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The news barely filled an
inside column in the Santa Teresa newspapers and few media outlets in the rest
of the country picked it up. Prison scores settled, read the headline. Four
members of the gang Los
Caciques, in custody while awaiting trial,
were massacred by inmates at the Santa Teresa penitentiary. Their bodies were
found piled in the laundry supply room. Later the bodies of two other former
members of Los Caciques were found in the sanitary facilities. The police and
members of the penal institution itself launched an investigation but were
unable to uncover the motives or identity of those responsible.

When his lawyer came to see him
at noon, Haas told her he had witnessed the killing of the Caciques. The whole
cell block was there, said Haas. The guards watched from a kind of skylight on
the floor above. They took pictures. No one did anything. The Caciques got
reamed. Their assholes were shredded. Are those bad words? asked Haas. Chimal,
the leader, was screaming for them to kill him. They splashed him with water
five times to wake him up. The executioners stood aside so the guards could take
good pictures. They stood aside and moved the spectators aside. I wasn't in the
first row. I could see it all because I'm tall. Strange: it didn't turn my
stomach. Strange, very strange: I watched all the way to the end. The
executioner seemed happy. His name is Ayala. He was helped by another man, an
ugly guy who's in my cell, named Farfan. Farfan's lover, Gomez, also took part.
I don't know who killed the Caciques they found later in the bathroom, but the
first four were killed by Ayala, Farfan, and Gomez, with the help of another
six men who held them down. Maybe there were more. Scratch six, make it twelve.
And all of us from the cell block who watched the action and didn't do
anything. And you think, asked the lawyer, that they don't know all this on the
outside? Oh, Klaus, you're so naïve. No, just stupid, said Haas. But if they
know, why don't they say anything? Because people are discreet, Klaus, said the
lawyer. The reporters too? asked Haas. They're the most discreet of all, said
the lawyer. For them, discretion equals money. Discretion is money? asked Haas.
Now you're getting it, said the lawyer. Do you know why they killed the
Caciques? I don't know, said Haas, all I know is it wasn't a walk in the park.
The lawyer laughed. For money, she said. Those animals killed the daughter of a
man with money. Everything else is beside the point. Just babble, said the
lawyer.

In the middle of November the
body of another dead woman was discovered in the Podesta ravine. She had
multiple fractures of the skull, with loss of brain matter. Some marks on the
body indicated that she had put up a struggle. She was found with her pants
down around her knees, by which it was assumed that she'd been raped, although
after a vaginal swab was taken this hypothesis was discarded. Five days later
the dead woman was identified. She was Luisa Cardona Pardo, thirty-four, from
the state of Sinaloa, where she had worked as a prostitute from the age of
seventeen. She had been living in Santa Teresa for four years and she was employed
at the EMSA maquiladora. Previously she had worked as a waitress and kept a
little flower stall in the center of the city. She lived with a friend in a
modest house, though it had electricity and running water, in Colonia La
Preciada. Her friend, who also worked at EMSA, told the police that at first
Luisa had talked about immigrating to the
United States
and had even had
dealings with a
pollero,
but in the
end she decided to stay in the city. The police questioned some of the other
workers at the maquiladora and then closed the case.

Three days after the discovery
of Luisa Cardona's body, the body of another woman was found in the same
Podesta ravine. The patrolmen Santiago Ordofiez and Olegario Cura found the
body. What were Ordofiez and Cura doing there? Taking a look around, as Ordonez
admitted. Later he said they were there because Cura had insisted on going. The
area they were assigned to that day stretched from Colonia El Cerezal to
Colonia Las Cumbres, but Lalo Cura said he wanted to see the place where they'd
found Luisa Cardona's body, and Ordonez, who was driving, didn't object. They
parked the patrol car at the top of the ravine and headed down a steep path.
The Podesta ravine wasn't very big. The tape that had cordoned off the area for
the crime scene investigators was still there, tangled in the brush and the
yellow and gray stones. For a while, according to Ordonez, Lalo Cura did
strange things, like measuring the ground and the height of the walls, looking
up toward the top of the ravine and calculating the arc that Laura Cardona's
body must have traced as it fell. After a while, when Ordonez was getting
bored, Lalo Cura told him that the killer or killers had disposed of the body
in that particular spot so it would be found as soon as possible. When Ordonez
objected that there weren't exactly many people around, Lalo Cura pointed to
the edge of the ravine. Ordofiez looked up and saw three children, or maybe an
adolescent and two children, all wearing shorts, who were watching them
closely. Then Lalo Cura began to walk toward the
south end of the ravine and Ordonez sat on
a rock, smoking and thinking that maybe he should have gone to work for the
fire department instead. a little while later, with Lalo out of sight, he heard
a whistle and headed after his partner. When he reached him he saw the woman's
body lying at his feet. She was dressed in something that looked like a blouse,
torn on one side, and she was naked from the waist down. According to Ordonez,
the expression on Lalo Cura's face was very odd, not a look of surprise but of
happiness. What did he mean by happiness? Was he laughing? Smiling? they asked.
He wasn't smiling, said Ordonez, he looked serious, like he was concentrating,
like he wasn't there, not right then, like he was in the Podesta ravine, but at
a different time, when the bitch got it. When Ordonez came up to him Lalo Cura
told him not to move. He was holding a little notebook and he had taken out a
pencil and was writing down everything he could see. She has a tattoo, he heard
Lalo Cura say. a good tattoo. By her position I'd say her neck was broken. But
first she was probably raped. Where is the tattoo? asked Ordonez. On her left
thigh, he heard his companion say. Then Lalo Cura got up and searched for the
missing clothes. All he found were old newspapers, rusted cans, burst plastic
bags. Her pants aren't here, he said. Then he told Ordonez to go up to the car
and call the police. The dead woman was five foot seven and she had long black
hair. She didn't have any kind of identification on her. No one claimed the
body. The case was soon shelved.

When Epifanio asked why he'd
gone to the Podesta ravine, Lalo Cura answered that it was because he was a
cop. You little shit, Epifanio said, don't go where you're not called, do you hear
me? Then Epifanio took him by the arm and looked him in the face and said he
wanted to know the truth. I thought it was strange, said Lalo Cura, that in all
this time a dead woman had never turned up in the Podesta ravine. And how did
you know that, ass wipe? asked Epifanio. Because I read the papers, said Lalo
Cura. Do you really, you little cocksucking son of a bitch? Yes, said Lalo
Cura. And you read books, too, I suppose. That's right, said Lalo Cura. The
faggot books for faggots that I gave you?
Modern
Criminal Investigation
by the late chief director of Sweden's National
Institute of Technical Police, Mr. Harry Soderman, and the former president of
the International Association of Chiefs of Police, ex-Inspector John
J.O'Connell, said Lalo Cura. And if those supercops were so fucking great how
come they're ex-fuckers now? asked Epifanio. Answer me that, you little punk.
Don't you know, you snot-nose bastard, that there is no such thing as modern
criminal investigation? You're not even twenty years old yet, are you? Or am I
wrong? You aren't wrong, Epifanio, said Lalo Cura. Well, be careful, champ,
that's the first and only rule, said Epifanio, letting go of his arm and
smiling and giving him a hug and taking him out to eat at the only place that
served posole in the center of Santa Teresa at that murky time of night.

In December—and these were the
last victims of 1996—the bodies of Estefania Rivas, fifteen, and Herminia
Noriega, thirteen, were found in an empty house on Calle Garcia Herrero, in
Colonia El Cerezal. They were half sisters. Estefama's father had disappeared
soon after she was born. Herminia's father lived with his wife and daughters
and worked as a night watchman at the MachenCorp. maquiladora, where the girls'
mother was also on the payroll, as a machine operator. The girls themselves
were still in school and helped with the housework, although Estefania planned
to quit the following year and go to work. The morning they were kidnapped they
were both on their way to school, along with two younger sisters, one eleven
and the other eight. The two little girls and Herminia went to
Jose
Vasconcelos
Primary School
. Every
day, after Estefania left them, she walked the same fifteen blocks to her own
school. The day of the kidnapping, however, a car stopped next to the four
sisters, and a man got out and pushed Estefania into the car and then got out
again and thrust Herminia in and then the car disappeared. The two little girls
stood frozen on the sidewalk and then they walked home, but no one was there,
so they knocked at the house next door, where they told their story and finally
burst into tears. The woman who took them in, a worker at the HorizonW&E
maquiladora, went to get another neighbor and then she called the MachenCorp.
maquiladora trying to find the girls' parents. At MachenCorp. she was told that
personal calls were forbidden and the operator hung up on her. The woman called
again and gave the name and job title of the girls' father, since it occurred
to her that their mother, being an ordinary worker like herself, must be
considered of lower rank, meaning disposable at any moment or for any reason or
hint of a reason, and this time the operator kept her
waiting for so long that she
ran out of coins and the call was cut off. That was all the money she had.
Despondent, she went back to her house, to the other neighbor woman and the
girls, and for a while the four of them experienced what it was like to be in
purgatory, a long, helpless wait, a wait that begins and ends in neglect, a
very Latin American experience, as it happened, and all too familiar, something
that once you thought about it you realized you experienced daily, minus the
despair, minus the shadow of death sweeping over the neighborhood like a flock
of vultures and casting its pall, upsetting all routines, leaving everything
overturned. So, as they waited for the girls' father to get home, the neighbor
woman (to kill time and master her fear) thought how she would like to have a
gun and go out in the street. And then what? Well, then she would fire a few
shots in the air to express her anger and shout
viva Mexico
to pluck up her courage or feel a last surge of warmth
and then dig a hole with her hands, with mindless speed, a hole in the
packed-dirt street, and bury herself in it, soaked to the bone, for ever and
ever. When the girls' father finally arrived they all went together to the
nearest police station. There, after giving a brief (or scattered) explanation
of the problem, they were made to wait for more than an hour until two
inspectors arrived. The inspectors asked them the same questions all over again
and some new ones, all about the car that picked up Estefanfa and Herminia.
After a while, there were four inspectors in the office where the girls were
being questioned. One of them, who seemed nice, asked the neighbor woman to
come along and took the girls to the police station garage, where they were
asked which car, of the ones parked there, looked most like the car that had
taken away their sisters. With the information they got from the girls, the
inspector said the car to look for was a black Peregrino or Arquero. At five
the girls' mother arrived at the station. One of the neighbors had left by then
and the other couldn't stop crying and hugging the littlest girl. At eight that
night Ortiz Rebolledo arrived and organized two search teams, one to question
the friends and family of the girls, headed by Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez
and Lino Rivera, and the other to locate, with the assistance of the city
police, the Peregrino or Arquero or Lincoln in which it seemed the girls had
been kidnapped, this team coordinated by Inspector Angel Fernandez and
Inspector Efrain Bustelo. Juan de Dios
Martinez
took a public stand against this approach, since in his opinion the two teams
should unite their efforts to find the car. His chief argument was that few if
any of the circle of friends, acquaintances, and coworkers of the Noriega
family owned a car at all, let alone a black Peregrino or a black Chevy Astra,
since virtually all of them could be classed as pedestrians, some so poor they
didn't even take the bus to work, preferring to walk and save a few pennies.
Ortiz Rebolledo's answer was unequivocal: anyone could steal a Peregrino,
anyone could steal an Arquero or a Bocho or a Jetta, you didn't need money or a
driver's license, all you needed to know was how to break into a car and start
it. So the teams remained divided as Ortiz Rebolledo had ordered, and the
policemen, moving wearily, like soldiers trapped in a time warp who march over
and over again to the same defeat, got to work. That same night, after making
some inquiries, Juan de Dios Martinez learned that Estefania had a boyfriend or
a suitor, a kid with a wild streak, nineteen years old, called Ronald Luis
Luque, aka Lucky Strike, aka Ronnie, aka Ronnie el Magico, who had been
arrested twice for car theft. When he got out of prison, Ronald Luis had shared
a house with a man by the name of Felipe Escalante, someone he'd met in prison.
Escalante was a professional car thief and he had also been under
investigation, though never charged, for rape of a minor. For five months
Ronald Luis lived with Escalante and then he moved out. Juan de Dios
Martinez
went to see
Escalante that same night. According to Escalante, his former cell mate hadn't
left of his own accord but had been kicked out because he didn't pay his
 
share
 
of anything.
  
Escalante was
 
currently stocking shelves at a supermarket
and no longer led a life of crime. It's been years since I stole a car, boss, I
swear, he said, kissing his fingers held up in the sign of the cross. In fact,
he didn't even have wheels, anyplace he went he took the bus, what choice did
he have, or hoofed it, which was cheaper and anyway made him feel like a free
man. Asked whether Lucky Strike, as he was called, ever stole even the
occasional car, Escalante said he didn't think so, although honest to God he
couldn't say for sure, because the fucker wasn't exactly predictable in these
matters. Others who were questioned seemed to confirm what Escalante had said:
El Magico was a freeloader and a lazy bastard, but not a thief or a thug, or at
least not into violence for the sake of violence, and most of them thought he
would piss himself if he went so far as to kidnap his girlfriend and his girlfriend's
sister. Now Ronald Luis lived with his parents and still couldn't find a job.
It was to his parents' house that Juan de Dios
Martinez
headed, where he talked to Ronnie's
father, who resignedly let him in and said that his son had left shortly after
the kidnapping of Estefania and Herminia. The inspector asked if he could take
a look around the place. Make yourself at home, said Ronnie's father. For a
while Juan de Dios
Martinez
poked around the room that Ronnie shared with three younger siblings, although
from the start he could see he wouldn't find anything there. Then he went out
into the yard and lit a cigarette as he watched the orange and violet sunset
over the ghost city. Did he say where he was going? he asked.
Yuma
, answered his father. And have you ever
been to
Yuma
?
Many times, as a young man: I crossed over, found work, got caught by the
border cops, was sent back to
Mexico
,
and then I crossed over again, many times, said Ronnie's father. Until I got
tired of it and settled down to work here and take care of my old lady and the
kids. And do you think the same thing will happen to Ronald Luis? I pray to God
it won't, said Ronnie's father. Three days had gone by when Juan de Dios
Martinez
learned that the
team assigned to find the black car used in the kidnapping had been disbanded.
When he went to demand an explanation from Ortiz Rebolledo he was told that the
order came from above. It seemed the police had fallen afoul of some big fish
whose sons, the Jrs. of Santa Teresa, owned almost the entire fleet of the
city's Peregrines (it was a car of choice for rich kids, like the Arcangel or
Desertwind convertible), and they pulled strings to get the cops to stop
fucking with them. Four days later an anonymous call alerted the police to some
shots fired inside a house on Calle Garcia Herrero. a patrol car showed up half
an hour later. The officers rang the bell several times and no one answered.
When the neighbors were questioned, they said they hadn't heard anything,
although their sudden deafness might have had something to do with the volume
of their TV sets, turned up so loud they could be heard from the street. But a
boy said that while he was riding by on his bicycle he had heard shots. When
the neighbors were asked who lived in the house, their answers were
contradictory, which made the patrolmen think it could be
narcos
and they'd better leave and not make trouble. One of the
neighbors, however, said he'd seen a black Peregrino parked outside the house.
Then the police drew their guns and knocked again at 677 Calle Garcia Herrero,
with the same results. Next they radioed the station and waited. Half an hour
later another pair of cops appeared, to act as backup, they said, and shortly
afterward Juan de Dios
Martinez
and Lino Rivera arrived. According to the latter, orders were to wait for the
rest of the inspectors. But Juan de Dios
Martinez
said there wasn't time and the patrolmen, on his express instructions, broke
down the door. Juan de Dios
Martinez
was the first to go in. The house smelled of semen and alcohol, he said. What
do semen and alcohol smell like? Bad, said Juan de Dios
Martinez
, just plain bad. But then you get
used to it. It isn't like the smell of decomposing flesh, which you never get
used to and which worms its way into your head, even into your thoughts, and no
matter whether you shower and change your clothes three times a day you keep
smelling it for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes whole months. Behind him came
Lino Rivera and nobody else. Don't touch anything, Lino remembers Juan de Dios
said. First they scanned the living room.
Normal
.
Cheap but decent furniture, a table with newspapers on it, don't touch them,
said Juan de Dios, two empty bottles of Sauza tequila and an empty bottle of
Absolut vodka in the dining room. Clean kitchen.
Normal
. Food wrappers from McDonald's in the
garbage can. Clean floor. Through the kitchen window a small yard, half paved,
the other half dried up, with a few shrubs clinging to the wall that separated
the yard from another yard.
Normal
.
Then they went back the other way. First Juan de Dios and behind him Lino
Rivera. The hallway. The bedrooms. Two bedrooms. In one of them, lying facedown
on the bed, Herminia's naked body. Oh, shit, Juan de Dios heard Lino Rivera
murmur. In the bathroom, curled up in the shower, her hands tied behind her
back, Estefanfa's body. Stay in the hallway, don't come in, said Juan de Dios.
He himself did go into the bathroom. He went in and kneeled down next to
Estefanfa's body and examined it carefully, until he lost all sense of time.
Behind his back he heard Lino talking on the radio. Get the medical examiner
here, said Juan de Dios. According to the medical examiner, Estefania had been
shot twice in the back of the head. Before that she had been beaten and it looked
as if she'd been strangled. But she wasn't strangled to death, said the medical
examiner. They played at strangling her. Abrasion marks were visible on her
ankles. I'd say she was hung by her feet, said the medical examiner. Juan de
Dios looked for a beam or a hook in the ceiling. The house was full of cops.
Someone had covered Herminia with a sheet. In the other bedroom he found an
iron hook bolted to the ceiling between the two beds. He closed his eyes and
imagined Estefania hanging upside down. He called two cops and ordered them to
find the rope. The medical examiner was in Herminia's room. She was shot in the
back of the head, too, he said when Juan de
Dios came up next to him, but I don't
think that was the cause of death. So why did they shoot her then? asked Juan
de Dios. To make sure she was dead. I want everybody out of the house who isn't
a tech, shouted Juan de Dios. The cops filed out slowly. In the living room two
hunched men, looking exhausted, searched for fingerprints. Everybody out! shouted
Juan de Dios. Lino Rivera was sitting on the sofa reading a boxing magazine.
Here are the ropes, boss, said one of the cops. Thanks, said Juan de Dios, and
now get out, man, I only want the techs here. The photographer lowered his
camera and winked at him. There's no end to it, is there, Juan de Dios? No end,
no end, answered Juan de Dios as he dropped onto the sofa where Lino Rivera was
sitting and lit a cigarette. Take it easy, the inspector said. Before he was
done smoking his cigarette, the medical examiner called him into the bedroom.
Each girl was raped several times, I'd say, with penetration of both orifices,
although there might have been penetration of three orifices in the case of the
girl in the bathroom. Both of them were tortured. In one instance, the cause of
death is clear. Less so in the other. Tomorrow I'll give you an official
report. Now clear the street for me because I'm taking them to the morgue, said
the medical examiner. Juan de Dios went out into the yard and told a policeman
that the bodies were going to be moved. The sidewalk was full of gawkers. It's
strange, thought Juan de Dios as the ambulance disappeared in the direction of
the
Institute
of
Forensic Anatomy
, suddenly, in a few
seconds, everything has changed. An hour later, when Ortiz Rebolledo and Angel
Fernandez showed up, Juan de Dios was questioning the neighbors. Some said it
was a couple who lived at 677, others said it was three boys, or rather a man
and two boys, who came there only to sleep, and others said it was a strange
man who didn't speak to anyone in the neighborhood and sometimes didn't appear
for days, as if he worked outside of Santa Teresa, and other times spent days
without leaving the house, watching TV until very late or listening to
corridos
and
danzones
and then sleeping past noon. Those who claimed it was a
couple living at 677 said they owned a Combi or some other kind of van and they
drove back and forth together from work. What kind of work? They didn't know,
although one of them said they were probably waiters. Those who believed it was
a man with two boys living in the house thought that the man drove a van, which
might, in fact, be a Combi. Those who said it was a single man living there
were unable to remember whether he had a car or not, although they said he was
often visited by friends who did. So in the end, who the fuck lives here? asked
Ortiz Rebolledo. We'll have to investigate, answered Juan de Dios before he
left the house. The next day, once the autopsies were completed, the medical
examiner confirmed his initial assessments and added that what had killed
Herminia wasn't the bullet lodged in the back of her head but a heart attack.
The poor little thing, the medical examiner said to a group of inspectors, the
torture and abuse were more than she could stand. She didn't have a chance. The
gun used was probably a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol. The house where the
bodies were found belonged to an old woman who had no clue about anything, a
Santa Teresa society lady who lived off the rents of her properties, including
most of the neighboring houses. The properties were managed by a real estate
company that belonged to one of the old lady's grandsons. According to papers
held by the agent, all of them in order, incidentally, the tenant at 677 was a
man named Javier Ramos and he paid his monthly bills through the bank.
Inquiries at the bank revealed that Javier Ramos had made a couple of big
deposits, enough to cover six months of rent as well as the electricity and hot
water bills, and no one had seen him since. a curious bit of information, worth
filing away for future reference, was turned up at the Property Registration
Office by Juan de Dios Martinez, namely that the houses on the next block of
Calle Garcia Herrero belonged, in their entirety, to Pedro Rengifo, and the
houses on Calle Tablada, which ran parallel to Garcia Herrero, were the
property of someone called Lorenzo Juan Hinojosa, who was a straw man for the
narco
Estanislao Campuzano. In addition,
all the buildings on Calle Hortensia and Calle Licenciado Cabezas, parallel to
Tablada, were registered in the name of the mayor of Santa Teresa or one or
another of his children. Also: two blocks to the north, the houses and
buildings on Calle Ingeniero Guillermo Ortiz were the property of Pablo Negrete,
brother of Pedro Negrete and distinguished rector of the
University
of
Santa Teresa
.
It's an odd thing, Juan de Dios said to himself. The bodies are there and you
shake. Then they take the bodies away and you stop shaking. Is Rengifo mixed up
in this business with the girls? Is Campuzano up to his eyebrows in it? Rengifo
was the good drug lord. Campuzano was the bad drug lord. Odd, genuinely odd,
Juan de Dios said to himself. No one rapes and kills on his own property. No
one rapes and kills
near
his own
property. Unless he's crazy and wants to be caught. Two nights after the
discovery of the bodies there was a meeting