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On
August 20 the body of a new victim was found in a field near the western
cemetery. She was between sixteen and eighteen years old and wasn't carrying
any kind of identification. Except for a white blouse, she was naked, wrapped
in an old yellow blanket printed with black and red elephants. After the
forensic examination, it was established that death had been caused by two stab
wounds to the neck and another very
near
the right auricle. In their first statement, the police said she hadn't been
raped. Four days later, they issued a correction and said she had been raped.
The medical examiner in charge of conducting the autopsy declared to the press
that they, the team of police and university pathologists, had never had the
slightest doubt she'd been raped, and they had made this clear in the first
(and only) official report. The police spokesperson reported that the
misunderstanding was due to a problem in the interpretation of said report. The
case was handled by Inspector Jose Marquez and soon shelved. The victim was
buried in the public grave in the second week of September.

Why did Perla Beatriz
Ochoterena kill herself? According to Elvira Campos, she was probably
depressed. Maybe she was heading toward a breakdown. She was clearly a lonely
and hypersensitive woman. Juan de Dios
Martinez
read her some of the titles of the teacher's books that he'd jotted down at
random. Have you read any of those? the director asked him. Juan de Dios
admitted he hadn't. They're good books, said the director, and some of them are
hard to find, at least here in Santa Teresa. She had them sent from the D.F.,
said Juan de Dios.

The next dead woman was Adela
Garcia Ceballos, twenty, a worker at the maquiladora Dun-Corp., stabbed to
death in her parents' house. The killer was Ruben Bustos, twenty-five, with
whom Adela had been living at 56 Calle Taxquena in Colonia Mancera, and with whom
she had a one-year-old son. For a week the couple had been fighting, and Adela
had moved in with her parents. According to Bustos, she planned to leave him
for another man. The capture of Bustos was relatively easy. He holed up in his
house in Colonia Mancera, but he had only a knife to defend himself. Inspector
Ortiz Rebolledo came in shooting and Bustos hid under his bed. The police
surrounded the bed, with Bustos refusing to come out, and threatened to pump
him full of lead. Lalo Cura was part of the group. Every so often Bustos's arm
swept out from under the bed, the same knife in his hand with which he'd killed
Adela, and tried to slash them in the ankles. The policemen laughed and jumped
back. One of them stepped up on the bed and Bustos tried to stab the soles of
his feet through the mattress. Another cop, a man by the name of Cordero,
famous at Precinct #3 for the size of his dick, began to urinate, aiming
straight under the bed. Seeing the urine running along the floor toward him,
Bustos started to sob. Finally Ortiz Rebolledo got tired of laughing and told
him that if he didn't come out they would kill him right there. The policemen
watched as he crawled out, a wreck, and they dragged him into the kitchen.
There one of them filled a pot with water and dumped it over him. Ortiz
Rebolledo grabbed Cordero by the neck and warned him that if the slightest
trace of piss smell lingered in his car he would be sorry. Cordero, though he
was near choking, laughed and promised it wouldn't happen. But what if he
pisses, boss? he said. I can tell different kinds of piss, said Ortiz
Rebolledo. This faggot's piss would smell like fear and yours stinks of
tequila. When Cordero came into the kitchen, Bustos was crying. Between sobs he
said something about his son. He talked about his parents, although it wasn't
clear whether he meant his own parents or Adela's, who had witnessed the
murder. Cordero filled the pot of water and slopped it over him, hard. Then he
filled it again and doused him again. The pant legs of the two cops guarding
Bustos were wet, and so were their black shoes.

•

What
was it the teacher couldn't stand anymore? asked Elvira Campos. Life in Santa
Teresa? The deaths in Santa Teresa? The underage girls who died without anyone
doing anything to stop it? Would that be enough to drive a young woman to
suicide? Would a college student have killed herself for that? Would a peasant
girl who'd had to work hard to become a teacher have killed herself for that?
One in a thousand? One in one hundred thousand? One in a million? One in one
hundred million Mexicans?

In
September there were almost no killings of women. There were fights. There were
drug deals and arrests. There were parties and long hot nights. There were
trucks loaded with cocaine crossing the desert. There were Cessna planes flying
low over the desert like the spirits of Catholic Indians ready to slit
everyone's throats. There were whispered conversations and laughter and
narcocorridos
as background music. On
the last day of September, however, the bodies of two women were found near
Pueblo Azul. The place they were discovered was a spot the
motorcyclists of Santa Teresa used for
races. The two women were dressed in house clothes, one even wearing slippers
and a bathrobe. No identification was found on the bodies. The case was handled
by Inspector Jose Marquez and Inspector Carlos Marin, who, based on the brands
of the women's clothing, suspected they might be American. After the American
police were informed, the dead women were revealed to be the Reynolds sisters,
from Rillito, outside of Tucson, Lola and Janet Reynolds, thirty and forty-four
respectively, both with drug-trafficking records. Marquez and Marin guessed the
rest: the sisters owed money for some purchase, not a big one, because they never
moved large quantities, and then they never paid up. Maybe they had liquidity
problems, maybe they got cocky (according to the Tucson police, Lola was a
woman to be reckoned with), maybe their suppliers came looking for them, showed
up at night and found them on their way to bed, maybe they crossed the border
with their victims and killed them when they got to Sonora, or maybe they
killed them in Arizona, two shots each to the head, the women still half
asleep, and then crossed the border and left them near Pueblo Azul.

In October the body of another
woman was found in the desert, south of Santa Teresa, between two country
roads. The body was in a state of decomposition and the forensic scientists
said it would take days to determine the cause of death. The victim had
red-painted nails, which led the first officers on the scene to think she was a
whore. By the clothes— jeans and a low-cut blouse—they deduced she was young.
Although plenty of sixty-year-olds dressed that way too. When the forensic
report finally arrived (the cause of death probably some kind of stab wound),
everyone had forgotten the case, even the media, and the body was tossed
without further ado into the public grave.

In October, too, Jesus Chimal
of Los Caciques, responsible for the death of Linda Vazquez, was admitted to
the Santa Teresa prison. Although new people were brought in every day, the
arrival of the young killer roused unusual interest among the inmate
population, as if they were being visited by a famous singer or a banker's son,
someone who would provide at least a weekend's worth of entertainment. Klaus
Haas could feel the excitement in the cell blocks and he asked himself if it
had been the same when he arrived. No, this time the expectation was different.
There was something terrifying about it, and also stirring. The prisoners
didn't discuss it directly, but somehow they alluded to it when they talked
about soccer or baseball. About their families. About bars and whores who
existed only in their imagination. Even the behavior of some of the most
disruptive inmates improved. As if they wanted to be worthy. But worthy in
whose eyes? Haas asked himself. They were
waiting
for Chimal. They knew he was on his way. They knew which cell he would be
in and they knew he had killed the daughter of a man with money. According to
El Tequila, the prisoners who were former Caciques were the only ones steering
clear of all this drama. The day Chimal arrived they were also the only ones
who came out to greet him. Chimal, for his part, didn't come alone. The other
three who'd been arrested for the killing of Linda Vazquez were with him and
they never left each other's side, even to go to the can. One of the Caciques
who'd been inside for a year slipped Chimal a steel shiv. Another slipped him three
amphetamine capsules under the table. The first two days Chimal acted like a
madman. He kept turning around to see what was going on behind his back. He
slept with the shiv in his hand. He carried the amphetamines everywhere, like a
tiny talisman that would protect him from evil. His three companions were never
far behind. When they walked in the yard, it was two by two. They moved like
commandos lost on a toxic island on another planet. Sometimes Haas watched them
from a distance and thought: poor boys, poor kids lost in a dream. On their
eighth day in prison, the four were forced into the laundry room. Suddenly, the
guards disappeared. Four inmates kept watch over the door. When Haas arrived
they let him in as if he was one of them, one of the family, something for
which Haas thanked them tacitly, although he never stopped despising them.
Chimal and his three partners were pinned in the middle of the laundry room.
Their mouths had been taped shut. Two of the Caciques were already naked. One
of them was shaking. From the fifth row, leaning on a pillar, Haas watched
Chimal's eyes. It seemed clear he wanted to say something. If they had taken
off the tape, he thought, he rnight've harangued his very captors. From a
window some guards were looking down on the events under way in the laundry
room. The light coming from the window was yellow and dim compared to the light
radiated by the laundry room's fluorescent tubes. The guards, noted Haas,
had taken off their caps. One
had a camera. An inmate by the name of Ayala went up to the naked Caciques and
slit their scrotums. The prisoners who were holding the Caciques immobile grew
tense. Electricity, thought Haas, pure life force. Ayala seemed to milk the two
Caciques until their balls dropped, encased in fat, blood, and something
crystalline he couldn't identify (and didn't want to identify). Who is that
guy? asked Haas. It's Ayala, whispered El Tequila, the steel gut of the border.
Steel gut? wondered Haas. Later El Tequila explained that among the many deaths
Ayala could claim were those of eight immigrants he had ferried to
Arizona
in a pickup.
After three days away, Ayala returned to Santa Teresa, but nothing was heard of
the pickup and the immigrants until the gringos found the wreckage of the
truck, with blood everywhere, as if Ayala, before he turned back, had sliced
the bodies into bits. Something ugly happened here, said the border patrol, but
since there were no bodies, the whole thing was easy to write off. What did
Ayala do with the bodies? According to El Tequila, he ate them, that's how
crazy and evil he was, although Haas doubted there was anyone capable of
wolfing down eight illegal immigrants, no matter how demented or ravenous he
might be. One of the castrated Caciques fainted. The other one had his eyes
closed and the veins in his neck looked as if they were about to burst. Next to
Ayala now was Farfan, and the two of them shared the role of master of
ceremonies. Get rid of those, said Farfan. Gomez scooped the balls off the
floor and remarked that they looked like turtle eggs. Nice and tender, he said.
Some of the spectators murmured in agreement and no one laughed. Then Ayala and
Farfan, each with a two-foot length of broomstick, headed for Chimal and the
other Cacique.

At the beginning of November,
Maria Sandra Resales Zepeda, thirty-one, a prostitute who worked the sidewalk
outside the Pancho Villa bar, was killed. Maria Sandra had been born in a town
in the state of Nayarit and at eighteen she had come to Santa Teresa, where she
worked at the HorizonW&E maquiladora and El Mueble Mexicano. At twenty-two
she became a streetwalker. The night she was killed there were at least five
other girls outside. According to the eyewitnesses, a black Suburban pulled up
near the women. Inside there were at least three men. Music was blasting from
the Suburban's speakers. The men called to one of the women and talked to her
for a while. Then the woman moved away from the Suburban and the men called
Maria Sandra. She leaned on the open window of the Suburban, as if ready to get
into a long discussion about her rates. But the conversation lasted barely a
minute. One of the men pulled out a gun and shot her from close range. Maria
Sandra toppled backward, and for the first few seconds the whores waiting on
the sidewalk didn't know what had happened. Then they saw an arm come out the
window and fire again at Maria Sandra, who was sprawled on the ground. After
that the Suburban started and disappeared in the direction of downtown. The
case was handled by Inspector Angel Fernandez, later joined by Epifanio
Galindo, who signed up on his own initiative. No one remembered the Suburban's
license plate number. The whore who had talked to the strangers said they asked
about Maria Sandra. They talked about her as if they knew her by reputation, as
if someone had spoken highly of her. There were three of them and the three
wanted to do some business with her. She didn't remember their faces well. They
were Mexicans, they sounded like they were from
Sonora
, and they seemed loose, ready to
party all night. According to one of Epifanio Galindo's informers, three men
showed up at the bar Los Zancudos an hour after Maria Sandra's murder. They
were in high spirits and they drank shots of mezcal the way other people eat
peanuts. At a certain point one of them pulled a gun from his belt and aimed at
the ceiling, as if to blow away a spider. No one said a thing and he put the
gun away. According to the informer, it was an Austrian Glock with a
fifteen-shot clip. Later they were joined by a fourth person, a tall, thin man
in a white shirt, with whom they drank for a while, and then they left in a
bright red Dodge. Epifanio asked his source whether they had come in a
Suburban. The source said he didn't know, all he knew was that they had left in
a bright red Dodge. The bullets that ended Maria Sandra's life were from a
7.65mm Browning. The Clock was a 9mm Parabellum. They probably killed the poor
thing with a Skorpion submachine gun, Czech made, thought Epifanio, a weapon he
didn't like, though some models had begun to be seen regularly in Santa Teresa,
especially among the small groups involved in drug trafficking or among
kidnappers out of Sinaloa.