An Inconsequential Murder by Rodolfo Peña

student in the Business Management and Accounting School. It seems they had to get married. She was pregnant at the time and rumor has it that Victor was not the father. They married two or three years ago. Other than that, he has been a pretty low-profile kind of guy, you know, nose to the grind stone and all of that.”
     
    “ He didn’t fool around with women, did he?”
     
    “ Victor? No! The guy was like an altar boy. Why do you ask that?”
     
    “ I’m trying to rule out a crime of passion. I guess I should ask his wife and maybe his brother.”
     
    “ You can but I doubt very much that you’ll get a different answer. Word would’ve gone around. You know, Monterrey may have nearly 4 million inhabitants but the middle class is the size of your
thumbnail. Everybody knows everybody. And the computer community is even smaller.”
     
    “ That’s true, Lupe, but if there is something I’ve learned in this job it’s that people never cease to surprise you.”
     
    “ Well, if he was fiddling around, he kept it well hidden, and I certainly would be surprised, considering what he had at home.”
     
    “ What do you mean by that?”
     
    “ You haven’t met the wife, have you?”
     
    “ No, I haven’t.”
     
    “ You’ll see what I mean when you meet her.”
     
    After talking to Lupe for several hours, Lombardo left the bar very late that night. Lupe wanted to go to a whorehouse and asked him to come along but he begged off saying he was tired, had had a long day, and had to get up early the next day. Lombardo had never liked whorehouses; he hated the smell of the mixture of cheap perfume and cigarette smoke that impregnated every stitch of your clothes, and worse, the over made up, over ripe, and over aggressive whores were unbearable. “Bad whiskey and worse women,” is how his father had described them, although Lupe would surely have disagreed.
     
    The taxi he took home raced down the nearly empty avenues and streets. The cool night air cleared his mind and he made notes about what his friend had explained. Yes, system managers have access to everything that’s in a computer, one way or another. Yes, there is very little information that they cannot reach, access, manipulate if needed. “What was the most sensitive kind of data?” he had asked. “Well, that depends on where you work. In a University it is probably budgets, salaries, performance evaluations, email, lots of stuff.” Lupe had said. “Sensitive?” “Yes, but nothing to get you killed,” Lupe remarked. And, according to Lupe, no one had ever heard of Delgado doing anything shady or illegal.
     
    Lupe wanted to know w hy Lombardo was so interested in Victor’s job. Lombardo had said that he could only think of three things that could have led to someone wanting to rough up and eventually kill the young man: something to do with his job, something to do with drugs, something do to with a love affair—a crime of passion. Since this last was out of the question, he was starting to look at the other two possibilities.
     
    He had said that his instincts and experience told him that it was probably not a drug-related case—not in the traditional sense, anyway. He was not killed in the usual way, was not left in the usual spots, and so on. A love affair? A crime of passion? Homosexuals gone rampant? Jealous husband that hired goons to work him over and kill him? Not from what everyone kept telling him; nice guy, normal, quiet, a simple technocrat. Jealous lovers kill in the bedroom, in the hotel room, even at work, like that woman who walked into the corporate offices where she worked and shot her boss. Those were the easy cases. Not much to do—gather the facts, let the Medical Examiner do his job, the judge took care of the rest.
     
    No, there was something about this case that did not fit. It was too cruel for a simple murder. Was this a message? Was someone sending a message? But, who, to whom? What was being said? Who was