Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [75]
His boss was screaming, beside himself. Zagribay was to go straight to the entrance of Cité Soleil. A seventh corpse in a state of interrupted metamorphosis in his sector. One or two, okay. A human being’s life is of little importance in this screwed-up country, but seven, that was really too much. The chief of police, a man very popular with the media, must have been afraid of losing his job and was waking him up in the middle of the night to box his ears. The problem had been brought up the day before at the cabinet meeting, yelled the chief. The president himself was upset about it. The story had already traveled around the globe, thanks to YouTube: in Haiti, “Christians” were being turned into cattle before being sacrificed during rituals honoring bloodthirsty gods from Africa. And it was easy to infer from this that Haitians were all cattle. The minister of the interior shared the president’s indignation. He had promised that the mystery would be quickly solved and the murderer arrested. And there! Just this morning he had another mutant dead body on his hands. Zagribay had better move his ass instead of wasting the government’s money listening to his maricón music. The boss was known as being someone who didn’t mince words. He wanted results. As soon as possible.
It’s easy to yell now, Zagribay was telling himself as he got up. If they’d asked for his services before, we wouldn’t be where we are now. His chances of finding useful clues would have been greater, especially as the murderer always proceeded the same way. Each time, the body was crushed as if by a steamroller, then burnt to such a point that it was impossible to identify its gender. It surely came from the same brain or criminal organization. But there you are, the bosses had to wait to have three corpses on their hands to take him on board. No wonder the bastard kept doing his grisly job. What were they thinking? That he could perform miracles?
Meanwhile, the opposition was quick to claim on TV and the airwaves of dozens of radio stations that the government was incapable of ensuring the safety of its citizens. For all you know, the inspector said to himself, maybe one of the big guns of the opposition is behind this sinister show. Just to destabilize the government and indulge in the favorite game of this country’s politicians: musical chairs. These people have no scruples. They’d sell their mothers to get a position in the cabinet or a seat in the national assembly. The lead was worth pursuing. But after a week of investigation, Inspector Zagribay had to face facts: there was no connection between the logorrhea of the members of the opposition and the carbonized bodies found on the streets of the capital.
His informers found nothing worth mentioning on the drug lords or kidnappers either. It didn’t match the modus operandi of the drug traffickers. They were used to benefiting from efficient complicity at all levels of the state and had no need to resort to such conspicuous acts to punish people who crossed the line. As for the kidnappers, they would have ended up giving themselves away if they proceeded in this manner. This research had required two extra weeks. And in the interim, three more corpses had been added to the first three, making the front page of the local press. Same method, applied with diabolical regularity, the stiff exposed at a crossroads. He was left with the option of a serial killer, even though, as far as he knew, no case of this type had ever been reported in Haiti. In this field, no lead can be ignored, he repeated like a seasoned professor of criminology. Who knows, with all those deportees the United States have been sending back to us recently …
Zagribay had reached this point in his investigation when that seventh corpse fell on his hands.