The Butterfly Effect Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Butterfly Effect

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  OJO x OJO

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Thanks

  The theory of chaos establishes the “butterfly effect” based on the following Chinese proverb:

  The simple flutter of a butterfly can change the world.

  One day in the summer of 2006, when little Oli dared to snoop on the medical results of his parents, a butterfly appeared out of nowhere, and for no apparent reason, it fluttered its wings.

  Foreword

  He woke up, opening his eyes in a thin slit, and immediately after that the phone rang. Or maybe it was the irritating timbre that made him wake up. In any case, he found himself laying on the leather sofa in his living room. He was wearing a black suit and matching shoes, the same outfit he wore the day before. It was hot.

  He could not remember clearly what had happened in the last few hours, but he was glad to be home. The last thing his memory recorded was that it was dark when he left the apartment, and he was at a bar with a glass of Jack Daniel's on the bar and that was the only clue that could help him rebuild the evening. That solitary memory made him turn his attention to an empty glass bottle that, in front of his dizzy eyes, was laying on the table in front of the sofa.

  He sighed.

  His eyelids were almost closed, for he was convinced that if he opened them completely, he would suffer an excruciating headache. He tried to move, but his left arm was asleep and it didn’t respond; he had fallen asleep on it. He felt an uncomfortable tingle in his fingertips when he finally released it with a sharp movement. Then he slowly lifted his left ear from the black leather, revealing the imprint his own stubble had left on the cushion. He had a metallic taste in his mouth, and an uncomfortable, doughy mass prevented him from swallowing. He decided that the first thing he would do after answering the phone call would be to brush his teeth. He got up with difficulty, and after muttering fuck and a couple of oh shit, picked up the phone with a simple hello.

  "I'm Carroll.” Then a pause, “I hope I didn’t wake you up”.

  The man looked around, disoriented and with a heavy hangover. It was still dark. The dim light coming from the outside lamps was sneaking through the window glass, showing part of the furniture shelves. A strong anger, followed by a strange feeling of frustration and helplessness, came to him as he followed with his glance the beam of clarity. Disorder was not the right word to define what he saw. The dozens of books and compact discs, the tennis trophies he had accumulated throughout his teen years, and a couple of modern vases that, while not worth a fortune, had a high sentimental value, were scattered on the floor. They were heaped up, dented and torn to pieces. Had he continued analyzing the room, he would have also found a blow to the center of his latest model television set that cracked the forty-six inches practically in its entirety. In an instinctive movement, he moved his hand to the back of his waist, where he usually carried his pistol. He was startled to feel the emptiness in his gun case, and sighed with relief when he found it on the table, inches from the bottle of whiskey. It was a Hekler Koch Compact, a weapon of almost 700 grams with the magazine prepared for 9 mm Parabellun bullets. Light, cold and manageable. He did not remember putting it there, and that was strange, because he had become accustomed to being aware of it at all times.

  He frowned.

  “Agent?” The voice persisted.

  "What the fuck do you want at this hour, Tom?"

  "I'm sorry for waking you up on your day off, but something has happened tonight."

  Your day off! These words were supposed to mean something good. People used to take advantage of them to take camping trips with their families, to dine downtown with their partners, to play football with their children or, in good weather, perhaps to enjoy a greasy and high calorie barbecue with the neighbors. He, however, had other kinds of plans. He would sleep late, maybe until 2 or 3pm. Afterwards he would have for breakfast an ice-cold whiskey while enjoying Andy Murray's match on television. The day would end with Ania's visit, which, at any time that he requested it, she would make up for his lousy day off with a torrid, wild sex exercise on the bedroom carpet, both drinking up champagne.

  But Carroll had called, something had happened that night. Something serious, the detective thought, keeping an eye on the shelf, which was bound to ruin his day off.

  “Are you listening to me?” Insisted the voice behind the receiver.

  “Tom, what do you say happened?"

  "I think you should see it with your own eyes." Thomas Carroll's voice was trembling on the other end of the phone. “Cowley Road, number 219. My God...”

  "Okay, don’t lose your temper. I’ll change in a second and run out there. Just tell me what to expect, give me some infor...”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence. During the conversation, he had begun to feel a stinging in the area of his right forearm. He had actually noticed it ever since he woke up. In an instinctive act, he moved the other hand to the area of ​​the itch to rub and scratch it. It was then that something sticky covered his skin. He was astonished at what he saw, and he understood that his discomfort was not only due to the hangover: three deep scratches ran down his arm from elbow to wrist. And judging by the bruised color that was making the skin bloody, they were starting to become infected.

  What the fuck...

  "A terrible murder has been committed tonight," Carroll said.

  The detective swallowed.

  After saying goodbye with the promise that he would be there as soon as possible, he hung up the phone and got up from the sofa. Stunned, he stared at the lock on the front door: it seemed to be intact. Then he staggered through the hallway of his house, helping himself by holding onto the walls. He reached the bathroom, and as he examined his appearance in front of the mirror, he began to sweat. He had to sit on the toilet to control the dizziness that was beginning to overwhelm him. His lip was slightly cracked (hence his mouth was so pasty), and some stains of dried blood littered his chin, his neck, and a good part of his shirt.

  Someone, most likely a professional, had come into the house at night destroying the furniture, drugging him and giving him a good beating. And worst of all, what plagued him most was that he didn’t remember anything at all. For an insignificant instant, the agent panicked.

  Chapter 1

  "Do you think they'll ever let me out of this place, Morgan?"

  "I hope so, Doctor. If it were me I couldn’t stand the thought of dying between these four walls. I have too many wonderful things in the outside world.”

  “Really? What do you have in your outside world that is so valuable?”

  "Well, my wife, whom I adore, and my two children, Benjamin and Africa, who are my reason for getting up every day.”

  “I get it.”

  "What's with the face, Salas? Don’t you have anything on the outside?”

  "Not much, to be honest.”

  "Don’t you have children?"

  "Come on, let's go for a walk. It's a splendid day.”

  "Why don’t you want to answer me? You’re leaving without
responding and I can’t stand that, and you know it! Do you have children or not?”

  “I insist, let's go outside and walk. I have the feeling that this is going to be a great day.”

  Monday, November 6, 2006

  Judge José Miguel Callejo took his glasses off, and held them a few inches from his mouth and let out a breath of hot air. As he carefully wiped the glass, he looked at the man in the trench coat, sitting diagonally to his right. His gaze focused on the forms he had on the desk and, with a permanently twisted frown, it made him seem like a person with a boorish personality and no sense of humor. Dr. Grau had presented himself to him a little over half an hour ago with a brief "hello, what's up" just before he took a seat in his corresponding place in the room, and had not looked at him again. Callejo cast him to be about fifty years old, although he might have been a young man of forty, who was embittered by his own ego or an old man whose thick, brown hair took fifteen years off. Beneath his trench coat was a stylish navy blue suit complemented by a tie of the same color.

  The Judge was concentrating on his visual examination when the doctor caught him off guard and gave him such a look that it made him instinctively turn his head.

  Then he put his glasses on the tip of his nose and pretended to read the papers before him. But the thoughts that actually occupied his mind were all related to the same date: last October the 12th. Until that damn day he had enjoyed a few quiet months in the region, with no more work than a small drug-trafficking between minors, a couple of cases of domestic violence, and some attempted robbery happily resolved by the Civil Guard. Everything changed, however, when that guy Charley, the maniac who was a proprietor in Ámber, with dubious ownership, was caught with his dick out of his pants and his hands on the tits of that poor girl. The case was closed in less than twenty-four hours. The girl denounced the attempted rape and the lout was forced to leave town until the trial was held that would lead directly to jail. A successful day and another medal for Judge Callejo, but on the 12th, a series of unforeseen events occurred. The man who had helped prevent her from being raped was found dead on the beach because, according to what had come to the judge heard, it was a stroke. And to his surprise when two days later, after the funeral, his own daughter denounced the father-in-law of the deceased!

  Callejo took a sip of the coffee he had just taken from the machine and fixed his gaze on the horizon.

  Apparently, the father-in-law, a prestigious retired physician, had allegedly falsified the diagnosis to hide his son-in-law's illness, God knew for what purpose. A case as surreal as this one did not happen every day, the judge thought then, and he continued thinking now. It would all have been an amusing challenge if the widow's accusation had not been supported by a testimony from the doctor who had been a victim of the old man's lies and his false diagnosis. The girl was called Sara Mora, and it turned out to be the same one that had denounced the attempted rape of the wretched Charley less than a week before. Too many coincidences! He had learned to distrust this after so many years in law service.

  And the best was still missing. The icing on the cake! Judge Callejo remembered that he was right at the door about to leave his house, on the way to his office, when he received an urgent call from the Civil Guard's office: Charley had been found dead at the foot of the cliff. They found remnants of his brain scattered among the rocks.

  The door of the room opened, and a pleasant lady with a calm gesture entered, accompanied by an usher, who kindly invited her to take a seat in the chair that occupied the center of the room.

  José Miguel Callejo had a hunch that something was off. Charley had committed suicide and the strange case of the crazy doctor was going to be resolved that same afternoon. Nevertheless, everything was so well connected, so simple, that it troubled him. He decided that as soon as the summons ended, it had just begun, he would pull some strings.

  "Violeta, please get comfortable." He spoke to the woman in a powerful tone of voice. “The sooner we start, the sooner we'll finish. We won’t take up too much time of your time.”

  Sara Mora dedicated the whole trip to look nostalgically out the window, first from the train, later the plane, and now, on the bus. She felt that she had been traveling all day, and in reality it had been so, between journeys, transfers and tedious waiting. She found it hard to get used to the convoluted way the English drove on the left, and at every roundabout, when the vehicle turned clockwise and not the other way around, she thought she’d have a heart attack. The landscape had been the same since she left London: green prairies, green hills... green, green, and greener. The young doctor watched in fascination the beauty of Great Britain, and for the first time on her trip, she was convinced that it might be a journey of no return. She liked the idea, which surprised her. She glanced at her watch to see that it wasn’t too far before she arrived.

  She had the laptop open and lit on her knees. A copy in "pdf" format of the cover of El Diario Montañés, local news of the Cantabrian province, occupied the screen. Sara had been hearing the same news for much of the trip:

  SUCCESSION OF TRAGEDIES IN ÁMBER

  Under the headline appeared four photographs in the foreground of Charley, Alfonso, Dr. Salas, and herself, in that order. Where in the world did this crowd get this image of me? The news was extensive, and it summed up in detail (and some other invented sensationalism) what happened during the fateful week in the northern town. Sara hated that she had been labeled as a poor young woman whose savage rape attempt would undoubtedly be very hard to overcome though she acknowledged that at least they had the decency to point to her brilliant career in the world of neurosurgery. In addition, according to her, the publication was too kind to Salas and the criminal, who was called ingenious calculator and mentally unfit, respectively.

  She closed the notebook angrily and blew into the air.

  Sitting to her left, an obese, red-faced man slept leaning towards her. Sara decided to baptize him Porky for obvious reasons, he snored so loudly that at times it seemed as if he was going to drown. The girl wanted to reach the station to lose sight of him, but until then she had to be distracted. Careful not to wake the huge snorer, she bent down to put away the computer and pulled out a notebook and pen from the bag at her feet. She paused for a moment, staring at the blank sheet, clicked on it with the pen and gave a nervous sigh. Then she began to write:

  Diana,

  I’m writing from the bus. It is eight-thirty in the afternoon, and I think I must be about to arrive. I'm exhausted, but the long journey has been worth it, how beautiful this is! It is always said that the weather in England is based on rain, cold and fog (you should see my suitcase, it looks like an Eskimo’s), but today makes a splendid day. It was very, very early when I left Ámber, and the train that took me to Madrid took more than five hours. I took advantage of the breakfast being served in the cafeteria they had installed in one of the cars, although the coffee was difficult to digest and they had hardly any pastries; I was content with a donut that was... hard as a stone! I have slept most of my trip, and when I arrived in Madrid it was raining without stopping. Then I almost got lost on the subway. I thought I'd be late to catch the plane, but finally it left late, so...

  She stopped, reread her own text, and crossed out the last few sentences, deciding that Diana would not be interested in the details of her boring day at all.

  Focus, Sara! She scolded herself.

  She was obviously nervous. The calligraphy was energetic and imperfect. Between phrase and sentence she took a deep breath, excited, then continued.

  I've been bad, Diana. During this last month certain things have happened of which I’ve been recovering little by little, you know. I haven’t told anyone about the attempted rape except you, of course.

  The young woman’s hand shook.

  As I told you in the last letter, my rapist threw himself off the cliff. However my nightmares haven’t stopped, rather the opposite. Sometimes I wake up at dawn, my body soaked with perspiration, c
onvinced that the strange-eyed maniac is under the bed. He has survived and has returned to finish his work with me. I know it's stupid. I don’t want to end up in a psychiatric hospital; I have faith that this trip will help me find peace again. Sometimes I am afraid of myself, of committing some madness.

  And speaking of doctors, there is another issue. nosy Doctor Salas. The very pillar of the community betrayed me, betrayed us all. He deserves to pay for what he did. He forced me to fail in my diagnosis and to lie to a whole family, to a friend. I feel so responsible! Verónica requested my help the other day, as a direct witness and principal victim, to denounce her father. It is very hard with everything that is happening in that family, but the old man deserves to pay. I am not a spiteful person, but I helped Verónica and testified against him. It was what my heart requested I did the right thing. I think he's going to be tried.

  A tear slid down the young woman's cheekbone and she was forced to stop writing. After half a minute, she blew her nose and calmed down.

  Finally the day has come. In a few minutes I will step on the ground in this city and start a new life. I will do what I should have done many years ago.

  Thanks for everything, Diana. Soon you will hear from me. I promise.

  She put the notebook and ballpoint pen back in place and, excitedly, turned her gaze back to the green landscape, now dark by night. Green hope.

  Porky was awakened by one of his most powerful snores, disoriented and satisfied, just as the bus was entering the platforms of the Gloucester Green Coach Station, Oxford City Bus Station.

  “The tractor should not be going too fast, more in fact bearing in mind that it circulated close to the number 5th on Granite Street, a road at that time without asphalt and at the edge of a fairly quiet residential area. The vehicle was so wide that it occupied part of the opposite direction, forcing the other cars, motorcycles and bicycles to move out of its way until it stumbled through. The mastodon driver assumed that the rest of the occupants on the road would be careful with him.”