The Dual Morales

Christina Morales stood outside her boyfriend's apartment, knocking on the door repeatedly.

"Ricky? Ricky, honey! Open the door please!" she uttered, not too loudly, trying not to yell and wake up the other residents of the apartment building at six o'clock on a cold Boston Sunday morning.

There was no response from the inside. She pulled her cardigan tightly around her, to protect herself from the December cold.

Christina thought of knocking again, then decided against it. She took out the spare set of keys she had to the apartment from her handbag, and turned the key in the lock. The door opened with a slight creak, and she pushed it back all the way through. The first thing she noticed was how pitch dark the apartment was. Frowning, she stepped inside the threshold.

It was then that she sensed the deathly silence inside the apartment. It was like she had entered a catacomb.

"Rickyyyyyy? Ric...Rickyyyy? You are creeping me out...where are you?" she spoke, her voice shaking. There was still no response. Was Ricky not at home? A sudden feeling of foreboding overtook her senses. She had never liked the dark, but right now she was more afraid of the graveyard silence that pervaded the apartment.

Using the dim light from her cell phone as a guide, she somehow reached the light switches, and turned on the light.

Then she looked around the living room. And she screamed....

***********

The next thing she knew was Detective Ansen Cole of the Boston PD Homicide standing in front of her, while she sat on a wooden chair, in the living room.

The detective, very gently and calmly, was trying to make her recall the sequence of events that had happened since she had arrived at the apartment.

"Take it slowly, Miss Morales. All I need you to do is tell me, in steps, what happened when you came here," Detective Cole said, in a soothing voice.

"Well...I arrived here at around six this morning. I and Ricky had a small fight last night...so I came here to talk to him and settle matters. I first knocked on the door, not wanting to barge unannounced in here while he was still mad at me," she spoke.

"Yes, go on," the detective encouraged.

"When Ricky didn't open the door, I had to use my spare set of keys to get inside. And then it was that I found him...... like..like... that...oh God," she said, her voice breaking as tears ran down her face.

All around her, cops and crime scene investigators ran about the apartment, processing the crime scene or talking to the neighbors. She couldn't still believe it. She had arrived at her boyfriend's that morning to find him dead. Murdered, actually. Lying prone on the living room sofa, covered in, and lying in a pool of, his own blood.

Ricky was dead. Dead, and gone forever.

"Miss Morales, can you tell me what the fight was about?" Detective Cole asked.

"Huh? Yes, of course. I'd bought some clothes at the mall yesterday. Actually, it was a tank top with low waist, skin-tight jeans. I usually don't wear dresses like that. I just bought it on an impulse. But Ricky didn't like that. He thought that all those revealing clothes made me look like a whore. He never wanted me to wear stuff that would make other guys ogle at me. Concerning that, we had a fight," she finished.

"What happened after the fight?"

"I stormed out of here, and went home."

"You didn't see him or talk to him between that time, and the time you arrived here this morning?"

"well, once my anger had calmed down, I tried to talk to him. I called him plenty of times...but he never picked up the phone. You will find calls from me on his phone. I even called on his landline, but got the answering machine. At first I assumed he was just being an ass. But then I started getting worried, and only then came here in person."

The detective was scribbling furiously in his notepad.

A crime scene investigator in dark blue overalls came up to Detective Cole.

"Excuse me, Detective. We found this torn piece of brown leather jacket, stuck in the bedroom window, which is broken, by the way. It seems someone escaped out that window, and tore off their jacket in the process," said the CSI, holding up an evidence bag for Cole to see.

"Thank you, Kath. May I have this for a second?" Detective Cole said to the CSI, and she handed him the evidence bag.

"Miss Morales, this was found stuck in the bedroom window sill. You know who this belongs too?" Cole asked Christina Morales.

She looked closely at the torn brown piece of cloth.

"No, Detective. I've no idea who this belongs to...seeing it for the first time in my life," Christina replied.

"Allright, Miss Morales," said Detective Cole.

*******

The police and CSIs had left. Ricky's battered body had been taken away by the coroner's people. Christina left his house and returned home, distraught and dazed.

The image of Ricky, lying prone on the sofa, all bloody and mangled, was still vivid in her mind. She couldn't believe that her boyfriend was gone. Yesterday they'd been fighting. And now Ricky was dead. Before she was even able to settle their fight.

Christina sat down on the tiny sofa in her own apartment, and rested with her head backwards. It was 9. a.m. in the morning, but all blinds and windows in her apartment were closed. The living room was as dark as Ricky's apartment had been.

Christina closed her eyes and assessed her current situation. Her boyfriend was gone. One month ago, her parents were murdered in their house, bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Christina had recieved a call from the police while she was at work at her office.

She'd drove from work to her parents' house in south Boston like a maniac. Only to find their dead bodies in the bedroom, lying besides each other, bloody and mangled. The hardest part of the thing was identfying their bodies in the morgue- bruises and wounds covered their face, hands, neck and limbs.

The murder weapon had not been found, and neither had the killer. The police had closed the case a few days later, for lack of any breakthroughs in the case. The case had become a cold case. Juanita and Mike Morales' death had just become another cold case in the File room of the Boston Police department.

Involuntary tears rolled down Christina's closed eyes. In a short span of two months, she had lost all the people she could call her own. Her parents, her boyfriend. Now it was only her and her empty, people-less apartment.

Christina couldn't take it anymore. She took out her cellphone from her jacket-pocket and proceeded to call one of her work friends. She wanted to go out, get sloshed at some bar, drive home in a cab and pass out on her bed for hours. Then call in sick at work. That was Christina's way of dealing with the vicissitudes of life. A life which had constantly been in turmoil since it had been concieved.

********

Detective Cole was sitting at his desk, holding his head in his hands. Ricky Mullings' death wasn't making any sense to him. Okay, the guy had been arrested twice for traffic violations. He had spent some time in jail too, for assaulting a guy in a bar. The guy was a masochist, an alcoholic and obviously had anger issues. So who had barged in his house in the middle of the night, bludgeoned him to death as the coroner had found, and ran out through the bedroom window, snagging their leather jacket on the window sill hook.

They hadn't found the murder weapon, which was okay. The murder weapon was the first thing missing in many murder cases, making the investigation harder to conclude and the perpetrator harder to catch.

But the real object of his intrigue was Christina Morales. Cole had found out that Christina had lost her parents last month, and they had also been murdered too. In their bed. Cole had seen the crime scene photos- the bodies were battered and bloody, just like Ricky Mullings' had been. Mike and Juanita had also been bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, just like Mullings.

Why would someone kill Christina Morales' parents and boyfriend within a narrow time period of two months? More than that, Cole hadn't seen any signs of grief, or torment or anything that should have afflicted a person who had lost all of their family members in quick succession.

Cole wasn't judging Christina or anything. He knew that people had different ways of dealing with grief. Sometimes people who lost family members like Christina had, people closed up. They suppressed their bottomless grief within them, and closed off their emotions from the world. They went around pretending around they're fine, and strong enough to deal with the hand life has dealt them. But something about Christina's relatives dying one after the other just nagged at Cole. He couldn't put his finger on what it was that nagged him about the murders, and it frusrated him to no end. Cole looked at Christina Morales' picture. Short-cropped jet black hair, framing a lovely face with chocolate brown eyes, strong jaw and full lips. Christina Morales was a beautiful woman.

*******

Two weeks after Ricky's murder

The uniformed woman at the check-in counter at the Logan International Airport smiled at the young woman who stood in front of her.

The woman smiled back at her. She was dressed in low-waist,skin tight jeans, and a cute pink tank top over which she had pulled on a brown leather jacket. She had chocolate brown eyes and full lips in a lovely face, and when she smiled at the woman at the counter, the smile was what is known as a 'million dollar smile'. The young woman was attracting many male gazes, the other woman noticed.

The nattily dressed woman handed over her airline tickets to the woman attendant for scrutiny. 'Carmen Morales' was the name on the e-ticket, which was a one-way ticket to Montreal, Canada.

The attendant handed Carmen Morales back her ticket, and along with it, her boarding pass.

Carmen walked away from the counter, and took a seat in the waiting lounge.

Finally, I have accomplished my mission. Finally, I am taking Christina away from this bloody family that we both are unfortunate enough to belong to. Finally, I have had my revenge. Finally, Christina and I can look forward to a life of peace and freedom...freedom from a pig of a father, and a coward of a mother. Christina can finally be free of her abusive boyfriend, that Ricky Mullings.

Two hours later, Carmen Morales was on her way to Montreal...to freedom.

*********

Three days later

Detective Cole would turn up at Christina Morales's house, only to discover that she didn't live there anymore. The landlord would state that she had ended her lease, paid up her dues, packed her bags and left. She wouldn't say where she was going , or what was her reason for suddenly leaving. Christina had quit her job, closed all her bank accounts and withdrawn all her money.

Cole would still conduct a search of the house, where he would find a bloody baseball bat hidden under the bed, along with a brown leather jacket torn at the hem. He would also find a thoroughly tattered old diary in what used to be Christina's dresser.

From the diary, Cole would learn that the diary belonged to Carmen Morales, Christina's elder sister, who had committed suicide when Christina was seventeen, and she was twenty three. Carmen had written that she had committed suicide because her father, Miike Morales, had been sexually abusing her for years, since she was a kid. Her mother, Juanita, did nothing to protect her and beat her up when she complained about her father's sexual advances.

Cole would later, through a detailed investigation, confirm that a Carmen Morales had indeed, committed suicide in 2007 by hanging herself from the ceiling fan...on the same day of November 16th, 2013 that Juanita and Mike Morales had been found murdered in their beds.

Investigations would also reveal that Ricky Mullings had once been arrested for assualting Christina and partly breaking her jaw, but she had withdrawn the charges soon after.