“What kind of time frame does that give us?” Deborah asked him.
Spielman shrugged. “Four to six weeks, start to finish,” he said. “He took at least a month to surgically dismember this guy, one small piece at a time. I can’t imagine anything more horrible.”
“He did it in front of a mirror,” I said, ever-helpful. “So the victim had to watch.”
Spielman looked appalled. “My God,” he said. He just sat there for a minute, and then said, “Oh, my God.” Then he shook his head and looked at his Rolex again. “Listen, I’d like to help out here, but this is . . .” He spread his hands and then dropped them on the table again. “I don’t think there’s really D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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anything I can tell you that’s going to do any good. So let me save you some time here. That Mister, uh—Chesney?”
“Chutsky,” Deborah said.
“Yes, that was it. He called in and suggested I might get an ID with a retinal scan at, um, a certain database in Virginia.”
He raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Anyway. I got a fax yesterday, with a positive identification of the victim. I’ll get it for you.” He stood up and disappeared into the hall. A moment later he ret
urned with a sheet of paper. “Here it is.
Name is Manuel Borges. A native of El Salvador, in the import business.” He put the paper down in front of Deborah. “I know it’s not much, but believe me, that’s it. The shape he’s in . . .” He shrugged. “I didn’t think we’d get this much.”
A small intercom speaker in the ceiling muttered something that might have come from a TV show. Spielman cocked his head, frowned, and said, “Gotta go. Hope you catch him.”
And he was out the door and down the hall so quickly that the fax paper he had dropped on the table fluttered.
I looked at Deborah. She did not seem particularly encouraged that we had found the victim’s name. “Well,” I said. “I know it isn’t much.”
She shook her head. “Not much would be a big improvement. This is nothing.” She looked at the fax, read it through one time. “El Salvador. Connected to something called flange.”
“That was our side,” I said. She looked up at me. “The side the United States supported. I looked it up on the Internet.”
“Swell. So we just found out something we already knew.”
She got up and headed for the door, not quite as quickly as Dr.
Spielman but fast enough that I had to hurry and I didn’t catch up until she was at the door to the parking lot.
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J E F F L I N D S A Y
Deborah drove rapidly and silently, with her jaw clenched, all the way to the little house on N.W. 4th Street where it had all started. The yellow tape was gone, of course, but Deborah parked haphazardly anyway, cop fashion, and got out of the car. I followed her up the short walkway to the house next door to the one where we had found the human doorstop.
Deborah rang the bell, still without speaking, and a moment later it swung open. A middle-aged man wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a tan guayabera shirt looked out at us in-quiringly.
“We need to speak to Ariel Medina,” Deborah said, holding up her badge.
“My mother is resting now,” he said.
“It’s urgent,” Deborah said.
The man looked at her, then at me. “Just a moment,” he said. He closed the door. Deborah stared straight ahead at the door, and I watched her jaw muscles working for a couple of minutes before the man opened the door again and held it wide. “Come in,” he said.
We followed him into a small dark room crowded with dozens of end tables, each one festooned with religious arti-cles and framed photographs. Ariel, the old lady who had discovered the thing next door and cried on Deb’s shoulder, sat on a large overstuffed sofa with doilies on the arms and across the back. When she saw Deborah she said, “Aaahhh,” and stood up to give her a hug. Deborah, who really should have been expecting an abrazo from an elderly Cuban lady, stood stiffly for a moment before awkwardly returning the embrace with a few pats on the woman’s back. Deborah backed off as soon as she decently could. Ariel sat back down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her. Deborah sat.
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