Cuba Blue (2 page)

“Are you suddenly deaf?” he replied, “Get moving! Take Hilito and Latoya. Three deaths, three investigators, all the support you need. Go. Call in your initial findings.”

Quiana stood, saluted, turned, and made for the door, her mind racing.
Finally, a major case—but a huge one, three deaths. What awaited her aboard Estrada’s boat? Must’ve been an accident: old boat, old equipment, young men—bad combination. Three deaths at once? This felt like a gauntlet Gutierrez’s had thrown down.
A challenge to her training and skills as an investigator.

Emerging from Gutierrez’s office, Qui walked toward her desk and called over to two detectives sitting nearby. “Hilito, Latoya, come. We’ve got an investigation. Let’s go!”

“Terrific!” Tino Hilito leapt from his squealing desk chair.

“We’re with you, detective!” added Sergio Latoya, stuffing paperwork into a desk drawer.

Their eagerness reflected delight at escaping headquarters. In fact, they’d been clock watching until now, fearful of the last hour before shift’s end, praying for a telephone to ring and pull them out onto the street. Everyone under the colonel’s command hated Friday afternoons when Gutierrez would emerge from his office to give them all a good talking to—a lecture on desk etiquette, filling out forms properly, often haranguing against sloppiness of dress and attitude and lack of military bearing. “After all,” he’d remind them, “this is the Policia Nacional de Revolucion.”

Qui checked for signs of amusement but his wink was one of camaraderie. Leaning close, he whispered, “For effect,” nodding toward the watching eyes.

She glanced around, annoyed at still being the center of attention. “Sergio, go check out an evidence kit—gloves included this time!” She grabbed her gun, strapped it onto her hip.

“So Aguilera, got a real case now?” taunted Peña. “Want my notes from school?”

Quiana turned, paused, and replied, “You keep ‘em. Try using ‘em on that missing persons case you’ve got! Perhaps then, you might be able to close it.”

Turning back, she grinned at the catcalls and laughter.

Walking alongside her, Sergio watched the grin fade as her lips thinned. He assumed it a sign of frustration. “He’s just jealous, Lieutenant. Ignore him. You got your shield faster and made higher scores in training—we all know that. Besides, you got that ‘thank you’ note last week. He’s still fuming about that.”

Quiana chuckled at the image of Peña fuming over a letter of appreciation detailing her perfect scores. This from a high-ranking training officer who happened to be Peña’s role model. Tino had made sure that Peña had seen the letter, posting it on the bulletin board. “Still fuming?” she replied. “Serves him right. Payback for rudeness.”

They headed in separate directions, Qui’s shoes tapping out a quick rhythm. Before she cleared the door, Colonel Gutierrez shouted from his desk, “Detective Aguilera! Why’re you still here? I gave you an order five minutes ago! Now, go, go!”

3

Aboard police cutter PNR-48, Havana Bay

Here on the water, the air smelled more like rain than it did from onshore, and the sky seemed even darker, more threatening. Quiana expertly piloted the police cruiser, pushing it to maximum speed across the choppy waters of the bay. She wanted to reach the Sanabela before daylight faded or rain fell. The ponderous government boat rocked and bucked over the surface. Sergio, never one for boats, had turned slightly green from the bouncing and the foul smell of polluted water. The sound of wind and motor had become a constant barrage of noise, making conversation impossible.

Outside the bay, in smoother waters, Quiana reduced their speed as they cruised in search of the trawler.

“Gutierrez sure seems to have it in for you,” Sergio shouted to be heard.

“Yeah,” agreed Tino. “That wily old, card-playing poker-faced bit of nastiness, our beloved Colonel, is a hungry dog, and he bites.”

Qui considered Sergio’s last remarks, although flippant, a serious matter. Other than Tino and Sergio, she had no one to confide in about the job, certainly no one in her personal life. Few people outside law enforcement understood the pressures. Still, Qui wished she had one friend or relative to whom she could openly and easily discuss such matters, but who? Her longtime friend Liliana concerned herself with her dancing career, dreams of one day making a splash on a real stage—somewhere in America maybe, and she simply did not care to understand what Qui faced on the job. Qui’s father did not want her on this job period, wishing she’d pursue any other career, something safe, perhaps photography as he had. As for her boyfriend, Dr. Estaban Montoya, he could hardly be bothered with such trivialities as her problems with Gutierrez or the department.

As she turned the boat toward the shrimper, Qui’s thoughts turned to her pending assignment aboard the Sanabela. Wanting this case to be by the book perfect, she reminded herself of each step in a successful investigation. In training, each lesson was learned in the company of other recruits, but now, although Tino and Sergio were here, she was the primary investigator, and any and all results depended on her competence. She steeled herself to deal with whatever lay ahead.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of shouting. “Finally, somebody in authority,” bellowed Estrada. “I radioed when it was still daylight!”

From the side of the cruiser, Quiana looked up into the piercing eyes and the inscrutable face of Luis Estrada where he stood aboard the Sanabela. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him, still robust but pale and uncharacteristically grim.

While Tino held the ladder steady, Qui handed off the evidence kit to Estrada. As she stepped aboard the foul-smelling fishing vessel, Qui immediately wished she hadn’t eaten that pork and rice lunch at the sidewalk café in the plaza.

“So Uncle, what sort of tragedy do we have? Accident?”

“This way. See for yourself.”

He maneuvered easily across the deck, while she cautiously picked her way past fishing paraphernalia and other obstacles. Streaked with an enormous yellow-brown stain, the deck had forty years of smeared and ground-in fish guts and tobacco. He suddenly stopped ahead of her, and she looked up. What she saw made her gasp and wince, her hand flying to her mouth. Suspended before them at eye-level dangled a heavily burdened net that slowly twisted with the shifting winds and seesaw motion of the boat.

Incrementally, by degrees, her brain made sense of what her eyes dared tell her, that the grid of the net held a mass of entwined bodies.

For once Estrada had not exaggerated a situation. No one could exaggerate this. This was real, and in real life bodies smelled and tore at one’s senses like hungry ghosts screaming at the living.

“Curse of the Sanabela,” Qui muttered. As if to punctuate her words, more half-dead eels and crabs dropped from the net, scuttling slowly into the shadows near the railing.

Tino lifted a camera and began taking photos, saying, “Still life takes on new meaning.”

Estrada shook his head at the words. Qui said to him, “Uncle, it’s how we deal with traumatic death. Bad jokes.”

Qui took a deep breath, her nose already de-sensitized to the odor. She stepped closer to the winch and held onto the solid metal to mentally ground herself. The death net continued to sway ever so slowly below the hoist and hook, making a high-pitched, irritating sound—sandpaper against raw nerves. A sound that made Qui want to reach out and stop the swaying until she remembered what was in the net.

Qui again stared through the crisscrossed netting at the tangled bodies. Two white-skinned males and a paler, snowier-skinned female. All of them showing signs of torture: contusions, burns, and marks indicating some sort of binding of the wrists. Some of the bruising created a shadowed blush about the woman’s neck, and the chain had cut deep furrows in her thigh. Cigarette burns dotted the men. The same thick gray chain snaked around the lower legs, creating a knot of bodies bound together by a massive ornate lock of a type she’d never seen before. Qui noticed Estrada also staring at the lock, and she gauged his weathered face, his whiskers drooping in the damp night, the deep fissures of his wrinkles without his customary smile to lift them. She’d caught him in an unguarded moment of total despair.

“Qui…why don’t we just do what my men want?” Estrada asked.

“What exactly do they want?”

Estrada conspiratorially whispered, “Send them back to the deep, where they came from. It’d be so easy. It’s why I left them dangling in the net. Why I didn’t bring the boat in…why I insisted it be you.”