in the living room, shot twice in the back and stabbed in the side, and a Spanish female, Julia Valdes, believed to be El Pulmon's girlfriend, found in the bedroom shot in the face.'
Falcon came off the motorway and on to the ring road. He took the exit before the golf club and joined the Carretera de Su Eminencia, a road he'd always thought ridiculously named, given that it enclosed one of the grimmest public housing projects in Seville.
In the 1960s and 70s the municipality had lured gypsies from the centre of town out to this development of residential blocks on the edge of civilization. Years of poverty, lack of community and self-respect had transformed a halfhearted attempt at social engineering into a neighbourhood of drugs, murder, theft and vandalism. This did not mean that the barrio was without soul. Some of the greatest flamenco voices came from here, and quite a few of them had done time in the prison he'd just come from. It was more that the soul was not evident from the bare, treeless landscape, the grimy concrete blocks, the cheap clothes hanging out to dry on metal bars over the windows and landings, the rubbish collecting in the basements and stairwells, the graffiti and the air of complete desolation that told anyone who was in any doubt that these were forgotten people in a place that had fallen off the back of the town hall's mind.
The operator in the Jefatura hadn't bothered with an address. It was just a question of cruising around, looking for the crowd of people, the collection of police cars and the green day-glo ambulances, which he soon found at the foot of an eight-storey block. The patrolmen were nervous. Some of the people gathered around the metal security cage at the entrance of the block looked more desperate than the usual citizens of Las Tres Mil. Some of them were crouched low on the grassless earth, arms wrapped round their shins, holding on to themselves and shaking. The name of El Pulmon reached his ears. These were his clients, and they'd just lost their supply.
A patrolman told him to watch his step going up. There were blood drips circled in yellow on a number of steps going up to the fourth floor. The stink of rubbish followed him. No lift. The apartment was full of the usual crime- scene personnel. The bodies were still in position. Falcon shook hands with the medico forense and the instructing judge, Anibal Parrado. Sub-Inspector Emilio Perez, with his dark good looks of a thirties matinee idol and total devotion to detail, was running the investigation. They talked Falcon through the scene.
'We're not sure of the sequence of events, but we're assuming that the gun found on the floor by the window was secured to the table by those screws. It has been fired only once and the blood spatter on the wall beneath the mirror would suggest that we're looking for a wounded man. There is no other firearm in the apartment. A hunting knife was found close to the Cuban's body, which had not been used. From the entry wounds, the ballistics guys think that the same gun that killed Miguel Estevez also killed Julia Valdes in the adjacent room. Obviously, given that two shots killed the victims, they were not killed by the gun found on the floor, which they think is of a different calibre anyway. They will confirm that when they get the bullets out of the two victims. An initial inspection of the gunshot wounds to Miguel Estevez suggests that he was shot by someone lying on the floor. The body seems to have fallen on to the shooter, which would suggest that someone was using him as a shield and pushed him back on to the killer. Judging by the blood drips on the threshold of the bedroom, it is believed that the girl was shot from there by the wounded man.'
Over the medico forense's shoulder Falcon could see the girl's ruined face. Her upper body was slumped against the wall, which was covered with blood and cerebral matter. Her neck was crooked over the low bed-head, while her left hand was flung out towards the window. Her other hand had come to rest between her splayed legs but, with the palm upwards, it indicated the awkwardness of sudden death rather than the demureness of a final modesty. She was naked, but with her right leg caught up in the twisted sheet. The cameo spoke of fear, panic, paralysis and, finally, violent death.
'The blood drips leave the apartment and go down the stairs to the pavement, where they disappear. We assume the shooter got into a car.'
'And the stab wound to Estevez?'
'The Narcs say that El Pulmon favoured a blade,' said Perez. 'And it looks as if he's taken it with him.'
Falcon inspected the gun on the floor, the screws in the table, the bullfight magazine on the floor in front of the mirror.
'There are clear prints on the gun,' said Jorge, appearing from under the table with his custom-made inspection glasses on.
'We've got El Pulmon's prints on file from previous drug arrests,' said Perez.
'We have to assume that this gun did not belong to the Cuban, Miguel Estevez. Two men with guns are no match for a single man with a blade. Which means,' said Falcon, 'that this was the gun secured to the table and that El Pulmon was expecting trouble.'
'He must have bought that gun recently,' said one of the Narcs. 'He was always a knife man before. You know he was an ex-bullfighter?'
'Have you seen this guy before?' Falcon asked the Narc, pointing at Estevez.
'No, but things have been changing around here. The product is different to what it was last year. We still haven't been able to work out where the packages are coming from.'
'Have you come across any Russians?'
He shook his head.
'Were you the one who found the bodies?' asked Falcon.
'Me and my partner,' said the Narc.
'Any idea what time this happened?'
'The guy upstairs said he heard the first gunshot at about one o'clock,' said the Narc.
'Did he call in the shooting?'
'Nobody calls in a shooting in Las Tres Mil,' said the Narc.
'What were you doing here?' asked Falcon. 'Did somebody send you?'
'At a quarter past one we got a call from Inspector Jefe Tirado asking us to find a junkie called Carlos Puerta, who he wanted to question. If we found him, we were to call Tirado and he'd come down here.'
'Did you find him?'
'He's downstairs with my partner, waiting for the Inspector Jefe.'
'Tell me when Tirado gets here.'
Two of Falcon's young detectives, Serrano and Baena, appeared, ready to do some door-to-door.
'I want you and your partner to work with my two detectives here,' said Falcon to the Narcotics agent. 'I want some ideas about where we're going to find El Pulmon… before somebody else gets to him.' Consuelo paced the long glass doors of her living room. The air-con was too chill to sit for long. A patrolman was slumped in the shade of the umbrella on the other side of the pool. She thought he might be sleeping under his mirrored sunglasses. His arm hung limply down by the side of his chair.
A sound technician who'd come in to set up some professional recording equipment, rather than the temporary stuff Inspector Jefe Tirado had left on Saturday evening, was sitting in the kitchen. He was talking to the family liaison officer. There was another patrolman at the front door. She'd told him to come in from the heat. He stared morosely out of the glass panel of the front door. She'd phoned her restaurant manager, told him to contact the estate agents she was currently dealing with to ask them not to call until further notice. She'd taken only one call, from Alicia Aguado. She'd yanked the wire out of her mobile, which was connected to the recording equipment, and taken the call upstairs in her bedroom.
Alicia wouldn't say it, but Consuelo knew that the only reason she could be calling was that she'd heard from Javier. The press and TV still had not been informed, and the radio stations, who'd been involved in the initial stages, had been asked to keep quiet for the moment. Inspector Jefe Tirado didn't want a media circus, or to have to deal with hoaxers, until there'd been contact from the kidnappers, or it became clear that there would be none.
Aguado's call had helped. Consuelo had started by venting her bile against Javier, and Aguado had heard her out to the bitter end before asking her what had actually happened. It was good for Consuelo to talk to someone who listened. It had calmed her down. She began to get some perspective on her anger. Blame and guilt were natural. Rage was inevitable. The call did not cure her of her animosity towards Falcon, or prevent her from replaying that moment when she'd lost sight of Dario over and over in her mind, but it had allowed some resolve to harden inside her. She felt stronger, less jittery. Her mood swings from despair to fury were not so violent. The tears still came, but with some warning.
After the call Consuelo had sent her other two sons away with her sister. She didn't want the boys caught up in
