The Silence of the White City Page 2

  I knew all my region’s emblems. They had been stored in my memory ever since the double crime of the dolmen had thrown the people of Vitoria into a panic twenty years and four months earlier.

  The dolmen, known as the Witch’s Lair; the Celtic village at La Hoya; the Roman salt pans at Añana; the medieval wall—those were the sites a serial killer had chosen that put Vitoria and the province of Álava on the world news map. And the morbid fascination created by his macabre staging of the murders had led to the establishment of tourist trails throughout the region.

  I was almost twenty when it happened; my obsession with the killings became the main reason I joined the police. I followed the investigation day after day, with an anxiety that only a single-minded young person could understand. I analyzed what little appeared in El Diario Alavés and thought: I can do better. They’re being stupid. They’re forgetting the most important thing: the why. Although I wasn’t even twenty, I thought I was smarter than the police. How naive that seems now.

  Soon afterward, the truth hit me in the face harder than a boxer’s fist. I was stunned, just like all of Spain. No one expected Tasio Ortiz de Zárate to be guilty. I wouldn’t have cared if it had been anyone else: my neighbor, a Poor Clare nun, the baker, the mayor. I wouldn’t have cared.

  But not Tasio, our local hero who was more than an idol: he was a role model, a TV archaeologist who starred in a show that won record ratings each season, the author of books of history and mythology that sold out in weeks. Tasio was the most charismatic, entrancing character that Vitoria had produced in decades. Intelligent and, in the unanimous view of Vitoria’s women, very attractive. And duplicated.

  Yes, duplicated.

  We had two to choose from. Tasio had a monozygotic twin, and they were identical down to the way they cut their fingernails. Indistinguishable. An optimist like him, from a good family, cheerful, full of fun, cultured, well-mannered. At the age of twenty-four, the brothers had Vitoria at their feet and a future that was generally expected to be beyond stellar, stratospheric.

  His twin, Ignacio, leaned toward the law. He became a policeman in the tough ETA years and was the most honest man we’d ever had in the force. Nobody ever imagined things would end up the way they did between them. Everything, and I mean everything, was too sordid and cruel.

  Ignacio uncovered irrefutable proof that his twin was the most wanted and, later, most studied serial killer since Spain had returned to democracy. Ignacio arrested Tasio, even though until that moment they had been as inseparable as conjoined twins. Ignacio became the man of the year, a hero worthy of our respect, the person brave enough to face the consequences and do what few of us would have ever done: hand over his own flesh and blood to a life behind bars.

  As I stood in the cathedral, my reverie led to a disturbing thought: Our two local newspapers—El Diario Alavés and its bitter rival, El Correo Vitoriano—never ceased reminding their readers that Tasio Ortiz de Zárate would be leaving prison soon, released on parole after twenty years. And at that very moment, the city with the lowest crime rate in the north of Spain was adding two corpses to its ghastly scoreboard.

  I shook my head, as if that could clear the phantoms from my brain. I forced myself not to draw conclusions until later and to focus on what we had in front of us.

  When we entered the recently restored crypt, I had to duck because the ceiling was so low. The space still smelled of recently sawn wood. I stepped cautiously across the polished gray flagstones, so perfectly rectangular they could only have been made in the twenty-first century by a machine. It seemed a shame to get them dirty. Two thick columns in front of us did their best to support the heavy weight of the centuries: the original foundations of the old, buckling cathedral.

  When I saw the two lifeless bodies lying there, I felt the need to retch rise from the pit of my stomach, but I resisted.

  I resisted.

  The crime techs in their white plastic suits and overshoes had been examining the area for some time. They had brought in lamps to shed some light in the dark crypt, and it seemed they had finished photographing the scene. Estíbaliz asked for a sketch, studied it closely for a while, then passed it to me.

  “Tell me they’re not twenty years old, Estíbaliz,” I begged her.

  Any other age, but not twenty.

  The previous serial killer had stopped at fifteen-year-olds: four naked couples, female and male, each affectionately laying the palm of one hand on the other’s cheek in an incongruously gentle gesture. Nobody had ever been able to explain this placement, especially since it was reported that none of the victims knew each other. They all had double-barreled names that originated in the Álava region: López de Armentia, Fernández de Retana, Ruiz de Arcaute, García de Vicuña, Martínez de Guereñu…

  On the dolmen known as the Witch’s Lair, near the village of Elvillar, the lifeless bodies of two newborn babies had been discovered. Shortly afterward, in the remains of the Celtic-Iberian settlement of La Hoya de Laguardia, a boy and a girl aged five were found, their hands comforting each other, their gazes lost in the heavens.

  In the Valle Salado at Añana, a prosperous salt pan dating to the time of the Romans, the bodies of a boy and a girl aged ten were found. By the time the crimes reached the city of Vitoria and two dead fifteen-year-olds had appeared close to the gate in the medieval wall, the population was in such a state of psychosis that we twenty-year-olds stayed at home all the time, playing cards with our grandparents. No one dared go out in the streets if they weren’t in a big group. It was as if the ages of the victims were progressing according to the chronology of our region’s history. It was all very archaeological, very Tasio.

  Eventually he was caught. Inspector Ignacio Ortiz de Zárate ordered the arrest of Tasio Ortiz de Zárate, Spain’s most famous and well-loved archaeologist. He was put on trial, convicted of the premeditated murder of eight children, and sent to prison.

  The grim harvest of young people in Vitoria ceased.

  My partner’s voice brought me back to the present.

  The pathologist, Doctor Guevara, a slender fifty-year-old woman with smooth pink cheeks, was whispering to Judge Olano, a stocky, elderly man with broad shoulders and short legs. One of his feet was pointing to the exit as he listened, as if he couldn’t wait to race out of there. We decided not to approach them; they looked as though they didn’t want to be disturbed.

  “They still haven’t been identified,” Estíbaliz said in a low voice. “We’re matching their descriptions with reports of missing people. Both the male and the female appear to be about twenty years old. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Kraken?”

  She sometimes called me by my adolescent nickname. It was a token of trust that had grown between us.

  “It’s impossible,” I muttered between clenched teeth.

  “But it is happening.”

  “We can’t be sure of that,” I insisted.

  She fell silent.

  “We still can’t be sure,” I repeated, as much to convince myself as anything else. “Let’s concentrate on what we have in front of us. Later we can calmly discuss our conclusions in my office, okay?”

  “Agreed. What do you see?”

  I approached the two bodies, knelt beside them, and whispered my plea:

  This is where your hunt ends and mine begins.

  “Three eguzkilores, flowers of the sun,” I said eventually, “laid next to their heads and feet. I can’t grasp their meaning in this context yet.”

  In Basque culture, the eguzkilore was an ancient protective symbol hung on the doors of rural homes to prevent witches and demons from entering. Except, in this case, they hadn’t worked.

  “No, I don’t understand what they’re doing here, either,” said Estíbaliz, crouching beside me. “I’ll continue with the victims: Caucasian female and male, both aged twenty or thereabouts.
Lying on their backs, naked, on the cathedral floor. No indications of wounds, blows, or any other form of violence. But look: they both have a small pinprick on the side of their neck. An injection. They’ve both been injected with something.”

  “We’ll have to wait for the toxicology reports,” I said. “We’ll need to send samples to the forensic lab in Bilbao, to see if they find any drugs or psychotropic substances. Anything else?”

  “One hand of each victim is lying on the other’s cheek. The pathologist will establish the time of death, but rigor mortis hasn’t set in, so I assume they’ve only been dead a few hours. I’m going to ask the techs to preserve the hands in paper bags. It doesn’t look as if they defended themselves, but you never know.”

  “Come closer,” I said. “Do you smell something? It’s quite faint, but I’d say there’s an odor of gasoline.”

  “You have a good sense of smell. I hadn’t noticed it,” she said after sniffing the bodies closely. “We still have to establish the cause of death. Do you think they’ve been poisoned, as in the earlier cases? Maybe they were forced to swallow gasoline?”

  I took a close look at the young woman’s face before replying. It was frozen in a rictus of pain. She had suffered as she’d died, and so had the young man. I looked at his hair, recently trimmed on the sides. The forelock was still prominent, stiff from what looked to be expensive hair gel. He had clearly taken care of himself; he was well groomed. She had also been attractive. Her eyebrows were plucked, no blemishes or acne. She belonged to the generation that grew up frequenting beauty parlors.

  Little rich kids, I thought. Just like before. But then I realized the mistake we were making.

  “Estíbaliz,” I said, “we have to reset and start again. We’re not examining the crime scene with open minds; we’ve immediately started comparing it to the other scenes. First we need to look at this one in a vacuum. We can compare later.”

  “But I think that’s exactly what the killer or killers want. The staging is identical to the earlier crimes. If you’re asking me about the victims, Kraken, I’d say they follow the series from twenty years ago.”

  “Yes, but there are differences. I don’t think they were poisoned. The kind of poison used in the past never appeared in the press. I don’t think they died from swallowing gasoline, either. The smell would be much stronger, it would have taken much more of the liquid, and there’s no sign of chemical burns. It’s as though they had only been in contact with one or two drops.”

  I bent over the young man’s face. It was odd the way his mouth was closed with the lips pressed slightly inward, as if he had been biting them.

  I had an idea, so I examined the young woman’s face as well.

  “They both had tape over their mouths, and it was ripped off. Look.”

  The rectangular mark from the adhesive tape stuck over their lips had left the skin slightly flushed.

  It felt as though the Old Cathedral was staring down at us in horror. Then I thought I heard something.

  A faint, annoying buzz.

  I signaled for Estíbaliz to be quiet and brought my ear to within an inch of the man’s face. What on Earth was that sound? I closed my eyes and focused on it, on its strangeness, trying to discover where the slight buzzing was loudest. I almost brushed against the tip of the victim’s nose, and then I moved down across the orbicularis oris muscle to his lips.

  “Do you have a pen?”

  My partner took one out of her back pocket, a quizzical look on her face.

  I used the tip of the pen to prize open the corner of the victim’s mouth. Suddenly, an enraged bee flew out. I fell over backward.

  “Shit, a bee!” I yelled from the ground.

  Everyone turned to stare at us. The techs looked reprovingly at me for having fallen over so close to the center of the crime scene.

  Estíbaliz reacted quickly and tried to catch the bee, but it flew over our heads toward the covered remains of the model of the ancient village. In just a few seconds, it was out of reach.

  “We should catch it,” said Estíbaliz, watching it escape. “If it is connected to the murder, it could be crucial for the investigation.”

  “Catch it, in a church that measures ninety-six meters from apse to door? Don’t look at me like that,” I said when I saw the face she was making. “Whenever a friend comes to visit Vitoria, I bring them for a guided tour of the cathedral.”

  With a sigh, Estíbaliz turned her attention back to the bodies.

  “All right, let’s forget the bee for now. Can you discern whether there was a sexual motive?”

  “No,” I said, approaching the bodies again. “As far as I can tell, the vagina is still intact. We can ask the pathologist. I think she’s finished with the judge.” In fact, the two were walking toward us.

  “Your Honor,” said Estíbaliz, pushing up her hair under her helmet.

  “Good evening, if you’ll pardon the expression,” said Olano. “My secretary will leave the visual inspection report for you to sign. I’ve had enough, especially on a holiday.”

  “You’re right there,” I muttered.

  The judge walked quickly out of the crypt, leaving us with the pathologist.

  “Did you find any biological residue?” I asked.

  “We’ve examined the bodies and sprayed the surrounding area with luminol,” she said. “There’s no trace of blood. We’ve also searched for semen, but we didn’t find any. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy results; they’ll be more precise. I’m afraid this is going to be complicated. Do you need anything else, inspectors?”

  “No, doctor. Not at the moment,” said Estíbaliz by way of good-bye. When the pathologist left, she turned to me: “Well, Unai, what’s your read on the staging?”

  “They’re naked, so there’s a definite sexual aspect. By placing their hands in that odd gesture, the killer seems to be suggesting that they are a couple, although I think that was done postmortem, when the killer brought them here and lined up the bodies facing…”

  Taking my cell phone from my pocket, I opened an app that served as a compass. Bending down again, I took my time until I was sure.

  “They’re pointing to where the sun rises at the winter solstice,” I told her.

  “Meaning? I’m not a wild soul who communes with Mother Earth on weekends like you.”

  “I don’t align with any telluric forces. I simply go back to the village to help my grandfather with his farm. If you had a ninety-four-year-old grandfather determined never to retire, you’d do the same. But to answer your question, the bodies are facing northwest.”

  Like the first double crime at the dolmen, I thought nervously. That much had come out in the press.

  But I didn’t say it.

  I didn’t want to appear to contradict myself, and I didn’t want Estíbaliz to realize that, despite my attempts to isolate this crime in my mind, I, too, was comparing it to our adolescent terror. She was probably doing the same thing.

  The fact was, something was vibrating inside me. I couldn’t help thinking that I was breathing the same air the murderer had. That only a few hours earlier, some asshole with an undiagnosed psychopathic illness had stood on the same spot. I peered at the air trapped inside the cathedral as if he had left visible traces in the void. His movements flashed through my mind. How he must have transported the bodies, then placed them in the crypt without leaving any sign. I knew that he was meticulous and that he had done this before.

  This display was not his first.

  I could picture his face. Could the answer be so simple and yet impossible, a riddle that was solved before it had even been posed?

  Estíbaliz was watching, waiting for me to emerge from the mental spirals I occasionally got lost in. She knew me well, and she respected my silences and rituals.

  Finally, I straightened up. We looked at
each other, and I realized we were ten years older than the pair of detectives who had entered the cathedral only half an hour before.

  “All right, Unai, what does your profiler’s brain tell you?”

  “This person is an organized killer. It’s not a random choice. Yet I could swear he didn’t know his victims. He turned them into objects. And there’s an absolute control of the scene. But what concerns me most is the disconcerting lack of any clues. That coincides with the profile: the murderer has an almost pathological awareness, and that’s very worrying.”

  “What else?” she pressed me. She knew that I hadn’t finished, that I was thinking out loud. We often did that; it allowed our thoughts to flow more freely.

  “The victims’ eyes are wide-open, which means the killer felt no compunction or pity. That’s a psychopathic trait.”

  “Any mixed traits?”

  “No, there’s not a single trait that would indicate a disorganized killer. Do you know how uncommon that is? Disorganized murderers usually leave behind a scene marked by brutal, explosive violence. There are attacks to the face, or the victims are disfigured. Blows with improvised instruments like sticks or stones. This is different. This guy isn’t psychotic; he’s more of a psychopath or a sociopath. He’s meticulous, he plans ahead, and he doesn’t suffer from mental illness, which means that, fortunately for us, he is fully responsible for his acts. What troubles me is the kind of weapon he used, if that’s what it is. Bees? That’s a fetishistic weapon.”

  “Objects that normally are not weapons but that have a special meaning for the killer,” said Estíbaliz, pondering aloud.

  “That’s my fear,” I said. “We need to check what poison the murderer used twenty years ago. We’ll have to ask for the old files when we get back to headquarters. And if we accept that these murders are a continuation of the series of four crimes in 1996, we’re talking about a cooling-off period of two decades. When we talk about ‘organized serial killers,’ the longer the gap, the calmer the psychopath’s personality, but statistically we’re usually talking about weeks or months. Do you have any idea what it would mean if we’re facing someone who can wait twenty years?”