Lex talionis
Chapter 09. Questionable decision
"Nothing. Or this guy had less of a social life than me," joked Isobel.
"What? Because you want to," Jubal replied in the same tone.
Isobel felt herself blush. Without looking at him, she didn't suppress a smile but didn't let him interrupt her.
"...or does not know what the internet is. I can't find anything on Ambrós' social networks."
She and Jubal had been trying to find out more information about the driver, and Isidoro Yáñez, the other coroner.
"Maybe he is very discreet," he suggested. Yáñez, on the other hand, must live glued to his cell phone. He never stops posting on many platforms. Look. Also, it's all in the style of this.
He showed Isobel a post on the laptop screen: a selfie of Yáñez's somewhat paunchy figure in a swimsuit, lying on the stern of a sleek speedboat, which floated on crystal clear turquoise waters; he had a pretty girl in a bikini on either side and a cocktail in his hand. All were sporting tanned skin and radiant smiles.
"Wow. The good life, huh? Aren't you envious? I am," said Jubal.
"Are you talking about the Caribbean, the boat or the girls?"Isobel teased in a burst of sarcastic audacity.
"Of it all?" he replied with guilty both grimace and smile, managing to make her laugh. When it came to visualizing himself on the boat, however, Jubal couldn't help but eliminate the girls and imagine Isobel next to him, laughing with her eyes sparkling, as she was now. Was it wrong that he liked to make her laugh so much…? "Although perhaps," he mused aloud, "I'd choose another company-"
At the door of the room, the knocks they had agreed upon between them interrupted him. Isobel checked first anyway, and let Darío in.
Meanwhile, Jubal made an effort to erase from his mind the image of Isobel wearing only a bikini. Not quite succeeding, he cleared his throat, somewhat heated.
"How did it go? What did you find out?" Isobel immediately asked Darío, anxious.
His friend had gone to the Civil Registry Office in search of information about the people to whom the dental records really belonged. Darío sat down heavily at the foot of one of the beds before answering. "Jubal here were right," he replied with a scowl. "Jacinta and Elías died in May of last year, both of natural causes."
It took a few seconds for that to sink in completely.
"So, probably," Isobel said in a sinister, hollow voice. "The charred corpses that appeared on the bridge were theirs. That's why they tampered with the dental records; to match them to the autopsy bodies..."
The three of them looked at each other dejectedly.
Jubal, however, tried to get his mind going right away. "But Sofía's sister…" he said, reviewing the documents in the case file. "There is an affidavit from Adriana Fresneda that identifies the bodies as those of her sister and her nephew. Unless the statement is also false, it is assumed that she recognized some of their personal effects..."
"Then we'll have to talk to her too, won't we?" proposed Darío.
Isobel could only half hear them. Her fears had been confirmed and it was as if the ground had finally disappeared beneath her feet. She went to the door, shaking her head.
"Isobel?" call her Jubal, worried.
But she did not answer; just left the room, closing the door slowly behind her.
Darío and Jubal exchanged a puzzled look. The younger man made a slight questioning gesture. Jubal hesitated. At his lack of reaction, Darío was to stand up looking at him with some derision. Jubal scowled and moved ahead of him, following Isobel; he pretended not to hear the other man sigh patiently.
·~·~·
To his great relief, Jubal found her outside in the hallway. He didn't like the idea of Isobel wandering the streets of Acuna alone under such circumstances.
She was with her back against the wall, her head down.
Jubal approached slowly."Are you all right?" he asked in a quiet voice.
Without looking at him, Isobel shook her head fatalistically. "No, damn it. I need a culprit," she muttered under her breath.
And now I'm not even sure if there is one. I need it and I don't know how to get it...
Something didn't fit, but Jubal was distracted by the lock of dark hair that had fallen to Isobel's face. It wasn't easy for him to suppress a highly inappropriate impulse to gently pull it back and tuck it behind her ear.
"Hadn't we agreed that it was better that Sofia and Carlos could be alive...?" he asked rhetorically but very softly.
"Yeah…" she replied. "But we don't know if they actually are. Just that someone," she almost exclaimed, frustrated, "manipulated everything so that it would be very difficult to find out what really happened."
Jubal looked at her in dismay. He tried to find words of encouragement, but still failed to understand Isobel's distress.
Unless...
An infinitesimal lightning flash illuminated his mind. And the blood thickened in his veins. "You weren't going to turn the culprit over to the GN. Your intention is to hand him over to Vargas," he declared gravely; it was not a question.
As if an arctic wind had blown over her, Isobel suddenly froze.
Of course. Jubal was a smart man. Isobel should have been more aware that sooner or later he would figure it out. It was still a terrible, heartbreaking moment. The seconds of silence became agonizing.
"Not in exchange for anything," Isobel finally confirmed, realizing that denying everything would be much worse.
Still staring at the floor, she could see Jubal's feet step back a little on the old-fashioned pattern of the worn hotel carpet.
Wrapping her arms around her body, she raised her face and looked at him with defiant eyes, daring him to question her, and at the same time terrified that she had lost his respect and appreciation... even more so that Jubal would get to tie up the last missing end. "I going to offer the culprit in exchange for him to stop attempting against... —your life— ...our lives," she added.
Jubal's mind struggled to grasp the implications of this, bewilderment mingling with an incipient sense of horror. "But Isobel... How could you even trust him?" he asked, his voice choking because he was having trouble breathing.
"He's already shown us that he can hold up his end of a bargain."
Reluctantly, but Jubal had to agree with her on that. Once a deal was done with Vargas, he had never backed down. But, of course, you had to have something to negotiate with. A human life, in this case.
"And would you really be-?" Jubal swallowed with difficulty the lump in his throat. "Would you be willing to put someone's life in Vargas' hands so that he could do with this person… whatever he wanted?" he managed to finish.
"No. No 'someone's'. A murderer's of innocents," Isobel remarked fiercely. I know, that doesn't matter," she admitted at once and lowered her eyes, unable to bear her shame. "No, I'm not willing... Nonetheless," for you, "I would."
"But-" gasped Jubal. "But that would be like sacrificing..." your soul.
Although he didn't have the courage to say it out loud, Isobel knew it anyway. It was as if someone twisted a dagger in her heart, the very fact that he thought that.
That he thought the same way she did.
"Yeah…" Isobel agreed downcast and resigned, "That's why I didn't want to implicate any of you. Darío doesn't know either. This must fall solely on my conscience." She looked up bravely. "No one else's."
Isobel was not surprised to see the shock on Jubal's face; she knew he would disapprove -she would have been disappointed her if he had not- but in the end she couldn't bear what she interpreted as his deep revulsion. She turned her face away and went back into the room.
Absolutely shocked by all this, Jubal took some time to follow her.
·~·~·
Looking for a way to contact Adriana Fresneda, they discovered that she was a successful engineer and entrepreneur. Despite her relative youth -she was only 35 years old- she was CEO and CTO of "BaluarTec", her own company located in Monterrey, Nuevo León, dedicated to the design and manufacture of sensors, specialized cameras and other security system devices. A thriving business that turned over several million dollars a year.
Isobel and Darío spent much of the morning trying to contact Srta. Fresneda at home and at her company, but they ran into an effective deflector screen of assistants, subordinates and people at her service who told them that Ms. Fresneda either was in the office working, or was busy, or not in the office, in an endless circle. All they offered to do was to take contact details to call back 'when she could' in a way that implied that 'when' might not be any time soon.
They knew that Ambrós had not disappeared during the incident, but he seemed equally impossible to track. Darío had called Caldera again, but this time received no answer.
For his part, Jubal had continued to take charge of Dr. Yáñez angle. There were no other means of contact except his social accounts. Jubal sent him DMs to fb, ig and twtr with anonymous profiles, but so far received no response. Furthermore, he let Isobel and Darío know that he had noticed that Yáñez had not posted anything for almost 48 hours. For someone averaging five posts an hour, that was pretty weird. Other than that, Jubal had ceased being of much help. He had been nothing but mentally stuck on what Isobel had confessed to him. He couldn't get out of that suffocating sense of anguish.
It didn't take Darío long to realize that something was up. The somber faces of both spoke for themselves. He had asked several times if everything was okay, only to receive mumbled affirmative answers. But it was obvious that Isobel was avoiding eye contact with Jubal, and Darío was becoming increasingly uneasy.
When they took their lunch break, heading for the cantina across the street, he approached Isobel slyly, letting a rather self-absorbed Jubal step forward a bit.
"[Are you okay?]" he whispered to her.
Isobel was far from okay.
While imagining what Jubal must be thinking about her tore at her insides, an unmanageable weight sank her heart into the mire of hopelessness and fear for him.
She nodded, trying to be convincing, but a sidelong glance toward Jubal escaped her. Unfortunately, that only made Darío now look at Jubal with resentment, as if thinking he was the cause of Isobel's distress.
When in reality, she was the only one to blame.
·~·~·
"Okay, then let's go talk to Miss Fresneda and that's it," said Isobel.
They were just finishing lunch and Sofia's sister still did not return their calls. Isobel was exasperated. She needed to do something soon or she was going to lose it.
"How far are we from Monterrey? Four hours by car?"
"Six, more like," Darío estimated with a grimace.
"Well, what do you propose?" she asked, waving his hand impatiently.
"I'd rather talk to Yáñez first," Darío answered reasonably, without letting himself be carried away by the urgency she gave off. "I think it will be easier to get information out of him than from Caldera, and I would swear they are both in on it."
"But we're not going all the way to Veracruz to talk to Yáñez," Isobel protested, frustrated. "It's twice as far or more..."
'I'd keep trying to do it over the phone."
"I agree with Darío," Jubal interjected, surprising the other two because he had been quiet during the entire meal. "But, if I'm not misunderstanding, it won't be possible."
The questioning look was identical on Isobel and Darío. With an almost creepy expression, Jubal pointed to what was playing on the cantina's television at the moment.
An unpleasant chill ran down Isobel's spine.
"Isidoro Carrión Yáñez was found dead near his home in Veracruz this morning," Darío grimly read the headline aloud, translating from Spanish.
That could not be accidental.
·~·~·
The information the media were reporting was that Yáñez's luxury home had been burglarized and that its owner had been found dead nearby.
With a sense of doom, upon returning to the hotel room, Darío decided to take a chance and take a look at the file that the GN had opened on the case.
The investigation has just been opened, of course. The autopsy report was not yet available, but the case summary mentioned that the body had been found at the bottom of a ravine. Although the cause of death was consistent with the fall he appeared to have suffered, Yáñez's body had other clear signs of violence.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Isobel asked, getting up after reading that. Her legs would not allow her to stand still. She walked across the room, "That someone was trying to get information out of him the hard way...?
Darío and Jubal nodded very seriously. All around them, the room felt dark and gloomy, as if death was haunting them.
"It may have been for unrelated reasons... But it would be too much of a coincidence," Jubal agreed.
"So," continued Darío, "whoever was also investigating, may have been able to find out what Yáñez knew... And has silenced him forever."
"Then we only have Adriana left," said Isobel dismay. "And even she may not know anything..."
That oppressive sensation forced her to close her eyes and hunch over physically. She heard Jubal and Darío ask her worriedly if she was okay. She did not answer, thinking for a moment she was drowning. Jubal started to get up.
No. She couldn't give up. Her insides remained clenched in an unpleasant knot, but Isobel shook her head and straightened her shoulders, regaining her resolve and unknowingly provoking one of those waves of admiration in Jubal that left him breathless.
"It doesn't matter," said Isobel. "We have to find out if she knows whatever. We must leave for Monterrey immediately."
Jubal and Darío nodded, without hesitation, suddenly imbued with the overwhelming force of her will. They were about to get to their feet, but Isobel made a gesture to stop them.
"The situation is becoming increasingly risky," she declared in a serious tone, looking at them alternately. "Yáñez's death confirms that we may have to deal with some really dangerous people. If you don't want to continue forward, I will understand perfectly." Hers eyes looked blacker than usual.
"Oh, sure, that's right. I'm going home then," Darío said with an openly sarcastic tone. He looked at her from under his eyebrows. "Let's go."
He got up and set about gathering his four things.
Isobel turned to Jubal with a resigned expression. She seemed to say, 'Knowing what you know now...'
The turmoil inside him made Jubal slow to answer, although in fact he had not hesitated for a second in making his decision.
"Count me in," he said plainly.
Isobel gave him a faint tormented smile that reached Jubal deep inside.
Somewhat annoyed, Darío watched them stare at each other in silence. He snapped his fingers impatiently.
"Vamos. You two. We don't have all day."
·~·~·
"Come on, Elise. You need to take a break. Eat something," Kelly insisted.
"Or you'll faint..." Stuart added worriedly.
-One more and I'm done," replied Elise.
They had been calling every lodging in Ciudad Acuña that they could find for hours.
"Good afternoon, please, may you put me through to Mr. Valentine's room," she repeated for the umpteenth time.
Asking to talk directly was the best way to contact without having to explain, but so far there had been no luck. All the hotels and hostels they had called had replied that none of their guests were called by that name. Neither by 'Mrs. Castille'. At the JOC, they all were beginning to fear that Jubal and Isobel had used other names and that it would not be possible to find them that way.
However, this time...
"Mmm... Yes, one moment, please," replied a polite male voice with only a slight accent.
Elise almost dropped the receiver from her hand. She gestured frantically to the others to signal that she had something. Everyone move quickly to gather around her, anxious.
"I'm sorry," came back the voice from earlier, "I can't put you through to him."
"And... um, could I leave a message?"
"No, I'm sorry. Mr. Valentine was staying with us but he is no longer at the hotel. He paid for his stay and checked out less than 1 hour ago."
Elise said a polite goodbye and hung up the phone. Only then did she allow herself to let out an expletive that was the first her colleagues had ever heard.
~.~.~.~