The Dead Women of Juarez (20 page)

“Police,” Sevilla said, and showed the woman his identification. “Sevilla. What is your name?”

“Adela de la Garza,” the woman replied. “I’m sorry… is something the matter?”

“Something is always the matter,” Sevilla said, and he made a gesture that vaguely encompassed the wall of flyers, all the faces and the cries for
justicia
. “I’m here because of Paloma.”

Adela crossed herself and then put her hands in her lap. She nodded. “We heard the news.”

“It couldn’t have happened to a finer woman,” said Sevilla.

“Are you the investigator? The one in charge?”

“No, I’m not. Paloma’s case is with the city police. But I consult with them.”

“They say it was her lover, that American. He came here, you know.”

Sevilla took a small pad from his jacket pocket and flipped back the cover. He wrote left-handed with a pencil. “Did he? This is Kelly Courter? The American who boxed?”

“
Sí
, that’s the one. He came here after she was gone.” Adela’s expression curdled and she made a spitting gesture. “He pretended to know nothing! But now we know the truth about him.”

“You asked him about her?” Sevilla inquired.

“No. He asked me about Paloma. Where she went, how long it had been. What kind of a man doesn’t know these things? Is it true he was a
drogadicto
? It makes sense to me. And Paloma’s brother…”

Sevilla held up a hand for quiet. “I can’t tell you very much about the case. It’s not allowed. Where did you get all of this information?”

“From the policeman who came yesterday.”

“A policeman came here?”

Adela nodded. “That is why I was confused. He only came yesterday. How could anything have changed so soon? He told me about what happened.”

“What was this policeman’s name?”

The woman thought for a moment. Sevilla tried to remember whether he’d seen her before, even once in all the time he had come here with his wife, but Adela’s face didn’t come to him. “Jiménez,” she told Sevilla at last. “Yes, I think that’s it.”

“Jiménez?”

“Yes.”

“What was his first name?”

“Cornelio, I think.”

“Did he show you identification?”

“Yes.”

“Was it city or state police?”

“I can’t tell the difference. I do clerical work here; I don’t speak to police. Not like Paloma did. Or Ella.”

Sevilla thought to ask Adela more questions, but there was no point. Paloma he knew and Ella Arellano, as well. There were two or three others he could recall by their faces if not their names. Marina? He wasn’t sure. “What did he want to know?”

“He wanted to ask about the American. He was lucky I was the one here; I remembered everything the American asked. And to think I sent him after Ella! I even gave him directions! What did he want to do to her, I wonder?”

Sevilla scribbled as quickly as he could. “He? You mean Kelly wanted to see Señorita Arellano?”

“I told you: he pretended he didn’t know where Paloma was. I sent him to Ella. I felt so stupid when the policeman told me everything.”

“You had no way to know,” Sevilla said automatically. His thoughts were turning.

“I should have known. Anyone who could do such a thing… you can tell from their eyes.”

“If only that were true. Señora, what else did you tell this policeman? Did he ask to see Ella, too?”

“Yes. I gave him the same directions.”

Sevilla flipped his notepad to a new page. Tension crawled in his back, made the muscles around his spine ache. He wished for another little breeze to flush the heat out of the office; it was as hot in here as it was in the full sun. “Can you give them to me?” he asked finally. “In case I can’t get a hold of this Jiménez. It would be a great favor.”

“Of course,” Adela said. She talked and Sevilla wrote and in the end Sevilla left his card with the woman and stepped out of the stifling little space with relief. The streets had grown still in the after-lunch quietude. When he reached the sidewalk he saw a CLOSED sign in the dentist’s window.

Normally he would also sleep in a still, shaded place where the troubles of the day so far could be shed, but Sevilla went to his car quickly. He rolled the windows down and invisible clouds of intense heat flowed out of the cabin. He sweated afresh beneath the layers of suit and shirt. The engine idled until the air conditioner was strong enough to take over. With the windows up and cool air circulating, Sevilla pored over his notes.

Cornelio Jiménez left no card. If it had been Garcia or even Enrique on the doorstep of Mujeres Sin Voces then Sevilla would have no reason to doubt the man or his appearance. The tension in his back climbed higher and settled between his shoulder blades to clench the nerves there.

He dialed Adriana Quintero’s number and got her voice mail instead of her assistant.

“
Señora
,” Sevilla said, “this is Rafael Sevilla. I wanted to ask you about one of your investigators, Cornelio Jiménez. Could you give me his number? I wanted to ask him a few questions. It would be a favor to me.
Gracias
. Goodbye.”

Almost no one walked the streets. The city was drained of bodies at this hour. Only the
maquiladoras
worked around the clock without pause. There were no quiet and shaded spots there.

He wanted to call Enrique, but it was too soon. His thoughts turned still further and pushed toward the
colonias
and Ella Arellano. There the people would be sleeping, as well.

“Damn it.”

Sevilla smacked the steering wheel with his palm. He put the car in gear and drove away.

O
NCE
E
NRIQUE
’
S POLICE STATION
had seemed just another government building in a simple collection of such buildings near the office of the Procuraduría. White brick and windows tinted against the sun and barred entryways saying NO ENTRANCE and a glass-and-metal box the size of a phone booth where a single policeman stood on duty, checking identification and manually operating the electric lock.

When the Sinaloa cartel came to the city, the landscape changed. At both ends of the block heavy, x-shaped sculptures made of steel crossbeams blocked traffic into a single lane. Barbed wire obstructed the sidewalks. Instead of a lone cop, a handful of armed federal police controlled the flow of people back and forth through the barricades. Still more guarded Enrique’s building, two of them from a parked jeep mounted with a heavy machine gun.

Already there was word of still more men and equipment headed to the city, more guns and more vehicles. Two days before, Enrique saw an armored personnel carrier patrolling the area around the Procuraduría. Government buildings were secured against assault within and without; uniformed officers with automatic rifles walked the halls, chatted with the local police, made themselves comfortable as if they would be there for a hundred years.

Enrique parked in a lot ringed by chain-link fencing and barbed wire a block away. Three others waited for the white van that shuttled them to and from the main building. An armored
federale
occupied the passenger seat, the window down though the
air conditioning was on, the barrel of his rifle pointed out through the open frame and into the sky.

He didn’t recognize the men with him and they didn’t speak. Enrique knew they tensed as he did each time the van passed another vehicle moving slowly. The Sinaloa cartel and their enemies, Los Zetas, used drive-by tactics and overwhelming firepower. The van was not armored; bullets could pass through the metal skin as easily as through a sheet of corrugated aluminum. In May two years before, the Sinaloa gunned down the chief of police.

The van made a too-sharp stop in front of the building. All four got out and went in different directions. Enrique paused a moment with the sun directly overhead. A federal policeman sat in the metal-and-glass booth. The butt of his rifle rested by his boot. He nodded at Enrique and made a motion toward the door.

“Yes,” Enrique said. The lock buzzed and he went inside.

Inside there were normal sounds, the only real survivor of the drug wars. Telephones rang and there was talking and bursts of laughter. Enrique didn’t like being here anymore. A look out the windows in any direction revealed the city at siege, the city the
turistas
didn’t see and didn’t care to. When the Gulf Cartel and the gangs and the Sinaloa clashed it was Mexican blood that flowed. In the west, in Baja, tourists were sometimes shot, sometimes kidnapped, but here it was still a domestic war;
el Paso del Norte
was too valuable to jeopardize.

Enrique climbed the stairs to the second floor. Here was the open bullpen, desks crowded together in clutches of three or four under harsh fluorescent lighting. The air had the smell of men working and coffee and dust.

First he checked his desk. He kept his space neat. His desk calendar was carefully marked with appointments, times and people. The logo of the Policía Municipal bounced around the screen of his computer. A few messages on pink slips of paper were stuffed beneath his keyboard. He could wait to answer those.

Captain Garcia kept an office at the edge of the bullpen, away
from Enrique. Normally an assistant would have an adjoining space and enjoy a small part of his master’s cachet, but Garcia kept Enrique among the rest to watch and listen and report. Enrique didn’t tell Garcia most of what he heard about the man they called La Bestia.

Thinking of Garcia made Enrique glance toward the man’s workspace. The blinds on the office windows were open, the desk was empty. Garcia had a computer he rarely used for anything except playing games and wandering the internet. His filing cabinets were empty. His messages were routed through Enrique and he hadn’t bothered setting up his own voice mail. There was no need for any of these things because La Bestia was not an investigator. La Bestia enforced.

He left the bullpen. A few men said hello, but most kept clear of him. This was the only benefit of being close to Garcia.

In the basement the ceilings were lower and the cool air drier. Exposed veins of wire and pipe snaked along the walls and overhead. Occasionally an air compressor roared and pumped cool to some section of the great structure. It was not like being in the heart of the building, but in its guts.

Evidence stood behind a barricade of mesh steel. No soldier stood guard here. Two women in uniform kept watch over ten interconnected rooms of metal shelving installed floor to ceiling in tight rows. Los Tigres del Norte played quietly on a radio, the accordion jumping through “La Puerta Negra.” The heavy-framed metal door was secured with two locks. An opening above the check-counter was no more than two feet wide.

“
Buenas tardes
,” Enrique told one of the women. One was young, the other old. It was always women down here, away from the sun and blood and gunshots of the street. In America women worked the streets alongside the men. Not so here.

“
Buenas tardes
,” the old woman replied. She came to the counter.

“I need something,” Enrique said. He filled out a slip and passed it through the barrier. “For Captain Garcia. I don’t know the item
number, but this is the case. It’s a red notebook. It should be the only thing like it.”

The old woman examined the paper. Her face was expressionless. “All right,” she said at last, and passed it to the young woman. “It will be a few minutes.”

“I can wait,” Enrique said.

They had no words for each other. Enrique caught himself pacing in the open space beneath a hanging rack of exposed fluorescent bulbs and stopped. On the radio the Tigres gave way to Conjunto Primavera and the Chihuahuense band accompanying Tony Meléndez while he sang about his first time in love. Enrique did not care for
norteño
and never had.

When the young woman returned she had the red notebook in a marked plastic bag. Somewhere nearby a fan kicked into motion and clattered loudly enough to drown out the radio. Enrique signed Garcia’s name in the log. He had to speak up to be heard. “
Gracias, señoras
.”

He felt the women watching him as he went. He resisted clutching the bag to his chest and looking back. At the stairs he put the notebook inside his jacket. It was too large to fit into a pocket, but it lay against his body. His shirt was damp with perspiration.

At the lobby he peered out of the stairwell before emerging. The building was quietening. Men were out to lunch, gone home or to a local gathering place where policemen could take the
comida corrida
with other policemen and a soldier at the door for safety. The shuttle van back to the parking lot came every fifteen minutes. Enrique checked his watch.

He didn’t want to wait out in the sun, but huddling in the stairwell was no good, either. He crossed the lobby and went into the men’s room, found a stall and sat down on the toilet without pulling down his pants. It was shadowed in the stall. The notebook felt like a secret thing when he brought it out, stripped it free of the plastic bag and dipped inside.

The
cuaderno
was a cheap, spiral-bound thing with a battered
cover. Shredded-edged worms of paper crowded the spiral binding from pages torn out and discarded. The first half was names and addresses and telephone numbers, none of which Enrique recognized. A thin divider of brown paper marked the section the American used for his appointments.

Kelly Courter had a child’s kind of writing with big loops and letters that were not always the same size or shape. He wrote in English, but Enrique knew the language well enough to interpret this word or that. In the final third of the notebook he found a letter to the victim, half written, and dated more than a month before the crime. He saw no hatred there or the kind of anger that would leave a violated corpse half burned in a fallow field.

Enrique checked his watch. He had five more minutes to wait.

He paged through the notebook again. Paper stuck to his fingers and he realized his hands sweated despite the air-conditioned cool. He imagined Captain Garcia bulling into the restroom, cracking the stall open with a single blow. Enrique would be trapped between flimsy metal walls and the beating would come. He had seen many of these.