Lost: Casa Perdida [Completed]

The Meeting At Sucre

Next Day. 10:30 a.m

Felipe Altamirano Alvarez Espadachín

I was sitting in a room in Station 4, Sucre. The building was quite small compared to Station 3 in La Paz, where I used to work before being transferred to Las Taperas, temporarily. My station in La Paz was composed of five buildings which were interconnected by passageways. One building was entirely for the cells where suspects awaiting interrogation or criminals awaiting trial were held. Another building was where all the offices were. One building was for the kitchen, while the fourth and fifth one was for the armory and officers' dormitories respectively. Station 4 in Sucre, on the other hand, was quite small. It was composed of only two buildings.

The incidents that transpired during the days following the earthquake and the collapse of La Abuela De Princesa Irene made me doubt that I could return to La Paz after a short while. Every new incident that showed up lengthened the duration of my posting. There were a lot of cases that I had to investigate.

I was inside an unoccupied office, waiting for the Argentinian Police officers to come. The office was small, yet cozy. There was a desk one end of the room, while there were a coffee table and sofas in the center of the room. I sat on one of the sofas with Pablo on my side. We were discussing what possible data the Argentinians could share with us. A few hours before I entered that office, I received a call from Luismar, who said that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recognized the picture on the I.D card that was discovered at the site of the accident which the woodcutter discovered (from now on, I would refer to it as the Incasisi accident, because the accident happened near the village of Incasisi). The person on the I.D card entered Bolivia many weeks ago. His name was Mícheál Súilleabháin Frainclín Ó Gallchobhair. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs' notes on him included his nationality and his residence. He was an Irish national with an American Permanent Residency card. The only contact number for Gallager that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knew about was the telephone number of a school in Wyoming, United States: Wolfgang Academy. That was an important lead in the Incasisi accident case. We knew that one of the persons was this Irishman Michael Gallagher and the driver might have been Eduardo Rodriguez or someone he lent the car to. If we successfully confirmed the identity of the driver, we would only have the third passenger's identity to confirm. The third passenger had a card on her body, but the card's text and photo were rendered illegible. But the good news was that that card was an EMV card. EMV cards have a chip inside them which stored data. We sent that card to the I.T Department of the Police to have the data extracted from the chip inside it. The peon told me that the Argentinians would arrive in fifteen minutes after I arrived at the office.

True to his words, punctually, after fifteen minutes, two tall, blond-haired officers entered the room. I would have mistaken them for Germans if I never knew that they were part of the Argentinian Police. We received their profiles an hour ago so we knew how they both looked, and we knew their names. As soon as they got into the room, Pablo and I stood up and shook their hands.

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Garcia. Nice to meet you, Mr. Sosa." I shook the hands of Mateo Garcia and Matias Sosa.

Mateo Garcia and Matias Sosa shook my hands and greeted us.

"Have a seat," I said.

Garcia and Sosa sat down across me and Pablo on one of the sofas. Garcia stared at the painting of Simon Bolivar on the wall and at the Bolivian flag. He then looked at the desk, the sofas, the coffee table, and the door before finally looking at me and Pablo with a smile on his face. Sosa took of a bag that he brought with him and handed it to Garcia, who placed it near his leg beside the sofa.

"How was the drive here? I heard Agua Blancas was closed after the accident," I said.

"It was pretty long. There was a lot of traffic on the road from Tupiza to Santiago de Cotagaita. That traffic jams delayed our arrival further. We came through La Quiaca because of the closure. But finally, we're here," Sosa said with a smile. He adjusted his position on the sofa.