2666 (90 page)

The
second week of March 1997, the macabre round began again with the discovery of
a body on some desert land in the southern part of the city, designated El
Rosario on city blueprints, where there was a plan to build a neighborhood of
Phoenix-style houses. The body was found half buried some fifty yards from the
road that crossed El Rosario and intersected a dirt track that ran from the
eastern end of the Podesta ravine. It was discovered by a local ranch hand who
was passing by on horseback. According to the medical examiners, the cause of
death was strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. Despite the body's
state of decomposition, signs of battery with a blunt object were still evident
about the head, hands, and legs. The victim had probably also been raped. As
indicated by the fauna found on the body, the date of death was approximately
the first or second week of February. There was nothing to identify the victim,
although her particulars matched those of Guadalupe Guzman Prieto, eleven years
old, disappeared the evening of February 8, in Colonia San Bartolome.
Anthropometric and odontologic tests were carried out to establish her
identity, with positive results. Later a new autopsy was performed and there
was confirmation of the cranial trauma
and
hematomas, as well as of the ecchymosis of the neck and the fracture of the
hyoid. According to one of the inspectors in charge of the case, it was
possible that the killer had hanged the girl with his hands. Trauma to the
right thigh and gluteal muscles was also detected. The parents recognized the
body as that of their daughter Guadalupe. According to
La Voz de Sonora,
the corpse was well preserved, which helped with
the identification, its skin cured as if the arid yellow earth of El Rosario
were a kind of medium for mummification.

•

Four
days after the discovery of the body of Guadalupe Guzman Prieto, the body of
Jazmín Torres Dorantes, also eleven years old, was found on the eastern slopes
of Cerro Estrella. The cause of death was determined to be hypovolemic shock,
occasioned by the more than fifteen stabs she had been dealt by her attacker or
attackers. The vaginal and anal swabs established that she had been raped
several times. The body was fully dressed: khaki sweatshirt, jeans, and cheap
sneakers. The girl lived in the western part of the city, in Colonia Morelos,
and she had been kidnapped twenty days before, although the case hadn't been
publicized. The police arrested eight young men from Colonia Estrella, members
of a gang involved in car theft and small-time drug dealing, as the
perpetrators of the crime. Three were transferred to juvenile court and the
other five ended up being held in the Santa Teresa penitentiary, although there
was no conclusive evidence against them.

Two
days after Jazmin was discovered, a group of children found the lifeless body
of Carolina Fernandez Fuentes, nineteen, worker at the WS-Inc. maquiladora, on
a stretch of wasteland to the west of General Sepulveda industrial park.
According to the medical examiner, it had been two weeks since she was killed.
The body was completely naked, although a bloodstained blue bra was found
fifteen yards away, and a pair of black nylon stockings some fifty yards away.
When
Carolina
's
roommate, also a worker at WS-Inc., was interviewed, she declared that the bra
belonged to the deceased but the stockings certainly did not, because her
friend and beloved roommate wore only panties and had never used stockings, an
item of clothing she considered more suitable for a whore than a factory
worker. When the requisite tests were completed,
however,
it turned out that there were traces of Carolina Fernandez Fuentes's blood on
both the stockings and the bra, which started a rumor that Carolina had led a
double life, or that the night when she was killed she had participated
voluntarily in an orgy, since traces of semen were also found in her vagina and
rectum. For two days some men at WS-Inc. were questioned about their possible
connection to the dead woman, to no avail.
Carolina
's
parents, who were from the town of
San
Miguel
de Horcasitas, made the trip to Santa Teresa.
They didn't issue any statements. They claimed their daughter's body, signed
the papers that were put in front of them, and returned by bus to Horcasitas
with what was left of
Carolina
.
The cause of death was five stab wounds to the neck. According to the experts,
she wasn't killed in the place she was found.

Three days after the discovery
of
Carolina
's
body, in the calamitous month of March 1997, a girl of between sixteen and
twenty was found on some stony ground near the Pueblo Azul highway. The body
was in an advanced state of decomposition, by which it was assumed that she had
been dead for at least fifteen days. She was completely naked, wearing only
brass earrings in the shape of little elephants. Several families of girls and
women who had disappeared were brought in to view the body, but no one
recognized her as a daughter, sister, cousin, or wife. According to the medical
examiner, the right breast had been mutilated and the nipple of the left breast
had been torn off, probably bitten or cut with a knife, though the putrefaction
of the body made it impossible to say for sure. The official cause of death:
fracture of the hyoid.

In
the last week of March the skeleton of another woman was discovered some four
hundred yards from the Cananea highway, essentially in the middle of the
desert. It was three students and an American history professor from the
University
of
Los Angeles
who found it. They were on a
motorcycle trip in the north of
Mexico
,
and according to them, they had turned down a back road looking for a Yaqui
village and gotten lost. According to the Santa Teresa police, the gringos had
left the road to commit indecent acts, in other words to fuck each other, and
they put
the
four in a ceil to await developments. Late that night, when the students and
their professor had been locked up for more than eight hours, Epifanio Galindo
arrived at the police station and asked to hear their story. The Americans
repeated it and even drew a map that showed the exact
 
spot
 
where
  
they'd
 
found
 
the
 
half-buried
 
body.
  
When
  
asked whether they might
not have mistaken the bones of a cow or a coyote for those of a human being,
the professor responded that there was no animal, except possibly a primate,
with a human skull. The tone in which he said this irritated Epifanio, who
decided to make a trip to the scene the next day, at dawn, along with the
gringos, which meant that in order to facilitate the process they would have to
remain on hand, in other words as guests of the Santa Teresa police, though of
course in their very own cell, not to mention that they would be fed on the
public dime, and not jailhouse slop but decent food that a policeman went to
fetch for them at the nearest coffee shop. And despite the foreigners'
protests, that was that. The next day, Epifanio Galindo, several policemen, and
two inspectors, with the Americans in tow, made their way to the spot, a place
called El Pajonal, a name that was clearly more the expression of a wish than a
reality, since there were no grasslands nearby or anything of the kind, only
desert and stones and, here and there, gray-green shrubs, the mere sight of
which made the heart sink. There, poorly buried, in the exact spot marked by
the gringos, they found the bones. According to the medical examiner, the
victim was a young woman with a fractured hyoid. She wasn't wearing clothes or
shoes or anything that might have helped to identify her. Either they carried
the naked body here or they stripped her before they buried her, said Epifanio.
Do you call this burying? asked the medical examiner. Why, no, sir, they didn't
try very hard, said Epifanio, they didn't try very hard.

The next day the body of Elena
Montoya, twenty, was found by the side of a local road from the cemetery to the
La Cruz ranch. She had been missing from home for three days and a report had
been filed. The body exhibited multiple stab wounds to the abdomen, abrasions
to the wrists and ankles, and marks around the neck, as well as trauma to the
head produced by a blunt object, possibly a hammer or a stone. The case was
handled by Inspector Lino Rivera and his first step was to question the husband
of the deceased, Samuel Blanco Blanco, who remained under interrogation for
four days, at the end of which he was released for lack of evidence. Elena
Montoya worked at the Cal&Son maquiladora and had a three-month-old son.

The last day of March some
scavenger children discovered a body in the El Chile dump, in a complete state
of decomposition. What was left of it was removed to the city's
Institute
of
Forensic Anatomy
, where all the usual
procedures were performed. It appeared that the victim was somewhere between
fifteen and twenty years old. According to the medical examiners, she had died
more than twelve months ago, and the cause of death was unable to be
determined. This information nevertheless caught the attention of the Gonzalez
Resendiz family, of Guanajuato, whose daughter had disappeared around that
time, and the Guanajuato police requested the forensic report for the El Chile
victim from the Santa Teresa police, putting special emphasis on the dental
evidence. Once the evidence was received, it was confirmed that the victim was
Irene Gonzalez Resendiz, sixteen, who had run away from home in January 1996
after a quarrel with her family. Her father was a well-known local PRI
politician and her mother had appeared on a popular TV show, live before the
cameras, asking her daughter to come home. Even a passport-style picture of
Irene was printed on the labels of milk bottles, with her physical description
and a telephone number. No Santa Teresa policeman ever saw the picture. No
Santa Teresa policeman drank milk. None but Lalo Cura.

The
three medical examiners of Santa Teresa bore no resemblance to one another. The
oldest of them, Emilio Garibay, was big and fat and suffered from asthma.
Sometimes he had an asthma attack at the morgue, while he was performing an
autopsy, and he ignored it. If Dona Isabel, his assistant, was nearby, she
would get his inhaler out of his jacket, hanging on the coatrack, and Garibay
would open his mouth, like a baby bird, and let himself be given a spurt. But
when he was alone he ignored it and kept working. He had been born in Santa
Teresa, and everything seemed to indicate he would die there. His family were
upper-middle-class landowners, and many had gotten rich selling desert plots to
the maquiladoras that set up shop this side of the border in the
eighties. Emilio Garibay, however,
hadn't sold anything. Or not much.

He was a professor at the
medical school, and as a medical examiner he unfortunately never lacked for
work, so he simply didn't have time for other things, like business, for
example. He was an atheist and it had been years since he'd read a book,
despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his
specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or
two.
 
Sometimes he thought it was
precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading,
it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism
as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a
fucking book? he asked himself.

The name of the second medical
examiner was Juan Arredondo and he was from
Hermosillo
,
the capital of
Sonora
.
Unlike Garibay, who had studied in
Mexico City
,
he got his degree at the medical school of the
University
of
Hermosillo
.
He was forty-five, married to a native of Santa Teresa with whom he had three
children, and his political sympathies lay on the left, with the PRO, although
he was never active in the party. Like Garibay, he alternated his work as a
medical examiner with teaching duties at the
University
of
Santa Teresa
,
where he was well liked by the students, who saw him as a friend, not just a
professor. What he liked best was watching TV and eating at home with his
family, although when invitations came to conferences abroad he went wild and
did everything he could to get his hands on them. The dean, who was a friend of
Garibay's, despised Arredondo, and sometimes, out of pure contempt, tossed him
a bone. As a result, Arredondo had traveled three times to the
United States
, once to
Spain
, and once to
Costa Rica
. On one occasion he
represented the
Institute
of
Forensic Anatomy
and the
University
of
Santa Teresa
at a symposium held in
Medellin
,
Colombia
, and when he got back, he
was a changed man. We have no idea what's going on there, he told his wife, and
that was all he would say.