The Surreal Killer (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 2) Page 9

  "You're really serious about this, aren't you, Roger?"

  "Yes, I am. There are two of you for me to worry about now, and I don't want either of us to make any mistakes we would regret for the rest of our lives."

  "I'll be careful", she promised, and now her expression was completely serious.

  The rest of the tour went by quickly. We found ourselves attached pretty tightly to the group because we shared one guide among all of us, so we targeted Roberta and Francis Roberts to be next to and talk with. This was perfectly natural as it made English the language of choice in deference to my limitations in Spanish. It was their first trip to Machu Picchu, so we had a lot in common in this situation. Most of the conversation was, naturally enough, about what we saw, about the Incan religion and Empire, and about what the guide was telling us (in Spanish) as we looked at the ruins.

  The guide collected us for the return trip and we did the reverse bus-train-bus trip to Cuzco. Our destination was Cuzco airport (luggage transfer and hotel checkout had been done for us by the tour folk, which saved all of us an hour in a very long day). The charter flight to Iquique was in the air before 10 P.M. We sat next to Eugene and Letitia Colon on the plane, and talked mainly about what Iquique was like for most of the short flight. Eugene started us off with a bit of perspective.

  "The first thing to realize," he said, "Is that everything is backwards here in South America from your normal orientation. It gets warmer as you go north towards the equator. Iquique is more than 1,100 miles north of the temperate South American cities you already know like Santiago, Buenos Aires, or Montevideo. It's actually a good bit north of Rio de Janiero in Brazil. But the South Pacific Ocean is very cold and the marine layer is close to the shore much of the time. So we have a lot milder climate than you might expect in South America. Our winter low temperature averages about 55 degrees and our summer high is about 76 degrees. There are lots of nice beaches that we enjoy all year round, and some natural hot springs. There's deep-sea fishing, golf, hunting, and lots of great tourist destinations to visit nearby. There's also a large mall full of stores featuring duty-free shopping, so the cost of living is low. We have a lot of retirees from the United States, Canada, and Australia who've retired here to enjoy the lifestyle, so everywhere you go English is spoken. It's a great place to live.

  "Iquique is a very comfortable size. The population is about 250,000 and has a mix of lots of different ethnicities so it feels like a real city. It's a rich city, with the second largest seaport in Chile and a lot of copper being exported through it. We live well there. It has a big international airport that you'll get a good look at in half an hour, so we can easily fly anywhere in the world we might want to go, and it’s on the Pan-American highway so we can drive up to Peru and down to the big cities of Chile. And I'm beginning to sound like a member of the local Chamber of Commerce so I'll shut up."

  “So, do you consider yourself to be an American who lives in Chile or a Chilean who was born in the United States?” Suzanne asked.

  “That’s easy,” replied Eugene, “We’re all expats, the slang for expatriates, and very definitely Americans living in Chile. There are a lot of things here in the Southern hemisphere that you never get used to. None of us has to stand on our head here to stick to the ground, but everything else is backwards. When you drain the tub or flush the toilet, the water swirls the wrong way. Christmas comes in the summer, since the seasons are reversed and December is the first month of summer here. Forget about dreaming of a White Christmas. My sense of direction is geared to the Northern hemisphere. I instinctively turn the wrong way down here unless I look at a map whenever I go somewhere new. I think my inner compass is lost as far as which way the North Pole really is. The food is different and so is the educational system for the kids and lots more stuff. I’m very definitely an American living in Chile.”

  Letitia jumped into the conversation. "I've been retired for almost 20 years, first to raise the kids full time and now to enjoy that comfortable lifestyle. We tend to draw all of our friends from the American expatriate community and we all do a lot of stuff together. It's a close-knit group so we play cards together, travel together, play tennis and golf together, fish and hunt together, and just enjoy a life very similar to what we'd be doing in almost any suburb in the United States. We’ve recreated a small neighborhood in the USA here to make it feel like home. Our kids play together, go to school together, and in a few years will probably start marrying each other. That's just fine as far as I'm concerned."

  The approximately 500 mile flight took a little over an hour, and we were through the passport checks and out of the airport by 11:30, still dinner time in Chile. We were fed, back to our hotel, and in bed before 2.

  "Suzanne, I was getting pretty hungry because of that very late dinner we had. That reminded me of an old story.

  "A hungry traveler stops at a monastery and is taken to the kitchens. A brother in the usual monastic attire of a plain cassock is standing in front of the large stove frying a huge pile of potatoes to make French Fries.

  "Are you the friar?' the visitor asks.

  "No. I'm the chip monk," the brother at the stove replies.

  Chapter 13. The Thrill of the Hunt From a New Perspective

  For the first time since this all began, I sensed that there was someone on my trail. I analyzed my feelings, and was surprised to find the idea exhilarating rather than intimidating. I knew that from the outside I looked and acted perfectly normal, and I had years of experience hiding the inner me. This had the makings of a new and exciting game, one that I was looking forward to.

  "Who is it?" I asked myself.

  I could smell cop a mile away when I saw Eduardo Gomez. Who did they think would mistake him for a scientist? On the other hand, Suzanne was a well-known biochemist from UCLA. I Googled her to make sure, but she’d been publishing in the area for a dozen years. Pub Med had at least 36 papers of hers listed. She had an h-factor of 25 on Google Scholar, which meant that her published papers were frequently cited by other researchers. Either they had planted a ringer at the meeting or she was the real deal. I’d visited her poster and listened pretty carefully. She knew her stuff and I doubted that anyone could fake it so convincingly on short notice. The jury was out on Roger, who also had some cop smell about him, but they seemed to be totally comfortable as a pair, with the easy familiarity of long-term lovers. I could tentatively take him at face value too. And he seemed to be a bit of a wimp the way that he followed her around. If he were a real man it would be the other way around. That left Eduardo, who could be as advertised, Suzanne’s cousin, who was also coincidentally a cop. Of the three of them, he was the only one big enough to pose any kind of physical threat to me. He would bear some close watching until I knew for sure.

  I knew I hadn’t left any clues that linked either the meeting or me to the killings. There just really wasn’t any way they could have made the connection. The killings were in three different countries that didn’t get along very well, so the different countries probably didn’t share police information on a routine basis. I could relax, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on Eduardo just in case. And it wouldn't hurt either to talk to the other biochemists from the University of Chile in our little group to find out if any of them had picked up any strange vibes. For a moment I wondered if the others had figured it out and the threat I was sensing was from my friends. No, that wasn't possible. They needed me too much and I'd have sensed it sooner. This had to be coming from the meeting and the three of them were the only people there who hadn't been to all of the other meetings. If my feelings were right, and they usually were, it would pay to keep my eye on Eduardo.

  For the first time in my adult life I was going to have the thrill of the hunt from the point of view of the hunted, not the hunter. But the hunted had a few surprises in store for the hunter. The prey was soon to become the predator. And vice-versa. Best of all, this was going to happen entirely on my turf, where the advantage would
be completely mine.

  Chapter 14. Iquique, Day 1

  We spent the morning at the university where Suzanne got to spend one-on-one time with various faculty members discussing biochemistry. She was scheduled to give a seminar on her research in the late afternoon, but the schedule was quite relaxed because everyone knew everyone else from the meetings. There were no high-powered researchers in this department, but they all had laboratories where they did some research on their own and where they supervised part-time regular year and full-time summer research by undergraduate students who volunteered to work in the labs.

  Apparently there was local venture capital-type funding for small research projects to look for chemicals that had potential pharmaceutical applications in the plants and shrubs indigenous to the Atacama Desert area. This was a perfect fit for the local university in general, and for the biochemists here at the university. It was also a potential fit for Suzanne and her own research interests, so she was able to discuss research and get a sense of what the various faculty members were studying in their laboratories as a perfect cover story for why we were visiting Iquique.

  Our first lunch in Iquique was a leisurely affair with Norberto Neruda and Pablo Pinochet, the distant cousins of folks with familiar names in Chile. Norberto was short and pudgy, the ultimate couch potato. There wasn't an ounce of muscle visible anywhere. If the expression existed in Chilean Spanish, which it doesn't, he would have been a "patata de sofá ultima". Anyway, you get the idea. Pablo was almost the exact opposite, very tall and very thin. He wasn't in any kind of shape either. As a pair, Norberto and Pablo were the classic "Gordo y Flaco" characters made famous as a fat and thin comedy team on countless Latin American TV variety shows and sitcoms. They took us to Boulevard, a small, crowded restaurant downtown, towards the harbor area north of the campus, which served an eclectic mix of French and European food. Our reservations got us immediate seating at a rectangular wooden table with old-fashioned wooden chairs towards the back of the large single room that housed this sophisticated, at least by Iquique standards, brightly lit restaurant. Both Suzanne and I had seats facing windows that looked out over the harbor. Service was leisurely paced and each table had a bottle or carafe of wine centered on it, so people were eating their meals at a pace that encouraged talking over an hour or two for the meal. The quiet murmur of conversations at other tables and the muted sounds of service contributed to the impression of discussion and leisurely dining. We ordered a couple of different styles of fondue to share and individual salads, which were huge. After we were served and began to eat, Norberto started telling us some of the history of Iquique. He spoke rapidly with only a slight accent, and punctuated occasional statements with sweeping hand and arm gestures and exaggerated facial expressions.

  “This city and the Tarapaca Region it is in were part of Peru in the colonial era, and remained part of Peru for the next 75 years or so until the War of the Pacific, when Chile took over the territory. The name of our university, UNAP, is an acronym for the Universidad Nacional de Arturo Prat, a name you will also see on our streets and all over this city. Arturo Prat was a naval officer who fought a major battle during the War of the Pacific here in Iquique harbor. His old wooden warship, the Esmeralda, fought against an ironclad ship from the Peruvian navy, the Huascar, and of course he lost the battle. Captain Prat’s ship was rammed and sunk. Prat was killed trying to board and capture the Huascar. But his bravery inspired all of Chile and he became a national hero as a result of his sacrifice."

  "Would Chileans in Santiago or the south of the country know this history and who Arturo Prat was?" asked Suzanne.

  "Of course, this is taught to all of us in our schools when we are very young, perhaps 10 or 11 years old. Your closest counterpart in United States history might have been one of the men who died at The Alamo in your war with Mexico in the nineteenth century. Would everyone in the entire USA know about that?" Norberto replied. The last comment was punctuated with upraised eyebrows and a quizzical expression.

  "Yes, of course," Suzanne answered, "But probably more from the movies than from history lessons. If you asked someone you met on the street back home in Los Angeles the name of the biggest hero of the Alamo they would most likely answer John Wayne!"

  Norberto continued his narrative. “This was a city of relatively great wealth in the 19th and early 20th centuries because of the region's guano deposits, which supplied fertilizer and gunpowder ingredients to Europe. With the invention of the Haber process for making nitrates in Germany, the nitrate industry in Chile tanked. But, just in time for all of those ships coming into our bay with its nice sheltered harbor to go out carrying a load of copper, Iquique became the port of choice for shipping copper from Northern Chilean mines to the rest of the world. Iquique is also famous for its brutal treatment of the copper miners when they tried to unionize and get better wages and working conditions. There was a famous massacre here in 1907 where hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of miners were killed when the Chilean army fired upon a large group of miners and their families who had assembled in the Church of Santa Maria in Iquique to protest against their working conditions."

  "What happened then?" I asked.

  "Not much. We are far away from the center of power in Santiago and very isolated here, then and now. The massacre remains famous mostly because of our folk music and poetry, but the conditions in the mines are still very dangerous and the workers are not well paid by Chilean standards. We still ship copper along with fresh fruits and vegetables from our irrigated agriculture inland from here.”

  Then it was Pablo’s turn, and he told us about the university, UNAP. Pablo was clearly the more effeminate half of the couple, with a higher pitched voice and a slightly fussy turn of phrase.

  “This is an undergraduate university where the faculty spends most of its time teaching. Research is not required, and most of the faculty has a Master’s degree rather than a Ph.D. We give only Bachelor’s degrees, the B.A. and B.S., to our students. If they want to get a higher degree, they generally go to Santiago or Concepcion for advanced study. Our students have to pass an examination for admission, so tend to be pretty good for the most part. There are a couple of lovely beaches within a few hundred meters of the campus, and the campus is co-educational, so this is a popular choice of university for students from northern Chile."

  Suzanne told them a little bit about her university, UCLA, the University of California in Los Angeles. "We have a few things in common after all," she continued. "We also select students based on academic excellence, so our undergraduates are very good, and we too offer beautiful beaches near the campus."

  Then the conversation turned to politics. Norberto remarked, “The Santa Maria de Iquique Massacre kind of set the tone for this region, which is politically an odd mix of very conservative elements led by the wealthy mine owners and the Church, and strong Socialist elements led by the mine workers and their unions. The university has a very strongly conservative administration, many of who were appointed during the Pinochet era. The faculty is split, with very liberal elements in the arts, the humanities, and social sciences, and pretty conservative members, for the most part, in engineering, agriculture, science, medicine, and technology. If one keeps quiet, nobody cares about somebody's political orientation. It can be a mistake to be labeled a liberal or a socialist at the beginning of one’s career if you want to be promoted to a tenured position.”

  Pablo added, “Norberto and I are almost certainly two of the most politically and socially liberated individuals in the group you met in Lima and Cuzco. Most of them are a lot more conservative than we are. I assume you realize that we are a gay couple, which scandalizes some of our older and more religious faculty members. Everyone accepts us completely as professional colleagues, but most of them tend to avoid us socially, especially the ones with families. They seem to be afraid that their children may catch whatever it is that we have,” he said with an ironic laugh.

  Suzanne sat up stra
ighter and replied for both of us. She leaned towards Pablo and spoke directly to him. “To be perfectly honest with you, neither Roger nor I have thought about your sexual orientations one way or the other. California is pretty far ahead of Northern Chile in terms of our comfort zone with population diversity, especially in terms of legal and social acceptance of different sexual lifestyles. But thank you for sharing this information with us. We’re trying to get to know as many scientists at the university as we can, as well as we can, on this trip and appreciate your honesty.”