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One night Mary-Sue Bravo
dreamed that a woman was sitting at the foot of her bed. She felt the weight of
a body on the mattress, but when she stretched her legs she didn't touch
anything. That night, before she went to bed, she had read a few online news
stories about the Uribes. In one of them, by a reporter from a well-known
Mexico City
daily, it
said that Antonio Uribe really had disappeared. His cousin Daniel Uribe was in
Tucson
, it seemed. The
reporter had talked to him on the phone. According to Daniel Uribe, all the
information provided by Haas was a pack of lies, easily disproved. Regarding
the whereabouts of Antonio, however, he gave no hint or the hints the reporter
got out of him were ambiguous, imprecise, evasive. When Mary-Sue woke up she
didn't entirely lose the feeling that there was another woman in the room until
she got out of bed and went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water. The next
day she called Haas's lawyer. She didn't know exactly what she wanted to ask
her, what she wanted to be told, but the need to hear her voice overrode any
logical imperative. After identifying herself, she asked the lawyer how her
client was. Isabel Santolaya said he was the same as he'd been the last few
months. Mary-Sue asked if she'd read Daniel Uribe's statements. The lawyer said
she had. I'm going to try to interview him, said Mary-Sue. Can you think of
anything I should ask? No, I can't, said the lawyer. To Mary-Sue it seemed as
if the lawyer were talking like someone in a trance. Then, for no reason, she
asked the lawyer about herself. My life isn't important, said the lawyer. She
said it haughtily, as if addressing an impertinent teenager.

On December 15, Esther Perea
Pefia, twenty-four, was shot to death at the dance hall Los Lobos. The victim
was sitting at a table with three friends. At one of the next tables, a
good-looking man in a black suit and white shirt pulled out a gun and started
to fool around with it. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 5906 with a
fifteen-round clip. According to some witnesses the same man had danced with
Esther and one of her friends, and everything had been relaxed and friendly.
The man's two friends, according to the version of one of the witnesses, warned
him to put away the gun. The man ignored them. Apparently he wanted to impress
someone, presumably the victim herself or the victim's friend, the one he'd
danced with before. According to other witnesses, the man claimed to be a
judicial
assigned to the narcotics squad. He looked like
a judicial.
He was
tall and strong, and he had a good haircut. At a certain moment, as he was
handling the gun, it went off and Esther was fatally wounded. By the time the
ambulance arrived, the girl was dead and the shooter had disappeared. Inspector
Ortiz Rebolledo took personal charge of the case and the next morning he was
able to inform the press that the police had found the body of a man (whose
clothing and physical description matched those of Esther's killer) on the old
Pemex sports fields, with a Smith & Wesson just like the one Esther's
killer had been carrying and a bullet in his right temple. His name was
Francisco Lopez Rfos and he had a long record of auto theft. But he wasn't a
natural killer and shooting someone, even if it was accidental, must have upset
him considerably. The man committed suicide, said Ortiz Rebolledo. Case closed.
Later Lalo Cura would comment to Epifanio that it was strange there hadn't been
a lineup to identify the body. And it was strange, too, that the killer's
companions hadn't come forward. And that the Smith & Wesson, once it was
locked away in the police archives, had disappeared. And strangest of all was
that a car thief should commit suicide. Did you know this Francisco Lopez Ribs?
Epifanio asked him. I saw him once and I wouldn't say he was handsome, said
Lalo Cura. No, he looked more like a rat. All very strange, said Epifanio.

For two years I had Loya on the
case. Over those two years I had time to craft an image that little by little
began filtering into the media: of a woman sensitive to violence, a woman who
represented change in the heart of the party, not just generational change but
a change in attitude, with a view of Mexican reality that was open-minded, not
dogmatic. Really, I was just burning with rage at Kelly's disappearance, at the
macabre joke made at her expense. I cared less and less about the opinion of
what we call the public, my constituents, whom I didn't truly see or if I did
see, accidentally or sporadically, I despised. As I learned about other cases,
however, as I heard other voices, my rage began to assume what you might call
mass stature, my rage became collective or the expression of something
collective, my rage, when it allowed itself to show, saw itself as the
instrument of vengeance of thousands of victims. Honestly, I think I was losing
my mind. Those voices I heard (voices, never faces or shapes) came from the
desert. In the desert, I roamed with a knife in my hand. My face was reflected
in the blade. I had white hair and sunken cheeks covered with tiny scars. Each
scar was a little story that I tried and failed to recall. I ended up taking
pills for my nerves. Every three months I saw Loya. At his express wish I never
visited him at his office. Sometimes he would call me or I would call him, on a
secure line, but we never said much when we talked on the phone, because
nothing, Loya would say, is one hundred percent secure. Thanks to Loya's
reports I began to create a map or piece together the puzzle of the place where
Kelly had disappeared. From his reports I learned that the parties thrown by
the banker Salazar Crespo were in fact orgies and that Kelly's job had
presumably been to put these orgies together. Loya had talked to a model who
worked for Kelly for a few months and now lived in
San Diego
. The model told him that Salazar
Crespo's parties would be held at either of the two ranches he owned, showplace
properties, pieces of land that the rich bought and neither cultivated nor used
to keep livestock. Just expanses of land, a sprawling house in the middle, a
big living room and lots of bedrooms, sometimes but not always a pool, they
aren't comfortable places, really, there's no feminine touch. In the north they
call them
narcorranchos,
because lots of drug traffickers own similar
estates, less like ranches than garrisons in the middle of the desert, some
even with watchtowers where they post their best marksmen. Sometimes these
narcorranchos
sit empty for long stretches of time. One employee might be left there,
without keys to the main house, with orders to do little, to wander the barren,
stony grounds, to watch so that packs of wild dogs don't take up residence. All
these poor men are given is a cell phone and some vague instructions that they
gradually forget. According to Loya, it isn't unusual for one of them to die
with no one the wiser, or simply to disappear, drawn by the simurgh, the
mythical giant flying creature of the desert. Then, all at once, the
narcorrancho
stirs to life. First to arrive are some of the peons, say three or four, in
a Combi, and they spend a day getting the big house ready. Then come the
bodyguards, the muscle, in their black Suburbans or Spirits or Pere-grinos, and
the first thing they do when they show up, besides strut around, is set a
security perimeter. Finally the boss and his right-hand men make their
appearance. Armored Mercedes-Benzes or Porsches snaking through the desert. At
night the lights never go out. You see all kinds of cars, even Lincoln
Continentals and vintage Cadillacs, ferrying people to and from the ranch.
Trackers loaded with meat, baked goods in Chevy Astras. And music and shouting
all night long. These were the parties, as Loya told me, that Kelly would help
to plan on her trips north. According to Loya, at first Kelly took along models
who wanted to make good money fast. The girl who lived in
San Diego
had told him there were never more
than three. At the parties there were other women, women Kelly in theory didn't
know, young girls, younger than the models, girls Kelly dressed appropriately
for the parties. Little whores from Santa Teresa, I guess. What happened at
night? The usual. The men would get drunk or high, watch videotaped soccer or
baseball games, play cards, go out to the courtyard for target shooting, talk
business. No one ever shot a porn film, or at least that's what the girl from
San Diego
told Loya.
Sometimes, in a bedroom, the guests would watch porn, the model had walked in
once by mistake and she saw the familiar sight, stony-faced men, their profiles
lit by the glow of the screen. It's always that way. I mean: stony-faced, as if
watching a film where people fuck turns the viewers into statues. But no one,
according to the model, ever shot a film like that at the
narcorranchos.
Sometimes,
a few guests would sing
rancheras
and
corridas.
Sometimes, those
same guests would go out into the courtyard and parade around the ranch,
singing at the top of their lungs. And once they went out naked, maybe one or
two covered their private parts, wore a thong or leopard- or tiger-print
briefs, braving the cold, which was intense at four in the morning, singing and
laughing, from one caper to the next, like Satan's helpers. Those aren't my
words. They're the words of the model who lived in
San Diego
, spoken to Loya. But no porn films,
nothing like that. Then Kelly stopped relying on the models and didn't call
them anymore. According to Loya, the decision was probably Kelly's, because the
models' rates were high and the little whores of Santa Teresa didn't charge
much and Kelly's finances weren't in very good shape. She made her first trips
for Salazar Crespo, but through him she met important people in the area and it
was possible that she had also organized parties for Sigfrido Catalan, who
owned a fleet of garbage trucks and was said to have an exclusive contract with
most of the maquiladoras in Santa Teresa, and for Conrado Padilla, a
businessman with interests in Sonora, Sinaloa, and Jalisco. Salazar Crespo,
Sigfrido Catalan, and Padilla, according to Loya, all had connections to the
Santa Teresa cartel, which meant Estanislao Campuzano, who occasionally, though
not often, in truth, had attended these parties. Evidence, or what a civilized
jury would consider evidence, was lacking, but during the time Loya worked for
me he collected a vast number of testimonies, drunken conversations or talk in
brothels, with people saying Campuzano didn't come, or that sometimes he did.
Whatever the case, there were plenty of
narcos
at Kelly's orgies,
especially two of them, considered Campuzano's lieutenants, one by the name of
Munoz Otero, Sergio Munoz Otero, the boss of the Nogales
narcos,
and
Fabio Izquierdo, who for a while was the boss of the Hermosillo
narcos
and
later worked creating routes for the transport of drugs from Sinaloa to Santa
Teresa or from Oaxaca or Michoacan or even Tamaulipas, which was the territory
of the Ciudad Juarez cartel. There was no question, Loya believed, that Munoz
Otero and Fabio Izquierdo were present at some of Kelly's parties. So there was
Kelly without models, working with girls of humble origin or simply with
whores, at
narcorranchos
in the middle of nowhere, and at her parties we
have a banker, Salazar Crespo, a businessman, Catalan, a millionaire, Padilla,
and, if not Campuzano, at least two of his most notorious men, Fabio Izquierdo
and Munoz Otero, as well as other personages from the worlds of society, crime,
and politics. A collection of worthies. And one morning or night my friend
vanishes into thin air.

For a few days, from the
offices of
El Indeyendiente de Phoenix,
Mary-Sue tried to get in touch
with the reporter from
Mexico City
who had interviewed Daniel Uribe. He was almost never at the paper and the
people she talked to refused to give her his cell phone number. When she was
finally able to speak to him, the reporter, who sounded like a drunk and an
asshole, thought Mary-Sue, or at least arrogant, wouldn't give her Daniel
Uribe's phone number, claiming he had to protect the privacy of his sources.
Mary-Sue unwisely reminded him that they were colleagues, they both worked for
the press, and the reporter from Mexico City told her they could have been
lovers for all he cared. There was no news about Josue Hernandez Mercado, the
vanished reporter from
La Raza.
One night Mary-Sue searched through her
file on the Haas case until she came up with the story Hernandez Mercado had
written after the poorly attended press conference at the Santa Teresa
penitentiary. Hernandez Mercado's style wavered between sensationalism and
flatness. The story was riddled with cliches, inaccuracies, sweeping
statements, exaggerations, and flagrant lies. Sometimes Hernandez Mercado
painted Haas as the scapegoat of a conspiracy of rich Sonorans and sometimes
Haas appeared as an avenging angel or a detective locked in a cell but by no
means defeated, gradually cornering his tormentors solely by dint of
intelligence. At two in the morning, as she drank her last cup of coffee before
she left the paper, Mary-Sue thought that no one with half a brain would have
bothered to kill a person and hide the body over trash like that. But then what
had happened to Hernandez Mercado? Her editor, who was also working late,
supplied various possible answers. He got fed up and ran off. He flipped out
and ran off. He ran off, period. A week later the boy reporter who had traveled
with her to Sonoita called. He wanted to know what kind of progress Mary-Sue
had made on the story she planned to write about Hernandez Mercado. I'm not
going to write anything, she told him. The boy reporter wanted to know why.
Because there's nothing to write about, said Mary-Sue. Hernandez is probably
living and working in
California
.
I don't think so, said the boy reporter. It sounded to Mary-Sue as if he'd
shouted. In the background she heard the noise of a truck or several trucks, as
if he were making the call from the yard of a trucking company. Why won't you
believe it? she asked. Because I've been to his house, said the boy. So have I,
and I didn't see anything to make me think he'd been taken by force. He left
because he wanted to. No, she heard the boy say. If he'd left of his own
accord, he would have brought his books. Books are heavy, said Mary-Sue, and
anyway you can always buy new ones. There are more bookstores in
California
than in
Sonoita, she said, intending it as a joke, but almost as she spoke she realized
it wasn't funny. No, I'm not talking about those books, I'm talking about
his
books, said the boy. What do you mean
his books'?
asked Mary-Sue.
The ones he wrote and published. He wouldn't have left those behind even if the
world was coming to an end. For a while Mary-Sue tried to remember Hernandez
Mercado's house. There were books in the living room, and some in the bedroom
too. All together there couldn't have been more than one hundred volumes. It
wasn't a big collection, but for someone like the farmworker-reporter, maybe it
was more than enough. It hadn't occurred to her to think that among them might
be the books Hernandez Mercado had written. And you think he wouldn't have left
without them? No chance, said the boy, they were like his children. Mary-Sue
thought that the books Hernandez Mercado had written must not have weighed much
and there was no way he could have bought new copies in
California
.