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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
w
hite 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
s
he 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,
w
hich 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
f
ew 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.