ended the call and swallowed down on a dry throat. It upset her to think of Angelo. She wanted to be with him, but she had to find the money to raise him, too.
It was a fifteen-minute drive from the guesthouse in Pasay to Police Station 4 in Pio Del Pilar. The traffic was thick on Bautista Street, and Josie cranked the malfunctioning fan all the way to the max in an attempt to get some cool air into the cabin. She had a lot to do, and she just wanted to get started.
17
POLICE STATION 4 was next to the crossroads where Vicente Cruz Street crossed Tuazon. Railway lines crossed the road to the left of the building and there was a hissing and popping lattice of electrical cables and telephone wires overhead. The building itself was small, a white-painted two-storey construction with the window frames and the balcony on the first floor all painted blue. It was surrounded by a low blue wall with taller white railings attached to it, and the entrance was shielded from the sun by a white awning with the words SERBISYONG MAKATOTOHANAN advertising the government radio initiative that was designed to teach the public how to prevent crime. Josie went under the awning and had the same thought that she always had: it was difficult to expect the public to take such measures seriously when there was so much municipal crime and corruption all around them.
She waved good morning to Gloria, the woman behind the desk who almost single-handedly ensured that the station ran efficiently, and went through into the back.
Bruno Mendoza was in his office.
She picked up her pace as she approached the open door, hoping that he might not see her.
“Josie,” he called out, “could you come in for a moment?”
Mendoza was Josie’s commanding officer. He was an inspector and had clawed his way up to that rank after a twenty-year career distinguished only by a tenacious desire to advance himself, and in spite of rumours of graft that had never been adequately proven. Everyone knew that he was also involved in the semi-sanctioned police death squads. No one would talk about it openly, but it was an open secret in the locker room. Josie could guess at the membership of the team and knew that they met in the back room of Mendoza’s favourite brothel to discuss their hits. The fact that he was so jolly made the fact of his involvement in something so bloody even more jarring. Mendoza was married, but he had a thing for her, an unfortunate attraction he regularly demonstrated with offers of dinner that she found increasingly difficult to turn down with grace.
She stepped into the office. “What’s up, Bruno?”
“You picked up a murder this morning?”
She nodded.
“Bad luck.”
“This isn’t going to be a difficult one.”
“Go on.”
“Maid goes into a room, sees a man asleep on the bed and a dead body in the bathroom. There’s booze everywhere. Pretty obvious what happened.”
“Drunken fight?”
She nodded.
“He’s English?”
“Yes, sir. How do you know that?”
“I was in the yard when they brought him in.”
“I’m going to interview him now. Is there anything else?”
“How’s Angelo?”
“He’s fine,” she said, suppressing the usual shudder as he fumbled an attempt at intimacy.
“Are you taking him to the park tomorrow? They’re saying the parade is going to be something special.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t worked out what I’m doing yet.”
“If you need to leave early, that would be okay.” He shuffled papers. “I’m going to be there. I’d love to meet him.”
“Let me think about it,” she said, her skin prickling with discomfort.
“Fine,” Mendoza said, grinning at her. “You do that.”
“I’d better get in there.”
“Let me know how it goes.”
Josie said that she would, left the office and—grateful to be away from him—went to her desk to collect her notes and her voice recorder.
Manuel Dalisay was waiting for her.
“How was he?” she asked.
“Didn’t say a word the whole time.
”
Dalisay had a paper bag of jellybeans and he offered one to Josie.
She took it and put it into her mouth. “What do you make of him?”
“Cold,” he said. “I saw him looking at me in the mirror. Dead eyes. Freaked me out.”
“I’m going to interview him now.”
“Good luck with that.”
She started away from the desk and then turned back. “I forgot to ask,” she said. “How was the party?”
Dalisay and his wife had been struggling to have a child for years, and, in something of a miracle given that Dalisay’s wife was in her early forties, a little girl had finally been born a year ago. They called her Mariel. Yesterday was her first birthday party.
He smiled. “It was good. I got there late, which didn’t go down well. You remember that shabu lab near Arayat?”
Josie remembered it well: two trailers off the road to Magalang, east of Route 8, in the middle of nowhere. They had busted it six months earlier.
“What about it?”
“We went back yesterday morning. They were using it again. Can you believe it?”
“The Chinese?”
He nodded. “The same crew. Eight of ’em this time. We only found out when they blew one of the labs up and the smoke was reported.” He reached down for a jellybean. “Anyway, by the time we’d wrapped that up and got back down to the city I was twenty minutes late. I thought Mary Grace was going to kill me, but the party was so good she forgot all about it. Lucky me, right?”
“I’m pleased it went well,” Josie said. She reached into the open bag, snagged another candy and popped it into her mouth. She tapped the recorder with her finger and headed to the station’s solitary interrogation room.
18
JOSIE LOOKED through the peephole. The room beyond was sparsely furnished, with just a table and two chairs and a bench seat against the far wall. There was a single barred window, and a naked lightbulb above the table flooded the space in harsh white light. The man was sitting at the table. His wrists were cuffed and the chain was attached to a bracket on the table. Josie would have been nervous at the prospect of a solo interrogation when she first started, but she had done so many by now that it had become commonplace. And, in a case like this, it wasn’t as if she would have to be inventive in order to secure a confession. That wasn’t necessary. This interview would be almost entirely administrative.
