Dolores Redondo - Offering to the Storm

‘Elena, look at me,’ she commanded.

Elena turned off the tap, dropped the sponge and swung round to look at her.

‘I had a twin sister who died at birth. The official cause was registered as cot death.’

Pale with fear, the woman raised her hands, placed them over her distraught face, moist with tears, and asked: ‘Where is she buried? Where is she buried?’

Amaia shook her head, watching the woman flinch as she went on to explain:

‘We don’t know. I found her tomb, but the coffin was empty.’

Elena gave a terrible, visceral howl, and lunged at Amaia, who leapt to her feet, startled.

‘Leave my house! Leave my house and never come back!’ she screamed, corralling Amaia to force her to walk on.

Before opening the front door, Amaia turned once more to plead with the woman.

‘At least tell me where the house is.’

After the door slammed shut, she could still hear the woman’s muffled sobs coming from inside.

Instinctively, she reached into her pocket for her phone and dialled Special Agent Aloisius Dupree. She pressed it tightly to her ear as she walked back to her car, listening hard for the faintest sound at the other end of the line. She was about to hang up, when she heard a crackle. She knew he was there, the FBI agent who had been her mentor during her time in New Orleans, and who remained an important part of her life, despite the distances. The sound that reached her through the earpiece a moment later made a shiver run up her spine: the repetitive drone of a funeral chant, the echo of voices suggesting a large space, possibly a cathedral. There was something bleak and sinister about the way three words were repeated over and over again in a monotone. But it was the shrill, anguished death cry that made her stomach turn. The tortured death throes continued for a few seconds, then at last the pitiful sound faded, she assumed because Dupree was moving away.

When at last he spoke, his voice betrayed the same anguish she herself felt.

‘Don’t call me again, I’ll call you.’ Then he hung up, leaving Amaia feeling so small and far away from him that it made her want to scream.

She was still holding her phone when it rang. She looked at the screen with a mixture of hope and panic. She recognised the FBI’s ID number and heard Agent Johnson’s friendly voice greeting her from Virginia. He announced that the seminars at Quantico had been given the green light, and they were hoping she might contribute to the area of studies concerned with criminal behaviour. They were currently in the process of requesting permission from her superior.

Up to that point, their conversation didn’t differ from any of the previous conversations she’d had with FBI officials, but the fact that she’d received the call moments after speaking to Dupree didn’t escape her notice, and what Agent Johnson said next instantly confirmed to her that they were monitoring her calls.

‘Inspector, have you had any type of contact with Special Agent Dupree?’

Amaia bit her lip, hesitating, as she recalled the conversation she’d had with Agent Johnson a month or so ago, when he’d advised her not to use official telephone lines for anything relating to Agent Dupree, and had given her a special number to call. On the rare occasions when she had managed to get in touch with Dupree, his voice always sounded far away, plagued with echoes; invariably, they got cut off, and on one occasion his number had vanished from her phone as if the call had never taken place. Then there had been the mysterious emails she’d asked Jonan to look into; he’d succeeded in tracking the source to an IP address in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – at which point the FBI stepped in and ordered him to desist with the search. Johnson had asked her about Dupree as if he’d forgotten what she’d told him during their last conversation, namely that Dupree always answered her calls. In any event, Johnson was calling her now because he knew she had just spoken to Dupree. Informing her that she had been accepted on to the course was simply a pretext.

‘Not very often. I occasionally call to say hello, the same way I do with you,’ she said, nonchalantly.

‘Have you spoken to Agent Dupree about the case he is currently working on?’

Johnson sounded as if he were ticking boxes on an internal questionnaire sheet.

‘No, I didn’t even know he was working on a new case.’

‘If Agent Dupree gets in touch with you again, will you inform us?’

‘You’re freaking me out, Agent Johnson, is something wrong?’

‘Only that in the last few days we’ve had trouble contacting Agent Dupree. I expect the situation has gotten a little complicated, and for reasons of security he’s decided to lie low. There’s no need for you to be alarmed, Inspector. However, if Dupree does get in touch with you, we’d be grateful if you’d let us know immediately.’

‘I’ll do that, Agent Johnson.’

‘Thank you, Inspector, we look forward to seeing you here very soon.’

She hung up, then sat in her car for ten minutes waiting for the phone to ring again. When it did, she recognised Johnson’s private number on the screen.

‘What was that all about?’

‘I told you, Dupree has his own way of doing things. He’s been incommunicado for some time, which, as you know, is normal when you’re working undercover. Finding the right moment can be difficult. However, that, together with Agent Dupree’s somewhat irreverent attitude, is causing them to question the security of his identity.’

‘You mean they think his cover might have been blown?’

‘That’s the official version. The truth is, they think he may have been taken hostage.’

‘What do you think?’ she said, warily, wondering how far she could trust Johnson. How could she be sure this second call wasn’t also being recorded?

‘I think Dupree knows what he’s doing.’

‘So do I,’ she declared, with all the conviction she could muster, as the grotesque cries she had heard when Dupree answered his phone resounded once more in her head.

They had spent the afternoon at the shopping centre on Carretera de Francia on the pretext of buying clothes for Ibai, and to escape the cold brought by the fog that was thickening as night fell; by the time they left for dinner in the evening, they could scarcely see beyond the far bank of the river. The Santxotena restaurant was relatively lively, the murmur of laughter and voices reaching them as soon as they crossed the threshold. They were in the habit of reserving a table by the kitchen that opened on to the spacious dining room, so that they could watch the orderly bustle of three generations of women, clad in starched white aprons over black uniforms, moving about the kitchen as if it were a formal dance they’d rehearsed a thousand times.

After choosing from the wine list, James and Amaia were content to enjoy the atmosphere in the restaurant for a while. They hadn’t touched on the subject of the funeral, and had avoided bringing to a head the palpable tension that had arisen between them that afternoon. They knew they needed to talk, but had made a tacit agreement to wait until they were alone.

‘How’s the investigation going?’ James asked.

She looked at him, debating how to answer. Since she joined the police force, she had been meticulous about never discussing her work with her family, and they knew not to ask. She had no desire to talk to James about the more disturbing aspects of her job, in the same way she felt there were scenes from her past it was best not to mention, even though he already knew about them. She found it difficult to talk about her childhood, and for years she’d buried the truth beneath a false veneer of normality. When the barriers holding back all that horror had burst open, driving her to the edge of sanity, confiding in James had been the chink in the wall of fear that allowed light to flood in, creating a place for them to come together – a place that had delivered her back to a world where, if she was vigilant, the old ghosts could not touch her.