Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira Read Free Book Online

arrested and, therefore, he was a suspect. The police had surveillance camera footage from a store on the main avenue facing the alley and it had shown no one coming out, other than Lucas. Physically, it was evidence against him. The person who called 112, emergency services in Portugal, had been located and she had cleared him, but her testimony was strange, which diminished its value.
     
                  When the session began, a witness was called, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who maintained that she’d been in a room on the fourth floor and had clearly seen the entire scene, without turning on the light in the window. She was a professional babysitter who was working in an apartment in the building that evening. The young men had fought and the big one had fallen. The small one had spit in his face and then immediately left, entering the main thoroughfare. A door across from the gym’s entrance had opened and a good looking fellow, with white hair and a small case, had appeared. He kneeled near the large young man on the ground, opened the case and took something out, but the young man stood up suddenly and ran toward the gym. The man raised his left arm and the kid fell face down. She thought it was a shot, although she had heard nothing. The man then approached the inert fighter, turned him over and did something to his face, closed the case, and went in the door he had come out of.
     
                  The witness had a concrete problem in terms of facts: other than the one to the gym, there was no other door in the alley. There were things in his favor. On the 112 recording, she said the two men had fought and, afterwards, a third seemed to have shot the one on the ground and then fled through a door across from the gym. Lucas had already referred to a new, public toilet in the alley in his deposition.
                  The judge interrogated her, but she insisted firmly on what she’d seen. Confronted with the nonexistence of the door, she confirmed that even though there was no other door, that night there had been one. Questioned if it could have been a porta-potty, she said it did not seem to be. She remembered a door.
                  Regarding the supposed public bathroom, the police peremptorily refuted its existence. Municipal authorities denied placing that equipment; there was neither water nor a sewer in that location, no one had seen it, and video in the authorities’ possession did not reveal the entrance of any similar structure into that alleyway. Worse yet, on that same night, there were multiple photographs of the crime scene and there was no lavatory, much less a door. Nevertheless, not considering that detail, the police seemed less convinced that Lucas was the murderer. They still presented that thesis, but perfunctorily, out of duty, without passion. The public ministry’s magistrate spoke in a monotone to assert that he saw no reason to change the investigation’s position. The prosecution stood by idly.
                  Lucas’s lawyer defended him eloquently. He took the facts and constructed the most favorable version that was still believable.  The elderly gentleman with a necktie surprised Lucas with an instrument of war of which he was unaware: words. Pronounced calmly and in their entirety. Having arrived at a point, the next one was as clear as water. Achieving one level, the next was evident to everyone. Along the way, he slipped grains of sand into the police’s version. Small grains, but they jammed the judicial machine’s gears. Whoever arrived at this point and heard him would have been surprised that anyone could have had the idea of looking for the young man, leaving the true assassin loose on the streets. His lawyer highlighted this: there is a murderer loose on Lisbon’s streets and judicial authorities were wasting resources in vain with his client. Lucas was convinced of his own innocence, until he’d awakened to