4. THE PART ABOUT THE CRIMES

The girl's body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved T-shirt and a yellow knee-length skirt, a size too big. Some children playing in the lot found her and told their parents. One of the mothers called the police, who showed up half an hour later. The lot was bordered by Calle Pelaez and Calle Hermanos Chacon and it ended in a ditch behind which rose the walls of an abandoned dairy in ruins. There was no one around, which at first made the policemen think it was a joke. Nevertheless, they pulled up on Calle Pelaez and one of them made his way into the lot. Soon he came across two women with their heads covered, kneeling in the weeds, praying. Seen from a distance, the women looked old, but they weren't. Before them lay the body. Without interrupting, the policeman went back the way he'd come and motioned to his partner, who was waiting for him in the car, smoking. Then the two of them returned (the one who'd waited in the car had his gun in his hand) to the place where the women were kneeling and they stood there beside them staring at the body. The policeman with the gun asked whether they knew her. No, sir, said one of the women. We've never seen her before. She isn't from around here, poor thing.

This happened in 1993. January 1993. From then on, the killings of women began to be counted. But it's likely there had been other deaths before. The name of the first victim was Esperanza Gomez Saldana and she was thirteen. Maybe for the sake of convenience, maybe because she was the first to be killed in 1993, she heads the list. Although surely there were other girls and women who died in 1992. Other girls and women who didn't make it onto the list or were never found, who were buried in unmarked graves in the desert or whose ashes were scattered in the middle of the night, when not even the person scattering them knew where he was, what place he had come to.

The identification of Esperanza Gomez Saldana was relatively easy. First the body was brought to one of the three Santa Teresa police stations, where it was seen by a judge and examined by more policemen and photographed. After a while, as an ambulance waited outside the station, Pedro Negrete, the police chief, arrived, followed by a pair of deputies, and he proceeded to examine her again. When he had finished he met with the judge and three policemen who were waiting for him in an office and asked what conclusion they had reached. She was strangled, said the judge, it's clear as day. The policemen just nodded. Do we know who she is? asked the chief. They all said no. All right, we'll find out, said Pedro Negrete, and he left with the judge. One of his deputies stayed behind at the station and asked to see the officers who had found the dead girl. They've gone back out on patrol, he was told. Well, get them back here, shitheads, he said. Then the body was taken to the morgue at the city hospital, where the medical examiner conducted an autopsy. According to the autopsy, Esperanza Gomez Saldana had been strangled to death. There was bruising on her chin and around her left eye. Severe bruising on her legs and rib cage. She had been vaginally and anally raped, probably more than once, since both orifices exhibited tears and abrasions, from which she had bled profusely. At two in the morning the examiner concluded the autopsy and left. A black orderly, who had moved north from Veracruz years ago, put the body away in a freezer.

Five days later, before the end of January, Luisa Celina Vazquez was strangled. She was sixteen years old, sturdily built, fair-skinned, and five months pregnant. The man she lived with and a friend of his were smalltime thieves who stole from stores and appliance warehouses. The police were alerted by a call from neighbors in the couple's building, located on Avenida Ruben Dario, in Colonia Mancera. After breaking down the door, they found Luisa Celina strangled with a television cord. That night, her lover, Marcos Sepulveda, and his partner, Ezequiel Romero, were arrested. Roth were locked up at Precinct #2 and subjected to an interrogation that lasted all night, conducted by the police chief's right-hand man, Officer Epifanio Galindo, with optimal results, since before the sun came up Romero confessed to having maintained intimate relations with the deceased behind the back of his friend and partner. Upon learning that she was pregnant, Luisa Celina had decided to put an end to these relations, which Romero refused to accept, because he thought that he, not Marcos Sepulveda, was the father of the unborn child. After a few months, when Luisa Celina wouldn't change her mind, he decided in a fit of insanity to kill her, which he finally did one night when Sepulveda was away. Two days later, Sepulveda was released, and Romero, rather than being sent to prison, remained locked up at Precinct #2, where the interrogations continued, their object this time not to clear up any lingering questions regarding the murder of Luisa Celina but to incriminate Romero in the murder of Esperanza Gomez Saldana, whose body had by now been identified. Despite what the police expected, deceived as they were by the speed with which they had obtained the first confession, Romero stood firm and refused to implicate himself in the earlier crime.

Midway through February, in an alley in the center of the city, some garbagemen found another dead woman. She was about thirty and dressed in a black skirt and low-cut white blouse. She had been stabbed to death, although contusions from multiple blows were visible about her face and abdomen. In her purse was a ticket for the nine a.m. bus to Tucson, a bus she would never catch. Also found were a lipstick, powder, eyeliner, Kleenex, a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and a package of condoms. There was no passport or appointment book or anything that might identify her. Nor was she carrying a lighter or matches.

In March, the female reporter for the radio station El Heraldo del Norte, sister company of the newspaper El Heraldo del Norte, left the broadcast studio at ten with a male reporter and the sound engineer. They headed to the Italian restaurant Piazza Navona, where they ordered three slices of pizza and three small bottles of California wine. The male reporter was the first to leave. The female reporter, Isabel Urrea, and the sound eengineer, Francisco Santamarfa, decided to stay and talk a little longer. They discussed work matters, scheduling, and programs, and then they began to talk about a friend who had left the station, gotten married, and gone to live with her husband in a town near Hermosillo, the name of which they couldn't recall but which they were sure was near the ocean and which for six months out of the year, according to this friend, was the closest thing to paradise. They both left the restaurant. The sound engineer didn't have a car, so Isabel Urrea offered to give him a ride home. No need, said the engineer, his house was nearby and anyway he would rather walk. As the engineer set off down the street, Isabel walked toward the place where she had left her car. As she got out her keys to unlock it, a shadowy figure appeared on the sidewalk and fired at her three times. The keys fell. A passerby some twenty feet away dropped to the ground. Isabel tried to get up but she could only lean her head against the front tire. She felt no pain. The shadowy figure approached and shot her in the forehead.

The murder of Isabel Urrea, covered the first three days by her radio station and paper, was explained as a frustrated robbery, the work of a lunatic or drug addict who probably meant to steal her car. The theory also circulated that the perpetrator might be a Guatemalan or Salvadorean veteran of the wars in Central America, someone desperate to get the money to move on to the United States. There was no autopsy, in deference to the family, and the ballistic analysis, which was never made public, was later lost for good somewhere in transit between the courts of Santa Teresa and Hermosillo.

A month later, a knife sharpener making his way along Calle El Arroyo between Colonia Ciudad Nueva and Colonia Morelos saw a woman clinging drunkenly to a wooden post. A black Peregrino with tinted windows passed by. At the other end of the street, the knife sharpener spotted an ice cream vendor approaching, covered in flies. The two men converged on the wooden post, but the woman had slipped or lost the strength to hold on. Her face, half hidden by her forearm, was a pulpy mass of red and purple flesh. The knife sharpener said they had to call an ambulance. The ice cream vendor stared at the woman and said she looked as if she'd gone fifteen rounds with El Torito Ramirez. The knife sharpener realized the ice cream vendor wasn't going to budge and he said to watch his cart, he would be right back. After he crossed the dirt road he turned around to check that the ice cream vendor was obeying, and he saw all the flies that had been circling the vendor settle around the woman's battered head. A few women were watching from the windows across the street. Somebody needs to call an ambulance, said the knife sharpener. That woman is dying. After a while an ambulance came from the hospital and the medics wanted to know who would pay for the ride. The knife sharpener explained that he and the ice cream vendor had found the woman lying on the ground. I know, said the medic, but what I care about now is finding out who will take responsibility for her. How can I take responsibility for a person when I don't even know her name? asked the knife sharpener. Well, somebody has to, said the medic. Is there something wrong with your ears, dumbfuck? asked the knife sharpener, pulling a giant carving knife out of a drawer in his cart. Hey now, hey now, hey now, said the medic. Go on, get her in the ambulance, said the knife sharpener. The other medic, who had knelt to examine the fallen woman, swatting away the flies, said there was no point in anyone losing his shit, the woman was already dead. The knife sharpener's eyes narrowed until they looked like two lines drawn with charcoal. Goddamn motherfucking asshole, it's your fault, he said, and he started after the medic. The other medic tried to intervene, but when he saw the knife in the knife sharpener's hand, he decided to lock himself in the ambulance and call the police. For a while the knife sharpener chased the medic until his fury, exasperation, and bloodlust abated, or until he got tired. And then he stopped, took his cart, and headed off down Calle El Arroyo until the onlookers who had gathered around the ambulance lost sight of him.

The woman's name was Isabel Cansino, though she went by Elizabeth, and she was a prostitute. The blows she'd received had destroyed her spleen. The police blamed the crime on one or several dissatisfied customers. She lived in Colonia San Damian, quite a bit farther south than she'd been found, and she wasn't known to have a steady boyfriend, although a neighbor woman talked about someone called Ivan who came by often, and who couldn't be located on subsequent visits. An attempt was also made to discover the whereabouts of the knife sharpener, whose name was Nicanor, according to the statements of residents of Colonia Ciudad Nueva and Colonia Morelos, where he came around approximately once a week or once every two weeks, but all efforts to find him were in vain. Either he had changed jobs or he'd moved from the west of Santa Teresa to the south or east or he'd left the city altogether. In any case, he was never seen again.

The next month, in May, a dead woman was found in a dump between Colonia Las Flores and the General Sepulveda industrial park. In the complex stood the buildings of four maquiladoras where household appliances were assembled. The electric towers that supplied power to the maquiladoras were new and painted silver. Next to them, amid some low hills, were the roofs of shacks that had been built a little before the arrival of the maquiladoras, stretching all the way to the train tracks and across, along the edge of Colonia La Preciada. In the plaza there were six trees, one at each corner and two in the middle, so dusty they looked yellow. At one end of the plaza was the stop for the buses that brought workers from different neighborhoods of Santa Teresa. Then it was a long walk along dirt roads to the gates where the guards checked the workers' passes, after which they were allowed into their various workplaces. Only one of the maquiladoras had a cafeteria. At the others the workers ate next to their machines or in small groups in a corner, talking and laughing until the siren sounded that signaled the end of lunch. Most were women. In the dump where the dead woman was found, the trash of the slum dwellers piled up along with the waste of the maquiladoras. The call informing the authorities of the discovery of the dead woman came from the manager of one of the plants, Multizone-West, a subsidiary of a multinational that manufactured TVs. The policemen who came to get her found three executives from the maquiladora waiting for them by the dump. Two were Mexican and the other was American. One of the Mexicans said they hoped the body would be removed as soon as possible. One of the policemen asked where the body was, while his partner called an ambulance. The three executives accompanied the policeman into the dump. The four of them held their noses, but when the American stopped holding his nose the Mexicans followed his example. The dead woman had dark skin and straight black hair past her shoulders. She was wearing a black sweatshirt and shorts. The four men stood looking at her. The American crouched down and moved the hair from her neck with a pen. It would be better if the gringo didn't touch her, said the policeman. I'm not touching her, said the American in Spanish, I just want to see her neck. The two Mexican executives crouched down and peered at the marks on the dead woman's neck. Then they got up and looked at their watches. The ambulance is taking a long time, said one of them. It'll be here in a second, said the policeman. Well, said one of the executives, you'll take care of everything, won't you? The policeman said yes, of course, and tucked the money the other man handed him into the pocket of his regulation pants. The dead woman spent that night in a refrigerated compartment in the Santa Teresa hospital and the next day one of the medical examiner's assistants performed the autopsy. She had been strangled. She had been raped. Vaginally and anally, noted the medical examiner's assistant. And she was five months pregnant.

The first dead woman of May was never identified, so it was assumed she was a migrant from some central or southern state who had stopped in Santa Teresa on her way to the United States. No one was traveling with her, no one had reported her missing. She was approximately thirty-five years old and she was pregnant. Maybe she was going to the United States to join her husband or her lover, the father of the child she was expecting, some poor fuck who lived there illegally and maybe never knew he had gotten this woman pregnant or that she, when she found out, would come looking for him. But this first death wasn't the only one. Three days later, Guadalupe Rojas (her identity clear from the start) was killed. She was twenty-six, a resident of Calle Jazmin, one of the streets parallel to Avenida Carranza, in Colonia Carranza, and employed at the File-Sis maquiladora, recently built on the road to Nogales, some five miles from Santa Teresa. As it happened, Guadalupe Rojas didn't die on her way to work, which might have made sense, since the area around the maquiladora was deserted and dangerous, best crossed in a car and not by bus and then on foot since the factory was at least a mile from the nearest bus stop, but at the door to her building on Calle Jazmin. The cause of death was three gunshot wounds, two of them pronounced fatal. The killer turned out to be her boyfriend, who tried to flee that very night and was caught by the train tracks, not far from a nightspot called Los Zancudos where he had gotten drunk earlier. It was the owner of the bar, a former city police officer, who called the police. Once the suspect had been questioned, it was revealed that the motive of the crime was jealousy, warranted or not, and after an appearance before the judge and upon the agreement of all present, he was sent without further delay to the Santa Teresa jail to await transfer or trial. The last dead woman of May was found on the slopes of Cerro Estrella, the hills that lend their name to the Colonia that surrounds them unevenly, as if nothing could easily grow or expand there. Only the eastern side of the hills faced mostly open country. That was where they found her. According to the medical examiner, she had been stabbed to death. There was unmistakable evidence of rape. She must have been twenty-five or twenty-six. Her skin was fair and her hair light colored. She was wearing jeans, a blue shirt, and Nike sneakers. She wasn't carrying any identifying documents. Whoever killed her had taken the trouble to dress her, because neither her jeans nor her shirt were torn. There were no indications of anal rape. The only mark on her face was a faint bruise on her upper jaw, near her right ear. In the days after the discovery, El Heraldo del Norte as well as La Tribuna de Santa Teresa and La Voz de Sonora, the three city papers, published pictures of the unknown victim of Cerro Estrella, but no one came forward to identify her. On the fourth day after her death, the Santa Teresa police chief, Pedro Negrete, went in person to Cerro Estrella, not accompanied by anyone, even Epifanio Galindo, and examined the place where the dead woman had been found. Then he left the low slopes and began to climb to the top of the Cerro. Among the volcanic rocks were supermarket bags full of trash. He remembered that his son, who was studying in Phoenix, had once told him that plastic bags took hundreds, maybe thousands of years to disintegrate. Not these, he thought, noting the rapid pace of decomposition here. At the top some children went running and vanished down the hill, toward Colonia Estrella. It began to get dark. To the west he saw houses with zinc and cardboard roofs, the streets winding through an anarchic sprawl. To the east he saw the highway that led to the mountains and the desert, the lights of the trucks, the first stars, real stars, stars that crept in with the night from the far side of the mountains. To the north he didn't see anything, just a vast monotonous plain, as if life ended beyond Santa Teresa, despite what he hoped and believed. Then he heard dogs, the sounds coming closer and closer until he saw them. They were probably starving and wild, like the children he'd caught a glimpse of when he arrived. He pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster. He counted five dogs. He took off the safety and shot. Instead of leaping in the air, the dog collapsed, and the force of the shot sent it skidding through the dust, curled in a ball. The other four dogs ran off. Pedro Negrete watched them go. Two had their tails between their legs and ran in a crouch. Of the other two, one ran stiff tailed, and the fourth, for some unknown reason, wagged its tail, as if it had been given a treat. He went over to the dead dog and touched it with his foot. The bullet had gone into its head. Without glancing behind him he walked on down the hill, to the place where the body of the victim had been found. There he stopped and lit a cigarette. A Ducados, unfiltered. Then he continued on to his car. From here, he thought, everything looked different.

There were no other deaths of women in May, with the exception of those who died of natural causes, that is, of illness or old age, or in childbirth. But the end of the month marked the appearance of the church desecrator. One day a stranger came into the church of San Rafael, on Calle Patriotas Mexicanos, in the center of Santa Teresa, during the early service. The church was almost empty. There were just a few of the faithful clustered together in the front pews, and the priest was in the confessional. The church smelled of incense and cheap cleaning products. The stranger sat in one of the last pews and got right down on his knees, his head buried in his hands as if it ached or he felt ill. Some of the elderly parishioners turned to look at him and whispered among themselves. One little old lady came out of the confessional and stood motionless staring at the stranger, as a young woman with Indian features went in to confess. When the priest had absolved the Indian woman of her sins, the service would start. But the little old lady who had come out of the confessional just stood there staring at the stranger, although sometimes she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, doing a kind of dance step. She knew immediately that something was wrong with the man and she intended to go and warn the other old ladies. As she walked up the main aisle, she saw a pool of liquid spread across the floor from the pew where the stranger was sitting and she smelled urine. Then, instead of moving on toward where the old ladies were clustered, she turned around and returned to the confessional. She knocked several times on the priest's little window. I'm busy, my child, he said. Father, said the little old lady, there's a man here who's polluting the house of the Lord. Yes, child, I'll be with you in a moment, said the priest. Father, I don't like this one bit, do something, for the love of God. As she talked, the little old lady seemed to dance. I'm coming, my child, be patient, I'm busy, said the priest. Father, there's a man doing his business in the church, said the little old lady. The priest poked his head out between the threadbare curtains and peered through the sepia dusk at the stranger, and then he stepped out of the confessional and the woman with Indian features also stepped out of the confessional and the three of them stood frozen watching the stranger who was moaning faintly and kept urinating, wetting his pants and loosing a river of urine that ran toward the vestibule, confirming that the aisle, as the priest had feared, was worryingly uneven. Then the priest went to call the sexton, who was having his coffee at the sacristy table and looked tired, and the two of them went up to the stranger to scold him and throw him out of the church. The stranger saw them coming and gazed at them with his eyes full of tears and asked them to leave him alone. Almost at the same moment, a blade appeared in his hand, and as the old ladies in the front pews screamed, he stabbed the sexton.

The case was entrusted to Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez, who was reputed to be capable and discreet, a quality some policemen associated with religious faith. Juan de Dios Martinez talked to the priest, who described the stranger as a man of about thirty, average height, dark-skinned, sturdy, your average Mexican. Then he talked to the old ladies. To them, the stranger was no average Mexican, he was the devil incarnate. So what was the devil doing at the early service? asked the inspector. He was there to kill us all, said the old ladies. At two in the afternoon, accompanied by a sketch artist, Juan de Dios Martinez went to the hospital to take the sexton's statement. The sexton's description matched the priest's. The stranger smelled of liquor. The smell was strong, as if he had washed his shirt the night before in a basin of ninety-proof alcohol. He hadn't shaved for days, although you couldn't really tell because he didn't have much of a beard. How did the sexton know he didn't have much of a beard? Juan de Dios Martinez wanted to know. By the way the hairs grew on his face, skimpy and every which way, like they were stuck there in the dark by his bitch of a mother and his cock-sucking faggot of a father, said the sexton. Also: he had big, strong hands. Hands maybe too big for his body. And he was crying, no question about that, but he also seemed to be laughing, crying and laughing at the same time. Do you know what I mean? asked the sexton. Like he was high? asked the inspector. Exactly. That's it. Later Juan de Dios Martinez called the Santa Teresa asylum and asked whether they had an inmate who matched the description he had compiled. They said they had two, but neither was violent. He asked if they were allowed out. One is and the other isn't, he was told. I'm coming to see them, said the inspector. At five, after eating lunch at a coffee shop where cops never went, Juan de Dios Martinez parked his metallic gray Cougar in the asylum parking lot. He was received by the director, a woman of about fifty, with her hair dyed blond, who had coffee brought in for him. The director's office was pretty and struck him as tastefully decorated. On the walls there were two prints, a Picasso and a Diego Rivera. Juan de Dios Martinez spent a long time gazing at the Rivera print as he waited for the director. On the desk were two photographs: one was of the director, when she was younger, with her arms around a girl looking straight into the camera. The girl had a sweet, blank expression on her face. In the other photograph the director was even younger. She was sitting next to an older woman, regarding her with an amused expression. The older woman had a serious air about her and stared at the camera as if she thought it was frivolous to have her picture taken. When the director came in at last, the inspector could see immediately that many years had gone by since the pictures were taken. He observed further that the director was still very attractive. For a while they talked about the mental patients. The dangerous ones weren't allowed out, the director informed him. And there weren't many dangerous ones, anyway. The inspector showed her the sketch the artist had made and the director examined it carefully for a few seconds. Juan de Dios Martinez stared at her hands. Her nails were painted and her fingers were long and looked soft to the touch. On the back of her hands he counted a few freckles. The director said the sketch wasn't good and it might be anyone. Then they went to see the two patients. They were in the yard, an enormous yard with no trees, a dirt yard like a soccer field in a slum. A guard dressed in white T-shirt and trousers brought out the first inmate. Juan de Dios Martinez heard the director ask how he felt. Then they talked about food. The patient said he could hardly eat meat anymore, but he said it in such a scattered way that the inspector couldn't tell whether he was complaining about the menu or informing the director of a recently acquired aversion. She talked about protein. The breeze in the yard ruffled the patients' hair. We need to build a wall, he heard the doctor say. When the wind blows it makes them nervous, said the guard dressed in white. Then they brought out the other inmate. Juan de Dios Martinez thought at first that they were brothers, although when the two were side by side he realized the resemblance was deceptive. From a distance, he thought, maybe all madmen look alike. Back in the director's office, he asked how long she'd been the head of the asylum. For ages, she said, laughing. I can't even remember how long. As they drank more coffee, of which the director was clearly very fond, he asked if she was from Santa Teresa. No, said the director. I was born in Guadalajara and I studied in Mexico City and then in San Francisco, at Berkeley. Juan de Dios Martinez would have liked to keep talking and drinking coffee, and maybe ask whether she was married or divorced, but he didn't have time. Can I take them with me? he asked. The director looked at him uncomprehendingly. Can I take the patients with me? he asked. The director laughed in his face and asked if he was right in the head. Where do you want to take them? To be part of a kind of lineup, said the inspector. The victim is in the hospital and can't go anywhere. You lend me your patients for a few hours, I'll take them on a ride to the hospital, and you'll have them back before dark. You're asking me? said the director. You're the boss, said the inspector. Bring me a court order from the judge, said the director. I can get one, but it's just red tape. Also, if I come with a court order, your patients will be brought in to the station, they might be kept a night or two, it won't be any fun for them. But if I take them with me now, it'll be easy. They ride in the car with me, I'm the only cop, and if the victim makes a positive identification, you still get your boys back, both of them. Doesn't that seem easier? No, not to me it doesn't, said the director, bring me a court order from the judge and then we'll see. I didn't mean to offend you, said the inspector. I'm shocked, said the director. Juan de Dios Martinez laughed. Well, I won't take them, then, and that's the end of it, he said. But will you promise to do your best to make sure neither of them leaves the asylum? The director got up and for a moment he thought she was going to kick him out. Then she called her secretary and asked for another cup of coffee. Would you like one? Juan de Dios Martinez nodded. Tonight I won't be able to sleep, he thought.

That night the stranger from San Rafael found his way to the church of San Tadeo, in Colonia Kino, a neighborhood springing up amid the scrub and rolling hills of southeastern Santa Teresa. Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez got a call at midnight. He was watching TV and after he hung up he collected the dirty plates on the table and put them in the sink. From the drawer of the night table he took his gun and the sketch, which he had folded in four, and went down the steps to the garage where his red Chevy Astra was parked. When he got to San Tadeo some women were sitting on the adobe steps. There weren't many of them. Inside the church he caught a glimpse of Inspector Jose Marquez questioning the priest. He asked a policeman whether the ambulance had come yet. The policeman looked at him with a smile and said there were no casualties. What the fuck was all this? Two crime scene technicians were trying to find prints on a statue of Christ next to the altar, on the floor. This time the freak didn't hurt anyone, Jose Marquez told him when he was done with the priest. Juan de Dios Martinez wanted to know what had happened. Some tripped-out asshole showed up here around ten, said Marquez. He was carrying a switchblade or a knife. He sat in the last row. There. Where it's darkest. An old woman heard him crying. Because he was sad or happy, I don't know. He was pissing. Then the old woman went to call the priest and he jumped up and started to smash statues. Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and a couple of other saints. Then he left. And that's all? asked Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez. End of story, said Marquez. For a while the two of them talked to the witnesses. The description of the perpetrator matched the description of the perpetrator at San Rafael. Juan de Dios Martinez showed the priest the sketch. The priest was young and seemed tired, not because of what had happened that night but because of something that had been wearing him down for years. Looks like him, the priest said indifferently. The church smelled of incense and urine. The chunks of plaster scattered across the floor reminded him of a movie, but he couldn't remember which one. With the tip of his foot he nudged one of the fragments. It looked like a piece of a hand and it was soaked. Have you noticed? asked Marquez. What? asked Juan de Dios Martinez. The bastard must have a huge bladder. Or else he holds it as long as he can and waits until he's inside a church to let go. When Juan de Dios Martinez came out, he saw some reporters from El Heraldo del None and La Tribuna de Santa Teresa talking to bystanders. He went for a walk through the nearby streets. It didn't smell of incense there, although at times the air seemed to waft directly from a septic tank. The streets were barely lit. I've never been here before, Juan de Dios Martinez said to himself. At the end of the street he spotted the shadow of a big tree. It stood in a poor imitation of a plaza, the tree the only thing that gave the barren semicircle any resemblance to a public space. Around the tree were some clumsily built benches where the neighborhood residents could sit and get a breath of fresh air. There used to be an Indian settlement here, remembered the inspector. A policeman who'd lived in the colonia had told him so. He dropped onto a bench and gazed up at the imposing shadow of the tree silhouetted menacingly against the starry sky. Where are the Indians now? He thought about the director of the asylum. He would've liked to talk to her just then, but he knew he wouldn't dare call her.

The attacks on San Rafael and San Tadeo got more attention in the local press than the women killed in the preceding months. The next day, Juan de Dios Martinez and two policemen went back to Colonia Kino and Colonia La Preciada and showed people the sketch of the attacker. No one recognized him. At lunchtime the policemen went downtown and Juan de Dios Martinez called the director of the asylum. The director hadn't read the papers and didn't know anything about what had happened the night before. Juan de Dios asked her out to lunch. Unexpectedly, the director accepted the invitation and they agreed to meet at a vegetarian restaurant on Calle Rio Usumacinta, in Colonia Podesta. He'd never been to the restaurant, and when he got there he asked for a table for two and a whiskey while he waited, but they didn't serve alcohol. The waiter was wearing a checkered shirt and sandals and looked at him as if something was wrong with him or he'd come to the wrong restaurant. It was a nice place, he thought. The people at the other tables talked in low voices and there was the sound of music like water tumbling over smooth stones. The director saw him as soon as she came in, but she didn't say hello. She went to talk to the waiter, who was preparing fresh-squeezed juice behind the bar. After exchanging a few words with him, she came over to the table. She was wearing gray pants and a low-cut pearl-colored sweater. Juan de Dios Martinez got up when she reached him and thanked her for agreeing to have lunch with him. The director smiled: she had small, even teeth, very white and sharp, which made her smile look carnivorous in a way that was out of keeping with the restaurant. The waiter asked what they wanted to eat. Juan de Dios Martinez looked at the menu and then said she should choose for him. As they were waiting for their food he told her about San Tadeo. The director listened carefully and at the end she asked if there was anything else. That's the whole story, said the inspector. My two patients spent the night at the center, she said. I know, he said. How? After I left the church I went to the asylum. I asked the guard and the nurse on duty to take me to their rooms. Both were asleep. There were no urine-stained clothes. No one let them out. What you're describing is illegal, said the director. But now they aren't suspects anymore, said the inspector. And I didn't even wake them up. They didn't realize a thing. For a while the director ate in silence. Juan de Dios Martinez was beginning to like the water-sounds music more and more. He told her so. I'd like to buy the album, he said. He meant it sincerely. The director seemed not to hear him. For dessert they were served figs. Juan de Dios Martinez said it had been years since he ate figs. The director ordered a coffee and wanted to pay for the meal herself, but he wouldn't let her. It wasn't easy. He had to insist more than once, and the director seemed to turn to stone. When they left the restaurant they shook hands as if they would never see each other again.

Two days later, the stranger got into the church of Santa Catalina, in Colonia Lomas del Toro, late at night when the building was closed, and he urinated and defecated on the altar, as well as decapitating almost all the statues in his path. This time, the story made the national news and a reporter from La Voz de Sonora dubbed the attacker the Demon Penitent. As far as Juan de Dios Martinez knew, the culprit might be anyone, but the police decided it had been the Penitent and he thought it best to go along with the official story. It didn't strike him as odd that nobody living near the church had heard anything, even though it would have taken time to break all those sacred objects and would've made lots of noise. No one lived at the church. The officiating priest was there from nine in the morning till one in the afternoon, and then he went to work at a parochial school in Colonia Ciudad Nueva. There was no sexton and the altar boys who helped at Mass sometimes came and sometimes didn't. In fact, Santa Catalina was a church with almost no parishioners, and the things inside were cheap, bought by the diocese at a store downtown that sold cassocks and saints, wholesale and retail. The priest was an open-minded man, a freethinker, or so it seemed to Juan de Dios Martinez. They talked for a while. There was nothing missing from the church. The priest didn't seem scandalized or upset by the outrage. He made a rapid calculation of the damages and said that for the diocese it was a drop in the bucket. He wasn't startled by the shit on the altar. After you leave this will all be cleaned up in a few hours, he said. But the quantity of urine alarmed him. Shoulder to shoulder, like Siamese twins, the inspector and the priest examined every corner where the Penitent had urinated, and the priest said at last that the man must have a bladder the size of a watermelon. That night, Juan de Dios Martinez thought to himself that he was beginning to like the Penitent. The first attack was violent and the sexton was almost killed, but as the days went by he was perfecting his technique. With the second attack he had only frightened some churchgoers, and with the third no one saw him and he was able to work in peace.

Three days after the desecration of the church of Santa Catalina, in the early morning hours, the Penitent slipped into the church of Nuestro Senor Jesucristo, in Colonia Reforma, the oldest church in the city, built in the mid-eighteenth century and once the seat of the diocese of Santa Teresa. Three priests and two young Papago Indian seminarians who were studying anthropology and history at the University of Santa Teresa slept in an adjacent building, located at the corner of Calle Soler and Calle Ortiz Rubio. In addition to pursuing their studies, the seminarians performed some minor cleaning tasks, like washing the dishes each night or gathering up the priests' dirty laundry and delivering the load to the woman who did the washing. That night, one of the seminarians wasn't asleep. He had tried to study in his room and then he got up to get a book from the library, where, for no reason, he sat reading in an armchair until he fell asleep. The building was connected to the church by a passageway that led straight to the rectory office. It was said that there was another underground passageway that the priests had used during the Revolution and the Cristero War, but the Papago student had never heard of it. Suddenly he was woken by the sound of breaking glass. First, oddly enough, he thought it was raining, but then he realized the noise was coming from inside the church, not outside, and he went to investigate. When he got to the rectory office he heard moans and he thought someone had gotten locked inside one of the confessionals, which was entirely unlikely, since the doors didn't lock. The Papago student, despite what was commonly believed about people of his ancestry, wasn't brave at all and was afraid to go into the church alone. First he went to wake up the other seminarian and then the two of them knocked very discreetly at the door of Father Juan Carrasco, who at that hour was asleep, like everybody else in the building. Father Juan Carrasco listened to the Papago's story in the hallway and since he read the news he said: it must be the Penitent. Immediately he went back into his room, put on pants and sneakers that he wore to go jogging or to play fronton, and got an old baseball bat out of a cupboard. Then he sent one of the Papagos to wake up the caretaker, who slept in a little room on the first floor, next to the stairs, and, followed by the Papago who had raised the alert, he headed for the church. At first glance both had the impression that no one was there. The opalescent smoke of the candles rose slowly toward the vaulted ceiling and a dense, tawny cloud hovered motionless inside the sanctuary. A moment later they heard the moan, like a child trying not to vomit, then another and another, and then the familiar sound of the first retch. It's the Penitent, whispered the seminarian. Father Carrasco furrowed his brow and headed resolutely toward the place the noise was coming from, gripping the baseball bat in two hands, as if he were about to step up to the plate. The Papago didn't follow him. Maybe he took a small step or two in the direction the priest had gone, but then he stood still, prey to a divine terror. Even his teeth were chattering. He could neither advance nor retreat. So, as he later explained to the police, he began to pray. What did you pray? asked Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez. The Papago didn't understand the question. The Lord's Prayer? asked the inspector. No, oh no, my mind went blank, said the Papago, I prayed for my soul, I prayed to the Holy Mother, I begged the Holy Mother not to abandon me. From where he was he heard the sound of the baseball bat slamming against a column. It might have been (he thought or he remembered having thought) the Penitent's spinal column or the six-foot column on which stood the wooden carving of the Archangel Gabriel. Then he heard someone panting. He heard the Penitent moan. He heard Father Carrasco swear at someone, but the words were strange, and he couldn't tell whether it was the Penitent who was being sworn at, or he himself for not following, or an unknown person from Father Carrasco's past, someone the Papago would never know and the priest would never see again. Then came the sound of a baseball bat dropping on stones cut with skill and precision. The wood, the bat, bounced several times until at last the noise ceased. Almost at the same instant he heard the scream, which brought back the sense of divine terror. Unthinking terror. Or a terror expressed in shaky images. Then he thought he saw, as if by candlelight, though it might just as easily have been a ray of lightning, the figure of the Penitent shattering the shinbones of the archangel in a single blow and knocking it off its pedestal with the baseball bat. Again the sound of wood, this time very old wood, hitting stone, as if in that place wood and stone were strictly antagonistic terms. And more blows. And then the footsteps of the caretaker, who came running and plunged into the darkness too, and the voice of his Papago brother asking him, in Papago, what was wrong, what hurt. And then more shouting and more priests and voices calling for the police and a flurry of white shirts and an acid smell, as if someone had mopped the stones of the old church with a gallon of ammonia, the smell of piss, as he was informed by Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez, too much urine for one man, for a man with a normal bladder.

This time the Penitent went berserk, said Inspector Jose Marquez as he knelt to look at the bodies of Father Carrasco and the caretaker. Juan de Dios Martinez examined the window the Penitent had come in through and then he went outside and spent a while walking along Calle Soler and then Calle Ortiz Rubio and through a plaza the residents used as free parking at night. When he got back to the church, Pedro Negrete and Epifanio were there, and as soon as he came in the police chief motioned for him to join them. For a while they talked and smoked sitting in the last row of pews. Under his leather jacket Negrete was wearing a pajama shirt. He smelled of expensive cologne and he didn't seem tired. Epifanio was wearing a light blue suit that looked good in the dim light of the church. Juan de Dios Martinez told the police chief the Penitent must have a car. What makes you say that? He can't get around on foot without attracting attention, said the inspector. His piss stinks. It's a long way from Kino to Reforma. It's a long way from Reforma to Lomas del Toro, too. Let's say the Penitent lives downtown. You could walk downtown from Reforma, and if it was nighttime, no one would notice you smelled like piss. But to walk downtown from Lomas del Toro, that would take, I don't know, at least an hour. Or more, said Epifanio. And how far is it from Lomas del Toro to Kino? At least forty-five minutes, assuming you don't get lost, said Epifanio. And that's not to mention Reforma to Kino, said Juan de Dios Martinez. So the bastard gets around by car, said the police chief. It's the only thing we can be sure of, said Juan de Dios Martinez. And he probably carries a change of clothes in the car. What for? asked the police chief. As a safety precaution. So in other words you think the Penitent is nobody's fool, said Negrete. He only goes crazy when he's in a church, when he comes out he's just like anybody else, whispered Juan de Dios Martinez. Goddamn, said the police chief. What do you think, Epifanio? Could be, said Epifanio. If he lives alone, he can come back smelling like shit, since it doesn't take him more than a minute to get from his car to his base of operations. If he's got some woman at home or his folks, he must change his clothes before he goes in. Makes sense, said the police chief. But the question is how we stop all this. Any ideas? For now, station an officer in each church and wait for the Penitent to make his next move, said Juan de Dios Martinez. My brother's a churchgoer, said the police chief, as if thinking out loud. I have to ask him a few things. What about you, Juan de Dios, where do you think the Penitent lives? I don't know, Chief, said the inspector, anywhere, although if he has a car I doubt he lives in Kino.

At five in the morning, when Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez got home, there was a message from the asylum director on his answering machine. The person you're looking for, said the director's voice, is sacraphobic. Call me and I'll explain. Late as it was, he called her right away. The director's recorded voice answered. Martinez here, from the Policia Judicial, said Juan de Dios Martinez, sorry to call so early… I got your message… I just got in… Tonight the Penitent… Anyway, I'll call you tomorrow… Or today, I guess… Good night and thanks for the message. Then he took off his shoes and pants and fell into bed, but he couldn't sleep. By six he was at the station. A group of patrolmen were celebrating the birthday of a colleague and they offered him a drink, but he said no. From the offices of the judicial police inspectors, which were empty, he heard them singing "Happy Birthday" over and over again on the floor above. He made a list of the officers he wanted to work with him. He wrote a report for the Hermosillo office and then he stood out by the vending machine and drank a cup of coffee. He watched two patrolmen come down the stairs with their arms around each other and he followed them. In the hallway he saw several cops talking, in groups of two, three, four. Every so often one group laughed loudly. A man dressed in white, but wearing jeans, pushed a stretcher. On the stretcher, covered in a gray plastic sheet, lay the body of Emilia Mena Mena. Nobody noticed.

Emilia Mena Mena died in June. Her body was found in the illegal dump near Calle Yucatecos, on the way to the Hermanos Corinto brick factory. The medical examiner's report stated that she had been raped, stabbed, and burned, without specifying whether the stab wounds or the burns had been the cause of death, and without specifying whether Emilia Mena Mena was already dead when the burns were inflicted. Fires were constantly being reported in the dump where she was found, most of them set on purpose, others flaring up by chance, so there was some possibility the body had been charred by a random blaze, not set alight by the murderer. The dump didn't have a formal name, because it wasn't supposed to be there, but it had an informal name: it was called El Chile. During the day there wasn't a soul to be seen in El Chile or the surrounding fields soon to be swallowed up by the dump. At night those who had nothing or less than nothing ventured out. In Mexico City they call them teporochos, but a teporocho is a survivor, a cynic and a humorist, compared to the human beings who swarmed alone or in pairs around El Chile. There weren't many of them. They spoke a slang that was hard to understand. The police conducted a roundup the night after the body of Emilia Mena Mena was found and all they brought in was three children hunting for cardboard in the trash. The night residents of El Chile were few. Their life expectancy was short. They died after seven months, at most, of picking their way through the dump. Their feeding habits and their sex lives were a mystery. It was likely they had forgotten how to eat or fuck. Or that food and sex were beyond their reach by then, unattainable, indescribable, beyond action and expression. All, without exception, were sick. To strip the clothes from a body in El Chile was to skin it. The population was stable: never fewer than three, never more than twenty.

The main suspect in the killing of Emilia Mena Mena was her boyfriend. When the police came looking for him at the house where he lived with his parents and three brothers, he was already gone. According to the family he had gotten on a bus a day or two before the body was found. The father and two brothers spent a few days in a cell, but the only coherent information that could be extracted from them was the address of the father's brother, in Ciudad Guzman, the suspect's ostensible destination. When the police in Ciudad Guzman were alerted, some officers made a visit to the residence in question, equipped with the necessary warrants, but they found no trace of the alleged boyfriend and killer. The case remained open and was soon forgotten. Five days later, while the investigation was still unconcluded, the janitor at Morelos Preparatory School found the body of another dead woman. It was on a piece of ground where the students sometimes played soccer and baseball, a field with a view of Arizona and the shells of the maquiladoras on the Mexican side of the border and the dirt roads leading from the factories to the network of paved roads. Along one side, separated from the field by a barbed-wire fence, were the school yards, and farther off were the two three-story school buildings, where classes were taught in big, sunny rooms. The school had opened in 1990 and the janitor had been there since the beginning. He was the first to arrive each morning and one of the last to leave. The morning he found the dead woman, something caught his attention while he was picking up the master keys from the principal's office. At first he wasn't sure what it was. By the time he came into the supply room he realized. Buzzards. Buzzards were flying over the field next to the yard. But he still had plenty to do, and he decided to investigate later. Shortly afterward, the cook and the kitchen boy arrived, and he went to have coffee with them in the kitchen. They talked for ten minutes about the usual things, until the janitor asked if they had seen buzzards over the school when they came in. Both of them answered that they hadn't. Then the janitor finished his coffee and said he was going to take a walk out to the field. He was afraid he would find a dead dog. If he did, he would have to come back to the school, to the room where the tools were kept, and get a shovel and go back to the field and bury the dog deep enough so the students wouldn't dig it up. But what he found was a woman. She was dressed in a black shirt and black shoes and her skirt was rolled up around her waist. She didn't have anything on underneath. That was the first thing he saw. Then he got a look at her face and saw she hadn't died that night. One of the buzzards landed on the fence but he shooed it off. The woman had long black hair at least halfway down her back. Some strands were stuck together with coagulated blood. On her stomach and between her legs there was dried blood. He crossed himself twice and stood up slowly. When he got back to the school he told the cook what had happened. The kitchen boy was scrubbing a pot and the janitor spoke in a low voice, so he wouldn't hear. He called the principal from the office, but the principal had already left home. He found a blanket and went to cover up the dead woman. Only then did he realize a stake had been driven straight through her. His eyes filled with tears as he returned to the school. The cook was there, sitting in the yard, smoking a cigarette. She made a gesture as if to ask how it had gone. The janitor responded with another gesture, impossible to decipher, and went out to wait for the principal by the main door. When he arrived they both went out to the field. From the yard the cook watched as the principal lifted one side of the blanket and stared from different angles at the scarcely visible shape on the ground. A little later they were joined by two teachers, and, about thirty feet away, by a group of students. At noon, two police cars, a third, unmarked car, and an ambulance arrived, and the dead woman was taken away. Her name was never learned. The medical examiner stated that she had been dead for several days, without specifying how many. The stab wounds to the chest were the probable cause of death, but the examiner couldn't rule out a fractured skull as the principal cause. The dead woman was probably somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-five. She was five feet seven inches tall.

The last dead woman to be discovered in June 1993 was Margarita Lopez Santos. She had disappeared more than forty days before. The second day she was gone, her mother filed a report at Precinct #2. Margarita Lopez worked at K &T, a maquiladora in the El Progreso industrial park near the Nogales highway and the last houses of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria. The day of her disappearance she was working the third shift at the maquiladora, from nine at night to five in the morning. According to her fellow workers, she had come in on time, as always, because Margarita was more dependable and responsible than most, which meant that her disappearance could be fixed around the time of the shift change and her walk home. But no one saw anything then, in part because it was dark at five or five-thirty in the morning, and there wasn't enough public lighting. Most of the houses in the northern part of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity. The roads out of the industrial park, except the one leading to the Nogales highway, also lacked adequate lighting, paving, and drainage systems: almost all the waste from the park ended up in Colonia Las Rositas, where it formed a lake of mud that bleached white in the sun. So Margarita Lopez left work at five-thirty. That much was established. And then she set out along the dark streets of the industrial park. Maybe she saw the pickup that parked each night in an empty plaza next to the parking lot of the WS-Inc. maquiladora, a truck that sold coffee and soft drinks and different kinds of sandwiches to the workers on their way into or out of work. Most of them women. But she wasn't hungry or she knew there was a meal waiting for her at home and she didn't stop. She left the park and the ever more distant glow of the lights of the maquiladoras. She crossed the Nogales highway and turned down the first streets of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria. Crossing Guadalupe Victoria would take her no more than half an hour. Then she would be in Colonia San Bartolome, where she lived. All in all, a fifty-minute walk, more or less. But somewhere along the way something happened or something went permanently wrong and afterward her mother was told there was a chance she had run off with a man. She's only sixteen, said her mother, and she's a good girl. Forty days later some children found her body near a shack in Colonia Maytorena. Her left hand rested on some guaco leaves. Due to the state of the body, the medical examiner was unable to determine the cause of death. One of the policemen present at the removal of the body, however, was able to identify the guaco plant. It's good for mosquito bites, he said, crouching down and plucking some little green leaves, pointed and tough.

There were no deaths in July. None in August either.

Around this time the Mexico City newspaper La Razon sent Sergio Gonzalez to write a story on the Penitent. Sergio Gonzalez was thirty-five and recently divorced, and he was looking to make money any way he could. Normally he wouldn't have accepted the assignment, because he was an arts writer, not a crime reporter. He wrote reviews of philosophy books that no one read, not the books or his reviews, and sometimes he wrote about art shows or music. He had been on staff at La Razon for four years and his financial situation was acceptable, if not comfortable, until the divorce, when suddenly he was in constant need of money. Since there was nothing else he could write for his own section (where he sometimes used a pseudonym so readers wouldn't be able to tell that all the articles were his), he badgered the editors of the other sections to give him extra assignments to help boost his income. Hence the proposal to travel to Santa Teresa and write the story of the Penitent. The person who offered him the story was the editor of the paper's Sunday magazine, who held Gonzalez in high regard and thought that with his offer he would kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, Gonzalez would make some money, and on the other hand, he could take three or four days of vacation up north, somewhere with good food and clean air, and forget about his wife. So in July 1993, Sergio Gonzalez flew to Hermosillo and took the bus to Santa Teresa. And in fact, the change of scene suited him perfectly. Hermosillo 's bright blue skies, almost a metallic blue, lit from beneath, cheered him up instantly. The people in the airport and later on the city streets struck him as friendly, relaxed, as if he were in a foreign country and seeing only the good side of its inhabitants. In Santa Teresa, which he thought of as a hardworking city with very little unemployment, he got a room at a cheap hotel called El Oasis in the center of town, on a street where the paving stones dated back to the time of the Reform, and a little later he visited the offices of El Heraldo del Norte and La Voz de Sonora and spoke at length with the reporters who were covering the story of the Penitent. They told him how to get to the desecrated churches, which he visited in a single day, in the company of a taxi driver who waited for him out front. He managed to talk to two priests, at San Tadeo and Santa Catalina, who had little new to add, although the priest at Santa Catalina suggested he take a good look around, because in his opinion the church-desecrator-turned-killer wasn't the worst scourge of Santa Teresa. The police let him have a copy of the sketch of the perpetrator and he made an appointment to talk to Juan de Dios Martinez, the inspector in charge of the case. In the afternoon he talked to the mayor, who invited him to lunch at the restaurant next door to the city council building, a restaurant with stone walls that strove and failed to look colonial. But the food was very good, and the mayor and two other lower-ranking members of the city administration made it their business to keep things lively with gossip and dirty jokes. The next day he tried to interview the chief of police, but it was a staff member who met with him, probably the police department's press officer, a kid straight out of law school who handed him a folder with all the information a reporter might need to write a story about the Penitent. The kid's last name was Zamudio and he had nothing better to do that night than keep Sergio Gonzalez company. They had dinner together. Then they went to a club. Sergio Gonzalez couldn't remember having been in a club since he was seventeen years old. He told Zamudio, who laughed. They bought drinks for lots of girls. The girls were from Sinaloa and it was immediately clear by their clothes that they were factory workers. Sergio Gonzalez asked one girl he ended up with whether she liked to dance, and she said she liked it more than anything in the world. The answer struck him as illuminating, though he couldn't say why, and also devastatingly sad. In turn, the girl asked him what a chilango from Mexico City was doing in Santa Teresa, and he said he was a reporter and he was writing a story on the Penitent. She didn't seem impressed by the revelation. She had never read La Razon either, which Gonzalez found hard to believe. At some point, Zamudio took him aside and said they could sleep with the girls. Zamudio's face was distorted by the strobe lights and he looked like a madman. Gonzalez shrugged.

The next day he woke up alone in his hotel room with the sensation of having seen or heard something forbidden. Or at least inappropriate, awkward. He tried to interview Juan de Dios Martinez. The only people in the office were two men playing dice, while a third watched. All three were judicial police inspectors. Sergio Gonzalez introduced himself and then sat down in a chair to wait, since they'd told him that Juan de Dios Martinez would be in soon. The inspectors were dressed in warm-up jackets and sweats. Each of the players had a cup of beans and at each toss of the dice they took a few beans out of their respective cups and placed them in the middle of the table. It seemed strange to Gonzalez tthat grown men would bet with beans, but even stranger when he saw that some of the beans in the middle of the table were jumping. He looked carefully, and it was true, every so often one or sometimes two of the beans jumped, not very high, maybe half an inch or a quarter of an inch, but they really were jumping. The players paid no attention to the beans. They dropped the dice, of which there were five, into the barrel, shook it, and, with a sharp knock, spilled them onto the table. At each throw, they spoke words Gonzalez didn't understand. They said: engar-roteseme ahi, or metateado, or peladeaje, or combiliado, or laiscornieto, or bola de pinole, or despatolado, or sin desperdicio, as if they were uttering the names of gods or steps in a ceremony that even they didn't understand but everyone had to obey. The inspector who wasn't playing wagged his head in unison. Sergio Gonzalez asked if the beans were jumping beans. The inspector looked at him and nodded. I've never seen so many, he said. In fact, he had never even seen one. When Juan de Dios Martinez came in, the inspectors kept playing. Juan de Dios Martinez was wearing a gray suit, slightly wrinkled, and a dark green tie. They sat down at a desk, which from what Gonzalez could see was the neatest in the office, and talked about the Penitent. According to the inspector, although he asked that this be off the record, the Penitent was sick. What kind of sickness does he have? whispered Gonzalez, realizing as they spoke that Juan de Dios Martinez didn't want his colleagues to hear. Sacraphobia, said the inspector. And what's that? asked Gonzalez. Fear and hatred of sacred objects, said the inspector. According to him, the Penitent didn't desecrate churches with the premeditated intent to kill. The deaths were accidental. The Penitent just wanted to vent his rage on the images of the saints.

It wasn't long before the churches desecrated by the Penitent were tidied up and the damages fully repaired, except at Santa Catalina, which for a while remained just as the Penitent had left it. We need money for many things, Sergio Gonzalez was told by the Ciudad Nueva priest who came once a day to Colonia Lomas del Toro to say Mass and clean, his words implying that there were higher or more urgent priorities than the replacement of the sacred objects that had been destroyed. It was thanks to this priest, the second and last time they met at the church, that Sergio Gonzalez learned that crimes other than the Penitent's were being committed in Santa Teresa, crimes against women, still mostly unsolved. For a while, as he swept, the priest talked and talked: about the city, about the trickle of Central American immigrants, about the hundreds of Mexicans who arrived each day in search of work at the maquiladoras or hoping to cross the border, about the human trafficking by polleros and coyotes, about the starvation wages paid at the factories, about how those wages were still coveted by the desperate who arrived from Queretaro or Zacatecas or Oaxaca, desperate Christians, said the priest (which was an odd way to describe them, especially for a priest), who embarked on the most incredible journeys, sometimes alone and sometimes with their families in tow, until they reached the border and only then did they rest or cry or pray or get drunk or get high or dance until they fell down exhausted. The priest sounded like he was chanting a litany, and for a moment, as he listened, Sergio Gonzalez closed his eyes and nearly fell asleep. Later they went outside and sat on the brick steps of the church. The priest offered him a Camel and they smoked, gazing at the horizon. So besides being a reporter, what other things do you do in Mexico City? the priest asked. For a few seconds, as he breathed in the smoke of his cigarette, Sergio Gonzalez thought about what to answer and couldn't come up with anything. I just got divorced, he said, and I read a lot. What kind of books? the priest wanted to know. Philosophy, more than anything, said Gonzalez. Do you like to read, too? A couple of girls came running by and greeted the priest by name, without stopping. Gonzalez watched them cut through a lot where big red flowers were blooming and then cross a street. Of course, said the priest. What kind of books? asked Gonzalez. Liberation theology, especially, said the priest. I like Boff and the Brazilians. But I read detective novels, too. Gonzalez got up and stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe. It's been a pleasure, he said. The priest shook his hand and nodded.

The next morning, Sergio Gonzalez took the bus to Hermosillo and then, after a four-hour wait, flew back to Mexico City. Two days later he filed his story on the Penitent with the Sunday magazine editor and promptly forgot the whole business.

What is sacraphobia exactly? Juan de Dios Martinez asked the director. Teach me a little about it. The director said her name was Elvira Campos and she ordered a whiskey. Juan de Dios Martinez ordered a beer and glanced around the bar. On the terrace an accordion player, followed by a violinist, was trying in vain to attract the attention of a man dressed like a rancher. A narco, thought Juan de Dios Martinez, although since the man had his back to him, he couldn't say who it was. Sacraphobia is fear or hatred of the sacred, of sacred objects, especially from your own religion, said Elvira Campos. He thought about making a reference to Dracula, who fled crucifixes, but he was afraid the director would laugh at him. And you believe the Penitent suffers from sacraphobia? I've given it some thought, and I do. A few days ago he disemboweled a priest and another person, said Juan de Dios Martinez. The accordion player was very young, twenty at most, and round as an apple. The way he held himself, however, made him look at least twenty-five, except when he smiled, which was often, and then all of a sudden it was clear how young and inexperienced he was. He doesn't carry the knife to hurt anyone, any living thing, I mean, but to destroy the sacred images he finds in churches, said the director. Shall we call each other by our first names? Juan de Dios Martinez asked her. Elvira Campos smiled and nodded. You're a very attractive woman, said Juan de Dios Martinez. Thin and attractive. You don't like thin women, Inspector? asked the director. The violinist was taller than the accordionist and she was wearing a black blouse and black leggings. She had long straight hair down to her waist and sometimes she closed her eyes, especially when the accordionist sang and played. The saddest thing, thought Juan de Dios Martinez, was that the narco, or the suited back of the man he thought was a narco, was hardly paying any attention to them, busy as he was talking to a man with the face of a mongoose and a hooker with the face of a cat. Weren't we going to call each other by our first names? asked Juan de Dios Martinez. You're right, said the director. So are you sure the Penitent suffers from sacraphobia? The director said she'd been looking through the archives at the asylum to see whether she could find some former patient with a case history like the Penitent's. She hadn't come up with anything. If he's as old as you say he is, I'd guess he's been institutionalized at some point. The accordion player suddenly started to stamp in time to the music. From where they were sitting they couldn't hear him, but he was making faces, working his mouth and eyebrows, and then he ruffled his hair with one hand and seemed to howl with laughter. The violinist had her eyes closed. The narco's head swiveled. Juan de Dios Martinez thought to himself that the boy had finally gotten what he wanted. There's probably a file on him in some psychiatric center in Hermosillo or Tijuana. It can't be such a rare case. Maybe he was on medication until recently. Maybe he stopped taking it, said the director. Are you married, do you live with anyone? asked Juan de Dios Martinez in an almost inaudible voice. I live alone, said the director. But you have children, I saw the pictures in your office. I have a daughter, she's married. Juan de Dios Martinez felt something release inside of him and he laughed. Don't tell me you're already a grandmother. That's not the kind of thing you say to a woman, Inspector. How old are you? asked the director. Thirty-four, said Juan de Dios Martinez. Seventeen years younger than me. You don't look more than forty, said the inspector. The director laughed: I exercise every day, I don't smoke, I drink very little, I eat right, I used to go running every morning. Not anymore? No, now I've bought myself a treadmill. The two of them laughed. I listen to Bach on my headphones and I almost always run three or four miles a day. Sacraphobia. If I tell my colleagues the Penitent is suffering from sacraphobia, they'll laugh at me. The man with the mongoose face rose from his chair and said something into the accordionist's ear. Then he sat down again and the accordionist's mouth screwed up into a pout. Like a child on the verge of tears. The violinist had her eyes open and she was smiling. The narco and the woman with the cat face bent their heads together. The narco's, nose was big and bony and aristocratic looking. But aristocratic looking how? There was a wild expression on the accordionist's face, except for his lips. Unfamiliar currents surged through the inspector's chest. The world is a strange and fascinating place, he thought.

There are odder things than sacraphobia, said Elvira Campos, especially if you consider that we're in Mexico and religion has always been a problem here. In fact, I'd say all Mexicans are essentially sacraphobes. Or take gephyrophobia, a classic fear. Eots of people suffer from it. What's gephyrophobia? asked Juan de Dios Martinez. The fear of crossing bridges. That's right, I knew someone once, well, it was a boy, really, who was afraid that when he crossed a bridge it would collapse, so he'd run across it, which was much more dangerous. A classic, said Elvira Campos. Another classic: claustrophobia. Fear of confined spaces. And another: agoraphobia. Fear of open spaces. I've heard of those, said Juan de Dios Martinez. And one more: necrophobia. Fear of the dead, said Juan de Dios Martinez, I've known people like that. It's a handicap for a policeman. Then there's hemophobia, fear of blood. That's right, said Juan de Dios Martinez. And peccatophobia, fear of comitting sins. But there are other, rarer, fears. For instance, clinophobia. Do you know what that is? No idea, said Juan de Dios Martinez. Fear of beds. Can anyone really fear beds, or hate them? Actually, yes, there are people who do. But they can deal with the problem by sleeping on the floor and never going into a bedroom. And then there's tricophobia, or fear of hair. That's a little more complicated, isn't it? Yes, very much so. There are cases of tricophobia that end in suicide. And there's verbophobia, fear of words. Which must mean it's best not to speak, said Juan de Dios Martinez. There's more to it than that, because words are everywhere, even in silence, which is never complete silence, is it? And then we have vestiphobia, which is fear of clothes. It sounds strange but it's much more widespread than you'd expect. And this one is relatively common: iatrophobia, or fear of doctors. Or gynophobia, which is fear of women, and naturally afflicts only men. Very widespread in Mexico, although it manifests itself in different ways. Isn't that a slight exaggeration? Not a bit: almost all Mexican men are afraid of women. I don't know what to say to that, said Juan de Dios Martinez. Then there are two fears that are really very romantic: ombrophobia and thalassophobia, or fear of rain and fear of the sea. And two others with a touch of the romantic: anthophobia, or fear of flowers, and dendrophobia, fear of trees. Some Mexican men may be gynophobes, said Juan de Dios Martinez, but not all of them, it can't be that bad. What do you think optophobia is? asked the director. Opto, opto, something to do with the eyes, my God, fear of the eyes? Even worse: fear of opening the eyes. In a figurative sense, that's an answer to what you just said about gynophobia. In a literal sense, it leads to violent attacks, loss of consciousness, visual and auditory hallucinations, and generally aggressive behavior. I know, though not personally, of course, of two cases in which the patient went so far as to mutilate himself. He put his eyes out? With his fingers, the nails, said the director. Good God, said Juan de Dios Martinez. Then we have pedophobia, of course, which is fear of children, and ballistophobia, fear of bullets. That's my phobia, said Juan de Dios Martinez. Yes, I suppose it's only common sense, said the director. And another phobia, this one on the rise: tropophobia, or the fear of making changes or moving. Which can be aggravated if it becomes agyrophobia, fear of streets or crossing the street. Not to forget chromophobia, which is fear of certain colors, or nyctophobia, fear of night, or ergophobia, fear of work. A common complaint is decidophobia, the fear of making decisions. And there's a fear that's just beginning to spread, which is anthrophobia, or fear of people. Some Indians suffer from a heightened form of astrophobia, which is fear of meteorological phenomena like thunder and lightning. But the worst phobias, in my opinion, are pantophobia, which is fear of everything, and phobophobia, fear of fear itself. If you had to suffer from one of the two, which would you choose? Phobophobia, said Juan de Dios Martinez. Think carefully, it has its drawbacks, said the director. Between being afraid of everything and being afraid of my own fear, I'd take the latter. Don't forget I'm a policeman and if I was scared of everything I couldn't work. But if you're afraid of your own fears, you're forced to live in constant contemplation of them, and if they materialize, what you have is a system that feeds on itself, a vicious cycle, said the director.

A few days before Sergio Gonzalez came to Santa Teresa, Juan de Dios Martinez and Elvira Campos went to bed together. This isn't anything serious, the director warned him, I don't want you to get the wrong idea about where things are going. Juan de Dios Martinez promised that she would set the limits and he would simply abide by her decisions. The director found the first sexual encounter satisfactory. The next time they saw each other, fifteen days later, the results were even better. Sometimes he was the one who called, usually in the afternoon, while she was still at work, and they would talk for five minutes, sometimes ten, about the events of the day. It was when she called him that they made plans to see each other, always at Elvira's apartment in a new building in Colonia Michoacan, on a street of upper-middle-class houses where doctors and lawyers, a few dentists, and one or two college professors lived. Their meetings always followed the same pattern. The inspector left his car parked on the street and took the elevator up, checking in the mirror to make sure his appearance was impeccable, at least to the extent possible, considering his limitations, which he would be the first to enumerate, and then he would ring the director's doorbell. She would open the door, they would greet each other with a handshake or without touching, and immediately they would have a drink sitting in the living room, watching the dark move over the mountains to the east through the glass doors that led onto the big terrace where, in addition to a couple of wooden and canvas chairs and a sun umbrella furled for the night, there was only a steel-gray exercise bicycle. Then, with no preliminaries, they would go into the bedroom and make love for three hours. When they were done, the director would put on a black silk bathrobe and go shower. When she came out, Juan de Dios Martinez would already be dressed, sitting in the living room, gazing not at the mountains but at the stars visible from the terrace. The silence was absolute. Sometimes there would be a party going on in the yard of one of the nearby houses and they would watch the lights and the people walking or embracing next to the pool or coming in and out, as if at random, of the tents erected for the occasion or the gazebos of wood and wrought iron. The director wouldn't talk and Juan de Dios Martinez would contain the urge he sometimes felt to rattle off questions or tell her things about his life that he'd never told anyone. Then she would remind him, as if he'd asked her to, that he had to go and the inspector would say you're right or glance pointlessly at his watch and leave at once. Fifteen days later they would see each other again and everything would be just as it had been the time before. Of course, there wasn't always a party at a house nearby and sometimes the director couldn't or didn't want to drink, but the dim light was always the same, the shower was always repeated, the sunsets and the mountains never changed, the stars were the same stars.

•

Around this time, Pedro Negrete traveled to Villaviciosa to hire someone trustworthy for his old friend Pedro Rengifo. He saw several young men. He scrutinized them, asked some questions. He asked if they knew how to shoot. He asked if he could rely on them. He asked if they wanted to make money. It had been a while since he'd been back to Villaviciosa and the town looked the same as it had the last time he was there. Low adobe houses with small front yards. Two bars and a grocery store. To the east, the foothills of mountains that seemed to shrink or grow depending on the progression of the sun and shadows. When he'd made his choice, he called Epifanio over and asked privately what he thought. Which one is it, boss? The youngest one, said Negrete. Epifanio let his gaze drift over the boy and then he glanced at the others and before he went back to the car he said the kid wasn't bad, but you never knew. Then Negrete let a couple of old men from Villaviciosa buy him a drink. One was very thin, dressed in white, and wearing a gold-plated watch. Judging by the wrinkles on his face, he was over seventy. The other man was even older and thinner and wasn't wearing a shirt. He was short and his torso was covered in scars partly hidden by the folds of his skin. They drank pulque and every so often huge glasses of water because the pulque was salty and made them thirsty. They talked about goats lost in the Blue Hills and about holes in the mountains. During a pause, without fanfare, Negrete called the boy over and told him he'd been chosen. Go on, say goodbye to your mother, said the shirtless old man. The boy looked at Negrete and then looked at the floor, as if thinking what to say, but suddenly he changed his mind, said nothing, and went out. When Negrete left the bar, the boy and Epifanio were leaning on the fender of the car, talking.

The boy sat beside him, in the back. Epifanio was at the wheel. When they had left the dirt streets of Villaviciosa behind and were driving through the desert, the police chief asked what his name was. Olegario Cura Exposito, said the boy. Olegario Cura Exposito, said Negrete, staring up at the stars, strange name. For a while they were silent. Epifanio tried to tune in a Santa Teresa radio station but he couldn't get it and turned off the radio. From his window the police chief glimpsed a flash of lightning many miles away. Just then the car shuddered and Epifanio braked and got out to see what he had hit. The police chief watched him head down the highway and then he saw the beam of Epifanio's flashlight. He rolled down the window and asked what it was. They heard a gunshot. The chief opened the door and got out. He took a few steps to stretch his stiff legs, and Epifanio came ambling back. I killed a wolf, he said. Let's see, said the police chief, and the two of them set out into the darkness again. There were no headlights visible on the highway. The air was dry but sometimes there were gusts of salty wind, as if before it made its way into the desert the air had brushed across a salt marsh. The boy looked at the lighted dashboard of the car and then he covered his face with his hands. A few yards away the police chief ordered Epifanio to pass him the flashlight and he shone it on the body of the animal lying in the road. It isn't a wolf, said the police chief. Oh, no? Look at its coat, wolves' coats are shinier, sleeker, not to mention they aren't dumb enough to get themselves run over by a car in the middle of a deserted highway. Let's see, let's measure it, you hold the flashlight. Epifanio trained the beam on the animal as the chief laid it straight and eyeballed it. Coyotes, he said, are twenty-eight to thirty-six inches long, counting the head. What would you say this one measures? About thirty-two? asked Epifanio. Correct, said the police chief. And he went on: coyotes weigh between twenty-two and thirty-five pounds. Pass me the flashlight and pick it up, it won't bite you. Epifanio picked up the dead animal, cradling it in his arms. How much would you say it weighs? Somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-three, maybe, said Epifanio. Like a coyote. Because it is a coyote, jackass, said the police chief. They shone the flashlight in its eyes. Maybe it was blind and that's why it didn't see me, said Epifanio. No, it wasn't blind, said the police chief, looking at the coyote's big dead eyes. Then they left the animal by the side of the road and went back to the car. Epifanio tried to get a Santa Teresa station again. All he heard was static and he turned the radio off. He imagined that the coyote he'd hit was a female coyote and it was looking for a safe place to give birth. That's why it didn't see me, he thought, but he wasn't satisfied by the explanation. At El Altillo, when the first lights of Santa Teresa appeared, the police chief broke the silence into which the three of them had fallen. Olegario Cura Exposito, he said. Yes, sir, said the boy. So what do your friends call you? Lalo, said the boy. Lalo? Yes, sir. Did you hear that, Epifanio? I heard, said Epifanio, still thinking about the coyote. Lalo Cura? asked the police chief. Yes, sir, said the boy. You're kidding, right? No sir, that's what my friends call me, said the boy. Did you hear that, Epifanio? asked the police chief. Sure, I heard, said Epifanio. His name is Lalo Cura, said the police chief, and he started to laugh. La locura, lunacy, get it? Of course I get it, said Epifanio, and he started to laugh too. Soon the three of them were laughing.

That night the Santa Teresa police chief slept soundly. He dreamed about his twin brother. They were fifteen and they were poor and they had gone out to roam the scrub hills where many years later Colonia Lindavista would rise. They crossed a gully where boys sometimes went in the rainy season to hunt toads, which were poisonous and had to be killed with stones, although he and his brother were interested in lizards, not toads. At dusk they returned to Santa Teresa, children scattering through the countryside like defeated soldiers. On the edge of the city there was always traffic, trucks going to Hermosillo or heading north or on their way to Nogales. Some were inscribed with odd phrases. One said: In a hurry? Go right on under me. Another one said: Passing on the left? just pump my horn. And another one: Like the ride? In the dream neither he nor his brother talked, but all of their movements were identical, the same stride, the same pace, the arm swinging. His brother was already quite a bit taller, but they still looked alike. Then they were back on the streets of Santa Teresa and they strolled along the sidewalk and the dream vanished little by little in a comfortable yellow haze.

That night Epifanio dreamed about the female coyote left by the side of the road. In the dream he was sitting a few yards away, on a chunk of basalt, staring alertly into the dark and listening to the whimpering of the coyote, whose insides were torn up. She probably already knows she lost her pup, thought Epifanio, but instead of getting up and putting a bullet in her brain he sat there and did nothing. Then he saw himself driving Pedro Negrete's car along a long track that came to an end on the slopes of a mountain bristling with sharp rocks. There were no passengers in the car. He couldn't tell whether he had stolen the car or the chief had loaned it to him. The track was straight and he could easily get up to ninety miles an hour, although whenever he hit the accelerator he heard a strange noise from under the chassis, like something jumping. Behind him rose a giant plume of dust, like the tail of a hallucinogenic coyote. But the mountains still looked just as far away, so Epifanio braked and got out to inspect the car. At first glance everything looked all right. The suspension, the engine, the battery, the axles. Suddenly, with the car stopped, he heard the knocks again and turned around. He opened the trunk. There was a body inside. Its hands and feet were tied. A black cloth was wrapped around its head. What the fuck is this? shouted Epifanio in the dream. When he had checked that the body was still alive (its chest was rising and falling, though perhaps too violently), he closed the trunk without daring to remove the black cloth and see who it was. He got back in the car, which leaped forward at the first thrust. On the horizon the mountains seemed to be burning or crumbling, but he kept driving toward them.

That night Lalo Cura slept well. The cot was too soft, but he closed his eyes and started to think about his new job, and soon he was asleep. He'd been to Santa Teresa only once before, with some old women who had come to the market to sell herbs. He could hardly remember the trip now, because he'd been very small. This time he hadn't seen much either. The lights of the highway ramps and then a neighborhood of dark streets and then a neighborhood of big houses behind high walls bristling with glass. And later another road, heading east, and the sounds of the country. He slept in a bungalow next to the gardener's house, on a cot in a corner that no one used. The blanket smelled of rancid sweat. There was no pillow. On the cot there had been a stack of old newspapers and magazines with pictures of naked women, which he put under the bed. At one in the morning the two men who slept on the cots next to his came in. They were both wearing suits and wide ties and fancy cowboy boots. They turned on the light and looked at him. One of them said: he's a little guy. Lalo smelled them without opening his eyes. They smelled of tequila and chilaquiles and rice pudding and fear. Then he fell asleep and didn't dream about anything. The next morning the two men were sitting at the table in the kitchen of the gardener's house. They were eating eggs and smoking. He sat down next to them and drank a glass of orange juice and a cup of black coffee. He didn't want anything to eat. Pedro Rengifo's security chief was an Irishman named Pat and he was the one who made the formal introductions. The two men weren't from Santa Teresa or anywhere nearby. The bigger one was from the state of Jalisco. The other was from Ciudad Juarez, in Chihuahua. Lalo met their eyes and thought they didn't seem like gunmen, they seemed like cowards. When he was done with breakfast the security chief took him to the farthest corner of the yard and gave him a Desert Eagle.50 Magnum pistol. He asked Lalo if he knew how to use it. Lalo said he didn't. The chief put a seven-round magazine on the gun and then found some cans in the weeds that he set on the roof of a car up on blocks. For a while the two of them shot. Then the chief explained how to load a gun, how to use the safety, how to carry it. He said his job would be to watch out for Mrs. Rengifo, the boss's wife, and he would be working with the two men he'd just met. He asked if he knew how much he would be paid. He told him that payday was every fifteen days, that he personally paid everyone, and no one ever had any complaints in that regard. He asked him his name. Lalo Cura, said Lalo. The Irishman didn't laugh or give him a strange look or think it was a joke. He wrote down the name in a little black book that he kept in the back pocket of his jeans, and then their meeting was over. Before he left he told Lalo his name was Pat O'Bannion.

In September another dead woman was found, this time in a car in the Buenavista subdivision, past Colonia Lindavista. It was a lonely place. The only building there was a prefab house used as an office by the salesmen who showed the plots. The rest of the subdivision was bare, with a few sickly trees, their trunks painted white, the last survivors of an old meadow and woods that drew water from an aquifer. Sunday was the day when the most people bustled around the subdivision. Whole families or developers came to see the plots, although without much enthusiasm, because the most promising spaces were already sold, although no one had started to build yet. The rest of the week, visits were by appointment, and by eight there was no one left except the occasional pack of kids or dogs who had come down from Colonia Maytorena and couldn't find their way back up. The discovery was made by one of the salesmen. He got to the subdivision at nine in the morning and parked in his usual spot, next to the prefab house. As he was about to go in he noticed another car parked in a lot that hadn't been sold yet, just behind a rise in the ground, which had hidden it until then. He thought it might be another salesman's car but dismissed the idea as absurd, because who would leave his car so far away when he could park right next to the office? So instead of going inside, he headed toward the strange car. He thought maybe the driver was a drunk who had parked there to sleep, or someone lost, because the exit for the southbound highway wasn't far away. He even thought it might be an overeager buyer. The car, when he came around the rise (excellent plot, with nice views and enough land to build a pool on later), struck him as too old to belong to a buyer. He was leaning again toward the idea that it was a drunk and was tempted to turn back, but then he saw a woman's head resting against one of the rear windows and decided to keep going. The woman was wearing a white dress and she was barefoot. She was about five foot seven. There were three cheap rings on her left hand, on the index finger, middle finger, and ring finger. On her right hand she was wearing a couple of bracelets and two big rings with fake stones. According to the medical examiner's report, she had been vaginally and anally raped and then strangled. She wasn't carrying any identification. The case was assigned to Inspector Ernesto Ortiz Rebolledo, who first made inquiries among Santa Teresa's high-class hookers to see whether anyone knew the dead woman, and then, when his questioning yielded scant results, among the cheap hookers, but no one from either group had seen her before. Ortiz Rebolledo visited hotels and boardinghouses, checked out some motels on the edge of town, mobilized his informers. His efforts were unsuccessful, and the case was soon closed.

The next dead woman appeared in October, at the dump in the Arsenio Farrell industrial park. Her name was Marta Navales Gomez. She was twenty years old, five foot seven, and she had long brown hair. She had been missing from home for two days. She was dressed in a bathrobe and stockings that her parents didn't recognize as hers. She had been anally and vaginally raped several times. The cause of death was strangulation. The odd thing about the case was that Marta Navales Gomez worked at Aiwo, a Japanese maquiladora located in the El Progreso industrial park, but her body was found in the Arsenio Farrell industrial park, in the dump, a difficult place to reach unless you were driving a garbage truck. The body was found by some children in the morning, and by noon, when it was taken away, a considerable number of workers had gathered around the ambulance to see whether the victim was a friend, coworker, or acquaintance.

In the same month, two weeks after the discovery of the dead woman in the Buenavista subdivision, another body turned up. The victim was Gabriela Moron, eighteen, shot by her boyfriend, Feliciano Jose Sandoval, twenty-seven, both of them workers at the maquiladora Nip-Mex. The events, according to the police investigation, revolved around a fight caused by Gabriela Moron's refusal to immigrate to the United States. The suspect, Feliciano Jose Sandoval, had already made two attempts and had been sent back each time by the American border police, which hadn't diminished his desire to try his luck for a third time. According to some friends, Sandoval had relatives in Chicago. Gabriela Moron, on the other hand, had never crossed the border, and after finding work at Nip-Mex, where she was well liked by her bosses, which meant she had hopes of a quick promotion and a raise, her interest in seeking her fortune across the border dropped to practically zero. For a few days the police looked for Feliciano Jose Sandoval in Santa Teresa and Lomas de Poniente, the Tamaulipas town he was from, and an arrest order was also issued by the proper American authorities, in case the suspect, his dream come true, had made it to the United States, although oddly enough no coyote or pattern who might have helped him cross over was questioned. To all intents and purposes, the case was closed.

In October, too, the body of another woman was found in the desert, a few yards from the highway between Santa Teresa and Villaviciosa. The body, which was in an advanced state of decomposition, was facedown, and the victim was dressed in a sweatshirt and synthetic-fabric pants, in the pocket of which was found an ID card in the name of Elsa Luz Pintado, an employee at Hipermercado Del Norte. The killer or killers didn't bother to dig a grave. Nor did they bother to venture too far into the desert. They just dragged the body a few yards and left it there. Subsequent questioning at Hipermercado Del Norte yielded the following results: none of the cashiers or saleswomen had gone missing recently; Elsa Luz Pintado had been on the payroll, yes, but it had been a year and a half since she lent her services to that branch or any other branch of the superstore chain that stretched across the north of Sonora; those who had known Elsa Luz Pintado described her as a tall woman, five foot seven and a half, and the body found in the desert probably measured five foot three at most. An unsuccessful attempt was made to discover the whereabouts of Elsa Luz Pintado in Santa Teresa. The officer in charge of the case was Inspector Angel Fernandez. The forensic report failed to establish the cause of death, alluding vaguely to the possibility of strangulation, but it did confirm that the body had been in the desert for at least seven days and no more than one month. Sometime later Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez joined the investigation and issued a request for a search for Elsa Luz Pintado, who had presumably also disappeared. He wanted an official letter to be sent to police stations all over the state, but his request was returned with the recommendation that he focus on the specific case under investigation.

In the middle of November, Andrea Pacheco Martinez, thirteen, was kidnapped on her way out of Vocational School 16. Although the street was far from deserted, there were no witnesses, except for two of Andrea's classmates who saw her head toward a black car, probably a Peregrino or a Spirit, where a person in sunglasses was waiting for her. There may have been other people in the car, but Andrea's classmates didn't get a look at them, partly because the car windows were tinted. That afternoon Andrea didn't come home and her parents filed a police report a few hours later, after they had called some of her friends. The city police and the judicial police took charge of the case. When she was found, two days later, her body showed unmistakable signs of strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. She had been anally and vaginally raped. There was tumefaction of the wrists, as if they had been bound. Both ankles presented lacerations, by which it was deduced that her feet had also been tied. A Salvadorean immigrant found the body behind the Francisco I School, on Madero, near Colonia Alamos. It was fully dressed, and the clothes, except for the shirt, which was missing several buttons, were intact. The Salvadorean was accused of the homicide and spent two weeks in the cells of Police Precinct #3, at the end of which he was released. When he got out he was a broken man. A little later he crossed the border with a pollero. In Arizona he got lost in the desert and after walking for three days, he made it to Patagonia, badly dehydrated, where a rancher beat him up for vomiting on his land. He was picked up by the sheriff and spent a day in jail and then he was sent to a hospital, where the only thing left for him to do was die in peace, which he did.

On December 20, the last violent death of a woman was recorded for the year 1993. The victim was fifty years old and, as if to contradict some voices that were timidly beginning to be raised, she died at home and her body was found at home, not in a vacant lot, or a dump, or the yellow scrub of the desert. Her name was Felicidad Jimenez Jimenez and she worked at the Multizone-West maquiladora. The neighbors found her on the bedroom floor, naked from the waist down, with a piece of wood jammed in her vagina. The cause of death was multiple stab wounds, more than sixty as counted by the medical examiner, delivered by her son, Ernesto Luis Castillo Jimenez, with whom she lived. The boy, according to the testimony of some of the neighbors, suffered from attacks of madness, which sometimes, depending on the state of the family finances, were treated with antianxiety medication or stronger drugs. The police found him that very night, hours after the macabre deed, wandering the dark streets of Colonia Morelos. In his statement he admitted without any coercion whatsoever that he had killed his mother. He also admitted to being the Penitent, the desecrator of churches. When he was asked what made him jam the piece of wood in his mother's vagina, first he answered that he didn't know, and then, after thinking about it more carefully, that he had done it to teach her. Teach her what? asked the policemen, among whom were Pedro Negrete, Epifanio Galindo, Angel Fernandez, Juan de Dios Martinez, and Jose Marquez. To take him seriously. Then he lapsed into incoherence and was transferred to the city hospital. Felicidad Jimenez Jimenez had another son, an older son, who had immigrated to the United States. The police tried to contact him, but no one could provide a reliable address. In the subsequent search of the house they found no letters from this son, or any personal objects left behind after his departure, or anything that testified to his existence. Just two photographs: in one, Felicidad appears with two boys between the ages of ten and thirteen, both of them staring seriously into the camera. In the other picture, dating farther back, Felicidad appears again with two children, one just a few months old, gazing up at her (her killer, years later), and the other, about three, who would immigrate to the United States and never come back to Santa Teresa. When he was released from the psychiatric hospital, Ernesto Luis Castillo Jimenez was taken to the Santa Teresa prison, where he proved to be unusually talkative. He didn't like to be alone and he was always requesting the presence of policemen or reporters. The police tried to pin other unsolved murders on him. The prisoner's willing nature invited it. Juan de Dios Martinez was sure Castillo Jimenez wasn't the Penitent. Probably the only person he had killed was his mother, and he couldn't even be held responsible for that, because it was clear he was mentally unstable. And this was the last death of 1993, which was the year the killings of women began in the Mexican state of Sonora, under Governor Jose Andres Briceno of the Partido de Accion Nacional (PAN), and Santa Teresa Mayor Jose Refugio de las Heras of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), decent and upright men who did the right thing, without fear of reprisals, prepared for any unpleasantness.

Before the end of the year, however, another lamentable event occurred that had nothing to do with the killings of women, assuming the killings were related to one another, which had yet to be proved. Around this time, Lalo Cura and his two sorry partners worked every day protecting Pedro Rengifo's wife. Lalo had seen Pedro Rengifo only once, from far away. And yet by now he knew several of the bodyguards who worked for him. There were some who seemed interesting. Pat O'Bannion, for example. Or a Yaqui Indian who almost never talked. But all he felt for the two men he worked with was distrust. There was nothing to be learned from them. The tall one from Tijuana liked to talk about California and the women he had met there. He mixed Spanish and English. He told lies, stories appreciated only by his partner, the man from Juarez, who was quieter but struck Lalo as the less trustworthy of the two. One morning, like so many others, Pedro Rengifo's wife took the children to school. They left in two cars, the wife's light green Mercedes, and a brown Jeep Grand Cherokee that stood parked at the corner outside the school all morning with two other bodyguards inside. These two were called the kids' bodyguards, in the same way that Lalo and his two partners were called the wife's bodyguards, all of them inferior to the three on Pedro Rengifo's team, who were called the boss's bodyguards or the boss's men, thus indicating a hierarchy not only of pay and duties but also of bravery, daring, and disregard for personal safety. After she dropped the children off at school, Pedro Rengifo's wife went shopping. First she stopped at a boutique and then she went into a drugstore and later she decided to visit a friend on Calle Astronomos, in Colonia Madero. For almost an hour Lalo Cura and the two bodyguards waited for her, the man from Tijuana in the car and Lalo and the man from Juarez leaning on the fender, in silence. When Pedro Rengifo's wife came out (her friend accompanied her to the door), the man from Tijuana got out of the car and Lalo and the other bodyguard straightened. There were a few people on the street. Not many, but a few. People walking into town to run some errand or another, people getting ready for the Christmas holidays, people going out to buy tortillas for lunch. The sidewalk was gray but the sun coming through the branches of the trees made it look bluish, like a river. Pedro Rengifo's wife gave her friend a kiss and stepped out onto the sidewalk. The man from Juarez hurried to open the gate for her. On one side of the street, the sidewalk was empty. On the other side, two maids were walking toward them. As Pedro Rengifo's wife came through the gate, she turned and said something to her friend, who was still in the doorway. Then the bodyguard from Tijuana spotted two men walking behind the two maids and he stiffened. Lalo Cura saw his face and he saw the men and he knew instantly that they were gunmen and they were there to kill Pedro Rengifo's wife. The man from Tijuana sidled up to the man from Juarez, who was still holding open the gate, and said something, though it wasn't clear whether it was in words or gestures. Pedro Rengifo's wife smiled. Her friend gave a laugh that Lalo heard like something coming from very far away, from the top of a hill. Then he saw the way the man from Juarez was looking at the man from Tijuana: up and down, like a pig staring into the sun. With his left hand he released the safety of his Desert Eagle and then he heard the clack of heels, Pedro Rengifo's wife heading to the car, and the voices of the two maids, full of question marks, as if instead of chatting they were constantly interrogating each other and lapsing into astonishment, as if not even they could believe what they were saying. Neither of them was over twenty. They were wearing ocher skirts and yellow blouses. The friend, who was waving goodbye from the doorway, was wearing tight pants and a green sweater. Pedro Rengifo's wife was wearing a white suit and her high-heeled shoes were white too. Lalo thought about his boss's wife's outfit just as the other two bodyguards took off down the street. He wanted to shout: don't run, you fucking pussies, but he could only murmur pussies. Pedro Rengifo's wife didn't notice anything. The gunmen shoved the maids aside. One was carrying an Uzi submachine gun. He was thin and his skin was very dark. The other was carrying a pistol and wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, without a tie, and he looked like a professional. Just as the maids were pushed aside to clear the line of fire, Pedro Rengifo's wife felt someone tugging on her suit and pulling her to the ground. As she went down she saw the maids fall in front of her and she thought there had been an earthquake. Out of the corner of her eye, she also saw Lalo, kneeling with his gun in his hand, and she heard a noise and saw a shell leap from the gun in Lalo's grasp and then she didn't see anything because her forehead hit the cement of the sidewalk. Her friend, who was still standing in the doorway and therefore had a broader view of the scene, started to scream, frozen in place, although in the back of her mind a little voice was saying that instead of screaming she should go inside and lock the door, or if she couldn't do that, at least get down and hide behind the geraniums. By now, the man from Tijuana and the man from Juarez had covered quite a distance and although they were sweating and panting since they weren't used to physical exercise, they didn't stop running. As for the maids, from the moment they hit the ground, they both curled up and began to pray or scan the faces of their loved ones and both closed their eyes and didn't open them until everything was over. Meanwhile, for Lalo Cura the problem was deciding which of the two gunmen would shoot him first, the one with the Uzi or the one who looked more like a professional. He should have fired at the latter, but he fired at the former. The bullet struck the thin, dark-skinned man in the chest and felled him instantly. The other gunman shifted imperceptibly to the right and experienced his own moment of uncertainty. How was it that the boy was armed? Why hadn't he gone running off with the other two bodyguards? The professional's bullet lodged in Lalo Cura's left shoulder, severing blood vessels and fracturing the bone. A shudder ran through Lalo Cura, and without changing position he fired again. The professional fell flat on his face on the ground and his second shot went wide. He was still alive. He could see the cement sidewalk, the blades of grass growing through the cracks, the white suit of Pedro Rengifo's wife, the sneakers of the boy coming toward him to shoot him dead. Fucking kid, he whispered. Then Lalo Cura turned and saw the figures of his two ex-partners in the distance. He aimed carefully and fired. The man from Juarez realized they were being shot at and ran faster. At the first corner they disappeared.

Twenty minutes later a patrol car showed up. Pedro Rengifo's wife had a cut on her forehead but she wasn't bleeding anymore and it was she who directed the policemen's first steps. Her initial concern was for her friend, who was in a state of shock. Then she realized that Lalo Cura was wounded and she demanded they call another ambulance for him and that both Lalo and her friend be taken to the Perez Guterson clinic. Before the ambulances came, more policemen arrived and several recognized the professional, who was lying dead on the sidewalk, as a state judicial police inspector. Just as Lalo Cura was about to be put in an ambulance, a couple of officers grabbed him by the arms, shoved him in a car, and drove him to Precinct #1. When Pedro Rengifo's wife got to the clinic, after leaving her friend settled in one of the best rooms, she went to check on the state of her bodyguard and was told he had never arrived. She demanded that the medics from the other ambulance be fetched immediately, and they confirmed that Lalo Cura had been arrested. Pedro Rengifo's wife picked up the phone and called her husband. An hour later the Santa Teresa police chief appeared at Precinct #1. With him was Epifanio, looking as if he hadn't slept for three days. Neither of the two seemed pleased. They found Lalo in one of the basement cells. There was blood on the boy's face. The policemen who were questioning him wanted to know why he had finished off the two gunmen, and when they saw Pedro Negrete come in they stood up. The chief sat in one of the vacated chairs and made a sign to Epifanio. Epifanio grabbed one of the policemen by the neck, pulled a switchblade from his jacket, and slashed the man's face from mouth to ear. He did it in such a way that not a single drop of blood landed on him. Is this the one who fucked you up? asked Epifanio. The boy shrugged. Take off his handcuffs, said Pedro Negrete. The other policeman took off the handcuffs, all the while muttering ay, ay, ay. What's wrong, man? asked Pedro Negrete. We made a mistake, boss, said the policeman. Get Pepe into a chair, it looks like he's about to pass out, said Pedro Negrete. Between Epifanio and the other policeman they sat the wounded officer down. How are you? Fine, boss, it's nothing, I'm just dizzy, that's all, said the officer as he felt in his pockets for something to press against the wound. Pedro Negrete handed him a tissue. Why did you arrest him? he asked. One of the guys he shot was Patricio Lopez, from the state judicial police, said the other policeman. Well, what do you know, so it was Patricio Lopez, but why did you think it was the kid who did it and not one of his partners? asked Pedro Negrete. His partners ran off, said the other policeman. Goddamn, that's what I call partners, said Pedro Negrete. So what did my boy do then? The policemen said that as far as they could establish, it seemed Lalo Cura had proceeded to shoot at them. At his own partners? That's right, his own partners, but before that, wounded in the shoulder and seemingly for no good reason, he had finished off Patricio Lopez and a shithead with an Uzi. It must have been the shock, said Pedro Negrete. I'm sure you're right, said the officer with the cut face. Anyway, what else could he do? asked Pedro Negrete. If Patricio Lopez had gotten the chance, he would have finished the kid off too. That's true, said the other policeman. Then they talked and smoked for a while longer, with a few brief interruptions for the officer with the cut face to change tissues, and then Epifanio escorted Lalo Cura out of the cell and helped him to the door of the police station where Pedro Negrete's car was waiting for him, the same car that had driven him away from Villaviciosa a few months before.

A month later, Pedro Negrete visited Pedro Rengifo's ranch, southeast of Santa Teresa, and demanded the return of Lalo Cura. I gave him to you, Pedro, and now I'm taking him back, he said. And why is that, Pedro? asked Pedro Rengifo. Because of the way you've treated him, Pedro, said Pedro Negrete. Instead of putting him with someone experienced, like your Irishman, so my boy could learn, you put him with a couple of faggots. You're right about that, Pedro, said Pedro Rengifo, but I'd like to remind you that one of those faggots came to me on your recommendation. True, I admit it, and as soon as I get my hands on him I'll right the wrong, Pedro, said Pedro Negrete, but now we're here to right your wrong. Well, as far as I'm concerned there's no problem, Pedro, if you want the boy back, he's yours, and Pedro Rengifo gave orders to one of his men to bring Lalo Cura from the gardener's house. While they were waiting, Pedro Negrete asked about Pedro Rengifo's wife and children. About the livestock. About Pedro Rengifo's grocery businesses in Santa Teresa and other northern cities. The wife spends all her time in Cuernavaca, said Pedro Rengifo, and we sent the children away to the United States for school (he was careful not to say where), the livestock is more a worry than a business, and the superstores have their ups and downs. Then Pedro Negrete wanted to know how Lalo Cura's shoulder was. It's just like new, Pedro, said Pedro Rengifo. The work is easy. The kid spends all day sleeping and reading magazines. He's happy here. I know he is, Pedro, said Pedro Negrete, but the way things are, one of these days he might get killed. Don't make it sound worse than it is, Pedro, said Pedro Rengifo with a laugh, but then he turned pale. On their way back to Santa Teresa, Pedro Negrete asked the boy if he'd like to be on the police force. Lalo Cura nodded. Shortly after they left the ranch they passed an enormous black stone. On the stone Lalo thought he saw a Gila monster, motionless, staring into the endless west. They say that stone is really a meteorite, said Pedro Negrete. In a gully, farther to the north, the Rio Paredes curved, and from the road the tops of trees were visible like a green-black carpet with a cloud of dust hanging over them where Pedro Rengifo's cattle came to drink each afternoon. But if it was a meteorite, said Pedro Negrete, it would've left a crater, and where's the crater? When Lalo Cura looked at the black stone again in the rearview mirror, the Gila monster was gone.

The first dead woman of 1994 was found by some truck drivers on a road off the Nogales highway, in the middle of the desert. The truckers, both Mexican, worked for the maquiladora Key Corp., and that afternoon, despite having full loads, they decided to stop for food and drinks at a bar called El Ajo, where one of the truck drivers, Antonio Villas Martinez, was a regular. On their way to the bar in question, the other truck driver, Rigoberto Resendiz, was dazzled for a few seconds by a flash in the desert. Thinking it was a joke, he radioed his friend Villas Martinez and the trucks pulled over. The road was deserted. Villas Martinez tried to convince Resendiz that it had probably been the reflection of the sun off a bottle or some broken glass, but then Resendiz saw a shape about three hundred yards from the highway and strode toward it. After a while, Villas Martinez heard Resendiz whistle and he set off after him, not without first checking that both trucks were locked. When he got to where his friend was waiting he saw the body, which was clearly a woman's, though her face was a bloody mess. Oddly, the first thing he noticed were the woman's shoes. She was wearing nice tooled-leather sandals. Villas Martinez crossed himself. What do we do, compadre'? he heard Resendiz ask. By the tone of his friend's voice he understood that the question was rhetorical. Call the police, he said. Good idea, said Resendiz. Villas Martinez spotted a belt with a big metal buckle around the dead woman's waist. That's what was flashing, compadre, he said. Yes, I saw, said Resendiz. The dead woman was wearing hot pants and a silky yellow shirt with a big black flower stamped on the chest and a red flower on the back. When the body reached the medical examiner, he discovered, in astonishment, that under the hot pants the woman still had on white underpants with little bows on the sides. He also noted that she had been anally and vaginally raped, and that the cause of death was massive craniocerebral trauma, although she had been stabbed twice too, once in the chest and once in the back, wounds that had caused her to lose blood but weren't necessarily fatal. Her face, as the truck drivers had observed, was unrecognizable. The date of death was fixed, in a general way, between January 1 and January 6, 1994, although there was some possibility that the body had been dumped in the desert on December 25 or 26 of the previous year, now fortunately past.

The next dead woman was Leticia Contreras Zamudio. The police reported to La Riviera, a nightclub between Calle Lorenzo Sepulveda and Calle Alvaro Obregon, in the center of Santa Teresa, after receiving an anonymous call. In one of the private rooms at La Riviera, they found the body, which exhibited multiple wounds to the abdomen and chest, as well as to the forearms, which led to the conclusion that Leticia Contreras had fought for her life to the last. The dead woman was twenty-three and had been working as a prostitute for more than four years, without a single brush with the police. After being questioned, none of the other girls could say who was with Leticia Contreras in the private room. At the time she was killed, some thought she had been in the bathroom. Others said she was in the basement, where there were four pool tables, because Leticia couldn't resist a game of pool and she wasn't a bad player. One girl even went so far as to suggest she had been alone, but what would a whore be doing alone in a private room? At four in the morning the whole staff of La Riviera was brought in to Precinct #1. Around this time, Lalo Cura was learning the traffic cop beat. He worked at night, on foot, and he drifted like a ghost through Colonia Alamos and Colonia Ruben Dario, from south to north, in no hurry, until he reached the center of the city, and then he could go back to Precinct #1 or do whatever he liked. He heard the screams as he was taking off his uniform. He got in the shower without paying much attention, but when he turned off the water he heard them again. They were coming from the cells. He tucked his gun in his belt and went out into the corridor. At that time of night, Precinct #1 was almost empty, except for the waiting room. In the antitheft task force office he found another policeman, asleep. He woke him and asked if he knew what was going on. The policeman said there was a party in the cells, and he could go down if he wanted. When Lalo Cura left, the policeman went back to sleep. From the stairs Lalo Cura smelled alcohol. There were twenty people jammed into one of the cells. He stared at them without blinking. Some were asleep on their feet. One who was up against the bars had his pants undone. The ones in the back were a shapeless mass of darkness and hair. It smelled of vomit. The cell must not have been more than ten feet square. In the corridor he saw Epifanio, who was watching what was happening in the other cells with a cigarette between his lips. He moved toward him to tell him the men were going to suffocate or be crushed to death, but with his first step he was silenced. In the other cells policemen were raping the whores from La Riviera. How's it rolling, Lalito? said Epifanio, going to get in on the action1? No, said Lalo Cura, you? Me neither, said Epifanio. When they'd seen enough they went out for some fresh air. What did those whores do? asked Lalo. It looks like they bumped off another girl, said Epifanio. Lalo Cura was quiet. The early morning breeze along the streets of Santa Teresa really was fresh and cool. The scarred moon still shone in the sky.

Two of the girls who worked with Leticia Contreras Zamudio were formally accused of her murder, although there was no proof they were guilty, except for their presence at La Riviera at the time of events. Nati Gordillo was thirty years old and had known the dead woman since the latter came to work at the nightclub. At the moment in question she was in the bathroom. Rubi Campos was twenty-one and she hadn't been at La Riviera for more than five months. At the moment in question she was waiting for Nati in the bathroom, with only the door of the stall between them. The two of them, it was established, had a very close relationship. And it was proved that Rubi had been verbally attacked by Leticia two days before Leticia was killed. Another girl had heard Rubi say that Leticia would pay. The suspect didn't deny this, although she made it clear that she had planned to beat her up, not murder her. The two whores were transferred to Hermosillo and locked up at Paquita Avendano, the women's prison, where they remained until their case was handed over to another judge, who was quick to declare them innocent.

In all, they spent two years in prison. When they got out they said they were going to try their luck in Mexico City, or maybe they went to the United States. The one thing certain is that they were never seen in the state of Sonora again.

The next victim was Penelope Mendez Becerra. She was eleven years old. Her mother worked at the maquiladora Interzone-Berny. Her older sister, sixteen, was also an Interzone-Berny employee. Her older brother, fifteen, worked as a delivery boy and messenger for a bakery not far from Calle Industrial, where they lived, in Colonia Veracruz. Penelope was the youngest and the only one in school. Seven years before, the children's father had left home. At the time, they all lived in Colonia Morelos, near the Arsenio Farrell industrial park, in a house Penelope's father had built himself from cardboard and stray bricks and sheets of zinc, next to a trench that two of the maquiladora companies had dug to build a drainage system that in the end was never completed. Both parents were from the state of Hidalgo, in the middle of the country, and both had migrated north in 1985, in search of work. But one day Penelope's father decided that the family's living conditions weren't going to improve with what he earned at the maquiladoras and he decided to cross the border. He left with nine others, all from Oaxaca. One had made the trip three times already and said he knew how to dodge the migra. For the others it was the first attempt. The pollero who led them across told them not to worry. If they were unlucky enough to be arrested, he said, they should give themselves up without a struggle. Penelope Mendez's father spent all his savings on that trip. He promised he would write as soon as he got to California. He planned to bring his family to join him in less than a year. They never heard from him again. Penelope's mother imagined that maybe he had found another woman, American or Mexican, and they were doing well for themselves. She also wondered, especially in the first few months, whether he had died in the desert, at night, alone, listening to the coyotes howl or thinking of his children, or on an American street, killed by a driver who left him to die, but these thoughts paralyzed her (in them everyone, including her husband, spoke a different, incomprehensible, language), and she decided not to think them. Also, if he had died, she reasoned, someone would have let her know, wouldn't they? In any case she had enough problems at home without speculating about her husband's fate. It was hard to keep herfamily afloat. But since she was a neighborly and circumspect woman, optimistic by nature, and since she knew how to listen, she had plenty of friends. Especially women, who found her story familiar, nothing strange or out of the ordinary. One of these friends got her the job at Interzone-Berny. At first she walked a long way to work. Her older daughter took care of the other children. Her name was Livia, and one afternoon a drunken neighbor tried to rape her. When her mother got home from work, Livia told her what had happened and her mother went to call on the neighbor with a knife in her apron pocket. She talked to him and she talked to his wife and then she talked to him again: pray to the Virgencita that nothing happens to my daughter, she said, because if it does I'll blame you and I'll kill you with this knife. The neighbor said that from then on everything would change. But by this point she didn't trust the word of men and she worked hard and put in overtime and even sold sandwiches to her own coworkers at lunch until she had enough money to rent a little house in Colonia Veracruz, which was farther from Inter-zone than the shack by the trench, but it was a real little house, with two rooms, sturdy walls, a door that could be locked. She didn't mind having to walk twenty minutes longer each morning. In fact, she almost sang as she walked. She didn't mind spending nights without sleeping, working two shifts back to back, or staying up until two in the morning in the kitchen when she had to leave for the factory at six, making the chile-spiked sandwiches her fellow workers would eat the next day. In fact, the physical effort filled her with energy, her exhaustion was transformed into vivacity and grace, the days were long, slow, and the world (perceived as an endless shipwreck) showed her its brightest face and made her aware, as a matter of course, of the brightness of her own. At fifteen, her older daughter started work. They still walked to the factory, but the trip seemed shorter with all their talking and laughing. Her son left school at fourteen. He worked at Interzone-Berny for a few months, but after several warnings he was fired for not being quick enough. The boy's hands were too big and clumsy. Then his mother got him a job at a neighborhood bakery. The only child still in school was Penelope. Her school was called Aquiles Serdan Primary School and it was on Calle Aquiles Serdan. There were children there from Colonia Carranza and Colonia Veracruz and Colonia Morelos and even a few children from the center of the city. Penelope Mendez Becerra was in the fifth grade. She was a quiet girl, and she always got good grades. She had long straight black hair. One day she left school and was never seen again. That very evening her mother requested permission from Interzone to go to Precinct #2 to file a missing person report. Her son went with her. At the precinct a policeman wrote down her name and told her she would have to wait a few days. Her older daughter, Livia, wasn't able to come with her because Interzone was of the opinion that it was sufficient to have given her mother leave. The next day Penelope Mendez Becerra was still missing. Her mother and brother and sister showed up at the police station again and wanted to know what progress had been made. The policeman behind the desk told them not to be insolent. The Aquiles Serdan principal and three teachers were at the station, inquiring about Penelope, and it was they who led the family away before they could be fined for disorderly conduct. The next day Penelope's brother talked to some of her classmates. One said she thought Penelope had gotten into a car with tinted windows and hadn't gotten out again. By the description it sounded like a Peregrino or a MasterRoad. Penelope's brother and her teacher talked to the girl for a long time, but the only thing they could get clear was that it was an expensive black car. For three days her brother crisscrossed Santa Teresa on exhausting walks looking for a black car. He found many, even some with tinted windows, gleaming as if they had just come from the factory, but the people in them didn't look like kidnappers, or were young couples (their happiness made Penelope's brother cry) or women. Still, he noted down all the license plate numbers. At night the family would gather at home and talk about Penelope in words that meant nothing or whose ultimate meaning only they could understand. A week later her body turned up. It was found by some city maintenance workers in a drainage pipe that ran beneath the city from Colonia San Damian to the El Ojito ravine, near the Casas Negras highway, past the clandestine dump El Chile. The body was immediately removed to the medical examiner's office, where it was established that the girl had been anally and vaginally raped, with considerable tearing of both orifices, and then strangled. After a second autopsy, however, it was declared that Penelope Mendez Becerra had died of a heart attack while being subjected to the abuses described above.

Around this time, Ealo Cura turned seventeen, six years older than Penelope Mendez when she was killed, and Epifanio found him a place to live. It was in one of the tenement buildings that still stood in the center of the city. The tenement was on Calle Obispo, and after crossing a hall where the stairs began, the visitor came out into a huge courtyard, with a big fountain in the middle, around which rose three floors of flaking arcades where children played or neighbor women talked, arcades half covered by wooden roofs supported by very narrow iron columns, rusted with the passage of time. Lalo Cura's room was big, with enough space for a bed, a table and three chairs, a refrigerator (next to the table), and a wardrobe too large for the few items of clothing he possessed. There was also a little stove and a new cement sink where he could wash dirty pots and dishes or splash his face. The toilet, like the shower, was communal, and there were two latrines on each floor and three more on the roof. Epifanio showed him his own room first, which was on the first floor. His clothes hung from a cord strung from one wall to the other and next to the unmade bed Ealo Cura spotted a stack of old newspapers, almost all Santa Teresa papers. The bottom ones were yellowing. The stove didn't seem to have been used in a long time. Epifanio said it was best for a policeman to live alone, but that he should do as he liked. Then he took Ealo Cura up to his room, which was on the third floor, and gave him the keys. Now you have a home, Ealito, he said. If you want to sweep, borrow a broom from your neighbor. Someone had written a name on the wall: Ernesto Arancibia. Arancibia was spelled with a v instead of a la. Ealo pointed to the name and Epifanio shrugged his shoulders. Rent is due at the end of the month, he said, and he left without further explanations.

Around this time, too, Juan de Dios Martinez was ordered to stop working on the Penitent case and look into a series of armed robberies that had taken place in Colonia Centeno and Colonia Podesta. When he asked whether this meant the Penitent case was closed, he was told it didn't, but since the Penitent seemed to have vanished and the investigation was stalled, and given that a limited number of investigators were assigned to Santa Teresa, they would have to prioritize more urgent cases. Of course, this didn't mean they had forgotten about the Penitent or that Juan de Dios Martinez was no longer in charge of the investigation, but the officers under his command, who were wasting their time watching the city's churches twenty-four hours a day, would have to devote themselves to matters of greater benefit to public security. Juan de Dios Martinez accepted the assignment without protest.

The next dead woman was Lucy Anne Sander. She lived in Huntsville, about thirty miles from Santa Teresa, in Arizona, and she had been to El Adobe first, with a friend, and then they had driven across the border, ready for a sampling, at least, of Santa Teresa's nonstop nightlife. Her friend, Erica Delmore, was the owner and driver of the car. They both worked at a crafts factory in Huntsville that made Indian beads sold wholesale to tourist gift shops in Tombstone, Tucson, Phoenix, and Apache Junction. They were the only two white women at the factory, because all the other workers were Mexican or Indian. Lucy Anne had been born in a little town in Mississippi. She was twenty-six and her dream was to live near the ocean. Sometimes she talked about going back home, but usually only when she was tired or upset, which wasn't often. Erica Delmore was forty and she had been married twice. She was from California, but she was happy in Arizona, where there weren't many people and life was more relaxed. When they got to Santa Teresa they headed straight to the downtown clubs, first El Pelicano and then Domino's. Along the way they were joined by a twenty-two-year-old Mexican who said his name was Manuel or Miguel. He was a nice guy, according to Erica, who tried to hook up with Lucy Anne, and then, when Lucy Anne turned him down, with Erica, and in no way could be called a stalker or a bully. At some point, while they were at Domino's, Manuel or Miguel (Erica couldn't remember his name exactly) went off and they were left alone at the bar. Then they drove randomly around the center, visiting the city's historic landmarks: the cathedral, the town hall, some old colonial buildings, the colonnaded Plaza de Armas. According to Erica, no one bothered them, nor were they followed. As they circled the plaza, an American tourist called out: girls, you have to see the bandstand, it's amazing. Then he vanished into the bushes and they decided it might not be a bad idea to walk for a while. The night was bright, cool, full of stars. As Erica was looking for a place to park, Lucy Anne got out, took off her shoes, and went running through the grass, which had just been watered. After she parked, Erica went to look for Lucy Anne but couldn't find her. She decided to head into the plaza, toward the famous bandstand. Some of the paths were dirt, but the main ones were still paved with old stone. On the benches she saw couples talking or kissing. The bandstand was wrought iron, and in it, though it was late at night, insomniac children played. The lights, Erica noted, were dim, just bright enough to let you see where you were going, but with so many people around, there was no sense of threat. She couldn't find Lucy Anne, but she did think she recognized the American tourist who had shouted to them from the plaza. He was with three others and they were drinking tequila, passing the bottle around. She went up to them and asked whether they had seen her friend. The American tourist looked at her as if she had escaped from a mental institution. They were all drunk and very young, but Erica knew how to handle drunks and she explained the situation. Since they had nothing better to do, they decided to help her. After a while the plaza echoed with shouts for Lucy Anne. Erica went back to where she had parked the car. No one was there. She got in, locked the doors, and honked the horn several times. Then she started to smoke until the air inside became unbreathable and she had to roll down a window. At dawn, she went to the police station and asked if there was an American consulate in the city. The policeman attending her didn't know and had to ask some other policemen. One of them said there was. Erica filed a missing person report and then she headed to the consulate with a copy of it. The consulate was on Calle Verdejo, in Colonia Centro-Norte, not far from where she'd been the night before, and it was still closed. A few steps away was a coffee shop, and Erica went in to have breakfast. She ordered a vegetable sandwich and pineapple juice and then she used the phone to call Huntsville, Lucy Anne's house, but no one answered. From her table she watched the slow stirrings of the street as it came to life. When she had finished her juice she called Huntsville again, but this time she dialed the sheriff's number. A kid called Rory Campuzano, someone she knew well, picked up the phone. He said the sheriff wasn't in yet. Erica told him that Lucy Anne Sander had disappeared in Santa Teresa, and the way things looked, she was going to spend all morning at the consulate or making the rounds of hospitals. Tell him to call me at the consulate, she said. Will do, Erica, sit tight, said Rory, and then he hung up. She sat there for an hour, picking at her vegetable sandwich, until she saw activity around the door of the consulate. She was helped by a man who said his name was Kurt A. Banks and who asked her all kinds of questions about her friend and herself, as if he didn't believe Erica's story. Only after she left did Erica realize he suspected the two of them of being whores. Then she went back to the police station, where she had to tell the same story twice more to policemen who knew nothing about the report she had filed and was finally informed that there was no news of her missing friend, who might very well have crossed back over the border. One of the policemen recommended that she do likewise, best to leave the matter in the hands of the consulate and go home. Erica stared at him. He looked like a good person and his advice seemed well-intentioned. The rest of the morning and much of the afternoon she spent visiting hospitals. Until that moment she hadn't stopped to think how Lucy Anne might have ended up at a hospital. She ruled out the possibility of an accident, because Lucy Anne had disappeared in the plaza or somewhere nearby and she hadn't heard any noise at all, no shout, no squealing of brakes, no skid. After trying to come up with other reasons that might explain why Lucy Anne would be in a hospital, all she could think of was an amnesia attack. The likelihood was so remote that her eyes filled with tears. Anyway, none of the hospitals she visited had any record of having admitted an American woman. At the last one, a nurse suggested she try the Clfnica America, a private hospital, but she answered with a burst of sarcasm. We're blue-collar workers, honey, she said in English. Like me, said the nurse, also in English. The two of them talked for a while and then the nurse invited Erica to have coffee at the hospital cafeteria, where she informed her that many women disappeared in Santa Teresa. It's the same in the United States, said Erica. The nurse met her eyes and shook her head. It's worse here, she said. When they parted they exchanged phone numbers and Erica promised to keep the nurse posted on any developments. She ate outside at a restaurant in the center of the city and twice she thought she saw Lucy Anne walking along the sidewalk, once coming toward her and once heading away, but it wasn't really Lucy Anne either time. Almost without knowing what she was ordering, she pointed at random to a couple of dishes that weren't too expensive. Both were seasoned with lots of hot pepper and after a while tears came to her eyes, but she kept eating anyway. Then she drove her car to the plaza where Lucy Anne had disappeared, parked in the shade of a big oak, and went to sleep with both hands clutching the steering wheel. When she woke she headed to the consulate, and the man named Kurt A. Banks introduced her to another man who said his name was Henderson. He told her it was still too soon for there to be any progress in the matter of her friend's disappearance. She asked when it wouldn't be too soon. Henderson gazed at her impassively and said: three more days. And he added: at least. As she was leaving, Kurt A. Banks said the Huntsville sheriff had called asking for her and inquiring about Lucy Anne Sander's disappearance. She thanked him and left. When she got outside she found a public phone and called Huntsville. Rory Campuzano answered and told her the sheriff had tried to get in touch with her three times. He's out now, said Rory, but when he comes back I'll tell him to call you. No, said Erica, I still don't have a place to stay, I'll call back in a little while. Before it got dark she checked out several hotels. The ones that seemed good were too expensive and finally she got a room at a boardinghouse in Colonia Ruben Dario, without private bath or television. The shower was down the hall and there was a little bolt to lock the door from inside. She took her clothes off, but not her shoes, afraid of catching a fungus, and stood under the water for a long time. Half an hour later, still wrapped in the towel with which she'd dried herself, she fell into bed and forgot about calling the Huntsville sheriff and the consulate and slept deeply until the next day.

That day they found Lucy Anne Sander not far from the border fence, a few yards past some gas tanks in a ditch running alongside the Nogales highway. The body exhibited stab wounds, most them very deep, to the neck, chest, and abdomen. It was discovered by some workers who immediately alerted the police. In the forensic examination a significant sampling of semen was found in the vagina, and it was established that Lucy Anne Sander had been raped several times. Death was caused by one of five stab wounds, any of which might have been fatal. Erica Delmore was given the news when she called the American consulate. Kurt A. Banks asked her to come in immediately, saying he had some sad news for her, but so insistent was she and so loud did her voice grow that he had no choice but to tell her the whole truth without further preamble. Before she went to the consulate, Erica called the Huntsville sheriff and this time she was able to reach him. She told him Lucy Anne had been murdered in Santa Teresa. Do you want me to come get you. asked the sheriff. I'd like that, but it's all right if you can't, I have my car, said Erica. I'll come get you, said the sheriff. Then she called the nurse who had befriended her and gave her the latest and presumably final update. They'll probably want you to identify the body, said the nurse. The morgue was in one of the hospitals she'd visited the day before. She went with Henderson, who was nicer than Kurt A. Banks, but she would really have preferred to go alone. As they were waiting in a corridor in the basement, the nurse appeared. They hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. Then she introduced the nurse to Henderson, who greeted her distractedly but wanted to know how long they'd known each other. Twenty-four hours, said the nurse. Or less. It's true, thought Erica, just a day, but I already feel as if I've known her for a long time. When the medical examiner turned up, he said Henderson couldn't come in with her. Believe me, I'd rather not, said Henderson, with a half smile, but it's my duty. The nurse gave her a hug and the two women went in together, followed by the American official. Two Mexican policemen were in the room examining the dead woman. Erica went to look and said it was her friend. The policemen asked her to sign some papers. Erica tried to read them but they were in Spanish. It's nothing, said Henderson, sign them. The nurse read the papers and told her she could sign. Is that all? asked Henderson. That's all, said one of the Mexican policemen. Who did this to Lucy Anne? she asked. The policemen looked at her uncomprehendingly. The nurse translated and the police said they didn't know yet. Past noon, the Huntsville sheriff drove up to the American consulate. Erica was smoking in her car with the doors locked when he arrived. The sheriff spotted her from the distance and they talked, she still sitting in the car and he bent toward her, one hand resting on the open door and the other on his belt. Then he went to request more information from the consulate and Erica stayed in the car with the doors locked again, chain-smoking. When the sheriff came out he said they should go home. Erica waited for the sheriff to start his car and then, as if in a dream, she followed him along the Mexican streets and across the border and through the desert, in Arizona now, until the sheriff honked his horn and waved and both cars stopped at an old gas station that also served food. But Erica wasn't hungry and she just listened to what the sheriff had to tell her: that Lucy Anne's body would be sent to Huntsville in three days, that the Mexican police had promised to catch the killer, that the whole thing stank like shit. Then the sheriff ordered scrambled eggs with refried beans and a beer and she got up from the table and went to buy more cigarettes. When she got back the sheriff was cleaning his plate with a piece of sandwich bread. His hair was thick and black and made him look younger than he was. Do you think they told you the truth, Harry? she asked. No, I don't, said the sheriff, but I plan to make it my business to find it out. I believe you, Harry, she said, and started to cry.

The next dead woman was found near the Hermosillo highway, five miles from Santa Teresa, two days after Lucy Anne Sander's body turned up. The discovery fell to four ranch hands and the ranch owner's nephew. They had been searching for runaway cattle for more than twenty hours. The five trackers were on horseback, and when they could see that it was a dead woman, the nephew sent one of the hands back to the ranch with orders to tell the boss, while the rest of them stayed behind, perplexed by the bizarre position of the body. Its head was buried in a hole. As if the killer, clearly a lunatic, had thought it was enough to bury the head. Or as if he'd thought that by covering the head with earth the rest of the body would be invisible. The body was facedown with its hands pressed to its body. Both hands were missing the index and little finger. There were stains of coagulated blood in the chest region. The woman wore a light dress, purple, the kind that fastens in front. She wasn't wearing stockings or shoes. In the subsequent forensic examination it was determined that despite multiple cuts to the chest and arms, the cause of death was strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. There were no signs of rape. The case was assigned to Inspector Jose Marquez, who soon identified the dead woman as America Garcia Cifuentes, twenty-three, a waitress at Serafino's, a bar belonging to Luis Chantre, a pimp with a long police record who was said to be a police informer. America Garcia Cifuentes shared a house with two friends, both waitresses, who had nothing of substance to contribute to the investigation. The only thing established beyond a doubt was that America Garcia Cifuentes had left home at five for Serafino's, where she worked until four in the morning, when the bar closed. She never came home, said her friends. Inspector Jose Marquez held Luis Chantre for a few days, but his alibi was impeccable. America Garcia Cifuentes was from the state of Guerrero and had been living in Santa Teresa for five years, where she had come with a brother, who was in the United States now, according to the testimony of friends, and with whom she never corresponded. For a few days, Inspector Jose Marquez investigated some Serafino's patrons but didn't come up with anything.

Two weeks later, in May 1994, Monica Duran Reyes was kidnapped on her way out of the Diego Rivera School in Colonia Lomas del Toro. She was twelve years old and she was a little scatterbrained but a good student. It was her first year of secondary school. Both her mother and father worked at Maderas de Mexico, a maquiladora that built colonial-and rustic-style furniture that was exported to the United States and Canada. She had a younger sister who was in school, and two older siblings, a sixteen-year-old sister who worked at a maquiladora that made wiring, and a fifteen-year-old brother who worked with his parents at Maderas de Mexico. Her body appeared two days after the kidnapping, alongside the Santa Teresa-Pueblo Azul highway. She was dressed and next to her was her schoolbag full of books and notebooks. According to the forensic examination, she had been raped and strangled. In the subsequent investigation, some friends said they had seen Monica get into a black car with tinted windows, maybe a Peregrino or a MasterRoad or a Silencioso. It didn't look as if she was taken by force. She had time to scream, but she didn't scream. When she saw one of her friends, she even waved goodbye. She didn't seem to be afraid.

In Colonia Lomas del Toro once again, a month later, the body of Rebeca Fernandez de Hoyos, thirty-three, was found. She had long dark hair down to her waist, and she had been a waitress at El Catrin, a bar on Calle Xalapa, in nearby Colonia Ruben Dario. Previously she had worked at the Holmes & West and Aiwo maquiladoras, where she was fired for trying to organize a union. Rebeca Fernandez de Hoyos was from Oaxaca, although she had been living in the north of Sonora for more than ten years now. When she was eighteen, she had lived in Tijuana, where she appeared on a register of prostitutes, and she had made several unsuccessful attempts to settle in the United States, brought back to Mexico four times by the migra. Her body was discovered by a friend who had a key to her house and was surprised Rebeca hadn't come in to work at El Catrin, because, as she stated later, the deceased was a responsible woman and missed work only when she was sick. The house, according to her friend, was the same as always, or in other words at first glance she didn't see anything to suggest what she was about to find. It was a small house, with a living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. When she went into the bathroom, she discovered her friend's body, which was sprawled on the floor as if Rebeca had fallen and knocked herself on the head, though there was no blood. Only when she tried to revive her, patting water on her face, did she realize that Rebeca was dead. She called the police and the Red Cross from a public phone and then she went back to the house, moved her friend's body to the bed, sat in one of the two armchairs in the living room, and watched a TV show while she waited. The Red Cross came much more quickly than the police. There were two medics, one of them very young, twenty at most, and the other about forty-five, who might have been his father. It was the older man who told her there was nothing they could do. Rebeca was dead. Then he asked her where she'd found the body and she said in the bathroom. Well, let's put her back in the bathroom, you don't want trouble with the cops, said the man, motioning to the boy to take the dead woman by the feet as he lifted her by the shoulders, returning her to the original scene of death. Then the medic asked her what position she had found her friend in: sitting on the toilet, propped against it, on the floor, huddled in a corner? She turned off the TV and came to the door of the bathroom and gave instructions until the two men had left Rebeca just as she'd found her. The three of them stared from the doorway. Rebeca seemed to be drowning in a sea of white tiles. When they were tired of the sight or felt queasy, they sat down, she in the armchair and the medics at the table, and lit some cigarettes that the medic took out of the back pocket of his pants. You must be used to this, she said, somewhat incoherently. That depends, said the medic, who didn't know whether she was talking about the cigarettes or about hauling dead and injured people every day. The next morning the medical examiner wrote in his report that the cause of death had been strangulation. The dead woman had had sexual relations in the hours before her murder, although the examiner couldn't certify whether she'd been raped or not. Probably not, he said when a final opinion was demanded. The police tried to arrest her lover, a man by the name of Pedro Perez Ochoa, but when they at last found where he lived, a week later, the person in question had been gone for days. Pedro Perez Ochoa lived at the end of Calle Sayuca, in Colonia Las Flores, in a shack built, rather skillfully, of adobe and bits of trash, with room for a mattress and a table, a few yards from the waste pipe of the EastWest maquiladora, where he had worked. The neighbors described him as a polite and generally clean-looking man, from which it was deduced that he had showered at Rebeca's house, at least in recent months. No one knew where he was, so no arrest warrant was sent anywhere. At EastWest his file had been lost, which wasn't unusual at the maquiladoras, since workers were constantly coming and going. Inside the shack, several sports magazines were found, as well as a biography of Flores Magon, some sweatshirts, a pair of sandals, two pairs of shorts, and three photographs of Mexican boxers cut out of a magazine and stuck to the wall next to the mattress, as if Perez Ochoa had wanted to burn the faces and fighting stances of those champions onto his retina before he went to sleep.

In July 1994 no woman died, but a man showed up asking questions. He came on Saturdays around noon and left late Sunday night or early Monday morning. The man was of average height and had black hair and brown eyes and dressed like a cowboy. He began by pacing the central plaza, as if he were taking measurements, but then he became a regular at some clubs, especially El Pelicano and Domino's. He never asked any direct questions. He looked Mexican, but he spoke Spanish with a gringo accent and his vocabulary was limited. He didn't understand puns, although when people saw his eyes they were careful not to kid him. He said his name was Harry Magana, or at least that's how he wrote it, but he pronounced it Magana, so that when he said it you heard Macgana, as if the self-sucking faggot was of Scottish descent. The second time he came by Domino's he asked for somebody called Miguel or Manuel, a young guy, in his early twenties, about so tall, built like so, a nice kid with an honest face, but no one could or would tell him anything. Another night he made friends with one of the bartenders, and when the bartender left work Harry Magana was waiting for him outside, sitting in his car. The next day the bartender couldn't come in to work, supposedly because he'd been in an accident. When he came back to Domino's four days later with his face covered in bruises and scabs, everyone was shocked. He was missing three teeth, and if he lifted his shirt he revealed countless bruises in the most outrageous colors on his back and chest. He didn't show his testicles, but there was still a cigarette burn on the left one. Of course, he was asked what kind of accident he'd gotten into and his answer was that on the night in question he had been out drinking until late, with Harry Magana, as it happened, and that after he left the gringo and was on his way home to Calle Tres Virgenes, a group of maybe five bastards had attacked him and beaten the shit out of him. The next weekend Harry Magana wasn't seen at Domino's or El Pelicano. Instead, he visited a whorehouse called Internal Affairs, on Avenida Madero-Norte, where he spent a while drinking highballs and then settled in at a pool table and played Demetrio Aguila, a big man, six foot three and over two hundred and fifty pounds, with whom he got to be friendly, because the big man had lived in Arizona and New Mexico, working as a fieldhand, by which he meant tending livestock, and then he had come back to Mexico because he didn't want to die far from home, he said, although later he admitted he didn't really have much family in the usual sense, a sister who must be around sixty by now and a niece who had never married and lived in Cananea, where he was from too, but Cananea could start to feel small, stifling, tiny, and sometimes he needed a trip to the big city that never sleeps, so then he hopped in his pickup without a word to anyone, or maybe with a see-you-later to his sister, and no matter what time it was he turned onto the Cananea-Santa Teresa highway, which was one of the prettiest highways he had ever seen in his life, especially at night, and drove nonstop to Santa Teresa, where he had a cozy little house on Calle Luciernaga, in Colonia Ruben Dario, you're welcome to stay anytime, Harry, my friend, one of the few old houses still standing after all the change and the mostly shoddy redevelopment projects that had been carried out. Demetrio Aguila must have been about sixty-five and he struck Harry Magana as a good person. Sometimes he went to a room with a whore, but most of the time he preferred to drink and watch the crowd. Harry asked if he knew a girl called Elsa Fuentes. Demetrio Aguila wanted to know what she looked like. About so tall, said Harry Magana, raising his hand to just over five feet. Blond dye job. Pretty. Nice tits. I know her, said Demetrio Aguila, Elsita, that's right, nice kid. Is she here? Harry Magana wanted to know. Demetrio Aguila said he d seen her on the dance floor a while ago. I want you to point her out to me, Senor Demetrio, said Harry, can you do that? Certainly, my friend. As they went up the stairs to the dance club, Demetrio Aguila inquired whether he had some score to settle with her. Harry Magana shook his head. Elsa Fuentes was sitting at a table with two other whores and three clients, laughing at something one of the girls said in her ear. Harry Magana leaned on the table with one hand, his other hand resting his belt, behind his back. He told her to get up. The whore stopped laughing and raised her head to get a good look at him. The clients were about to say something, but when they saw Demetrio Aguila behind Harry they shrugged it off. Where can we talk? Let's go to a room, he said into Elsa's ear. As they were on their way up the stairs Harry Magana paused and told Demetrio Aguila it wasn't necessary for him to come along. Of course not, said Demetrio Aguila, and he started back down. In Elsa Fuentes's room everything was red: the walls, the bedspread, the sheets, the pillow, the lamp, the lightbulbs, even half the tiles. Through the window you could see the bustle of Madero-Norte late at night, cars crawling by and people overflowing the sidewalks between the food carts and juice carts and the cheap restaurants jostling for business, the prices of their daily specials scrawled on big blackboards that were constantly revised. When Harry Magana turned to look at Elsa, she had taken off her blouse and bra. She does have big tits, he thought, but he didn't plan to make love to her that night. Don't get undressed, he said. The girl sat on the bed and crossed her legs. Do you have cigarettes? she asked. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros and offered her one. Give me a light, said the girl in English. He lit a match and held it out to her. Elsa Fuentes's eyes were a brown so light they looked yellow like the desert. Stupid kid, he thought. Then he asked her about Miguel Montes, where he was, what he was doing, the last time she'd seen him. So you're looking for Miguel? asked the whore. Do you mind telling me why? Harry Magana didn't answer: he undid his belt and then rolled it up in his right hand, letting the buckle dangle like a bell. I don't have time, he said. The last time I saw him was about a month ago, maybe two, she said. Where was he working? Nowhere and everywhere. He wanted to get a degree, I think he was going to night school. Where did he make the money? Odd jobs here and there, said the girl. Don't lie to me, said Harry Magana. The girl shook her head and blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. Where does he live? I don't know, he's always moving. The belt whistled through the air and left a red mark on the whore's arm. Before she could scream, Harry Magana covered her mouth with one hand and pushed her down on the bed. If you scream, I'll kill you, he said. When the whore sat up again the mark on her arm was bleeding. It'll be your face next time, said Harry Magana. Where does he live?

The next dead woman turned up in August 1994, on Callejon Las Animas, almost at the end of the alley, where there were four abandoned houses, five counting the victim's house. She wasn't a stranger, but, oddly, no one could say what her name was. No personal papers or anything that might lead to a rapid identification were found in the house, where she had lived alone for three years. A few people, not many, knew her first name was Isabel, but almost everyone called her La Vaca. She was a solidly built woman, five foot five, dark-skinned, with short curly hair. She must have been about thirty. According to some of her neighbors, she worked as a hooker at a club downtown or in Madero-Norte. According to others, La Vaca had never worked. And yet it couldn't be said she was short of money. When her house was searched, the kitchen shelves were found to be full of canned food. She also had a refrigerator (she stole electricity from the city lines, like most of her neighbors on the alley), well stocked with meat, milk, eggs, and vegetables. She dressed carelessly, and no one could say she put on airs. She had a new TV and a video player, and the police counted more than sixty tapes, most of them romances or melodramas, that she'd bought over the last few years. Behind the house was a little yard full of plants, and, in a corner, a wire chicken coop with a rooster and ten hens. The case was handled jointly by Epifanio Galindo and Inspector Ernesto Ortiz Rebolledo, with Juan de Dios Martinez joining them as backup, neither side particularly happy about the arrangement. It didn't take much digging to discover that La Vaca's life was unpredictable and full of contradictions. According to an old lady who lived at the head of the alley, women like Isabel were few and far between. She was the real thing. One night a drunken neighbor was hitting his wife. Everyone who lived on the alley heard her screams, which rose or fell in intensity as time passed, as if the battered woman was in the throes of a difficult childbirth, the kind that often ends in the death of the mother and the little angel. But the woman wasn't giving birth, she was just being beaten. Then the old woman heard footsteps and went to the window. In the gloom of the alley she glimpsed the unmistakable silhouette of Isabelita. Anyone else would have walked on home, but the old woman saw how La Vaca stopped and stood there. Listening. Just then the screams weren't very loud, but after a few minutes the volume rose again and during all that time, the old woman said to the police with a smile, La Vaca stood motionless, waiting, like someone who walks down a random street and suddenly hears her favorite song, the saddest song in the world, coming from a window. And it's clear which window it is. What happened next is hard to believe. La Vaca went into the house and when she came back out she was dragging the man by the hair. I saw it myself, said the old woman, and maybe everyone saw it, but they were too embarrassed to say so. She hit like a man, and if the drunk's wife hadn't come out of the house and asked her for the love of God to stop hitting him, La Vaca would've killed him for sure. Another neighbor testified that she was a violent woman, that she came home late, usually drunk, and then no one would see hide nor hair of her until after five in the afternoon. It didn't take Epifanio long to establish a connection between La Vaca and two men who had recently been visiting her, one of them called El Mariachi and the other El Cuervo, who often stayed to sleep or stopped by every day, and other times vanished as if they had never existed. La Vaca's friends were probably musicians, not just because of the first one's nickname, but because they were occasionally seen walking down the alley with their guitars. While Epifanio visited clubs with live music in the center of Santa Teresa and around Madero-Norte, Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez kept investigating in the alley. The conclusions he drew were the following: (1) La Vaca was a good person, according to the majority opinion of the women; (2) La Vaca didn't work, but she always had plenty of money; (3) La Vaca could be extremely violent and she had strong ideas about right and wrong, rudimentary ideas, but ideas nonetheless; (4) someone was giving La Vaca money in exchange for something. Four days later El Mariachi and El Cuervo were arrested. They turned out to be the musicians Gustavo Dominguez and Renato Hernandez Saldana, respectively, and after being questioned at Precinct #3 they declared that they had committed the murder on Callejon Las Animas. As it happened, it was a movie that triggered the crime, a movie La Vaca wanted to watch and couldn't because her friends kept bursting out laughing. All three of them were pretty drunk. La Vaca started it, punching El Mariachi. At first El Cuervo didn't want to get involved, but when La Vaca started swinging at him he had to defend himself. The fight was long and fair, said El Mariachi. La Vaca had asked them to step out into the street so they wouldn't damage the furniture, and they obeyed. Once they were outside, La Vaca informed them that it would be a clean fight, fists only, and they agreed, although they knew how strong their friend was. After all, she weighed almost one hundred and eighty pounds. And it wasn't fat, it was muscle, said El Cuervo. Outside, in the dark, they really started to give each other hell. They kept it up for almost half an hour, back and forth, without a pause. When the fight was over, El Mariachi's nose was broken and he was bleeding from both eyebrows, and El Cuervo was complaining of a rib he said was broken. La Vaca was on the ground. Only when they tried to hoist her up did they realize she was dead. The case was closed.

Shortly afterward, Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez went to visit the musicians at the Santa Teresa penitentiary. He brought them cigarettes and a few magazines and asked how things were going. We can't complain, boss, said El Mariachi. The inspector said he had some friends inside and he could help them if they wanted. What do you want from us in return? asked El Mariachi. Just some information, said the inspector. What kind of information? Very simple. You and La Vaca were friends, close friends. I'll ask you some questions, you answer them, that's all. Let's hear the questions, said El Mariachi. Did you sleep with La Vaca? No, said El Mariachi. And what about you? Never, said El Cuervo. Well, now, said the inspector. And why is that? La Vaca didn't like men, she was already macho enough herself, said El Mariachi. Do you know her full name? asked the inspector. No idea, said El Mariachi, we just called her Vaca. Real close friends, weren't you? said the inspector. It's the honest truth, boss, said El Mariachi. So do you know where she got her money from? asked the inspector. We wondered that ourselves, boss, said El Cuervo, because we would've liked to make a few extra pesos, but La Vaca never talked about it. And didn't she have any friends, I mean besides you and the old women in the alley? asked the inspector. Sure, once when we were in my car she pointed out a friend of hers, said El Mariachi, some girl who worked in a coffee shop downtown, nothing special, on the skinny side, but La Vaca pointed and asked if I had ever seen such a pretty woman. I said no, so she wouldn't get mad, but really the girl wasn't anything special. What was her name? asked the inspector. She didn't tell me her name, said El Mariachi, and she didn't introduce me to her either.

While the police were working to solve the murder of La Vaca, Harry Magana found the house where Miguel Montes lived. One Saturday afternoon he kept watch, and after two hours, tired of waiting, he forced the lock and went in. The house had only one room and a kitchen and a bathroom. On the walls were pictures of Hollywood actors and actresses. On a shelf were two framed photographs of Miguel himself, and he really was a kid with an honest face, good-looking, the kind of man women like. He went through all the drawers. In one he found a checkbook and a knife. When he lifted the mattress on the bed he found some magazines and letters. He flipped through the magazines. In the kitchen, under a cupboard, he came upon an envelope containing four Polaroids. One was of a house in the middle of the desert, a modest-looking adobe house, with a little porch and two tiny windows. A four-wheel-drive pickup was parked next to the house. Another picture was of two girls with their arms around each other's shoulders, their heads tilted to the left, gazing at the camera with similar expressions of incredible assurance, as if they had just set foot on this planet or their suitcases were already packed to leave. This picture was taken on a crowded street, which might have been in downtown Santa Teresa. The third picture was of a little plane on a dirt landing strip, in the desert. Behind the little plane was a hill. Everything else was flat, nothing but sand and scrub. The last picture was of two men who weren't looking at the camera and were probably drunk or high, dressed in white shirts, one of them in a hat, shaking hands as if they were great friends. He looked everywhere for the Polaroid camera but couldn't find it. He put the pictures, the letters, and the knife in his pocket, and after searching the house once more he sat down in a chair to wait. Miguel Montes didn't come back that night or the next. He thought maybe he'd had to leave town in a hurry or maybe he was dead. He felt depressed. Luckily for him, ever since he'd met Demetrio Aguila he no longer stayed at a boardinghouse or hotel or spent sleepless nights wandering from dive bar to dive bar and drinking. Instead, he slept at the house on Calle Luciernaga, in Colonia Rube'n Dario, owned by his friend, who had given him a key. The little house, despite what a person might expect, was always clean, but its cleanliness, its neatness, lacked any feminine touch: it was a stoic cleanliness, utterly graceless, like the cleanliness of a prison or monastery cell, a cleanliness that tended toward sparseness, not abundance. Sometimes when he came in he found Demetrio Aguila making cafe de olla in the kitchen and the two of them would sit in the living room and talk. Talking to the Mexican relaxed him. The Mexican talked about the days when he'd been a cowboy at the Triple T ranch and about the ten ways to tame a wild colt. Sometimes Harry told him he should come to Arizona to visit and the Mexican answered that it was all the same, Arizona, Sonora, New Mexico, Chihuahua, it's all the same, and Harry thought about it and in the end he couldn't accept that it was all the same, but it made him sad to contradict Demetrio Aguila and so he didn't. Other times they would go out together and the Mexican was able to observe the gringo's methods from close up. He didn't like their harshness in principle, but he believed they were justified. That night, when Harry got back to the house on Calle Luciernaga, he found Demetrio Aguila up, and as he made coffee he told him he thought his last lead had disappeared. Demetrio Aguila didn't say anything. He poured the coffee and made scrambled eggs with bacon. The two of them began to eat in silence. I think nothing ever disappears, said the Mexican. There are people, and animals, too, and even objects, that for one reason or another sometimes seem to want to disappear, to vanish. Whether you believe it or not, Harry, sometimes a stone wants to vanish, I've seen it. But God won't let it happen. He won't let it happen because He can't. Do you believe in God, Harry? Yes, Senor Demetrio, said Harry Magana. Well, then, trust in God, He won't let anything disappear.

•

Around this time, Juan de Dios Martinez was still sleeping with Dr. Elvira Campos every two weeks. Sometimes the inspector thought it was a miracle the relationship had survived. There were difficulties, there were misunderstandings, but they were still together. In bed, or so he believed, the attraction was mutual. He had never wanted a woman the way he wanted her. If it had been up to him he would have married the director without a second thought. Sometimes, when it had been a long time since he saw her, he began to mull over their cultural differences, which he saw as the main hurdle. The director liked art and could look at a painting and say who the painter was, for example. The books she read he had never heard of. The music she listened to just made him pleasantly drowsy, and after a while all he wanted was to lie down and sleep which, of course, he was careful not to do at her apartment. Even the food the director liked was different from the food he liked. He tried to adapt to these new circumstances and sometimes he would go to a record store and buy some Beethoven or Mozart, which he would then listen to alone at home. Usually he fell asleep. But his dreams were peaceful and happy. He dreamed that he and Elvira Campos lived together in a cabin in the mountains. The cabin didn't have electricity or running water or anything to remind them of civilization. They slept on a bearskin, with a wolf skin over them. And sometimes Elvira Campos laughed, a ringing laugh, as she went running into the woods and he lost sight of her.

Let's read the letters, Harry, said Demetrio Aguila. I'll read them to you as many times as you need me to. The first letter was from an old friend of Miguel's who lived in Tijuana, although the envelope wasn't postmarked, and it was a catalog of memories of the happy times they'd had together. It made reference to baseball, hookers, stolen cars, fights, alcohol, and it mentioned in passing at least five crimes for which Miguel Monies and his friend could have gotten jail time. The second letter was from a woman. It had been postmarked in Santa Teresa itself. The woman demanded money and insisted on swift payment. Otherwise beware the consequences, it said. The third letter, to judge by the handwriting, since it wasn't signed either, was from the same woman, with whom Miguel still hadn't settled his debt, and it said he had three days to show up with the money, you know where, and if not-and here, according to Demetrio Aguila and also Harry Magana, it was possible to discern a hint of sympathy, the hint of feminine sympathy Miguel could always count on, even at the worst of moments-the woman recommended that he leave town as soon as possible and without a word to anybody. The fourth letter was from another friend, and it might have come from Mexico City, although the postmark was illegible. The friend, a northerner who had recently arrived in the capital, described his impressions of the big city: he talked about the metro, which he compared to a mass grave, about the coldness of the residents of Mexico City, who never lifted a finger to help anyone, about how hard it was to get around, since in Mexico City there was no point having a badass car because the traffic jams were endless, about the pollution and how ugly the women were. Regarding this he made some tasteless jokes. The last letter was from a girl from Chucarit, near Navojoa, in the south of Sonora, and, predictably, it was a love letter. It said of course she would wait, she would be patient, that even though she was dying to see him it was up to him to take the first step, and she was in no hurry. It sounds like a letter from a hometown girlfriend, said Demetrio Aguila. Chucarit, said Harry Magana. I have a hunch our man was born there, Senor Demetrio. Will you believe that's just what I was thinking? said Demetrio Aguila.

Sometimes Juan de Dios Martinez would sit and think how he wished he knew more about the director's life. For example, her friendships. Who were her friends? He didn't know any of them, except for a few employees at the psychiatric center, people the director treated warmly but also kept at arm's length. Did she have friends? He suspected she did, although she never talked about it. One night, after they had made love, he told her he wanted to know more about her life. The director said he already knew more than enough. Juan de Dios Martinez didn't insist.

La Vaca was killed in August 1994. In October the next victim was found at the new city dump, a festering heap a mile and a half long and half a mile wide in a gully south of the El Ojito ravine, off the Casas Negras highway, where a fleet of more than one hundred trucks came each day to drop their loads. Despite its size, the dump would soon be too small and there was already talk, given the proliferation of illegal sites, about creating a new dump on the edge or to the west of Casas Negras. The dead girl was between fifteen and seventeen years old, according to the medical examiner, although the final word was left to the pathologist, who examined her three days later and concurred with his colleague. She had been anally and vaginally raped and then strangled. She was four foot seven. The scavengers who found her said she was dressed in a bra, denim skirt, and Reebok sneakers. By the time the police got there the bra and denim skirt were gone. On the ring finger of her right hand she was wearing a gold ring with a black stone, inscribed with the name of an English academy in the center of the city. She was photographed and later the police visited the language academy, but no one recognized the dead girl. The photograph was published in El Heraldo del Norte and La Voz de Sonora, with the same lack of results. Inspector Jose Marquez and Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez questioned the head of the school for three hours and apparently they went too far, because his lawyer sued them for harassment. The suit didn't go anywhere but it got them each a reprimand from the state representative and the chief of police. A report was also issued on the conduct of the head of the judicial police in Hermosillo. Two weeks later the body of the unidentified girl was sent to swell the supply of corpses for medical school students at the University of Santa Teresa.

Sometimes Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez was surprised how well Elvira Campos could fuck and how inexhaustible she was in bed. She fucks like someone on the brink of death, he thought. More than once he would have liked to tell her it wasn't necessary, she didn't need to work so hard, that just feeling her nearby, brushing against him, was enough, but when it came to sex the director was practical and businesslike. Darling, Juan de Dios Martinez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him-of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love, at her express request, in semidarkness. A few times he was tempted to turn on the light and look at her, but he didn't, not wanting to upset her. Don't turn on the light, she said to him once, and it seemed to him Elvira Campos could read his mind.

In November, on the second floor of a building under construction, some workers found the body of a woman of about thirty, five feet tall, dark-skinned, bleached blond, two gold crowns on her teeth, dressed in only a sweater and hot pants or shorts. She had been raped and strangled. No identification was found on the body. The building was on Calle Alondra, in Colonia Podesta, in the upper part of Santa Teresa. Because of where it was, the workers didn't stay to sleep, as they would at other construction sites. At night a private security guard kept watch over the building. When he was questioned, he confessed that despite the terms of his contract, he usually slept at night, since during the day he worked at a maquiladora, and some nights he would be at the site until two in the morning and then go home, to Avenida Cuauhtemoc, in Colonia San Damian. The interrogation, conducted by the chief's right-hand man, Epifanio Galindo, was tough, but from the beginning it was clear the watchman was telling the truth. It was assumed, not without reason, that the victim was a recent arrival and there must be a suitcase somewhere with her clothes in it. With this in mind, inquiries were made at boardinghouses and hotels in the center, but none was missing a guest. Her picture was published in the city papers, to no avail: either no one knew her or the picture wasn't good or no one wanted trouble with the police. Missing person reports from other states were checked for matches, but no description fit the dead woman who had turned up in the building on Calle Alondra. Only one thing was clear, or at least clear to Epifanio: the woman wasn't from the neighborhood, she hadn't been strangled and raped in the neighborhood, so why dump the body in the upper part of the city, on streets assiduously patrolled at night by the police or private security guards? why go to the effort to leave the body on the second floor of a building under construction, with all the risks that entailed, including a fall down stairs still missing a railing, when the logical thing would be to dispose of it in the desert or at the edge of a dump? For two days he thought about it. As he ate, as he listened to his companions talk about sports or women, as he drove Pedro Negrete's car, as he slept. Until he decided that no matter how much he thought about it he wasn't going to come up with a good answer, and then he didn't think about it anymore.

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