Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  He’d been talking to me from the back porch.

  Madrone shook his head, cuffed him hard enough that Davidson’s cheek flinched.

  “Not so fucking fast now, are you?” Madrone whispered hard, into the back of Davidson’s head.

  “Yeah,” Davidson said, his eyes blood-red, stoned on something both harder and softer than just a little weed, “your detective work, Detective. The pressure of it, all that intelligence focused on me, I had to—had to…”

  Just as Davidson lost the thread, Madrone took his knees out, drove him hard to the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but Davidson shook his head no.

  I followed Madrone and Davidson to the back door, then stood on the stoop by my shoes, counting the cinder blocks in the fence up and back, row by row.

  My hand was still shaking around the phone. I looked down to it, closed it.

  That night the news carried a phone-in report of a flower boy who had supposedly been beaten by a crowd over by De Vargas park. Right by the elementary school almost.

  Because Madrone didn’t know what to make of Carrie Mena’s name in my pocket, he’d just told me to take it on home. Like I was something to be ashamed of. On the way, half in my headlights for a moment, had been a flower delivery truck. Its windshield was caved in with its own spare tire. El Paso City, on the Rio Grandé. Marty fucking Robbins.

  I didn’t go home, but up to the station again. Everybody was watching the news.

  Carrie Mena was there already. And the Rose Killer.

  Whoever had the remote clicked to the next station, 26, the land of telemundo. Here she—her and Jennifer Rice both—were Las Hijas de Piedra. Because of their hard lips. Which Madrone probably thought I’d leaked too, along with the roses.

  I leaned forward, the set switching now to KVIA. It was Liz P.’s segment. Because Carrie Mena had been Mexican like Jennifer Rice, they were Spanish Angels for her. I smiled, shook my head: they were already naming it—this. Meaning they were sure it wasn’t going to stop.

  The footage was quiet, a visual elegy: Carrie Mena’s house, none of our emergency vehicles there. As if this could happen anywhere. To you.

  Click.

  The fourth station, KFOX, had a Hispanic bystander. The field correspondent was asking him about Jennifer Rice being bled out from those two holes—they knew about that too?—and the bystander stepped back from her, said it for the whole city: chupacabra. The goat sucker from The Weekly World News. Only, now, because she’d seen him walking away from the house in an astronaut suit, he was from space.

  So. Liz P’s Spanish Angels were in a comic strip now. I rubbed my right eye, faded back to the stairwell, just to be alone. One-hundred and twenty seconds after I closed the door, the automatic lights switched off. I told myself it didn’t matter, that the stairwell was the same lit up or not—that I was probably safer in the dark—but then looked around fast, all at once. Understood why I was even scared in the first place: I fit the profile here. Young, single Mexican girl. Not heavy. Long hair.

  I tried to swallow, dry heaved instead, kept it down. Barely.

  But that profile. It was 1995, the Lote Bravo Rapist. It hit me then that I’d been thinking about it ever since Carrie Mena’s, ever since fixing on the clear phone cord tied around her wrists, ever since fixing on it and trying to match it somehow with Jennifer Rice’s cordless phone.

  I had been looking the wrong way, though.

  What was important was that her wrists were tied. That, like Jennifer Rice, she had had something carved, inscribed, cut, into her lower back, her upper hip.

  “Las Hijas de Piedras,” I said, just to hear it, how much it sounded like Las Muertas de Juarez.

  Trevana had been awake for too long, I could tell. Haunting his own morgue.

  “You should sleep,” I told him.

  “Want me to take your advice,” he said, “or your example?”

  I didn’t say anything else.

  He led me to the wall of drawers.

  “Hector told you about the semicircular injury?” he asked, all business.

  I looked up to him. We both knew where Davidson was now. That they were holding him all night just to see if another girl was going to turn up dead or not.

  “Now tell me why you had to see me,” he said.

  “You’re not going to believe it,” I said. “This—these girls. I thought they were like all that Lote Bravo stuff, y’know?”

  Instead of laughing, even smiling, Trevana trained his eyes over to me.

  “Tell me why you thought this,” he said.

  I touched my hair, my face, showing him.

  “Past tense, though,” he said. “You used the past tense, ‘thought.’”

  Then I placed my hand on my lower back, my upper hip.

  “He—whoever it was. He carved, like V’s in them, right? Not O’s or half moons or whatever…”

  Trevana shrugged, said, “You know what that V was, don’t you?”

  I looked up to him again. His eyes so alive, so awake.

  “…quality-checked?” I tried.

  It had been the joke in high school. Not a good one.

  “Lambda,” Trevana said, pretending he could ignore me. “The eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet. In wolf packs, the Lambda male is the weakest, the poorest. The last to be missed.”

  “That would mean,” I said, watching the floor now, “that would mean the Lote Bravo Rapist. That he was… educated.”

  Trevana smiled, nodded. Was folding back the top of one of the girl’s sheets the way he always did, like he needed the double fabric for grip or something. I’d noticed it in class once, found myself doing the same thing to the sheets of my bed. Made myself quit.

  “Or maybe it was just a Roman numeral,” he said. “Five.”

  “Or a V.”

  “For victory.

  “But not an O.”

  Instead of answering, Trevana whipped both sheets off at once, like a magician. I didn’t understand the showmanship, then did: the semi-circles on both girls were exactly the same. It wasn’t an accident.

  “Why?” I said, almost touching Jennifer Rice’s back. Her O, her half-moon.

  Trevana was smiling.

  “You haven’t kept up with Juarez, have you?”

  I shrugged. “It’s—it’s an inside job of some sort,” I said, “right? I mean, Jack the Ripper stuff. In-house.”

  “But originally,” Trevana said.

  I nodded with him.

  “Before all the cartels and cops started hiding their dead under the same, um…”

  “Aegis,” Trevana filled in. “There’s no longer one killer, but still one set of victims, who all appear more or less similar, right? But originally, originally, it was just him, the Lote Bravo Rapist.”

  “But these are just—O’s,” I said. “Not V’s.”

  “You should ask Godder about nineteen ninety-nine,” he said.

  “Richard?”

  “Nineteen ninety-nine,” he repeated. “A girl is found in the desert, like the rest. Hands tied, etcetera. But there were differences too. Of all the girls that still had some flesh on them, this one’s the only to ever have been exsanguinated.”

  I tried to say something back, couldn’t.

  Trevana nodded, tapped Jennifer Rice’s lower back, right by her wound.

  “…she had an O?” I said.

  “No,” Trevana said, looking down at the semi-circle on Jennifer Rice. “But neither does she, right?”

  Almost an O.

  “But it’s the same?”

  Trevana nodded; this was why he hadn’t been sleeping.

  “Lote Bravo…” I said, and sat back against an autopsy table, trying to breathe.

  “They—at the scene,” I said, nodding to Carrie Mena. “They were calling her the stripper. Because of the g-string.” I looked to Jennifer Rice then. Shook my head with wonder. “And we thought—we thought she was a nurse.”

  Trevana smiled, his eyes s
uddenly wet.

  “He’s still switching their clothes back and forth…” he said. I could see his heart beating in his neck, had to look away, down, at the floor, the drain.

  Richard, Trevana had said. Ask Richard.

  The only time I’d ever heard Richard mention Las Muertas de Juarez was at the liquor store. We’d been standing over a newspaper rack; it had been February, maybe—we barely knew each other. There had been another girl dead in the desert. Richard had shook his head, exhaled disgust through his nose, and then told the clerk that, if they’d let him, he’d nail the killer to the wall inside of two weeks. That all he was was a sport-killer, an American, hiding the girls he killed below the border because nobody cared down there.

  But now, July. Maybe the Juarez killer was tired of the desert, after all these years, all these women. Of the way the Chihuahua state police kept letting him go.

  Maybe he was coming home.

  Day 3

  Monday 7 July 2003.

  Two hours later, going on four hours sleep, I went back to Carrie Mena’s house. For Madrone.

  “Our guy,” I said. “He’s the Lote Bravo Rapist.”

  We were standing in the garage. It was the unofficial smoking section, because all you had to do to ventilate it was push the button, raise the door.

  “Sharif Sharif?” Madrone said. “Going to hang another one on him, Villarreal?”

  Sharif Sharif was the Egyptian national who’d been arrested for the Juarez killings forever ago, then had supposedly paid gang members and bus drivers to keep on killing. It was a joke Madrone was making. Standing in a dead girl’s garage.

  “No,” I said, “listen,” and gave him what I had: all the similarities in victimology, in signature—that the guy who’d killed Jennifer Rice and Carrie Mena was picking the same type of girls then reenacting the same ritual on them.

  “Sounds good and fine,” he said. “Except of course that we already caught him.”

  “Sir,” I said, barely moving my lips.

  “Villarreal,” he said back, too fast. “You seem to have the idea that since—since you have the deputy coroner’s ear, that makes you a detective or something.”

  “I had the second victim’s name in my pocket.”

  “Because I sent you to get it, yeah.”

  Madrone spun slow on his heel. Stopped to study the lawn across the street.

  “Lote Bravo…” he said, when he could. Like a punchline. Like he was impressed it was even still a term.

  “Sir, you can’t ignore this.”

  “Can’t ignore that a geographically stable killer with a bottomless victim pool would leave his home ground, change his m.o.—”

  “He’s not—”

  “They’re in domestic settings, Villarreal. Closets, kitchens. Filled with some sort of mummy shit, did I forget that? Yeah, the Lote Bravo Chemist, we should say, now. But forgetting all that, even. And that the real Lote Bravo Rapist seems to be working out of Chihuahua City now. Forgetting all that, remember that the Lote Bravo Rapist was a serial killer.”

  “But—”

  “Now look at where that word comes from, serial. Frosted Flakes? Hmmm no… wait, wait. Series? Could it be series? And—maybe this is for the mathematicians, I don’t know—are two dead women a series, Villarreal?”

  “There’s going to be more,” I said. “The next one, today’s, she’s a stripper.”

  “Correction,” he said. “You want there to be more. For your little friend’s sake.”

  I exhaled, trying to control myself.

  “He’s advancing their clothes,” I said. “The first victim was wearing the second one’s scrubs. Now the second one’s wearing—”

  “Who’s to say they weren’t her panties?”

  “Have CSU work them up,” I said. “They’ll find they’re new, never washed, that they’re the only pair she has that flashy…”

  “Thought they were from the next victim?” he said.

  He was right: I’d gotten ahead of myself—they were supposed to be from the next girl, to indicate that he was watching her.

  I looked away, caught.

  Madrone hissed a laugh through his teeth.

  “I’ve seen techs like you before,” he said. “Everything’s got to be so damn complicated.”

  “If they are new,” I said, weakly. “If they are, we could probably find where they were bought, if we could just get people out to the stores to run receipts.”

  “I’ll get right on it, Villarreal. Anything else? Want me to lock up all the long-haired senioritas in El Paso, too? Keep them safe, yeah?”

  He was the mayor in Jaws, refusing to close the beaches.

  “You don’t really want this case solved, do you, sir?”

  “Apparently not, if I keep letting you into my crime scenes.”

  I hated him. Maybe even more than Richard.

  “So, no assignments for today, I take it?”

  “Assignments?” he said. “Are you even on the investigation here?”

  I stared at him for a moment, then turned away. Started to slam the door behind me but just held the knob instead, closed my eyes tight.

  I was at a crime scene, in a restricted area. Behind the yellow tape. Not a detective, though. I told myself I knew that, too. Not a detective.

  That didn’t necessarily make Madrone one either though.

  Like I should have expected, Nate was in the kitchen, his kit loose in his hand.

  He didn’t say anything to me, just shrugged. I understood: no vase, no roses.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He swept his eyes across the counters one more time, as if he was just missing the roses somehow. Already the P-trap was disassembled, standing up in the sink. He’d emptied the ice-maker too.

  “She look like you again?” he said, finally.

  “Mejicano,” I said, blowing hair from my face. He laughed through his nose, let himself smile.

  “What are you here for?” he asked. “Ricky Ricardo turn up?”

  “I’m just trespassing, pretty much.”

  “Heard about Davidson,” he said, holding both arms behind himself for a second, to do the handcuff shuffle: shoulders front, bangs not near long enough to hide who you are, who you don’t want to be anymore.

  “Trevana—” I started, then looked to the open doorway behind me. Nate followed me to the backyard, the back fence.

  “Trevana wanted me to ask Richard something,” I said, not facing the house. “About Lote Bravo.”

  Nate nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “He writing an article or what, though?”

  “Makes sense?” I said, instead of answering.

  Nate nodded. “Your boyfriend was on that international task force back in like, I don’t know. Ninety-seven, maybe.” He shrugged. “The one that lasted like four weeks?”

  I’d never heard of it.

  “Why Lote Bravo, though?” Nate asked.

  I told him, just rearranged it some, so that it was Trevana’s idea. Nate shook his head with wonder.

  “And you buy it?” he said, his eyes narrowed, his face ready to agree with me if I didn’t.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Say Trevana’s right,” Nate said, pulling his upper lip in, in thought. “I mean, he’s not stupid or anything. If he’s right, though, then we shouldn’t be playing grabass here all day. We should be out there finding her.”

  I looked up to him, not quite following.

  “You know what color she is,” he explained, “what age, what occupation… All you need now’s a phonebook.”

  Two minutes later we were in my frontseat, using up all the minutes on my cell. Of all the exotic dancing places in the yellow pages, fourteen were open for some kind of free lunch/happy hour trick. After the first two, Nate put me on the line, because the doormen answering the phone didn’t care about his badge number. Evidently lonely cops called about strippers all the time. So I talked to the doormen or bartenders, got the names of three girls
with vaguely Hispanic names who hadn’t called in about not showing for all the Naked Lunches, All-Dairy Happy Hours, Unfat Tuesdays and Clam Taco Specials El Paso had to offer.

  I felt like washing my hands when I was done.

  Beside me, Nate laughed. “So now… what?” he said, dipping his voice down into a bass he could hardly reach: “‘Officer Villarreal prowls the lonely streets of El Paso City, on the Rio Grandé, trying to save all the naked women from themselves…’”

  I turned back to him, closed the phone book.

  “Wish I could go, I mean,” he added, already fingering the door open.

  “You’re not?” I said, leaning over.

  “Got to crack this too,” he said, hooking his head to the house, to however the killer was gaining access, getting in the door. I understood: it was his first real assignment, his big chance to prove himself. He raised his kit in farewell and I pulled away. On the dash in front of where he’d been sitting, now, was a single dollar bill, folded the long way. For the girls.

  I flipped him off until he was small in all my mirrors. Maybe loved him just a little.

  All three dancers lived in apartment complexes. On the second floor, to keep their legs in shape. More in shape. Or to keep men from their windows.

  The first one was over by the old mall. I knocked and knocked and she never answered, and the woman at the front wouldn’t let me in with the maintenance man’s key, even when I talked Spanish to her.

  In Spanish, she explained back to me that without a warrant, I was nobody.

  On the way out I said culera, just loud enough.

  The next girl was all the way up by Bliss again. She was there, just occupied with a sick three-year old. I would have never guessed she danced, thought maybe I even had the wrong apartment, but then she asked if I could watch her little Armando for one hour. That it would be worth a hundred and twenty-five dollars—half of what she could skim off the lunch crowd.

  I thanked her and left, taking her son’s eyes with me. How he had been ready for me to watch him too, ready to shape himself around my personality for however long he had to.