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Those fucking
judiciales
never solve a case, Epifanio
said to Lalo Cura. Then he began to rummage through his papers until he found a
little
notebook. What do you think this is? he asked. An address book, said
Lalo Cura. No, said Epifanio, it's an unsolved case. This happened before you
came to Santa Teresa. I don't remember the year. A little before Don Pedro brought
you, that I do remember, but I'm not sure about the exact year. Maybe 1993.
What year did you come? In '93, said Lalo Cura. Is that so? Yes, said Lalo
Cura. Well, then this was months before you got here, said Epifanio. A radio
reporter was killed. Her name was Isabel Urrea. She was shot to death. No one
ever figured out who the killer was. They tried to find him, but they couldn't.
Of course, it didn't occur to anyone to look at Isabel Urrea's appointment
book. The assholes thought it was a mugging gone wrong. There was talk about a
Central American. Some desperate fuck who needed money to cross the border, an
illegal, see? An illegal even in
Mexico
, which is saying a lot,
because we're all potential illegals here and one more or one less hardly makes
a difference. I was there when they searched her house to see if they could
find some clue. Of course, they found nothing. I remember I sat in an armchair,
with a glass of tequila next to me, Isabel Urrea's tequila, and I glanced
through the appointment book. An inspector asked me where I had gotten the
tequila. But no one asked me where I had gotten the appointment book or whether
there was anything important in it. I glanced through it, some of the names
sounded familiar, and then I left it with the rest of the evidence. A month
later I went into the archives at the precinct, and there was the appointment
book, along with a few other things belonging to the reporter. I slipped it
into my pocket and took it. That way I could study it in my own time. I found
the phone numbers of three
narcos.
One
of them was Pedro Rengifo. I also found the numbers of several
judiciales,
including a big boss in
Hermosillo
. What were
those phone numbers doing in an ordinary reporter's appointment book? Had she
interviewed them, put them on the air? Was she friends with them? And if she
wasn't, who had given her the numbers? A mystery. I could have done something.
I could've called some of the names I'd found and asked for money. But money
doesn't do it for me. So I kept the notebook, fuck it, and didn't do anything.

Early in September, the body of
a girl later identified as Marisa Hernandez Silva appeared. She was seventeen
and had vanished at the beginning of July on her way to the
Vasconcelos
Preparatory
School
, in Colonia Reforma. According to the
forensic report, she had been raped
and strangled. One of her breasts was almost
completely severed and the other was missing the nipple, which had been bitten
off. The body was found at the entrance to the illegal dump El
Chile
.
The call that alerted the police was made by a woman who had come to the dump
to dispose of a refrigerator, at noon, a time of day when there were no tramps,
just the occasional pack of children or dogs. Marisa Hernandez Silva was
sprawled between two big gray plastic bags full of scraps of synthetic fiber.
She was wearing the same clothes she'd had on when she disappeared: denim
pants, yellow blouse, and sneakers. The mayor of Santa Teresa ordered that the
dump be closed, although he later changed the order (informed by his secretary
of the legal impossibility of closing something that, for all intents and
purposes, had never been open) to decree the dismantling, removal, and
destruction of that pestilential no-man's-land. For a week a police guard was
posted on the edge of El
Chile
and for three days a few garbage trucks, aided by the two city dump trucks,
ferried trash to the dump in Colonia Kino, but faced with the magnitude of the
job and their own lack of manpower, they soon gave up.

Around this time, Sergio
Gonzalez, the reporter from Mexico City, had moved up the ranks of his paper's
arts page and his salary was higher, which meant he could send monthly support
payments to his ex-wife and still live comfortably, and he even had a lover, a
reporter from the international news section, with whom he slept occasionally,
but to whom he couldn't talk, because they were so different. He hadn't
forgotten— although he wondered himself why the memory persisted—the days he'd
spent in Santa Teresa or the killings of women, or the priest-killer called the
Penitent, who had vanished as mysteriously as he'd appeared. Sometimes, he
thought, being an arts reporter in
Mexico
was the same as reporting on
crime. And being on the police beat was the same as working for the arts page,
although in the minds of the crime reporters, all the arts reporters were
faggots
(assthetes,
they called
them), and in the minds of the arts reporters, all the crime reporters were
scum. Some nights after work he went for drinks with a few older reporters from
the crime page, which, as it happened, had the highest percentage of the oldest
reporters at the newspaper, trailed distantly by national news and sports.
Usually they ended up at a bar frequented by whores in Colonia Guerrero, a huge
lounge presided over by a seven-foot-tall plaster statue of Aphrodite,
probably, he thought, a place that had enjoyed a certain louche glory back in
Tin-Tan's day, and since then had been in perpetual decline, one of those
interminable Mexican declines, meaning a decline stitched together here and
there with a muted laugh, a muted shot, a muted whimper. A Mexican decline?
More like a Latin American decline. The crime reporters liked to drink there,
but they hardly ever slept with the whores. They talked about old cases,
recalled tales of corruption, extortion, and bloodshed, greeted the cops who
dropped by too, or took them aside to talk, as they put it, on background, but
they hardly ever went with a whore. At first, Sergio Gonzalez followed their
example, until he figured out that the reason the older reporters didn't sleep
with the whores was essentially because they had already been with all of them,
years ago, and because they weren't of an age to throw their money around. So
he stopped following their example, found a pretty young whore, and took her to
a nearby hotel. Once, he asked one of the oldest reporters what he thought
about the killings of women up north. The reporter answered that Santa Teresa
was a center of the drug trade and most likely nothing happened there that
wasn't related to the phenomenon one way or another. This struck him as an
obvious answer, an answer anyone might have given him, but every so often he
pondered it, as if despite the obviousness or simplicity of what the reporter
had said, the answer was orbiting his brain and emitting signals. His few
writer friends, those who came to visit him at the arts department, had no idea
what was happening in Santa Teresa, although news of the dead women reached
Mexico City at a steady rate, and Sergio imagined they probably didn't care
much what was happening in some distant corner of the country. His fellow
reporters, even those on the police beat, were indifferent too. One night,
after making love with the whore, as they lay smoking in bed, he asked her what
she thought about all the kidnappings and all the bodies of women found in the
desert, and she said she had only a vague idea what he was talking about. Then
Sergio told her everything he knew about the dead women and described the trip
he'd taken to Santa Teresa, and why he took it, because he needed the money,
because he'd just gotten divorced, and then he talked about the killings, which
he, as a newspaper reader, had followed, and about the press releases from a
women's organization whose initials, WSDP, he remembered, although he'd
forgotten what they stood for, Women of
Sonora for Democracy and
the People?, and as he was talking the whore yawned, not because she wasn't
interested in what he was saying but because she was tired, which irritated
Sergio and made him say, in exasperation, that in Santa Teresa they were
killing whores, so why not show a little professional solidarity, to which the
whore replied that he was wrong, in the story as he had told it the women dying
were factory workers, not whores. Workers, workers, she said. And then Sergio
apologized, and, as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head, he glimpsed an
aspect of the situation that until now he'd overlooked.

The month of September still
held surprises for the citizens of Santa Teresa. Three days after the discovery
of Marisa Hernandez Silva's mutilated body, the body of an unidentified woman
turned up next to the Santa Teresa—Cananea highway. The dead woman must have
been about twenty-five and she had a congenital dislocation of the right hip.
And yet, no one missed her, and even after the details of her deformity were
published in the press, no one came to the police with new information that
might lead to an identification. She was found with her hands bound, the strap
of a woman's purse used for the purpose. Her neck was broken and both arms
displayed knife wounds. But most significant of all was that, just like young
Marisa Hernandez Silva, one of her breasts had been severed and the nipple of
the other breast had been bitten off.

The same day that the victim
with the hip dislocation was found next to the Santa Teresa-Cananea highway,
city workers who were trying to move the El Chile dump discovered the rotting
body of a woman. It was impossible to determine the cause of death. She had
long black hair. She was dressed in a light-colored blouse with dark patterns
that couldn't be made out because of the body's state of decay. She was wearing
Jokko brand jeans. No one came to the police with information that might lead
to an identification.

At the end of September, the
body of a thirteen-year-old girl was found on the east side of Cerro Estrella.
Like Marisa Hernandez Silva and the woman by the Santa Teresa—Cananea highway,
her right breast had been severed and the nipple of her left breast had been
bitten off. She was dressed in Lee jeans, a sweatshirt, and a red vest. She was
very thin. She had been raped numerous times and stabbed, and the cause of
death was a fracture of the hyoid bone. But what surprised the reporters most
was that no one claimed or acknowledged the body. As if the girl had come to
Santa Teresa alone and lived there invisibly until the murderer or murderers
took notice of her and killed her.

As the crimes followed one
after the other, Epifanio carried on alone with his investigation of the death
of Estrella Ruiz Sandoval. He talked to her parents and the siblings still
living at home. They didn't know anything. He talked to an older sister, who
was married and lived on Calle Esperanza now, in Colonia Eomas del Toro. He
looked at pictures of Estrella. She was a pretty girl, tall, with beautiful
hair and nice features. Her sister told him who her friends were at the
maquiladora where she'd worked. He waited for them outside. He noticed that he
was the only older person waiting; the others were children,
 
some even carrying schoolbooks. Near the
children was a man with a green ice cream cart. The cart had a white umbrella.
As if Epifanio wanted to make them disappear, he whistled to the children and
bought all of them ice cream bars, except one who wasn't even three months old
yet, a baby in the arms of her sister, who might have been six. The names of
Estrella's friends were Bosa Marquez and Rosa Maria Medina. He asked how to
find
 
them,
 
and
 
one
 
of the women leaving work
pointed
 
out
 
Rosa Marquez. He told her he was a cop and
asked her to find her friend. Then they went walking out of the industrial
park. As they talked about Estrella, the one called Rosa Maria Medina started
to cry. The three liked the movies and on Sundays, though not every Sunday,
they would go downtown, where they usually saw the double feature at the Rex.
Other times they just window-shopped, looking at women's clothes especially, or
they went to a mall in Colonia Centeno. There was live music there on Sundays
and it was free. He asked if Estrella had plans for the future. Of course she
had plans, she wanted to study, not spend her whole life working at the
maquiladora. What did she want to study? She wanted to learn how to use a
computer, said Rosa Maria Medina. Then Epifanio asked if they wanted to learn a
trade too and they said they did, but it wasn't easy. Did she only go out with
you or did she have any other
friends? he wanted to know. We were her best friends, they
answered. She didn't have a boyfriend. Once she did. But that was a long time
ago. They didn't know him. When Epifanio asked how old Estrella was then, the
two girls thought a little and said she was at least twelve. How can it be that
such a pretty girl didn't have any boys chasing her? he wanted to know. The
friends laughed and said there had been lots of men who would've liked to date
Estrella, but she didn't want to waste her time. What do we need men for when
we have our own jobs and make money and can do what we want? Rosa Marquez asked
him. True, said Epifanio, you're right, although sometimes, especially when
you're young, there's nothing wrong with going out and having fun, sometimes
you need to. We have fun by ourselves, the girls told him, and we never feel
the need. When they had almost reached the house of one of the girls, he asked
them, even though it might not do any good, to describe the men who had wanted
to date Estrella or be her friend. They stopped on the street and Epifanio
wrote down five names, no last names, all of them workers at the same
maquiladora. Then he walked a few more blocks with Rosa Maria Medina. I don't
think it was any of them, said the girl. Why do you say that? Because they seem
like nice people, said the girl. I'll talk to them, said Epifanio, and after
I've talked to them I'll let you know. In three days he had tracked down the
five men on the list. None of them looked like a bad person. One of them was
married, but the night Estrella disappeared he had been at home with his wife and
three children. The other four had more or less solid alibis, and, most
important, none had a car. He talked to Rosa Maria Medina again. This time he
sat outside her house waiting for her. When the girl got home she asked,
scandalized, why he hadn't knocked. I knocked, said Epifanio, and your mother
came to the door and asked me in for a cup of coffee, but then she had to go to
work and I came out here to wait for you. The girl invited him in but Epifanio
said he would rather sit outside, claiming it was too hot indoors. He asked her
whether she smoked. At first the girl remained standing to one side, and then
she sat on a flat stone and said she didn't smoke. Epifanio gazed at the stone:
it was very odd, shaped like a chair, but with no back, and the fact that Rosa
Maria Medina's mother or someone in the family had set it there, in that little
yard, showed good taste and even sensitivity. He asked the girl where the stone
had come from. My father found it, said Rosa Maria Medina, in Casas Negras, and
he carried it back all by himself. That's where Estrella's body was found, said
Epifanio. On the highway, said the girl, closing her eyes. My father found this
stone right in Casas Negras, at a party, and he fell in love with it. That's
how he was. Then she said her father had died. Epifanio wanted to know when.
Years and years ago, said the girl, with a shrug. He lit a cigarette and asked
her to tell him again, any way she wanted, about her outings with Estrella and
the other girl, what was her name? Rosa Marquez, on Sundays. The girl started
to talk, with her gaze fixed on the few potted plants her mother kept in the
tiny front yard, although from time to time she lifted her eyes and glanced at
him as if to gauge whether what she was telling him was useful or a waste of
time. When she was finished Epifanio had gotten one thing clear: they didn't go
out only on Sundays, sometimes they went to the movies on Mondays or Thursdays,
or out dancing, it all depended on the shifts at the maquiladora, which
followed no set pattern and obeyed production schedules beyond the workers'
comprehension. Then he changed the line of questioning and wanted to know what
they did for fun on Tuesdays, say, if that was the day of the week they had
off. The routine, according to the girl, was similar, although in some ways it
was a little better, because the stores downtown were all open, which wasn't
the case on Sundays. Epifanio pushed a little. He wanted to know what their
favorite movie theater was, besides the Rex, what other theaters they had gone
to, whether anyone had approached Estrella anywhere, what businesses they had
visited even if they hadn't gone in and just stood looking in the windows, what
coffee shops they had been to, the names of the coffee shops, whether they had
ever been to any club. The girl said they had never been to a club, Estrella
didn't like that kind of place. But you do, said Epifanio. You and your friend
Rosa Marquez. The girl wouldn't look him in the face and she said that
sometimes, when they went out without Estrella, they went to the clubs
downtown. And not Estrella? Estrella never went with you? Never, said the girl.
Estrella wanted to know things about computers,
 
she wanted to learn,
 
she wanted
to get ahead, said the girl. Computers, computers, I don't believe a word
you're saying, cupcake, said Epifanio. I'm not your fucking cupcake, said the
girl. For a while they sat there without speaking. Epifanio laughed a little
and then lit another cigarette, sitting there at the door to the house,
watching people come and go. There's a place, said the girl, but now I don't
remember where it is, it's downtown, a computer store. We went there a few
times. Rosa and I waited for her outside and she
went in by herself and talked to a tall man, really tall, much taller
than you, said the girl. Tall, and what else? asked Epifanio. Tall and blond, a
gilero,
said the girl. And what else?
Well, at first Estrella seemed excited, I mean, the first time she went in and
talked to that man. She said he was the owner of the store and he knew a lot
about computers and also you could tell he had money. The second time we went
to see him Estrella was mad when she came out. I asked her what had happened
and she didn't want to say. It was just the two of us and then we went to the carnival
in Colonia
Veracruz
and we forgot all about it. And when was that, cupcake? asked Epifanio. I
already told you I'm not your fucking cupcake, you pig, said the girl. When was
that? asked Epifanio, who could already see a very tall, very blond man walking
in the dark, along a long, dark passageway, back and forth, as if waiting for
him. A week before she was killed, said the girl.