Felipe and Jorge, the same forensics on the Raul Jimenez killing, turned up and they all stood around waiting for the Medico Forense. She arrived some minutes later, a woman in her thirties with long dark hair, which she stuffed into a white plastic cap. Her inspection of the body took less than fifteen minutes. She came out of the mausoleum, casually handed Falcon’s dropped pen torch to a patrolman and gave her report to Juez Calderon. She put the time of death at some time early on Saturday morning and, as rigor mortis was fully developed, she reckoned that the body had been there since the weekend. Cause of death was by strangulation and, given the nature of the burn mark, probably done with the missing stocking. The depth of the marks around the front of the neck would indicate that the killer had tackled her from behind and used the girl’s own weight to kill her. She was not prepared to make a comment about the eyes until she had the girl back in the Instituto.
Felipe and Jorge moved in, dusted the mobile and envelope, which were clean. They opened the envelope, dusted the card inside, also clean. They handed it over to Falcon with raised eyebrows.
Why do they have to die, those that love to love?
And on the reverse side was the answer:
Because they have the gift of perfect sight.
Falcon read it out loud and then slipped it into the evidence bag. The Medico Forense conferred with Calderon and the secretaria, who took down notes. Ramirez repeated the sight lesson.
‘I don’t know what that means,’ he said. ‘I understand it, but … do you know what that means, Inspector Jefe?’
‘Well … maybe it’s ironic,’ said Falcon. ‘A prostitute does not love to love.’
He changed his mind almost as soon as he’d said it. The sad-eyed, stiffly embracing panda in Eloisa Gomez’s bedroom came to mind, along with the thought that maybe the killer had reached that far in.
‘And the gift of perfect sight?’
‘Maybe as you said, Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderon, returning to the conversation, ‘these girls see things very clearly.’
‘The stocking,’ said Falcon. ‘The single stocking that was removed …’
‘He probably put her under the chloroform to get that off her,’ said Ramirez.
‘Yes, that was probably it,’ said Falcon, disappointed by the likely mundanity. He was imagining some break- through between the killer and Eloisa Gomez, that they’d achieved some intimacy, until, at the onset of sex, with all its psychological leaking, the killer’s true nature was revealed.
‘Where was she killed?’ said Calderon. ‘It has to have been local, doesn’t it?’
‘And he has to have had transport, too,’ said Ramirez.
‘Or they could have come here together and then he killed her and hid the body. There must be a lot of gardening rubbish here,’ said Falcon, and told Ramirez to get a shot of the girl sent down and run it past the
Ramirez spoke into his mobile and surveyed the hectares of crosses and mausoleums that stretched off in all directions to the distant palm trees and cypresses at the walls of the cemetery. Falcon looked over the garish flower arrangements, the endless names, the ranks of the dead reaching off up to the blue sky and the high cirrus.
An ambulance crawled up the main avenue at a respectful pace, the blank windscreen made it seem unpeopled, impersonal.
‘I’ll speak to Comisario Lobo and get some manpower released to search this cemetery,’ said Falcon, and Ramirez nodded, pulled a cigarette from the pack with his lips and lit it.
‘The eyes,’ said Calderon. ‘Do you think he removed the eyes here as well?’
‘I have it on the authority of a jealous husband I gaoled some years ago in Barcelona that it’s not so difficult to do,’ said Falcon. ‘He did it to his wife who was having an affair. He said they just popped out under his thumbs like a couple of bird’s eggs.’
Falcon shuddered at himself retelling the story and the forensics came over to give their report.
‘He killed her outside the mausoleum and dragged her in,’ said Felipe. ‘It was too narrow for him to carry her inside so he had to drag her up the steps and lift her in. Her skirt’s all rucked up at the back, the remaining stocking is badly laddered and the back of the bare leg is grazed. We’ve found plenty of strands of material in the shelving where he’s scraped his coat, but there’s no blood, saliva or sperm. No discernible footprints either. We did find this in the victim’s hair though, which might help you find the killing place —’
Jorge handed over a bag containing rose and chrysanthemum petals, grass and leaves.
‘Gardening detritus,’ said Felipe and the forensics left.
Calderon signed off the levantamiento del cadaver. The ambulancemen lifted the body into a bag, zipped it up and stretchered it away. The ambulance reversed back down Jesus de la Pasion to the main avenue and, lights flashing, drew stunned glances from a straggle of mourners, baffled by the sight of it in this place. Lobo gave Falcon a squad of fifteen men to search the cemetery. Calderon rejoined him.
‘This line, “where the shadows move”,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you were afraid of, would you go to a cemetery … with anyone, let alone a client? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Unless you consider how difficult it is to get a dead body over one of those walls,’ said Falcon. ‘I think he’d brought her in close … close enough to open the door for him to Jimenez’s flat and close enough to go to a cemetery with him.’
‘The girl was killed Saturday morning,’ said Ramirez, coming back from his mobile conversation, ‘and we know
