The Ripper

  THE RIPPER

  ÍNDICE

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  THE RIPPER

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  © 2017 CARMELO ANAYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  "I want to master life and death."

  Ted Bundy

  31 August

  1

  A dark van swerves in front of me. I hit the side of it and the driver changes course, lining up with the other vehicles.

  Just four steps in, I'm sweating. Heat. Humidity. Sweat.

  Traffic for miles. Blue patrol lights flashing. Sirens. Whistles. Crowds lining the pavements.

  A choking sensation. Like being in a nightmare.

  I curse the call. The call I'll always regret taking.

  - "Chief...!"

  An agent calls my name as soon as he sees me. He trails off. He gestures to a shadow on the ground between two stone walls, barely a metre from the pavement. What I see there... a shudder. A sudden wave of cold turns my sweat to ice.

  Next to me, Inspector Malasana stops abruptly. He opens his arms as if to receive a blow. An agent hands us a torch. Everything is happening in slow motion. As if we were at the bottom of a swamp, the muck muddying our vision. I fumble for the torch's on switch. My hands are shaking. The woman lies on her back. Her arms, slightly bent at the elbow, lie by her sides, palms facing upward in a plea or a prayer. Her legs are spread, the tight skirt riding up so that she is exposed. The bodice that clung to her body is open like a vest. Her blood has reached the street; a trickle of blood drips from the edge of the pavement onto the tarmac. Her neck has been so brutally hacked open that her head lolls, almost completely decapitated. Her guts spill out of her open stomach onto her body like giant worms.

  I hold back a terrible urge to retch.

  Malasana stops in the middle of a retch that looks like an epileptic fit.

  Silence descends suddenly. A brutal, sordid silence. A silence as hard as stone. Out of nowhere, I become aware of the sound of the waves and the stars winking on the horizon. As if my horrified brain were looking at a place my eyes cannot reach. Because I cannot take my eyes off the shattered body in front of us.

  - This isn't happening!

  I'm not sure my lips have uttered the words that scream out in my mind.

  - "Godddd!" A plea from the toughest man I know.

  The drunken cries return. The shouts from the police. The sirens. The whistles. The purring of the car motors, backed up behind the crowds surrounding the body, blocking the motorway.

  Malasana takes a step, avoiding the blood. He looks behind the wall into the bush. Sergeant Lopez arrives at my side. With a brutal moan of pure sickness at the sight, he turns and vomits, spitting and groaning like a dying man. Even the toughest man is no match for the slashed and ruined body before us.

  Our backup manages to clear the area. People leaving Club Mandala stop to see what's going on. I order the team to put up a police line, but blocking off the motorway is impossible. There won't be any point anyway, because the crime scene is so contaminated that any precaution is useless. The scientific support unit is on its way. The medical examiner has been informed. While we wait, I feel my shirt and trousers sticking to me, as damp as if I had been soaked to the skin by the rain that never falls here. The mist that has been hanging over the sea for the past hour is already drifting in, blanketing the scene.

  Every time I dare snatch a look at the body, my intuition freezes up.

  Lopez has had to leave and stands in front of Club Mandala with the bouncers. He said he was going to interrogate them. But we know that, really, he ran from the scene.

  - "This will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life," he said.

  He sobered up instantly.

  Malasana returns from his inspection of the area where the body was found.

  - "He broke the fence on the other side too, next to the stream. I think he parked a car there. There are prints in the sand."

  I nod, happy to have him back. With Malasana by my side, the fear I try to hide is less overwhelming.

  I see tears in his eyes. The disgust and fear have left his face, leaving behind the deepest compassion and a bottomless sorrow that cannot be consoled.

  - "How can this be?" he asks out loud.

  He takes a deep breath. We lean against the wall, our backs to the body. He lights a cigarette.

  - "Do you agree with me?"

  I look at him intently for a second without speaking.

  - "I don't know," I lie. "We'll see what the examiner says"

  We stare at the sea. Local police agents get the traffic moving and break up the clusters of people, who leave reluctantly. The agents are pleased to be busy with a different task and keeping their distance. We ordered that Club Mandala be cleared a while ago. Almost all the cars in the adjacent parking lot have slipped away. It's going to be a sad sunrise. Some fishermen seem suspended in darkness out at sea. Some early birds head for the beach from the camping grounds and nearby blocks of flats. A few wear trainers to greet the new day with a walk along the beach; others hold fishing rods. Life goes on, so distant that for a split second I even think that what I saw, what lies next to me, is just a dream brought on by the alcohol.

  - "I'll kill whoever did this," mutters Malasana.

  But I can't muster up rage yet. I'm still in shock. I've seen a lot over the years, but I thought I had left all that behind. What did I expect from my job and the city I was posted to, more as a punishment than a prize, this forgotten place? A few drunk-driving incidents, family feuds, petty theft. Not much more. But I've even seen decapitated men and a whole family shot to death. Trusting that the fate I had been assigned as a punishment held no more evil in store for me than what I had already witnessed, I gradually understood, and an unexpected bitterness overwhelms me.

  I see the mist coming; it swallows up the motorway and us along with it.

  - "How appropriate," remarks Malasana.

  A soft and friendly fog. Like a cool caress to the face. It swallows up the palm trees and pines around us and this place suddenly looks less forbidding.

  Lopez crosses the motorway flanked by the bouncers, who wear jeans and tight black T-shirts damp with sweat.

  - Tell the Chief - orders Lopez, his eyes averted from the place where the body lies.

  - "Not much to tell, Chief". He's Spanish, with a southeastern accent. A short glut of muscles, with a closely-shaved head, a wide jaw and ears stuck so close to his skull that you can't see them looking at him straight on. "Mandala" is written on his T-shirt, with the business's mysterious-looking logo. A tangled circle of a diagram. "We were focusing on the people. It's been a crazy night. People going in and out. Ther
e's was just one point where I looked over here cos I thought I saw something. But I didn't see anything so I forgot about it. Later, I did notice that the metal sheet was gone, but I thought it must have been someone messing about." From where we stand, the body is barely visible.

  The second bouncer, identical to the first, confirms his version of events with a curt nod. Lopez will take their statements. He leaves quickly, the relief showing on his face.

  Braulio, the medical examiner, leaves his briefcase to one side, being careful not to stain it with blood, and looks at the land leading into the wasteland.

  - "Who walked around over here?" shouts Braulio, sweating.

  - "Everyone," I reply. "A group of boys walking along the street found it. They got too close. Some were sick."

  He nods. He's in no mood for jokes today. He touches the woman's body with the utmost care. Her neck moves like that of a broken doll.

  - "She hasn't been dead for more than two hours," he says.

  He looks at the cuts on her neck.

  - Her throat slit. That's the cause of death. Beyond the shadow of a doubt.

  The swallows are mad with the dawn and crowd the nearby Sopalmo camping site trees. Their shrieks are deafening. An incongruous cry of happiness.

  - "What he did after." he says slowly, taking in the carnage and moving his hands lightly over the body, "She didn't feel it. She was already dead."

  His words bring us some relief, as he shooes away the flies and lifts the body up slightly. A thick pool of blood.

  - "He killed her there," Braulio says, pointing a few metres into the field.

  A black stain in the dirt.

  - "Was this gender-based?" asks the judge, a young man with slicked-back hair standing further back than you'd think was reasonable, with the uncertain air of someone who's up too early or hasn't gone to bed yet.

  Braulio seems to shake his head, but says:

  - "Beats me," he shrugs. "Do you know who she is?" he asks.

  - We haven't found the victim's bag or her ID in her clothes.

  - "Looks like I'm done for now. As soon as you get her to the Institute, I'll do the autopsy."

  I motion to the scientific unit and they come over, dressed in white lab coats. Their work here won't be much help, but I pray they find something, regardless.

  We drive back to the station in a patrol car because Lopez took the Golf. We don't say a word the whole drive home. The agent at the wheel is silent too.

  As soon as I get back to my office I go to the bathroom and have a cold shower. I change into clean clothes and blast the AC. Then I call Malasana in. He looks his usual unkempt self despite his shower. His eyes are red from the drinking before the call, lack of sleep and the horror he has witnessed.

  - "No one has been reported missing. I've already checked. Not in the Guardia Civil or the local police, not anywhere in the area," he says.

  He slumps into the armchair opposite me and for a moment I think he might start crying. He starts to say something, but stops when Lopez walks in, still white as a sheet. He sits down next to Malasana without saying anything. His lips pressed shut, staring at me. We smoke without speaking in the low hum of the AC unit.

  - "They say she was killed by her partner, whoever that is. If that's it, he might have killed himself," he says, a naive look on his face, wanting to believe the impossible. That this is just another gender-based crime and all this will be over as suddenly as it began.

  I shake my head slowly.

  - "Don't talk bullshit, Lopez."

  - "Why wouldn't it be?" He looks at Malasana, offended. "A fight outside a club... maybe the boyfriend got jealous..."

  - Malasana cuts him off. "She was a prostitute."

  Lopez gapes.

  - "Who kills a prostitute outside the busiest club in the county like that, Lopez?

  - So..." He trails off, shudding.

  - "No one breathes a word of this. We know nothing. Complete silence. I don't want anything leaving this room," I order.

  - "We need to do some digging in her circles, boss," suggests Malasana.

  - "Well, you'd better get on with it. That's your call."

  Malasana gets to his feet abruptly. He can't stand the stillness either, after seeing what we saw.

  - "If I find him, this time I'm not phoning you to come and arrest him," he warns before he leaves my office.

  - "Finding him won't be easy."

  He's still hesitating, one hand on the door.

  - "You want to know what this reminds me of?"

  - "No."

  I refuse to hear it, for the second time. I won't be able to hold him off a third.

  - "What does he mean, boss?' Lopez asks when Malasana closes the door.

  - "Don't go trying to find out yet."

  He shakes his head, incredulous.

  - "This is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life."

  Garcia bursts in without knocking and shouts from the door,

  - "Boss, they've posted pictures of the body online."

  I pull up a search and photos of the body come up immediately, as well as a video some idiot has taken with his phone.

  - "Where do they get the nerve?" "Nothing is sacred these days," mutters Lopez bitterly, as if retreating from a threat.

  - "It's on the news too," adds Garcia.

  On the computer screen the photos don't look real. The images flick past. The cameramen loses his nerve and films his friends, scared, some vomiting and others making jokes. They were the first to walk past the scene, too drunk.

  Two hours later, Malasana appears.

  - "I know how to identify her." "Let's go!"

  We leave the station. Suffocating heat. Blinding light. We get into the Golf, practically charred from the burning sun. Malasana's informers have confirmed that a Romanian woman is missing.

  - It has to be her.

  He drives me to the outskirts of town. A building, the first of an identical set, abandoned when the recession hit. The new streets, sweltering in the sun, are tarred with a layer of asphalt so fine it peels up like rolling paper, protesting its abandonment. The asphalt is lined with empty plots of land on either side where not so much as a whisp of a weed grows. A grey block devoid of imagination. Some of the windowpanes still have their stickers on. On the lower floors, the windows are broken, shattered by stones. The flats are rented by crooks who buy businesses on the brink of ruin and rent out the flats dirt and cheap until the bank repossesses them.

  Wires hang out of the buzzer, though Malasana has no intention of announcing himself. He opens the door with a key card and we enter the building, grateful for the cool dark. I press the lift button and Malasana laughs as he starts up the stairs.

  By the time I reach him on the fourth floor, I'm panting. He is already pounding on a cheap door.

  The woman who comes to the door isn't a day over twenty. She wears a revealing blouse that reminds me of the top the murdered girl was wearing, and pyjama short shorts that suggest she is not wearing underwear. Malasana pushes open the door and enters the flat. I follow him and we see a dining room devoid of a dining table, a cheap sofa and a huge television. The remains of someone's breakfast sit on a coffee table. A pile of clothes teeters on an armchair. The light that streams in from the window is almost blinding, especially to the girl, who appears to have woken up moments ago.

  - "Police." Malasana shows his ID.

  The girl gestures wildly.

  - "I haven't done anything!" she shouts in an Eastern European accent.

  - "Is anyone else home?"

  The girl folds her arms over her chest.

  - "What's your name?" Malasana asks, intimidating her.

  - "Tatiana," she replies shortly.

  - "Your real name. Your papers," he demands.

  She motions further down the hall.

  - "Now," orders Malasana.

  I
open the door to an empty bedroom. No one has slept in the bed. Malasana follows the girl down the hall, one hand on the butt of his gun.

  - "Tell the others to come out," he shouts.

  The girl comes running back and tries to push Malasana towards the dining room.

  - "Domenica Tatiana Demeter, Romanian national. Age nineteen."

  - "Do you have a warrant to enter my house?"

  Malasana stares her down and she shrinks.

  - "I said tell the others to come out."

  Domenica Tatiana looks behind her. She shouts something in Romanian and a moment later two other women walk down the hall. Malasana orders them to sit on the couch.

  - "Who else lives here?"

  The girls shrug and look down at their feet. One of them, a scruffy bottle blonde with anunderbite and sunken cheeks, dressed in cutoffs that show her thighs and a red T-shirt, says:

  - "Have you got a warrant?"

  - "This is nothing to do with you," I respond, reassuring her. "We're looking for a friend of yours."

  The third girl is chubby, with short hair. She keeps her round face down, refusing to look up.

  - "There's a fourth girl living here who didn't come home last night, isn't there?"

  No answer. They still don't understand why we're here.

  - "What's her name?" shouts Malasana.

  The skinny one is called Petrica Stoica and she's the most confident of the three.

  - "She didn't come home last night."