Things like these don’t normally happen here.
I got into something I shouldn’t have, I was out of my depth, but no one stopped me. In the first months of 2013 I was a rookie police officer in a big city in South American country, I won’t disclose it so to not involve anyone from the DP from back then, as some of the characters in this story still work on the force. If you want a description think of New York city from an old noir film, but with less rats. I find it unlikely that this will get traced back to me or even get the attention of the police, seeing that I no longer live there, and they very much want this forgotten. So, take it as a horror story, nothing more.
I will use their last names to refer to them along the story, inventing names to something like this seems immature, but that and a brief description of their character will be all that I will provide, they earned their distance from this tale.
As for me, I don’t really matter that much, it was a mistake, you may call me X.
February, 2013. It was one of the DP officers on the beat that first responded to the call, a distressed old lady complained about the smell of smoke and dog food coming from one of the tenants of her little “hotel” (motel, but that has different meaning here). It was a strange but simple crime scene: a man in his 30s, fresh off a plane from California to visit his parents was on his knees, head down, hands up, tied to the right bed post with a pillowcase. He was blindfolded with his own socks, and his own shirt was wrapped around his neck, making it the murder weapon.
Nothing out of the ordinary, even though the display of the body was strange, seemed like robbery where the assailant decided for whatever reason that it was not enough to take this man’s possessions, but also that he should not live. Not uncommon, not frequent, but also not uncommon. But either way, by the time I got to the scene the forensics team already dusted the usual places for prints and were on their way out, it was only me, Officer Gillespie, Det. Campos and another officer who later I learned was named Phelps.
There was something about it, I was on the job for almost 3 years at this point and seen much more gruesome things, even fired my gun once, but never saw whether the bullet had hit the running man. There was something about that room, it terrified me, it was like going into a church for the first time, you feel the energy of all the people sitting in silence with their heads down and hands up, sharing the load with the man with the nails in his hands. There was a faint smell of incense, and dog food like the old lady mentioned, I knew what was producing the smell, I just wonder what kind of dog food that lady bought.
Detective Campos was as usual, tired and unimpressed, didn’t even consider touching the bed sheets until I mentioned the smell, the other two officers were quiet and on edge, they too have never seen anything like this. The detective noted that the sheets were a bit crumpled but still tucked tightly under the mattress, they were not used. Campos lifted the remaining pillow on the bed to reveal a wooden crucifix, unpopulated, just two perpendicular pieces of wood about the size of his hand, and it was big, bigger than usual, bigger than one a priest would use, more fit to hang on the wall.
We returned to the station all together on the cruiser, I was driving, and the heavy atmosphere was all that I could hear, even over the radio and the sound of traffic. The smell of incense was still in my nose. Getting to the station we all sat in “the room” to give our statements about the scene, I made sure emphasize the smell, it bothered me. A few moments later I glanced at Campos, which looked at me with a worried expression. I was dreading what he would say to me when I excited the room, I am not big on confrontation, these past years I’ve done my job with precision and no back-talk, as to avoid situations like these, but things like these don’t normally happen here.
I exited the room, and he came up to me and in a calm and reassuring tone said:
“Look, I know that you smelled the incense, but don’t get hang up on that, this isn’t the movies, and that scene is most likely of a robbery gone wrong, don’t twist things.”
I asked what he meant, and he answered:
“You know what I mean, if that is something else than a robbery, we’re gonna have a big problem, and that’ll be only harder to solve.”
Then he walked off in the direction of the cafeteria for his 3rd cup of coffee since the beginning of the shift.
I’m not sure why he felt he needed to say that to me, it only sowed the seed of doubt I had in me already. He needed to say that to someone, even though he didn’t want it to be true. I spent the entire day on the DP, Lt. Sanchez send other officers on patrol instead. I helped gather the information of the victim; he was just a normal adult working in a software company abroad that decided to visit his parents this week. He booked the extra cheap room on Airbnb and arrived the day he said would.
When it was done, I read the report, his bag was still there when the police arrived, his phone was on the bedside table. Nothing was missing except for the 200 USD in cash he had on his wallet that he had to declare when he arrived on the country. It was a robbery, but all the electronic devices he had on his bag were worth much more than that, and yet they were left behind. It could be that the robber thought that he’d get away easier if he only got the money, but we both know that these people can hack into these devices within minutes and get them untraceable. Besides, no matter how many charges you press, the police will never allocate resources to search for a stolen cell phone or laptop, even if they’re company owned.
I couldn’t even sleep that day.
Something about this bugged me, it scared me, it didn’t make sense. I’ve never even seen the forensics report, but later Campos told me it was scrapped, the only DNA on the scene was the old lady’s, as she had prepared the room in the morning of the occurrence, she didn’t even have spare keys for the rooms. Specially strange was the coroner’s report being missing, even knowing what I know now, it was unusual.
You see, disappearances are not uncommon here, you’ll see on the subway posters of several faces with names that have been missing for years. No fuss is made about them, people don’t report, and don’t see them again. Some of them are young, some of them are old, some of them ran away. Again, not frequent, but not uncommon. Especially back in the day, many South American countries were under some sort of dictatorship in the 60’s through the 80’s, where people would routinely disappear without leaving a trace and sometimes show up dead. No fuss was made about them.
I lay in bed awake, thinking what might have happened. Thinking about the brutality of such crime, and yet no further desecration was made and a simple explanation. Only a street camera only showed the victim pull up from a cab late in the afternoon and heading into the building. The old lady spoke to him, showed the room, and in the morning complained about the smell behind a locked door.
That was on a Tuesday, the case was filed as armed robbery and was not further investigated. That is, for about a week and two days, when the morning blue filled the ceiling through a curtain I forgot to shut, and I made my way to a station in a chaos of phone calls and papers passing back and forth, when I glance Gillespie and he looks back and says:
“They found another one.”