Closed Road Ahead

Road Closed Ahead (extract)

Paula Ilabaca Núñez

Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Rothe

On the other hand, nothing is clear. For example: who are you? And if you think you know, why do you keep lying about it?

Paul Auster

I know I was never here, or maybe I dreamed ofvisiting this place, I remember exactly what it was like Los Encargados

To all those mouths and voices that fell silent on a roadblock 1

They always said I was the best. Maybe they were right, maybe I did stand out from the others. I alwayshandled what they requested, did whatever they told me. I held truth and justice in my hands and used them to get the job done; pain and death were always nearby and I became immersed in both. With my hands open or closed, I was there. This could be my story or not This could be the story of threefriends growing up, and me falling into a deep, endless spiral of encounters. I see myself, a young woman, digging into whatever he suggested and instructed, into the lives of other people, into their grieving and silences, into their difficulties. I see myself in an echo of basins and cells, in holes I called memories. I look at myself in a mirror that keeps on bending, the mirror of my face. I lie, dream a lot, telling myself: it’s late, it’s late, Leiva, and you’ll run to work and see him, yes, you’ll see him again standing in front of you, like that morning, but he won’t be burned; you’ll see him alive and you’ll have him in front of you, and you won’t know what to do.

I was your best detective. I imagine you reading the documents spread over your desk, cell phone in hand. You keep calling me. I see the orange light on my cellphone flash, once, twice, three, four, nine missed calls. You’re probably smoking another cigarette. When you leave the office, they’ll ask you if you needa lift home. I know you, though,you prefer to drive. You go back to your office, sit in your big chair and look at the picture of yourunit on the left side of your desk. You look at each of us, thinking: she was my best detective. I imagine you crumpling a piece of paper, the report on my situation. You angrily toss it in the trash. Then you look at Urquiza, that seducer;you look him up and down. Why had youthought it a good idea to pay off an old debt by letting him join the Unit? Why did you accept to mix him with the men and women who you had trained for years?Urquiza, standing inthe cornerofthe group, with his hand at his waist. Urquiza saying with his body that he’s standing there because he’s the tallest. He smiles cynically, with his blond, slicked-back hair, serious, but with greenish brown eyes staring at the camara, slightly exposing his shoulder holster and service gun. I’m also in the picture, sitting to the right ofour boss, far fromUrquiza, with myblack hair pulled back inatight ponytail, a clean face, dark mascaraed eyes, and a soft glowon mylips. I don’t smile, I hardlyever smile; that’s my thing, my way of saying don’t fuck with me. I was your best detective, and this time, Deputy Commissioner Cuevas, Ilet you down.

No, I can’t talk about what happened to me. I mean, I know I have to, that it’s my duty, but if it were up to me, I wouldn’t. I know you’re from the Fifth Department and I can’t decline this interview, it’s part of an internal investigation. I know you’re investigating me and the other people we’re investigating. I’ll tell you everything, but give me some time.What happened to me was arbitraryand violent—stupid too. I don’t know where you want to start; I’d like to start from the beginning, but tell me where you’d begin if you were on this side of the table. I look you over, dressed in your brand name suit, which still isn’t enough to make you appear like anything else than a public service employee No, I don’t want to start with Urquiza, he’s not a bad guy,

much less a bad detective. He’s got a good eye, sharp, born for forensics, accurate, tenacious. No, I wouldn’t put him down. Urquiza is ambitious and competitive, two facades that, between us, we in the Homicide Unit don’t really tolerate. He had his opportunity and made the most of it. He didn’t care about drowning me in rumors and staining my resume. Like you said yesterday, he could do it and he did. That’s what I least want to talk about with you, but, as I said, show me where to walk. And I’ll follow.

Deputy Commissioner Cuevas has gone through a lot this month. We began with the death of the dictator, the end of an era. The geezer dropped dead and the whole country was shaken up; work got strange, dense. We were all nervous, prepared for anything. We didn’t rest until his body was buried in Los Boldos. On edge, no sleep. I setmy ringtone volume to max, ready to go wherever they sent me. There were nights when I kept my clothes on, napping on the couch in my apartment, waiting for the call. Not at all, the dictator was everywhere, as if he were still alive. More than a month has gone by and yeah, it seems like any moment now he could walk out of the BoldosEstate in some pathetic, final act. This is how things went down: first, it was his death, and right when we started to get back to normal, we had the case of the woman killed at the grocery store on Christmas Eve. The news was all over it, classifying, giving a nameto the new crime: “The Grocery Girl Stabbing.” A young, beautiful woman, they said, a model mother. How could someone take her life? A new crime of passion. My question, my unease, was simpler. Why had they killed another woman?

That case is why we’re here, face to face at this table, in this office, you and I. That case is why GabrielBarriosAcuña came looking for me and sat here, just like you and I are now. That case, the one with the murdered woman, is why we unrolled this black thread. The skein will get darker, like Gabriel’s hair and body when I saw him burned five years ago. This black thread is about to break or get entangled right here in my chest. I told you I’d tell you everything; I just need some time, though. Yeah, some of them say they unmasked me, that I’ll never be myself

again. But I wonder, can I be myself again after what happened? After seeing him in the Unit office that afternoon? Seeing him there and remembering his mother, his house, the pictures of him I saw at that scene five years ago? I feel like my thoughts are falling in front of me, in front of us, and I can’t arrange them. You look at me but don’t say a word. Tell me, really, where are we carrying this thread? Because the skein, at least for me, has already fallen apart.

Yeah, I heard that Deputy Commissioner Cuevas suggested he take a vacation, that he disappear from his desk and the halls, but he also had to talk with you. I know they call him the traitor, that they don’t even look at him, that he goes into the cafeteria and everyone gets up, like he were a virus or something. No one wants to be with him, or even be close to him. I thought it would be like that with me too, but no, no one wants to look at Urquiza. They say I’m a solitary woman, and I may be, because I don’t have a boyfriend, I don’t know what the point is either way, no one knows if I live alone or not what do they care! The only colleague I ever invited to my apartment was Urquiza, and look what happened. Yeah, I want to take a break and talk about him. Listen to this: we were working a crime scene downtown and the station radioed for us to take a post at one of the student marches, a couple months ago, in September. Lunch time came around. Urquiza said something about going to a spot on the corner of the Alameda. I thought it was a funny suggestion. Imagine two on-duty police officers eating lunch there, for everyone to see. He looked at me and muttered that he had never seen me smile before, and I guess he was right, I took it as a sort of naïvecompliment and suggested we have lunch at my apartment. He’d buy something and I’d head up in the meantime. That’s what we did; we left each other at my building entrance. He didn’t take long to came up with food and a conspicuous bottle of wine. We set the table, talking the whole time. He looked around at everything: the living room and open kitchen, the short hall leading to the two bedrooms with their doors half open. After a while he asked if I lived with anyone. I said no, that I liked living alone. I said yes,that the apartment had been my home for a long time. I also nodded. He got up from his chair and went to turn on the radio. An old song played, a popular onefrom the 60s. Say nighty-night and kiss me, just hold me tight and tell me you miss me. He took off his jacket and stared at

me. We could have a glass of wine, he said, and I found it bold, attractive, but I said no, we were still on duty, best not to drink

I tried to talk about work, but I felt him flirting and he insisted on drinking that glass of wine. We laughed. I know I told you I never smile, but with him it was easy to smile; he loosened me up. He disassembled me and I felt comfortable with himlike that He asked if I liked the city, since I lived in the heart of downtown, and I said yes, but that I didn’t rule out leaving, moving away from Santiago, experiencing Chile’s other realities, other languages, and why not, other kinds of crimes. He listened to me attentively, gave opinions; we connected on so many ideas. They’ll never let us leave together, he interrupted. Where to? I replied. They say a position’s going to open in Iquique, he said, the description sounds a lot like your detective profile, he kept talking and pointed his index finger at me. I asked how he knew that. You always know things if you keep your eyes open, he smiled. The time came to leave, we had to change shifts at the Unit office. I didn’t want to leave, it was fun and also random, speaking about all these things, not concentrating or analyzing anything; I liked feeling that with him. In that rhythm, in that relaxation, I asked him to wait for me, because I needed to change clothes, and I went into the bathroom. When I came out, I noticed that the door to the second bedroom was wide open. Urquiza was in an armchair: he had changed the radio station, he was listening to the news and glancing through some books he had taken from my library. I hadn’t been in the bathroom that long, but I know that’s when it happened. I know that during that interval, he dug through my things like a rat. Colleagues don’t do that, they don’t sniff around, they don’t pry, don’t search for something to be used in their favor. Sometimes I feel bad that they call him a traitor; other times I think he deserves it. Of course, you’re absolutely right, what he saw, yes, we both agree, he had to report it. That’s why we’re here, you and I, in this gray room, surrounded by filing cabinets and papers in folders. That’s why we’re here. But I still don’t want to talk about him, I’d rather start by talking about what happened to Noelia and Gabriel. I need to put into words that black ball of yarn before it unwinds or disappears.

Look, there are two threads. One thread will lead us to Gabriel. The other will lead us to Noelia. There’s also a knot. The knot is in a book. Yes, write that down, a book. I see your gesture and I’ll respond right away: no, I don’t have that book anymore. It exists, of course. You can see it in the case evidence box, “The Grocery Girl Stabbing.” You might not want to hear what I’m going to tell you now, but the names of cases unsettle me. The press is always a step ahead of us, we end up saying what they indicate. If I may, I prefer to call it “Noelia’s Death.” Her murder, since that’s what it really was. So, as I was saying, the knot is in that book. At the site where Noelia was murdered, there was a book of poems. Really. I assumed it was related to the passionate nature of the crime. I don’t like calling it that either. It was a man who killed a woman. I don’t know how much passion there is in an act that low, in that kind of violence; but look, the thing is, that, investigating with Urquiza, we discovered that the book belonged to Joel. He went everywhere with that book, from one woman to another. We’ll never know why it showed up at the crime scene next to Noelia’s body. So, wait, that book, the knot in my ball of thread, had been written by Gabriel Barrios Acuña. Wait. That’s right. The thing is he didn’t use his real name, he used another name. A name he invented. That’s right. VíctorCelis. That was the name he used to protect himself, observe others, hide behind, an identity that wasn’t an identity. GabrielBarriosAcuña saw the news of Noelia’s death on the TV. He heard that there had been a book at the crime. He told me that morning he got really close to the screen to take a better look. And there he saw his book, the one he had written. They said the author’s name, and it was his name, sure, the name he had invented, an alias or pseudonym, like writers say. He heard themsayhis name. Maybe his ego brought him to this point. He wanted to see himself here, just like you and I are, but it wasn’t necessary. He made a mistake coming into the Unit. It wasn’t a good idea. I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that. No, I’m not covering for him. Wait a second, I need to get out of this office for a bit. Gabrieland Noelia are one in my ball of thread: one leads to the other. I need to go to the bathroom. You can stop recording for a second, I’ll be right back.

Thank you. I’m listening. I understand your opinion. Yes, I understand. We cannot compare Noelia’s murder with the apparent death of Gabriel Barrios Acuña. Exactly. I mean, what you mentioned and something else. I’m getting to that. Let me tell you something: I’ve talked to those women. I listen to them every day. I’ve talked with their mothers, their sisters, their grandmothers, with the wives of the suspects, with their lovers. Don’t be fooled because I’m young. I’ve been in charge of crime scenes. A lot of crime scenes. You know what goes down. You talk with the neighbors, from the most trivial to the most unsettling. I’m there and I’m not, I stand on the edge, the brink. In that cordiality, in that closeness, I search everywhere for the thread that will lead me to the truth. Of course, not the universal truth, but the truth of the investigation. In Noelia’s case, I listened to a lot of women. Wait, I have to tell you something before that: there’s a rumor here in the Unit, you know? They say I don’t get along with women. That’s not true. I listen to them without saying a word, absolutely receptive. I take something away from each crime scene. And in this ball of yarn, beyond the book and Gabriel’s visit, the outroar merged into one question: why did they kill another woman?

I don’t know if I can talk about the first time I saw her, because I’m not sure when that was. It was probably when they assigned us to be partners. But I do remember when she really caught my attention for the first time. We’d been working together for almost a year, we’d done several operations together, but that day all my thoughts and reflections about her fit into place. It was last Christmas, that night at that supermarket killing. She was picking up a discman. It was on the floor. I’d say that blood had almost splattered it, but she picked it up anyway. I mention this because, well, I saw her wipe it clean. There are two things here: first, at crime scenes we always keep our hands in our pockets, so we don’t alter the evidence; it’s our job, find meanings in the investigation. Second, it’s true that we now use gloves, before we’d just go to the scenelike this, but she used her naked finger to scoop up a pint of blood and stash it in one of her cargo-vest pockets. Instead of bothering me, this got me thinking about her, what was inside her, in her

head, in her mind, to be able to do that. You know: at a crime scene, we collect and individualize evidence as soon as we see it, but she took the discman and kept it. The rest of the elements left at the scene were: the knife the forensic doctor extracted from the woman’s body, the clothes they had taken off her, a wedding ring that fell onto the floor, a book. Yeah, a book of poems. Everything was left there, as if they chose to stay there until someone picked them up and packed them in plastic bags to transfer them to the Crime Lab. That’s right, we completed the custody proceeding of evidence for their corresponding examination. They’d told me about her before I joined the Unit, but I had gotten used to the situation. Before, I didn’t know what it would be like trying to start conversation with her, looking into her dark eyes, observing her expressions, which are always serious. I didn’t know how nervous I could get with a colleague. Yeah, I get nervous. I mean, she’s also imposing, but not with her size, which is quite normal, or with her height, because she’s rather short. You already spoke to her. You understand. You know what I mean. The thing is I think she’s imposing because she has a serious air about her, which you notice right away, and it’ssheer sadness. She almost never smiles, she speaks fast, never talks much about her personal life, what she likes or what touches her. No one knows if she has a boyfriend, if she’s engaged, if she wants to be a mother. She’s there like one more person, but working with her is, to say the least, odd. They say a case scarred her when she was young, one of the first cases she solved, or tried to solve, when she joined the Unit. They say that’s what connected her with Deputy Commissioner Cuevas, that she’shis protégée. Here in the institution, we use that expression a lot: protégé, protégée. To me, they’re just two good colleagues that respect each other. Even though he considers her the best detective in the Homicide Unit.

During the time we worked together I had grown to respect her sort of predictions, a procedure that doesn’t actually bother anyone, but a lot of colleagues feel it’s disrespectful: it consists of doing a preliminary eyeball inspection of the crime scene, completely by herself, for several minutes, and then the rest of us can start our work. That Christmas Eve, Leiva, who was in charge of the crime scene, asked us all to leave. The neighbors who had gathered around complied, and the experts took a step out to smoke a cigarette. I knew everyone was waiting for the magic. Inthe Homicide Unit we have some very histrionic colleagues who like to have an audience hear their first hypotheses. She’s not like that. They used to say, when I came to work here, that when she was alone she could see what had happened. I know, it’s ridiculous to think

that, but that’s what they talked about in the Homicide Unit, that’s what they said: that she did magic. It’s a metaphor, an idea, of course, of something incomprehensible. I think she’s so good at what she does because she knows how to read the crime scenes. That night, I don’t know why, it had never occurred to me before, I stayed there, hidden in one of the supermarket aisles, very quietly, to watch what she did from a distance. I remember that Leiva kept staring at the woman’s body. I had noticed a high heel, it looked old, not like the ones they use now, lying next to the body. She was wearing one and the other was a meter away, approximately a meter and a half away from her. It was a pink or peach colored high heel. I noticed that Leiva also kept staring at it very intently. She walked along the wide aisle. She looked at the roof, and seemed to discard it immediately: it was too high for there to be a clue. There was a discman close to the woman’s right hand, and a bookfarther off. That’s the book that would lead us to possibly reopening the case of the “Burnt Man of La Florida.”

I kept watching her. Leiva took a notebook from her pocket and quickly started sketching the scene. Yes, she’s a really good drawer. She’s used to doing her own drawings of the scene which she later compares with those provided by the planimetrics expert. She added numbers around the drawing of the body; I guessed they were space measurements, evidence she had found. When she finished, and without putting on gloves, she took the discman and opened it. I almost went over to her. What was she doing? Her fingerprints would be all over the discman. There was a CD inside. She looked around and stashed the discman in her right jacket pocket. She then went over to the book, remember that book, she flipped through it and put it in her left pocket. When I describe these actions, I try to do so just as she did: no doubts, no hesitation. She did it cleanly, even though we hadn’t spent more than ten minutes at the crime scene. She moved quickly through the aisles back to the entrance. She asked the Crime Lab experts to go in and register the evidence. I acted like I was just arriving. I got nervous. They were going to collect the evidence of an intervened crime scene.

Leiva’s hypothesis was that the victim had been killed by a possible lover. The number of knife wounds was precise for committing an accurate murder, in one go. There weren’t any signs of cruelty. Horrified, we coincidedon the fact that there were crimes in which men kill women to alleviate a weight, I don’t know how to explain it, like an obsession; crimes of passion, as they’re called. We concluded that the supposed lover worked at the supermarket, primarily because the guards said none of the doors had been forced open. And yes, we assumed that it

was a man, from the force of the knife wounds. The medical examiner later corroborated this. I got ahead of myself and said I’d take declarations. That’s when the district attorney, who was a woman, showed up. Of course, everyone knows that Leiva doesn’t like working with women. The district attorney asked her what we could determine at that point, that we keep her up to date. Leiva said it was too early. I smiled. Leiva knew that hypotheses are quickly leaked to the press and that Christmas Eve was ideal for breaking news of a crime in the morning. She told the DA she needed to trail a suspect and asked for her authorization. The response was affirmative. I stuck around taking declarations and she left without saying a word, but in the end I wasn’t surprised. She usually does that; I think I’m used to it. As for me, I contacted two people that night. One was the suspect who Leiva went after that morning. Yeah, the bagger who worked at the same checkout booth as the dead woman. My second interviewee was one of the neighbors who approached me to talk. You know how it goes, you choose them and they choose you.