Authors: Robert W. Walker
Acknowledging no one—not even Captain Estrada, Dr. Arturo Benilo stepped aboard the trawler. He’d successfully maneuvered through all the hoopla of the crowd without notice, his hefty black valise—stuffed with medical paraphernalia—shifting his weight from side to side. He knew the value of anonymity and silence and used each whenever it suited, and now it suited.
At mid-ship, Benilo turned to watch Detective Aguilera take leave of the crowd. She’d seen him and would soon be on his heels, but he wanted a moment alone with the dead, as was his preference and custom. New and eager to do well, the young detective would probably irritate Benilo by introducing herself and reading from her notes, details she’d uncovered about the victims—all of which would color his initial impression of the scene and the dead. Accustomed to detectives like Jorge Peña, who sleepwalked through an investigation, Benilo so far found her enthusiastic, a rare trait in a cop in today’s Cuba. Because a crime scene inevitably turns into a spectator sport, Benilo had to admire her deft handling of the curious crowd. Amused by her clever tactics, it was not lost on him that she’d won her point without arguing—so like her mother.
Flashlight in hand, Benilo picked his way to the mire of bodies. He sadly shook his head over the sight of the three victims and said a whispered prayer. He prayed for the violation he was about to do, and for safe passage of their souls to whatever might exist on the other side.
With his prayer ended, Benilo kneeled and placed his old ratty medical bag, carried since medical school, beside him. He opened it and pulled out a large sterile cloth from a polyethylene bag. He carefully spread the cloth next to the dead, meticulously arranged protective gloves, vials, slides, and needles on the white cloth when Benilo’s flash illuminated the hefty restraining chain about the ankles, and the lock that held it in place. The peculiar ornate lock startled him, giving him pause. It recalled an evil he thought long buried.
Captain Estrada, who stood nearby, cleared his throat as if about to speak. Benilo looked up from his kneeling position, his eyes silencing the captain. Silence in the face of such death felt right, but Benilo, like everyone else, also believed that every word anyone spoke got back to the Secret Police. In fact, he saw at least two men in the heckling crowd who, although dressed in street clothes, were most certainly Secret Police—but not so secret, Arturo thought.
A case like this…what else do you expect, Arturo?
His eye returned to his task.
Benilo erupted. “You, Estrada, isn’t it? Find me some bolt cutters, now!”
The bolt cutters dropped immediately onto the deck beside Benilo as if materialized from thin air. Benilo looked up into Estrada’s wry smile. “Thought you’d ask for these.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Benilo decided Estrada was not the fool he’d assumed.
Ignoring all else now, including any peripheral concern about the SP sniffing about, Benilo worked with agile hands, a skill born of decades of hard-won experience. He drew blood from the three corpses with a deftness most medical people lacked when dealing with the living.
Having quietly taken a position between the two men, Qui waited for the right moment to speak. In rapt attention, she watched the legendary examiner—a true modern-day shaman with an enigma lying at his feet. An air of sadness surrounded Benilo along with the distinct scent of rum. No doubt, he’d been interrupted from his evening meal when ordered here.
Sergio, who was taking formal statements from the crew, called for Estrada. The moment Luis stepped away, Benilo asked without lifting his eyes from his work, “You are Tomaso Aguilera’s daughter, yes?”
“Yes. And you are Dr. Arturo Benilo, Chief Medical Examiner for Cuba, and—” she paused, choosing her words carefully “—at one time, my father’s best friend.”
“Friend, yes, a long time ago…before you were born.” Benilo now looked up at her, his glance disconcertingly direct and intense from beneath hooded eyelids. He continued, “Tell me what you make of this case. If I am not mistaken, this is your first murder investigation.”
Qui frowned at the mention of it being her first murder case. She began filling him in on what little she’d discovered of the Canadian woman named Denise from Adondo, while the medico-legal man carefully labeled each vial of blood, matching each with the name John Doe #1, John Doe #2, and now ‘Denise’ Doe. She saw that he’d already placed corresponding toe-tags on each victim. He now inched his fine-point Sharpie pen along, jotting a date and time on the final vial of blood extracted for analysis and tests.
When Qui finished her report, Dr. Benilo replied, “Very good, Lieutenant. I’m impressed!”
“Thank you, sir. Coming from you—”
“—and to impress a jaded old dog…well, that’s no small matter.” The unexpected twinkle in his dark eyes caught her off guard. “Tell me, please…. Why do you think their fingertips are damaged?”
“To slow identification.”
“On the one hand, yes,” he quipped, “but what of the other one, the missing hand?”
“Maybe she wore a ring the killer couldn’t get off any other way?”
“Perhaps,” he replied, turning and examining the woman’s remaining hand. “Perhaps a threat to amputate further.” At Qui’s grimace, he added, “A possibility we must consider.”
“A horrible act…ruthless…. What’d her killer want?”
“Who can say at this point, but whoever did this guessed wrong about a number of things: Estrada’s nets, today’s technology.” He carefully fingerprinted the woman, using a state of the art digital finger-printer about the size of a PalmPilot. “I have ways of bringing them back.” He smiled at Qui, then continued collecting impressions from all three victims.
Qui pondered his promise as she watched him work. She’d read about this new fingerprinting device but never expected to see one used in one of her cases. “How does it work?” she asked.
“Like ground-penetrating radar, imaging through layers of rock to determine what is below before you dig, this device captures the deep imperceptible image of the prints below the destroyed surface by lifting them off the sub-epidermal layers.
After glancing around, he surreptitiously removed the memory chip of the fingerprint device and quickly dropped it into his jacket pocket. “For safe keeping, just in case,” he softly answered her unasked question.
Fascinated at his take-charge command of the situation, as well as his high-tech tools, Qui felt a growing confidence that her case would be solved. She was not surprised that his medical bag contained the very latest instruments of evidence detection. While it was true that the Cuban citizenry lacked most modern conveniences, the military, and by extension the Havana police, proved as up-to-date as New York, London, or Moscow. This was especially true when it came to cell phones, evidence collection, medical facilities, and electronic gadgetry—much of it coming out of the European market. Like her father, Benilo doubtless knew things and had connections rooted some fifty odd years in the past.
The two of them, Papa and Benilo, they know where the bodies are buried,
she thought.
After a while, Benilo sighed and quietly said to Qui, “Someone may believe he has committed the perfect crime here.”
“Perfect crime? I don’t understand?”
“If Estrada’s net had been a few feet to the right or left… or a few more days in the water….” Benilo paused as if lost in thought.
“Oh yes, I see. It’s possible then that the bodies might never have been discovered, in which case—”
“And, even if they were discovered months from now, they’d be damn near impossible to identify save for dental records.”
“—we’d never have known a crime was committed,” she concluded.
“Now you understand. Someone’s gone to a great deal of trouble. Meant to be both thorough and quick, near impossible to achieve.”
“All to hide the results of a triple murder. Some kind of professional job we’re looking at, isn’t it? Cuban underworld, smugglers, a drug cartel, perhaps?”
“Perhaps,” replied Benilo, still labeling vials and bags.
Feeling increasingly comfortable around Benilo, she felt a glimmer of hope that indeed she would avenge the murders of Denise and her as yet unidentified companions.
In a gravelly whisper, Benilo said, “Pinpoint the method and—”
“The how and the why of it—” Qui added.
“—the motive.”
“—and you arrive at—”
“The suspect.”
8
In a palatial home outside Havana
“You fool! You weren’t supposed to kill the girl, and what do you do? You kill her and her two American friends as well! You idiot.” The man on this end of the cell phone conversation paced the length of his marble hallway, his cell phone sporting a Plantronics headset with a boom microphone, hands gesturing wildly in the air. As he paced, his bathrobe lifted with the air stream pouring from an air conditioning vent.
The voice on the phone replied, “You wanted results, didn’t you?”
“Results yes, not murder!”
“We kept a lid on things.”
“A lid? After allowing everything to get out of control? Some lid!” he shouted, frustrated, storming out to the pool and staring out over the bay.
“I call it taking responsibility under difficult circumstances, and I am not used to having my judgment called into question!”
“We’ve got three dead tourists come back to haunt us. Vanished without a trace, you said!”
“Alejandro made that promise! Not me.”
“OK…Ok tell me this—where are the bodies now?”
“In the custody of authorities.”
“Exactly! On their way to Benilo’s freezers, and you know what that man is capable of finding?”
“Ahhh…he’s an old man resting on his reputation.”
“That old man is a bloodhound. If my dog dropped a single hair on my shoe, that anal-retentive asshole can trace it back to me! That means he can put murder on my doorstep!”
His longhaired Afghan wolfhound, fur dancing with his trot, came begging for attention. Still on the phone, he angrily swatted at the dog.
“I swear nothing’s gonna get back to you, sir. I’ll protect you. There’s no way any of this can touch you.”
“What exactly are you doing to make this go away?”
“I’ve already taken steps.”
“Smart steps? Like putting Benilo on the case?”
“There’d’ve been no keeping Benilo off this case, once it came to light, sir. Even so, it was not my idea to assign Benilo in the first place.”
“No, but you thought the woman, this Aguilera woman, would be the perfect choice, when others could’ve been bought off.”
“There’s no evidence that she can’t be bought off, but our first hope is she will prove unsuitable.”
“She is Tomaso Aguilera’s daughter! Do you think the daughter will be any different from the father? Are you incapable of putting two and two together? You’re beginning to sound like that conniving brainless bastard Gutierrez.”
“Sometimes, Alfonso Gutierrez makes sense.”
“Now I know we’re in trouble if you think this.”
“Sir, my men and I will not let you down. I promise.”
“You’d better know what you are doing, else you know what hell awaits you. Do I make myself perfectly clear?” The icy calm tone said more than his threats.
The phone went dead.
To the man on the other end, the sudden silence felt like an omen, a sword dropping. “Well, fuck you too!” replied Cavuto Ruiz.
American Interest Section, Miramar
Satisfied with his meeting with the Canadians, Julio Roberto Zayas had returned to his office and now sat staring at a file grown fat over the past few days. Far from the simple case it had at first seemed, this problem of the two missing American doctors had taken on an ominous cast. Frustrated at every turn by local authorities, he again reviewed what he’d amassed so far on his own.