Cappuccino Twist (9 page)

Tenderly, deliciously, and much too briefly, he kissed my lips.  Crackling chemistry turned explosive in the fleeting moment that our mouths touched.  Just as I was twining my arms around his neck to bring him closer, he started to pull away.

“I better let you get some rest,” he said reluctantly.  “How about breakfast tomorrow?”

“I would love that,” I breathed.

“Good.  I’ll come by around 8:30.  Sleep in a little bit.” Eduardo placed a hand over my cheek and stroked my skin softly before hesitantly walking away.

***

Two hours later, I awoke from a well earned nap, stretching and yawning in bed.  That brief space of unconsciousness had been necessary for
me to refresh and not think about the investigation.  Not think about anything.  But now I was wide awake and wired even without a caffeine jolt.  Grabbing a spiral notebook and sharpened pencil from my suitcase, I jotted down the names of the three prime suspects in my aunt’s murder.  Next to their names, I recorded my gut instincts about their involvement in the crime.

Marcelo Sanchez
.  Sad old man, bitter, lonely, dejected.  Not likely the perpetrator. 
Jorge Canton, Sr
.  Highly suspect.  Shady family.  Detective Mendez, please do your job and figure this family out. 
David Garcia
.  A wild card.  As a cheating married man, he had more motive than anyone else.  But did he do it?

All roads seemed to lead back to Jorge Canton, Sr., but I couldn’t establish a motive.  Yet.
  Then my line of thinking shifted to other possible suspects.  The murder hadn’t been overly violent or gruesome.  The weapon of choice had been a pillow.  Perhaps that meant that the smothering had been carried out by a woman who might have been squeamish about the sight of blood?  But I wasn’t sure if that theory held much weight.  After all, how squeamish could a murderer be? Supposing the murderer had been a woman, though, opened up a whole new Pandora’s Box of suspects.  David Garcia’s scorned wife could have been the murderer.  Perhaps Jorge Canton, Sr., had been dating multiple women and one of them had become enraged with jealousy over his relationship with Aunt Silvia.

I sighed in massive frustration, feeling like I was a hamster running around on a wheel that wouldn’t stop.  Ripping the page out of my notebook and crumpling it up, I leaned back against the pillows and stared
listlessly up at the ceiling.  As I was contemplating how to spend the rest of the long, lonely day until nightfall, my cell phone rang and vibrated on the nightstand. 

“Hello?” I held my breath, hoping to hear Detective Mendez’s voice on the other end, and I wasn’t disappointed.

“Señorita Falcon?  This is Detective Mendez.” His voice sounded deeply troubled. 

“Yes? Do you have any news for me?” I asked breathlessly.

“I’d like you to come down to the police station so we can talk in person,” he replied mysteriously.

“Why? You can’t tell me anything over the phone?”

“I think this discussion would be better face to face. Can you be here in half an hour?”

“I can be there in 15 minutes! Let me just go grab a cab!
I’m on my way!”

If I had glanced in the mirror, I would have seen the telltale signs of a nap railroad tracked all over my face.  But I didn’t have any time for vanity.  I could barely contain myself as I wondered what information Detective Mendez could have unearthed in the short hours since I had left the station with Eduardo.  It was too soon for the notes to have come back from the crime lab.  That process could take weeks even when expedited.  What could Detective Mendez possibly have learned in three hours that no one else on the police force had been able to uncover in 50 plus years?

Exactly twelve minutes later, I handed a wad of Euros to the cabbie and dashed into the police station.  Detective Mendez came out to greet me immediately, a stony expression chiseled into his features.  “Come with me, Señorita Falcon.  We need to talk.”

My heart was beating madly and my throat felt scratchy.  Sitting across from the detective at a
wobbly round table, I grabbed for a glass of water and sipped.  But the water did little to tame my throat, and nothing could soothe my nerves until Detective Mendez explained why he needed to talk to me.

“Please, Detective Mendez.  Please tell me what you found out,” I begged as he opened a file folder and then closed it again, driving me to the brink of insanity.

“To your knowledge, has anyone in your family traveled to Barcelona since your aunt was murdered?”

The detective’s question caught me completely off guard.  What did my family have to do with anything? Certainly, he wasn’t insinuating that any of my relatives could have murdered Silvia?  Defiantly, I replied, “No. Not to my knowledge. 
As for me, this is my first time ever in Spain.  And my grandmother could never bring herself to come back after her sister was murdered.”

“I see.  And what was your grandmother’s first name?” The detective probed as my impatience skyrocketed. 

“Margarita,” I said tightly, daring him with dagger-spewing eyes to just
try
and accuse my Nana of any misdeed.

“I’m not accusing you
r grandmother of anything, Señorita Falcon.” He accurately read my eyes. “Please don’t misunderstand.  In fact, it’s someone in the generation between you and your grandmother that I’m concerned with here.  But not as a suspect.  As another victim,” the detective replied cryptically as I felt a small measure of relief to know that no one in my family was under suspicion.  But what was he talking about, the generation between my grandmother and me?

“I’m not following you at all,” I said as a vein pulsed in my jaw.

“In March of 1992, a woman by the name of Angelita Falcon disappeared in Barcelona.  She was officially declared dead more than a decade ago, but no remains have ever been found, and we’ve never been able to reach her family.”

Gut clenching nausea swirled around in my stomach as I whispered, “
Angelita Falcon? She was my mother.”

Chapter 11

Tears flooded my eyes as Detective Mendez quickly handed me a tissue.  “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said quietly. 

“But I don’t understand! My mother abandoned me when I was 7 years old! I never knew she came to Barcelona.  My grandmother never told me anything about that.” I felt my entire world and security crash down in pointy shards of glass all around me, digging cruelly into the center of my heart.

“And you’re 29 now?” The detective figured.  “That would match up with the timeline of Angelita’s disappearance.”

Wiping my eyes dry, I tried desperately to come up with an explanation for why my mother would have traveled to Barcelona alone…and why my grandmother had never told me.  Maybe my mother had come to solve Aunt Silvia’s murder just like I was doing?  And maybe she hadn’t told my grandmother because she knew her plan would be met with disapproval. 
Utterly disillusioned, I vaguely watched as the detective reopened the file folder.

“I know this is very emotional for you.  And a huge shock.  But would you like me to tell you what else I found? Angelita’s disappearance is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“I’m listening,” I heard myself say, still lost in my inner world and feeling like an abandoned child all over again.  For my entire life, I had believed that my mother had walked out to start a new life without the burden of a daughter.  It was crushing to think how my mother might actually have wanted me and was stolen from me.

“Alright.  Let me just start by saying that I don’t know how all this was kept under the radar all these years.  But if any of the police officers who worked here decades ago hadn’t retired, they’d be fired and hauled to the curb.” Anger flared in Detective Mendez’s eyes.

“What do you mean? Has there been some sort of cover up?”

“I have reason to believe there has.  And I have reason to believe that Jorge Canton’s money paid for it.”

“Please.  Just start from the beginning.  I’m not understanding any of this.” Suddenly, the pressing issue was no longer learning who had killed Aunt Silvia.  I wanted to know what happened to my mother.

Detective Mendez took a big gulp from the coffee mug set in front of him.  Exhaling
thickly, he began the story.  “According to the file I have here, Angelita Falcon was last seen with Jorge Canton, Jr.  Ironically, they were spotted having coffee together at Dario’s Cappuccino Boutique.”

My blood boiled at the detective word’s, and I knew he was only just warming up.  I wasn’t sure if I could contain my fury until he reached the end of his story. 
Then, I remembered Dario’s offhanded comments to me when he hired me to work in his shop. 
You look kind of familiar. Have I seen your face before?
Sadly, I realized that he must have seen my mother all those years ago and her face had remained etched in his memory. “Go on,” I gritted, sickened to think of my mother interacting with Reptile Eyes or Dario. 

“For some reason---again, I’m guessing because of a shady payoff---that part of the story ends there.  No one pursued your mother’s disappearance, unfortunately.  The missing persons report was typed up in a
hurry and the case was sealed within a week of her vanishing.” Detective Mendez’s weathered features contorted as he conveyed the injustice of it all.

“Okay, let me get this straight.  A beautiful young woman vanishes in Barcelona.  There are witnesses who actually saw her with a man who has been positively identified.  And then the case just goes cold? Was Jorge Canton, Jr. ever even questioned?” I demanded, already starting to piece the puzzle together in my head. 

My mother must have come to Barcelona to search for clues in Aunt Silvia’s murder.  Reptile Eyes had probably noticed the family resemblance---just as he had with me---and then killed my mother.  But why would he kill my mother?  Only if someone in his family had been responsible for Aunt Silvia’s death.  My guess is that the perpetrator was his father.  Junior likely knew that his father had committed the crime and was trying to protect him.  My mother’s presence in Barcelona was a threat to the Canton family’s wealth, prestige, and freedom.  Snuffing her life out had bought Jorge Canton, Sr. freedom until he died of natural causes as an elderly man. 

My poor grandmother probably never even knew that my mother had come to Spain and wrongly assumed that she abandoned me.  But why would she jump to that conclusion? That part didn’t make sense.  Wouldn’t she have filed a missing persons case in New York?  Gaping hole
s still left the puzzle unresolved.

“Unfortunately, that’s correct.  The case went by the wayside.  But Jorge Canton, Jr. isn’t going to walk free for much longer, I wager.  As of this moment, there are officers at his mansion conducting an interview.  And the police department has obtained an emergency search warrant to comb
through his entire estate.” Detective Mendez took another thirsty gulp of coffee and pointed to his mug.  “I don’t care how many cups of coffee I need to drink to see this case through to arrest.  I’m not going to let two women’s deaths go unpunished.” A deep craving for justice was evident in the detective’s impassioned features and voice.  My confidence in the man was effectively restored, and I believed with every fiber of my being that he would solve both crimes or die trying.

“I just don’t understand why my grandmother thought my mother abandoned me.  Are you telling me that no one ever contacted my grandmother in the United States?” I asked, haunted by the idea that my grandmother could have let her only daughter go so easily. 

“Your grandmother, Margarita, was given misinformation.  Basically, she was lied to.  According to this file, it says that your mother made a phone call to her family in New York stating that she was moving in with a man she had met in Spain.”

“What?! That can’t be true!”

“I don’t think so either.  My guess is that it’s part of the cover-up.  The phone call could have been made by your mother under duress.  Or it could have been made by a woman posing as your mother.  Who knows what kind of phone connection they had across the Atlantic? Your grandmother might have thought she was speaking with her daughter when in fact she was being tricked,” Detective Mendez laid out his theories that seemed completely logical to me.

“So my grandmother was lied to? She was made to believe that my mother had met some random guy, fallen in love, and abandoned us
forever?” I shook my head despairingly, half sad for how my grandmother had been deceived and half furious with her for being so gullible.

“Listen, I’ve just given you an earful.  Why don’t you go back to your hotel and rest a little?  I won’t be going home tonight.  I have a lot of work to do.  But you shouldn’t have to deal with all of this.  I’ll get you a taxi so you can just rest,” Detective Mendez offered gently as tears
cascaded from my eyes.

As I was mulling over his fatherly recommendation for me to go rest in my room, a cell phone ringing made me jump.  But it wasn’t my cell phone. 
“What the hell is going on?” Detective Mendez barked into his phone.  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me! Well, who’s on it?  Are there squad cars trying to catch him? Don’t you even think about letting him get away now after we’ve come so close to nailing him!” Detective Mendez huffed in exasperation as I inferred that somehow Reptile Eyes had slithered away.