Read Online The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Eduardo Sacheri
Tags: Contemporary, Mystery
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the truth was I hadn’t been able to do very much.
I put aside the papers I’d been working on and pulled the blue dossier closer. “Liliana Emma Colotto,” I read. “Homicide.” I leafed through the pages; their contents were pretty predictable. The initial police report, with the statement of the first officer to arrive at the crime scene after the neighbor called the police. The description of the discovery of the body. The medical examiners’ application to perform an autopsy. The note attesting to the notification of the examining magistrate’s court, namely me. Me receiving the news, half asleep on the wide desk in the judge’s office, with that prick Romanojumping around me and celebrating. The statements Báez collected from the witnesses. The photographs of the crime scene. I quickly flipped past those; nevertheless, in one of the shots, taken from a point to the right of the victim’s body, I thought I recognized, very close to her hand, the tip of my shoe. I paged through the autopsy very fast—those descriptions turned my stomach—but I lingered over the examiners’ conclusions.
Rape … death by strangulation … and that third conclusion? I hadn’t paid attention to it when we’d first received the autopsy report, some weeks before. Although it didn’t seem possible, the case was apparently capable of intensifying grief even further from beyond the grave. Suddenly anxious, I continued looking through the file, but it appeared to contain no more new information. I came to the brutal charade Romano and Sicora had conducted with the innocent workers: two scanty pages of “spontaneous confessions” beaten out of those poor guys by that pig Sicora. After that, there was my formal complaint to the Appellate Court, accusing Romano and Sicora of illegal coercion and abuse and requesting that a medical examiner assess the injuries suffered by the two arrestees.
I thought of Romano, as I did every time I passed his empty desk. Right after I filed my complaint, disciplinary proceedings had begun, and he’d been provisionally suspended from his duties. At first, I’d been afraid thathis staff might bear me a grudge for turning him in; at the end of the day, we all worked for the same court. But my relations with them remained so cordial that I was moved to wonder whether they might not be secretly grateful to me for having gotten their loutish boss off their backs. I returned to the few pages left in the file. The remand of the case from the police to the examining magistrate’s court. The statements taken in our offices from the same witnesses, who limited themselves to verifying what they’d already said. And finally, a supplementary autopsy report (on the results of some visceral examination that added nothing and which, in any case, I was too apprehensive to do more than skim).
On the back of the last page, there was a note in Pérez’s handwriting, dated that same day. Following Judge Fortuna Lacalle’s express instructions, Clerk Pérez had written, “Any case submitted by the police but containing no named suspects or perpetrators must be removed from the active docket within two months, or three at the most.” Had the judge upheld that principle because he was methodical, that would have been one thing; but no, he upheld it because he was mediocre. His real motto was “The fewer cases, the better.” That was the reason behind his mania for shelving cases as soon as possible when no suspects had been found, no matter whether the crime was theft or murder.
I imagined the next step. I would put a sheet of letterhead paper in the typewriter, select the approved heading for such a document, and type up a decision of some ten lines, prescribing a stay of proceedings in the case, citing the lack of suspects, and recommending that the police continue their investigations in order to identify the guilty parties. That last part served to keep up appearances; in practice, the document was the
I put aside the papers I’d been working on and pulled the blue dossier closer. “Liliana Emma Colotto,” I read. “Homicide.” I leafed through the pages; their contents were pretty predictable. The initial police report, with the statement of the first officer to arrive at the crime scene after the neighbor called the police. The description of the discovery of the body. The medical examiners’ application to perform an autopsy. The note attesting to the notification of the examining magistrate’s court, namely me. Me receiving the news, half asleep on the wide desk in the judge’s office, with that prick Romanojumping around me and celebrating. The statements Báez collected from the witnesses. The photographs of the crime scene. I quickly flipped past those; nevertheless, in one of the shots, taken from a point to the right of the victim’s body, I thought I recognized, very close to her hand, the tip of my shoe. I paged through the autopsy very fast—those descriptions turned my stomach—but I lingered over the examiners’ conclusions.
Rape … death by strangulation … and that third conclusion? I hadn’t paid attention to it when we’d first received the autopsy report, some weeks before. Although it didn’t seem possible, the case was apparently capable of intensifying grief even further from beyond the grave. Suddenly anxious, I continued looking through the file, but it appeared to contain no more new information. I came to the brutal charade Romano and Sicora had conducted with the innocent workers: two scanty pages of “spontaneous confessions” beaten out of those poor guys by that pig Sicora. After that, there was my formal complaint to the Appellate Court, accusing Romano and Sicora of illegal coercion and abuse and requesting that a medical examiner assess the injuries suffered by the two arrestees.
I thought of Romano, as I did every time I passed his empty desk. Right after I filed my complaint, disciplinary proceedings had begun, and he’d been provisionally suspended from his duties. At first, I’d been afraid thathis staff might bear me a grudge for turning him in; at the end of the day, we all worked for the same court. But my relations with them remained so cordial that I was moved to wonder whether they might not be secretly grateful to me for having gotten their loutish boss off their backs. I returned to the few pages left in the file. The remand of the case from the police to the examining magistrate’s court. The statements taken in our offices from the same witnesses, who limited themselves to verifying what they’d already said. And finally, a supplementary autopsy report (on the results of some visceral examination that added nothing and which, in any case, I was too apprehensive to do more than skim).
On the back of the last page, there was a note in Pérez’s handwriting, dated that same day. Following Judge Fortuna Lacalle’s express instructions, Clerk Pérez had written, “Any case submitted by the police but containing no named suspects or perpetrators must be removed from the active docket within two months, or three at the most.” Had the judge upheld that principle because he was methodical, that would have been one thing; but no, he upheld it because he was mediocre. His real motto was “The fewer cases, the better.” That was the reason behind his mania for shelving cases as soon as possible when no suspects had been found, no matter whether the crime was theft or murder.
I imagined the next step. I would put a sheet of letterhead paper in the typewriter, select the approved heading for such a document, and type up a decision of some ten lines, prescribing a stay of proceedings in the case, citing the lack of suspects, and recommending that the police continue their investigations in order to identify the guilty parties. That last part served to keep up appearances; in practice, the document was the
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