Clint Faraday Collection C: Murder in Motion Collector's Edition (33 page)

Clint walked around among them. All the women
were trying to use the cellulars. There was no signal up here. He
warned them they would deplete the batteries and wouldn’t be able
to call when they were back to a place where there was a signal. He
came across one man standing away from the others talking into a
satellite phone. He saw Clint and swore, saying there wasn’t even a
signal for the damned eight hundred dollar phone out here – which
was likely. It was below the surrounding mountaintops and the angle
could make the things as worthless here as the regular phones.

The Indios and Clint started cutting leaves
from the large heliconias and strung them on limbs to construct a
very dry and secure shelter. The bus driver and some of the
passengers pitched in and it was soon done. Judy brought out the
little two-burner gas stove and put on a pot of water, the Indios
brought their part of the food and an exceptionally good dinner was
soon served. The coffee was exceptional quality, the cacao made a
good drink for the two six and seven year old children and the bus
driver got out a case of beer to drop into the ice-cold little
stream (that was now almost a river) running into the washout.

Everyone was in a very good mood and everyone
was getting along very well. All of them remarked that this wasn’t
such a bad thing at all. Everyone could meet other people and enjoy
a little camping trip vacation!

They were going to sack out in the car, Clint
in front and Judi in back. It was slightly cramped for sleeping,
but not bad. They took some of their stuff to put in the car trunk
as the people started going back aboard the bus. The driver, Sancho
Lopez, had rationed the beer. There was enough for everyone who
liked beer to have one and two each for Clint and himself.

Clint said this was really a pleasant way to
be detained and started to get into the car when there was a
commotion from the bus. A woman was squealing and on the verge of
hysteria so Clint went to see what was wrong.

When she went back to her seat the fellow who
was sitting next to her had gone to sleep, or so she thought, on
the whole seat. She shook him to ask him to sit up and he slid onto
the floor. There was blood all over! He was dead! There was a knife
sticking out of his chest!

“
Shit!”
Clint said, with deep feeling.

All the
Suspects

This wasn’t the kind of thing you could be
prepared for. All he knew was that the suspects were all right
here. He hadn’t seen any signs of rancor among them. He went back
to tell Judi to watch for anything that would give them a clue. A
man was murdered on the bus.

He got things explained and a sort of system
set up with Judi and went back onto the bus. He showed the papers
where he was an agent for the Policía Nacionál and said he was
going to try to determine who did this. He would need to talk to
all of them. Fix in the mind as much as you can remember from the
last time the dead man was seen, less than an hour before he was
found murdered. Remember who you were with, what you were doing,
where.

The dead man’s name was Carlos Santamaria
Vega. Try to remember if you’d seen him anywhere before this trip.
He had Sancho get a list of the names of the passengers on the bus
for him with their cedula numbers:

Sancho Lopez M. = driver

Cecilio Pastore = attendant

Carlos Santamaria Vega = victim

Eladio Cano ind

Luis Silva ind

Yajaira (Silva) Nunez ind

Maria Guerra + Nilsa & Juan (children, 7
& 9 yrs.) pan

Jose Ricardo & Sister Ana pan

Dona Comacho pan

Silvestre Mario & Salvador (son 9 yrs.)
ind

Arturo Taylor pan

Carlos Sandros pan blk

Pacho Sandros (br) pan blk

Elena Sandros (sis) pan blk

Guillermo Robinson pan

Sandy Barnes NA espa

George Barnes NA espo

Penny Goodson eng

Armando Sucha CR

Pedro Vargas ind

David Estevez pan

The
Sandros were into real estate. The Barnes and Goodson were
backpackers/surfers/tourists. Taylor worked for IDAAN (the water
agency of Panamá in Santa Lucia – that Clint never heard of).
Vargas owned a pescado supply company in Pedrigal. Estevez was a
lawyer. (
Him!
Clint
thought. He didn’t like most Panamanian lawyers even a little bit).
The rest didn’t give information and Sancho didn’t ask.

Clint asked Sancho to have Cecilio bring
everything Santamaria had as baggage to him. He had an electric
lantern that would hold out well until dawn as well as several good
flashlights. No one wanted to stay on the bus except the Indios,
who were perfectly well aware that people died from many things and
a dead body the first night wouldn’t stink or anything. They threw
a plastic tarp over the body and went to sleep in their seats in
the rear of the bus. The body was in the second seat back from the
door on the right. Judi grinned at the practicality of the Indios.
The rest would sit around outside in tarps hung over limbs to keep
them out of the drizzle. Clint wondered what they would do if
another heavy deluge-type band came through.

One woman, Maria Guerra, said there was a row
of conduits about half a kilometer back that were plenty big for
sleeping. She would take her children and go back there. Most of
the others thought that was a good idea. One other noticed the
conduit and said they were meter and a half diameter and about six
meters long and there were twenty or more of them. That was plenty
of room for three or four busloads of people. They would have to be
careful that there weren’t any dangerous snakes or spiders in
them.

Clint suggested Sancho lock the bus and that
everyone go to the conduit pipes for the night. Take only what they
needed and leave the rest locked up. Sancho said Cecilio would stay
with the bus. He would have more than enough comfortable room under
the cooking shelter.

They formed a parade of sorts and went there.
Clint drove back with his lanterns and such and shined his
headlights into the conduits that were at angles to be in them.
They used flashlights to check out the other pipes carefully and
found a dangerous spider in one of them, but nothing else
dangerous.

Everyone
chose a spot and moved in. Clint and Sancho made a tent of a tarp
carried on the bus to cover luggage on the top. Seeing as there
were only surfboards and some fresh vegetables up there they used
the small tarp for that and the large one for the tent. Judi said
she’d take notes and they could wake anyone up for the few shrt
minutes of questioning.

Clint took the children first, together. He
only wanted to know if they heard anyone arguing or saw anyone
doing anything that didn’t seem right. They hadn’t. They had been
with their mother/ father the whole time so that would probably
help eliminate those from the suspect list.

He decided to take the Indios next. Only one
of them had any possible motive that Clint could see and they were
a nonviolent people. They were together, the Cano/Silva trio. The
only time they were apart at all was when they were getting the
vegetables to cook. Silvestre and his son were with them all the
time.

Next was the Sandros trio. Together all the
time.

Jose and Ana Ricardo were together the whole
time. The Barnes and Goodson were together the whole time.

His suspect list, serious suspects, was
growing shorter. Sancho was driving, then with Clint with the food.
Cecilio was with Clint and Judi that whole time working on the
food.

The rest would wait until morning. Clint
wanted a clear view of their facial expressions and body language
when he asked his questions. He would spend awhile going through
Santamaria’s luggage very carefully. There was a large maleta and a
briefcase/ laptop case – with no laptop? There wasn’t anything in
the laptop side except two memory sticks that were in with the
papers on the briefcase side and two cellulars, one Movistar and
one Mas Movil and chargers for them.

Clothes, shaving kit and such, extra shoes –
totally ordinary.

Clint looked through the papers. Not much to
tell him anything unless he knew what to look for. There wasn’t a
note about being threatened or anything. Most of it was standard
stuff that might be carried by any businessman.

Santamaria had been a supplier to hardware
stores. Painting and gluing materials and tools with a sideline of
making signs of all types. He apparently had a small shop for that
in Santiago. He lived close to Santiago on a finca that he rented
out to some cattle ranchers for pasture. He supplied in Chitre, Las
Tablas and all the towns on the peninsula and back toward Santiago.
He had orders from Las Tablas, Chitre and Piedasi this trip.

Cecilio said he remembered that he got on the
bus on the corner after the terminal as it left. He had put his
maleta under the seat and left a small wrapped package there to
reserve the seat, then had arranged for the bus to pick him up
there because he had to meet a business cita (date). That could
mean a lot. If someone was following him and saw him getting the
bus they could get in a seat behind and have a newspaper or
something hiding them when he boarded later. He could have
suspected that he was being followed and arranged getting on the
bus a block from the terminal so a follower wouldn’t be able to
catch the same bus. That would mean he expected some kind of attack
or something. He should have left ... maybe he did! That computer
was gone!

Clint could only hope the memory sticks were
deliberately put in the briefcase section of the carry-case, so
taking the ones stored with the computer wouldn’t give the taker
the information he/she was taking it to hide.

Clint decided to wait until morning to look
further. He was getting an idea about where to look.

He thought a moment, then woke Sancho and
said to very quietly come with him to the bus. There was something
there they had to find. Cecilio was there with the keys to the bus
and would know where every little thing that was out of place
should be. That was part of his job.

The computer was very easy to find. It had
the running light on and the low battery light on. It was under the
first seat behind the driver. It was running a program. “Format
Hard Drive.” There had been something on that computer the killer
thought must not be found. He could hope it was also on one of the
memory sticks.

There was a camera download cord under the
seat. Was it a picture? Where was the camera?

They searched the bus. No camera under a seat
or whatever.

Did that mean the killer had that camera? All
he/she would have to do is format the memory. Surely the camera
wasn’t thrown out the window or such.

That would mean the killer also still had
those memory sticks. Throwing them out the window would be too
dangerous. Anyone finding them would automatically run them to see
what was there. That was two things that would possibly identify
the killer.

Sancho called Clint from halfway back in the
bus. He found six memory sticks stuffed in the seam in back of the
seatpads of two seats. He handed them to Clint.

Well, there were probably no prints on them
anyway.

They didn’t find the camera. Clint took the
memory sticks back and plugged them into the USB ports on his
laptop. They were formatted. The killer thought of that so the
camera would be formatted, too. All finding it would do is identify
the killer – if they could even prove it was Santamaria’s camera.
He didn’t even know the brand of the camera.

Shit!

He and Sancho went back to the camp in the
culverts. It would have to wait for morning – about two hours
away.

Only for
Some

Clint had waited to look at those memory
sticks from the case until he had a hint of what to look for. He
did that while Judi and the women were preparing breakfast. They
had flour and oil and everything else they needed. The Indio women
knew how to make excellent hojaldres (fried bread) and tortillas
they served with boiled eggs. Judi had made deviled eggs out of
part of the eggs. Several of the Panamanians wouldn’t eat them when
they were told they were called huevos diablitos, translated to
mean “the eggs of the devil.” The Indios grinned at her. That meant
more for them. They believed that any “devil” who existed was
inside a person, not someone who would torment their souls for
eternity as a reward for worshiping him. They found the concept
ridiculous to the point it was silly. The idea of hell was as
silly. Hell was also inside a person.

“
Not
true!” Judi said, grinning. “This is a detour through hell right
here!”

“
Only for
some,” Yajaira replied, eyes sparkling and a laugh in her voice.
“Some find it a good time for most where we get to know other
people. The gringas are very nice. We are a curiosity for them.
They don’t understand us, but we don’t understand them, so it’s
equal!”

Clint grinned when he overheard that. This
really was a detour through hell for Judi and for most of the
Panamanians. It wasn’t particularly for him now that the rain was
lessening and it certainly wasn’t for the Indios. He had a mystery
to solve and only until the road was opened to solve it. He hoped
to have it solved before darkness tonight.

He looked around at the group. More than half
of them were up for coffee and hojaldres. The Indio kid was up with
his father and drank a cup of the strong coffee they liked with
them. He was ready to go to work, as usual. He had his duties and
chores since he was about six years of age and would have a strong
work ethic for the rest of his life as a result. It was part of
their culture. Everyone worked cooperatively for the family and
community.