Lucia and Richard
Brooklyn
Richard Bowmaster and Lucia Maraz conscientiously collected everything published about the Kathryn Brown case from the moment her body was found in March to a couple of months later, when they were able to consider their life-changing adventure at an end. The discovery of the body at Rhinebeck led to speculation about a possible human sacrifice by members of an immigrant cult in New York State. Xenophobia toward Latinos was already in the air, unleashed by Donald Trump’s hateful presidential campaign. Although few people took him seriously as a candidate, his boast that he would build a wall like the Great Wall of China to seal the border with Mexico and deport millions of undocumented immigrants was beginning to take root in the popular imagination. This made it easy to give the crime a macabre explanation. Details of the discovery pointed toward the theory of a cult: like a pre-Columbian mummy the victim had been wrapped in a fetal position inside a bloodstained Mexican rug, with an image of the devil carved on a stone around her neck and a bottle with a skull on its label next to the body. The point-blank shot to the forehead suggested it had been an execution. And, according to some scandal-mongering newspapers, the body had been left in the Sanctuary of the Omega Institute to mock its spirituality.
Several Spanish-speaking churches put out emphatic denials of the existence of satanic cults in their communities. Soon however, the virgin sacrifice—as one tabloid called her—was identified as Kathryn Brown, a physical therapist from Brooklyn, aged twenty-eight, single, and pregnant. Forget the virgin. It also emerged that the tiny stone sculpture did not represent Satan but a goddess from Maya mythology, and the skull was a frequent decoration on the commonest bottles of tequila. At this, interest from public and press diminished until it faded away completely, making it harder for Richard and Lucia to follow the case.
The article that appeared in the New York Times during the last week in May, which Richard Bowmaster confirmed through other sources, had little to do with Kathryn Brown. It concerned a human trafficking network that involved Mexico, several Central American countries, and Haiti. Frank Leroy’s name was mentioned in the article, along with that of other accomplices, and Kathryn’s death warranted barely a couple of lines. Even though it was within the police department’s jurisdiction, the FBI had investigated the Kathryn Brown case due to her links to Frank Leroy, who was briefly arrested as the main suspect for the crime but released on bail. For several years, the FBI had been on the trail of a vast human trafficking operation, and they were more concerned with laying their hands on Leroy for that than with the fate of his unfortunate lover. They were aware of Frank Leroy’s involvement in the trafficking but did not have sufficient proof to prosecute; he had protected himself carefully against that eventuality. It was only by linking him to Kathryn Brown’s murder that they were able to obtain a search warrant for his office and house, uncovering sufficient evidence to implicate him.
Leroy escaped to Mexico, where he had contacts and where his father had lived quietly for years as a fugitive. That could have been his destiny as well, were it not for a special FBI agent who had infiltrated their gang. This man was Ivan Danescu. It was thanks to him more than anyone that they were able to disentangle the criminal knot in the United States and its links with Mexico. Danescu was killed during a raid on a ranch in Guerrero where many of the victims were imprisoned, and where several of the network’s bosses were holding a meeting. According to the press, Ivan Danescu accompanied the Mexican military in a heroic operation to free more than a hundred prisoners waiting to be transported and sold.
Between the lines, Richard read a different version, because he had studied the methods of both the cartels and the authorities. Any cartel boss arrested usually succeeded in escaping from prison with astonishing ease. The law was constantly flouted, since both police and judges yielded to threats or corruption, and anyone who resisted was killed. Very seldom were the guilty men who operated with impunity in the United States ever extradited.
“I’m convinced the military entered that ranch to kill, backed up by the FBI. That’s what they do in operations against the narcos, and I don’t see why it would be any different in this case. Their plan to take them by surprise must have failed, and it ended in a shootout. That would explain the death of Ivan Danescu on the one hand and Frank Leroy on the other,” Richard told Lucia.
THEY CALLED EVELYN, who had not heard the news, and agreed she should come up from Miami to Brooklyn, as she was obsessed with the idea of seeing Frankie again. She had not as yet dared to call Cheryl. Lucia had to convince Richard that now that Frank Leroy was dead, Evelyn was in no danger, and that both she and Cheryl deserved some closure on what had happened. She offered to make the initial contact, and faithful to her conviction that it was always best to take the bull by the horns, she immediately phoned Cheryl and asked to see her because she had something important to tell her. Terrified, Cheryl hung up. Lucia left a note in the mailbox at the house of statues: I’m a friend of Evelyn Ortega’s, she trusts me. Please see me, I have news of her. She added her cell phone number and put the keys to the Lexus and Kathryn Brown’s house in the envelope. The same night, Cheryl called her.
An hour later, Lucia went to see her. Richard waited in the car, so nervous his ulcer began to throb. They had decided it would be better if he didn’t appear, as Cheryl would feel more at ease with another woman. Lucia discovered that Cheryl was exactly as Evelyn had described her: tall, blond, almost masculine, but a lot older looking than she had expected. She was agitated, fearful, and defensive. She was trembling when she showed Lucia into the living room.
“Tell me right away how much you want, so we can get this over with,” she said in a choking voice, standing with her arms folded.
It took Lucia half a minute to grasp what she had heard.
“Good Lord, Cheryl, I don’t know what you’re thinking. I haven’t come to blackmail you, far from it. I know Evelyn Ortega and what happened to your car. I’m sure I know a lot more than you do about that Lexus. Evelyn wants to come in person to explain, but above all she wants to see Frankie. She misses him a lot; she adores your son.”
At this, Lucia witnessed an astonishing transformation in the woman in front of her. It was as if the armor plating protecting her had been suddenly smashed, to reveal someone with no backbone, nothing to hold her up inside, a person held together by an accumulation of pain and fear, so weak and vulnerable that Lucia could scarcely resist the urge to hug her. A sob of relief escaped from Cheryl’s chest. She collapsed onto the sofa, head in hands, crying like a baby.
“Please, Cheryl, calm down, everything is all right. All Evelyn ever wanted is to help you and Frankie.”
“I know, I know. Evelyn was my only friend, I told her everything. She left when I most needed her. She vanished with the car without saying a word.”
“I don’t think you know the whole story. You don’t know what was in the trunk of the car . . .”
“How wouldn’t I know?” said Cheryl.
CHERYL TOLD LUCIA that the Wednesday before the January storm, when she was going through her husband’s shirts for the laundry, she saw a grease stain on his jacket lapel. Before adding it to the pile she discovered a key hanging from a golden ring. A jealous itch told her it belonged to Kathryn Brown’s house, which confirmed her doubts about her husband and that woman.
The next morning, when Kathryn was helping Frankie exercise, he suffered a hypoglycemic crisis and passed out. Kathryn brought him around with an injection and his blood sugar levels soon stabilized. No one was to blame for the incident, but the question of the key had stirred up Cheryl against Kathryn. She accused her of mistreating her son and sacked her on the spot. “You can’t get rid of me. It was Frank who hired me. Only he can fire me, and I doubt he’ll do that,” Kathryn replied haughtily, despite which she picked up her things and left.
Cheryl spent the rest of Thursday with her stomach churning as she waited for her husband. When he arrived that evening there was no need to explain anything, because he already knew. Kathryn had called him. Frank grabbed Cheryl by the hair, dragged her into their bedroom, slammed the door so violently the walls shook, and punched her so hard in the chest it left her gasping desperately for air. When he saw this, Frank was afraid he had gone too far, and went to his own room in a fury. On the way he bumped into Evelyn, who was waiting anxiously for the chance to go to Cheryl’s aid. Frank pushed her out of the way and stormed off. Evelyn ran to the bedroom and helped Cheryl lie down. She made her comfortable on the pillows, gave her painkillers, and put ice compresses on her chest, afraid Cheryl might have suffered some broken ribs, just as she herself had when attacked by the MS-13 gang members.
That Friday before anyone was awake, Frank Leroy left home very early in a taxi to catch his flight before the airport closed due to the blizzard. Cheryl spent the whole day in bed, drugged with tranquilizers, and Evelyn looked after her. Cheryl remained stubbornly silent, not shedding a tear, but as she lay there, she decided she must act. She loathed her husband and it would be a blessing if he left with Kathryn Brown, but that was not going to happen in the normal course of events. The bulk of Frank Leroy’s wealth was in offshore accounts that she would never have access to, but the remainder still in the United States was in her name. This was something he had set up to protect himself if he ran into any legal problems. To Frank, the best solution was to get rid of her and Frankie. He had fallen in love with Kathryn Brown and was in a sudden rush to be free. Cheryl could not have suspected there was an even more powerful reason: his lover was pregnant. She only discovered that in March, when the results of the autopsy were made public.
Cheryl thought she must confront her rival, since it was useless to try to reach any kind of agreement with her husband. The two of them only communicated on trivial matters, and even then they were at odds, but once she understood the advantages of her offer, Kathryn Brown was bound to be more reasonable. Cheryl was going to suggest she could keep her husband; she would grant him a divorce and guarantee to remain silent, in exchange for financial security for Frankie.
On Saturday Cheryl had left around midday. The pain from the blow to her chest and what felt like a crown of thorns at her temples ever since the beating on Thursday had grown worse. With two glasses of liquor and a large dose of amphetamines in her stomach, she told Evelyn she was going to her therapy. “They’re just clearing the streets, señora, you’d do better to stay calm at home,” Evelyn begged her. “I’ve never been calmer, Evelyn,” Cheryl replied, then left in the Lexus. She knew where Kathryn Brown lived.
When she arrived she saw Kathryn’s car out on the street. This meant she was thinking of going out soon, otherwise she would have left it in the garage to protect it from the snow. On an impulse, Cheryl felt in the glove compartment for Frank’s pistol, a small semiautomatic thirty-two-millimeter Beretta, and put it into her pocket. Just as she had suspected, the key she had found was to the front door of the house, and she could slip in without making any noise.
Dressed in her sports gear, Kathryn Brown was about to go out, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She gasped in surprise when she suddenly found herself face-to-face with Cheryl. “I only want to talk to you,” said Cheryl, but Kathryn pushed her toward the door, screaming insults. Nothing was turning out as Cheryl had intended. Pulling the pistol from her coat pocket, she pointed it at Kathryn, intending to force her to listen. Far from cowering, the young woman burst out laughing defiantly. Cheryl slipped off the safety catch and clutched the gun in both hands.
“You stupid bitch! You think you can scare me with your damn pistol? Wait and see when I tell Frank!” shouted Kathryn.
The shot rang out of its own accord. Cheryl had no intention of shooting her when she pulled the trigger, and as she swore to Lucia Maraz when she told her, she didn’t even take aim. “The bullet hit her in the middle of her forehead by pure chance, because it was written, it was my karma and Kathryn Brown’s,” she said. It was so instantaneous, such a simple, clean act, that Cheryl did not register the sound of the shot or the recoil of the weapon in her hands. She could not understand why Kathryn fell backward or what the black hole in her face meant. It took her more than a minute to react and realize the other woman wasn’t moving, then to stoop down and discover she had killed her.
After that, all her movements were made in a trance. She explained to Lucia that she could not remember what she did in any detail, even though she had never stopped thinking about what happened that cursed Saturday. “At that moment, the most urgent thing was to decide what I was going to do with Kathryn, because when Frank discovered her it would be terrible,” she said. The wound had not bled much, and the stains were all on the rug. She opened the garage and drove the Lexus inside. Thanks to a lifetime of swimming and exercise, and thanks to her rival being so small, she was able to drag the body along on the rug and heave it into the trunk. She threw the pistol inside and put Kathryn’s key in the glove compartment. She needed time to sort things out and had forty-eight hours before her husband was due to return. For more than a year now the fantasy had been going around in her head that she should call the FBI and testify against him in return for protection. Above all she had to calm down: her heart was about to shatter. She headed for home.
In March, during the investigation into Kathryn Brown’s death, she was only briefly questioned. The prime suspect was her husband, whose alibi of being in Florida playing golf proved useless because the state of the cadaver made it impossible to determine the exact time of death. Perhaps if she had been questioned in the days immediately following the young woman’s murder, Cheryl would have given herself away, but the interrogation did not take place until two months later. Those months gave Cheryl the chance to make peace with her conscience.
She had lain down to rest that Saturday at the end of January because she had a blinding headache, only to wake up several hours later with the terrifying sensation that she had committed a crime. The house was in darkness, Frankie was asleep, and Evelyn was nowhere to be found, something that had never happened before. She could easily have gone mad, envisaging all the possible explanations for the incredible disappearance of Evelyn, the car, and Kathryn Brown’s body.
Frank Leroy got back the following Monday. Cheryl had spent the two intervening days in a state of absolute panic, and as she confessed to Lucia, had it not been for her sense of duty toward her son, she would have swallowed all her sleeping pills and put an end to her miserable existence once and for all. When Frank couldn’t find the missing Lexus or his lover, he imagined all sorts of explanations, apart from her having been murdered. He only learned about it when her body was discovered and he was accused of the crime.
“I think Evelyn got rid of the evidence to protect Frankie and me,” Cheryl told Lucia.
“No, Cheryl. She thought your husband had killed Kathryn and went to Florida as an alibi, without ever imagining someone might use the Lexus. The cold would preserve the body until the Monday when he returned.”
“What? Evelyn didn’t know it was me? So why did she . . . ?”
“Evelyn took out the Lexus to go the drugstore while you were asleep. My partner, Richard Bowmaster, collided with her. That’s how he and I got mixed up in all this. Evelyn thought that when your husband returned he would know she had used the car and seen what was in the trunk. She was terrified of him.”
“In other words . . . You didn’t know what happened either,” murmured Cheryl, the color draining from her face.
“No. I only knew Evelyn’s version. She thought Frank Leroy was going to eliminate her, to silence her. She was also scared for you and Frankie.”
“So what’s going to happen to me now?” asked Cheryl, horrified at what she had confessed.
“Nothing, Cheryl. The Lexus is at the bottom of a lake, and no one suspects the truth. What we’ve said stays between the two of us. I’ll tell Richard, because he deserves to know, but there’s no need for anyone else to find out. Frank Leroy has already done you and many others enough harm.”