The John Milton Series Boxset 1

by Mark Dawson

  She already had the title for the post.

  The City of Lost Girls.

  That was what some people were calling Juárez these days. It was Murder City, too, and people were dying in the drug wars every day, more than seven hundred this year already and not yet Easter. Caterina was obsessed with the drug wars, it was the bread and butter of Blog del Borderland: post after post about the dead, mutilated bodies left in plain site on the city’s waste ground, drive-by shootings with SUVs peppered with hundreds of bullets, babies boiled in drums of oil because their parents wouldn’t do what they were told, bodies strung up from bridges and lamp-posts. Grave pits were being dug up all around the city, dozens of bodies exhumed, the dead crawling out of their holes. And all the awful videos posted to YouTube and Facebook showing torture and dismemberment, warnings from one cartel to another, messages to the government and to the uncorrupted police and to the people of Mexico.

  We are in control here.

  We own this city.

  Caterina reported on all of it, three thousand posts that had slowly gathered traction and gathered pace, so much so that Blog del Borderland was attracting a hundred thousand visitors every day. She had an audience now, and she was determined to educate it.

  People had to know what was happening here.

  The City of Lost Girls.

  She kept coming back to it. The drug war was Juárez’s dominant narrative but there were other stories, too, drowned out in the static, stories within the story, and the one Caterina had found was the most compelling of them all. They were calling it feminicidio––femicide––the mass slaughter of women. In the last five years, three hundred women and girls––mostly girls, fifteen, sixteen years old––had been abducted as they made their way home from the maquiladoras that had sprung up like mushrooms along the southern banks of the Rio Bravo. The multi-nationals had hurried in under the auspices of one-sided trade agreements to exploit wages a fraction of what they would have to pay their workers north of the border. Sweatshops and factories, staffed by young women who came from all over the country for the chance of a regular pay check and a better life. Women were favoured over men: their fingers were nimbler and more dextrous and they could be paid even less.

  These girls were nobodies, anonymous ghosts who moved through the city, barely disturbing its black waters. The kind of women who would not be missed. Some of them were abducted from the streets. Others were taken from bars, lured to hotels and clubs and other rendezvous, promised work or money or romance or just an evening when they could forget the mind-numbing drudgery of their workaday lives.

  No-one ever saw them alive again.

  Their bodies were dumped without any attempt to hide them: on patches of waste ground, in culverts and ditches, tipped out of cars and left in the gutters. The killers did not care and made no attempt to hide their handiwork. They knew that they would not be caught. Not all of the missing were found and desperate parents glued posters to bus shelters and against walls.

  Caterina photographed the posters, published them all, noted down the names.

  Alejandra.

  Diana.

  Maria.

  Fernanda.

  Paulina.

  Adriana.

  Mariana.

  Valeria.

  Marisol.

  Marcella.

  Esperanza.

  Lupe.

  Rafaela.

  Aciano.

  She had a notebook full of names, ages, dates.

  This one was called Guillermina Marquez. She had worked for Capcom, one of the large multinationals who made transistors for western appliances. She would normally have walked home from the bus-stop with her friends but the company had changed her shift and she had walked alone. It was dusk; there should have been plenty of people to intervene and police officers were around, including a special downtown patrol. But Guillermina disappeared. After she failed to return home, her mother went to the police. They shrugged and said that there was nothing that they could do. Her mother made a thousand flysheets and posted them around the neighbourhood. Caterina had seen the posters and had interviewed the mother. She had posted an appeal for information on the blog but nothing had come of any of it. And this was two weeks ago.

  Caterina knew that they wouldn’t find her this morning. Her body would appear, one day, in a place very much like this. She was here to write about the search. She took photographs of the participants scouring the dirty sand and the boiling rocks for anything that might bring some certainty to the idea that they must already have accepted: that the girl was dead.

  Because only a handful of them ever came back alive.

  They gave up the search for the morning and headed back to the place where they had parked their cars. Young women were emerging from their shacks and huts, huddling by the side of the road for the busses that would take them to the factories. As they passed through the fence again, Caterina watched as dirt-biker cutting through the dunes to intercept them, plumes of dust kicked up by his rear wheel. He rolled to a stop fifty feet away and removed his helmet. He was wearing a balaclava beneath it. He gunned the engine two times, drawing attention to himself, a reminder that they were trespassing and that they needed to get out.

  * * *

  5.

  SIX HOURS LATER. Caterina sat in front of her laptop, willing a response to her last message. She bit her lip anxiously but the cursor carried on blinking on and off, on and off, and the message did not come. She ran her fingers through her long dark hair, wincing as she stared at the screen. She had scared the girl off. She had pushed too hard, gone too fast, been too keen for her to tell her story, and now she had lost her.

  Damn it. Damn it all. She kicked back, rolling her chair away from the desk a little and stretched out her arms above her head. She was tired and stiff. She had spent eight hours at her desk, more or less, just a five minute break to go and get lunchtime gorditas and quesadillas from the take-out around the corner, bringing them back and eating them right here. The papers were still on the floor, next to the overflowing bin where she had thrown them. Yesterday had been the same, and there had been little sleep during the night, either. When she was in the middle of a story, like this, she allowed it to consume her. She knew it was a fault but it was not one that she was prepared to correct. That was why she did not have a boyfriend or a husband. It would take a very particular type of man––a very patient, very understanding man––to put up with a woman who could become so single-minded that she forgot to wash, to eat properly, to go out, to do anything that was not in the service of furthering the story.

  But that was just how it had to be, she reminded herself.

  The story was the most important thing.

  People had to know.

  The world had to know what was happening in Ciudad Juárez.

  She did her work in the living room of her one bedroom flat. The walls had been hung with large sheets of paper, each bearing scribbled ideas for stories, diagrams that established the hierarchy of the cartels. One sheet was a list of three hundred female names. There was a large map to the right of the desk, three hundred pins stuck into the wall to mark where the bodies had been found. Caterina’s second-hand MacBook Pro sat amidst a whirlwind of papers, books and scrawled notes. An old and unreliable iMac, with an opened Wordpress document displayed, was perched on the corner of the desk. Minimised windows opened out onto search results pages and news stories, everything routed through the dark web to ensure that her presence was anonymous and untrackable. Caterina did not know whether the cartels themselves were sophisticated enough to follow the footprints from the Blog del Borderland back to this flat in the barrio but the government was, and since most of the government was in the pocket of the cartels, it did not pay her to be blasé. She was as sure as she could be: nothing she wrote could be traced, and her anonymity––shielded behind a series of online pseudonyms––was secure. It was liaisons like this one, with a frightened girl somewhere in the city, that
were truly dangerous. She would have to break cover to write it up and all she had to go on with regard to the girl’s probity was her gut.

  But the story was big. It was worth the risk.

  She checked the screen.

  Still nothing.

  She heard the sound of children playing outside: “Piedra, papel, tijeras, un, dos, tres!” they called. Scissors, paper, stones. She got up and padded to the window. She was up high, third floor, and she looked down onto the neighbourhood. The kids were playing in front of the new church, the walls gleaming white and the beautiful new red tiles on the domed roof. The money to build it came from the cartels. Today––and yesterday, and the day before that––a row of SUVs with tinted windows had been parked in front of the church, a line of men in DEA windcheaters going to and from the garden at the back of the house three doors down from her. She could see all the gardens from her window: the backs of the whitewashed houses, the unused barbeques, rusted satellite dishes, the kid’s trampoline, torn down the middle. The third garden along was dominated by pecan trees and an overgrown creosote bush. The men in the windcheaters were digging a deep pit next to the bush. Cadaver dogs sat guard next to the pit, their noses pointing straight down, tails wagging. Every hour they would pull another body out.

  Caterina had already counted six body bags being ferried out.

  Like they said.

  Ciudad Juárez.

  Murder City.

  The City of Lost Girls.

  She pulled her chair back to the desk and stared absently at the computer.

  “I am here.”

  The cursor blinked at the end of the line.

  Caterina sat bolt upright, beginning and deleting responses until she knew what to say.

  “I know you’re scared.”

  There was a pause, and then the letters tapped out, one by one, slow and uncertain: “How could you know?”

  “I’ve spoken to other girls. Not many, but a few. You are not the first.”

  “Did they tell you they could describe them, too?”

  “They couldn’t.”

  “Then the stakes are much higher for me.”

  “I accept that.”

  “What would I have to do?”

  “Just talk.”

  “And my name?”

  “Everything is anonymous.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re right to be scared. I’m scared, too. These men are dangerous. But you can trust me.”

  The cursor blinked on and off again. Caterina found she was holding her breath.

  “If I come it would just be to talk?”

  “It would be whatever you want it to be. But talking is fine.”

  “Who would be there?”

  “Me and my partner––he writes, too. You can trust him.”

  Another pause, and Caterina wondered whether she should have said that it would just be her alone. Leon was a good man, but how was she to know that? A fear of men whom she did not know would be reasonable enough after what Delores had been through.

  The characters flickered across the screen again. “I can choose where?”

  “Wherever you want––but somewhere public would be best, yes?”

  “La Case del Mole––do you know it?”

  Caterina swept the papers from the iMac’s keyboard and typed the name into Google. “The restaurant on Col Chavena?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know it.”

  “I could meet you there.”

  “I’ll book a table. My name is Caterina Moreno. I will be there from 8PM. OK?”

  There was no immediate reply.

  And then, after a pause, three letters: “Yes.”

  * * *

  6.

  LIEUTENANT JESUS PLATO stopped at the door of his Dodge Charger police cruiser and turned back to his three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Juárez. His pregnant wife, Emelia was at the door, with their youngest––Jesus Jr––in her arms. She was calling him.

  “What is it?”

  “Come here,” she said.

  He tossed his shoulder holster, the Glock safely clipped within it, onto the passenger seat, and went back to the house. “What did I forget?”

  “Nothing,” his wife said, “I did.” She stood on tip-toes and he bent a little so that she could plant a long kiss on his lips. “Be careful, Jesus. I don’t want to hear about you taking any risks, not this week. Lord knows you’ve done enough of that.”

  “I know. I won’t––no risks.”

  “You got a different life from next Monday. You got me and this one to think about, the girls, and the one on the way. If you get into trouble on your last week it’s going to be much worse as soon as you get back, alright? And look at that lawn––that’s your first job, right there, first thing, you hear me?”

  “Yes, chica,” he said with an indulgent grin. The baby, just a year old, gurgled happily as Plato reached down and tickled him under the chin. He looked like his mother, lucky kid, those same big dark eyes that you could get lost in, the slender nose and the perfect buttery skin. He leant down again to kiss Emelia on the lips. “I’ll be late back tonight, remember––Alameda and Sanchez are taking me out for dinner.”

  “They’re just making sure you’re definitely leaving. Don’t go getting so drunk you wake the baby.”

  He grinned again. “No, chica.”

  He made his way back down the driveway, stopping where the boat he was restoring sat on its trailer. It was a standing joke between them: there he was, fixing up a boat, eight hundred miles from the coast. But it had been his father’s, and he wanted to honour the old man’s memory by doing a good job. One day, when he was retired, maybe he’d get to use it. Jesus had been brought up on the coast and he had always hoped he might be able to return there one day. There would be a persuasion job to do with his wife but when his job was finished there would be little to hold them to Juárez. It was possible. He ran the tips of his fingers along the smooth wooden hull and thought of all the hours that he had spent replacing the panels, smoothing them, varnishing them. It had been his project for the last six months and he was looking forward to being able to spend a little more time on it. Another week or two of good, hard work––time he could dedicate to it without having to worry about his job––that ought to be enough to get it finished.

  He returned to the cruiser and got inside. He pulled down the visor and looked at his reflection in the vanity mirror. He was the wrong side of fifty now, and it showed. His skin was old and weathered, a collection of wrinkles gathered around the corners of his eyes, his hair was salt-and-pepper where it had once been jet black and his moustache was almost entirely grey. Age, he thought, and doing the job he had been doing for thirty years. He could have made it easier on himself, taken the shortcuts that had been offered, made the struggle of paying the mortgage a little easier with the backhanders and bribes he could easily have taken. He could have avoided getting shot, avoided the dull throbbing ache that he felt in his shoulder whenever the temperature dipped. But Jesus Plato wasn’t made that way, never had been and never would. Honour and dignity were watchwords that had been driven into him by his father, a good man who had also worked for the police, shot dead by a sicario around the time that it all started to go to hell, the time that dentist was shot to death. The rise of El Patrón and La Frontera. Plato had been a young cadet then, and, while he had been green he had not been blind. He could see that plenty of his colleagues had already been bought and sold by the narcos, but he vowed that he would never be the same as them and, thirty years later, he still wasn’t.

  He looked down and saw that Emelia was laughing at him, watching him stare at his own reflection. He waved her away with an amused flick of his hand and gunned the Dodge’s big engine. One more week, he thought, flipping the visor back against the roof. He reversed off the drive and onto the street, his eye drawn to the overgrown lawn and wondering if he could justify buying that new sit-down mower he had seen in the Hom
e Depot the last time he had crossed over the bridge into El Paso. A retirement present for himself; he deserved it. Just five more days, and then he could start to enjoy his life.

  * * *

  7.

  THE CALL had come through as Plato was cruising down the Avenida, Juárez’s main drag. The street had two-storey buildings on each side, the once garish colours bleached out by the sun, the brickwork crumbling and broken windows sheltering behind boards that had themselves been daubed with graffiti. The shops that were still open catered to the baser instincts: gambling, liquor, whores. East of the main street was the red light district, a confusing warren of unlit streets where, if the unwary escaped after being relieved just of their wallets, then they were lucky. Plato had seen plenty of dead bodies in those dirty, narrow streets and the rooms with single bare light bulbs where the hookers turned their tricks. But then he had seen plenty of dead bodies, period.

  The call had been a 415, just a disturbance, but Plato was only a couple of blocks away and he had called back to say that he would handle it. He knew that if he took it there would be less chance he would be assigned one of the day’s 187s and 207s. Those were the calls you didn’t want to get, the murders and the kidnappings that always turned into murders. Apart from the risk that the killers were still around––first responders had been shot many times––they were depressing, soul-sickening cases that were never really resolved, and the idea of having one or two of them on his docket when he finally hung it up wasn’t the way he wanted to go out.

  No, he reminded himself as he pulled the Dodge over to the kerb. Taking this call wasn’t cowardice. It was common sense and, besides, hadn’t he had more than his fair share of those over the years? He had lost count, especially recently.

  The disturbance was on the street outside one of the strip clubs. Eduardo’s: Plato knew it very well. Two college boys were being restrained by the bouncers from the club. One of the boys had a bloody nose.