Trese: Thirteen Stations
by Budjette Tan & Kajo Baldisimo
EDSA, Metro Manila
Comforter of the Aflicted
by F.H. Batacan
Lagro
The neck is broken. That’s why the head is turned at such an unnatural angle. The body is lying chest down on the floor, but the head tilts upward and twists sharply to the right, a rotation of more than ninety degrees. The eyes are open, staring. Something in that frozen expression makes Saenz think she did not go down meekly. Her fingernails are rimmed with gunk from where she scratched her attacker, raked flesh, drew blood.
Senior Inspector Mike Rueda stands quietly behind the priest, waiting.
Saenz straightens up from a crouching position over the body with a slight groan.
“You okay, Father?” Rueda asks.
“I’m an old man,” Saenz mumbles, almost to himself. He strips off the latex gloves, presses the heel of his left hand against his right eye to relieve the pressure there. He is about to absentmindedly stuff the bloodstained gloves into the pocket of his jeans when Rueda reaches out to stop him.
For a man with a prizefighter’s face, Rueda is surprisingly gentle. “Let me take those.” He holds open his own gloved hand. Saenz realizes his mistake, grunts, and hands the gloves over. He glances down at his jeans and notices a small red streak where the gloves have made contact with the denim.
“Like I said, Mike. An old man.”
Rueda bags the gloves. “You need a vacation.” He shrugs at the woman’s body. “Well, maybe after this one.” He turns, motions for a young officer to take the small bag for disposal. When she’s out of earshot, he moves closer to the priest. “So was it the broken neck, or the glass?”
She had fallen from the stairs onto a glass-top table. The blood pooled beneath her head was from where a large sliver of glass had lodged itself in her brain.
“Either, both,” Saenz shrugs. “What matters is, was she pushed?” He glances up at the stairs, waving long fingers toward a section of the balustrade near the top that had given way. “You try a fracture-match on that, and I’m guessing the stress marks will be consistent with a forceful impact. Not with any mere weakness in either the structure or the material.” Back to the woman now, fully absorbed in her face. “Gave him hell, though. Her luck ran out at the top of the stairs, but before she went down, she made him suffer nearly as much as she did.”
Rueda surveys their surroundings. Books have fallen off shelves, picture frames knocked off walls, furniture overturned. “Satisfied it’s a him, then?”
Saenz nods. “There’s a full-length mirror on the door of one of the bedrooms. It’s cracked. Nothing lying around it, and a bit of blood and hair at the point of impact. So what cracked it was a someone, not a something. Someone’s head, in fact.”
“And it’s a him because...?”
“The hair is short.” A note of exasperation lends a slight edge to Saenz’s voice. “And the point of impact is a few inches above where it would have been, had that head been hers. She’s, what — about 5'5", 5'6"? Bit taller than the average woman here. So if the person who cracked the mirror is even taller, odds are it’s a man.”
Rueda takes a deep breath, biting down his own frustration. Father Augusto Saenz is a forensic anthropologist by training, and technically his expertise wouldn’t be needed for cases like this. But if Rueda and his people could see things as clearly, connect the dots as quickly as the Jesuit does, he wouldn’t be asking him to his crime scenes so often. “Okay. I’ll make sure someone gets samples from the mirror too.”
Saenz doesn’t answer, doesn’t even seem to have heard. He is still looking intently into her face. “You brave girl,” he mutters. “You brave, brave girl.”
Her parents have been arguing for what seems like hours, but suddenly the shouting stops.
They told her to stay downstairs but she needs to know if it’s all right to come up now, if they’re going to start making dinner soon. So she creeps up the stairs and then she hears it, thud-thud-thud, like someone hitting the wall with a fist, then gasping, panting, whispered words that she can’t quite understand.
When she opens the door, her father has his hand around her mother’s throat, and he is pounding her face against the headboard.
Blind instinct, blind rage, blind something else that the child can’t understand makes her rush toward them, makes her clamber up the bed and onto his back. She grabs great thick fistfuls of his hair, tugs hard, and he releases his grip on her mother, pulls himself up from where he has been looming over the woman and pinning her down. He turns his attention to the screaming six-year-old on his back, and with one easy motion flings her off.
The child falls and hits her head on the floor, pain blooming a dozen colors in her field of vision before bleeding into white, but she gets up and lunges for him, all fingernails and elbows and tiny sharp teeth. And he knocks her back just as easily as the first time, and still she comes back for more.
The fourth time she comes at him, he picks her up by an arm, shoves her out of the room, and locks the door. The child doesn’t know it yet, but her shoulder has been dislocated.
Under ordinary circumstances, someone would have heard. The Lagro house is in a subdivision carved out of the side of a hill, and although each house is built on its own little plot of land and surrounded by concrete walls, someone would still have heard something. The living room had been a wreck when Saenz, Rueda, and his team arrived; the bedrooms only slightly less so. When she fell from the stairs, it was likely that she screamed. When her body landed below, the glass table had shattered on impact. Either of the two would have woken someone.
But everyone was awake, and still nobody heard anything. A much bigger racket was drowning it all out. It was New Year’s Eve when the killer came into her home, and nobody heard them battling it out above the din of firecrackers, blaring car horns, paper trumpets, random gunfire, and people shouting and singing in the streets. He could not have chosen a better time to strike.