by Sean Black
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘So what did you mean? Who are they?’
Another army truck sped past them. One of the soldiers leered at Rafaela from the back.
‘He’s one of the men who are killing the women here.’
‘If you know he’s killing women, why don’t you go arrest him?’ he asked.
He caught sight of Rafaela’s lips parting in a sad smile in the rear-view mirror. ‘How long have you been in this part of the country?’
‘People don’t get arrested here?’
‘That depends on the evidence — and who they are.’
‘So, who is he? There’s something you’re not telling me.’
She turned, facing him briefly. ‘He’s a police officer.’
Thirty-seven
Rafaela turned off towards the centre of Diablo. They were moving down a main avenue, busy with bars, stores and restaurants. The traffic began to slow. Through the front windshield, Lock could see people crowding a small section of sidewalk and spilling out on to the road. At first he thought it must be another killing, with the inevitable ghoulish assembly that death attracted. Rafaela braked.
‘Someone been shot?’ Ty asked.
‘No,’ said Rafaela. ‘It’s a shrine.’
As they drew level it didn’t look much like a shrine, and the people gathered around it didn’t look much like worshippers. It was a plain storefront with a couple of tables stacked out front, and the crowd was low rent — lots of overweight girls sporting tattoos, and men clutching beer bottles or smoking spliffs.
‘A shrine to Santa Muerte,’ Rafaela said. ‘Saint Death.’
That was when Lock, who was still digesting the notion of a police officer moonlighting for a major drugs cartel, saw it. Right at the front, bathed in candlelight, a human skeleton was wearing a blonde wig covered with a black shawl.
‘They believe she can offer protection. They come here every night and bring her offerings.’
Next to him, Ty sucked his teeth. ‘Maybe someone should bring her something to eat — she looks like she could use a good meal. I mean, I like my chicks skinny an’ all, but there’s such a thing as taking it too far.’
‘We shouldn’t stick around here. A lot of the people who work for the traffickers come to worship,’ Rafaela said, nudging the car past the edge of the crowd.
Lock looked through the rear window as a hulking Mexican guy, with full sleeves of tattoos running up his arms, made the sign of the cross before the skeleton, then retreated back into the gathering. ‘This why they call it Diablo?’ he asked Rafaela.
‘No. They worship Santa Muerte all over the country.’
‘What’s with the name?’ said Ty.
Rafaela shrugged. ‘It’s an old name, but the joke now is that Santa Maria is so bad that the devil himself is afraid to come within forty miles of it. This is the closest he’ll get to the city, hence Diablo.’
Lock chewed it over. ‘You believe in the devil, Rafaela?’
‘I’m Catholic. It comes with the territory. God. Jesus. The Holy Mother. Can’t have God without the devil, right?’
Before they turned the corner and saw the bar, they smelt smoke. Two fire crews were still at work, dousing it with water, even though all that was left was the charred outline of the frame. Forgetting himself, Lock opened the door and got out as Rafaela pulled up opposite.
The crowd here was sparser than the one that had stood around the skeleton with the bad haircut but the smell of death was more real. There were four bodies laid out on the sidewalk. A fireman was covering each with a white cotton sheet, but Lock could see that they were badly burned. As he drifted through the crowd towards them, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned.
‘Go and wait in the car,’ Rafaela said.
He shrugged her off and kept walking. Perhaps not wanting to make a scene, she let him go. As Lock reached the bodies, the fireman had covered two. The others lay on their backs, clothes burned from them, faces blackened by smoke.
He knelt down beside them, recognizing the American who had given him the picture of the bodyguard. There was a gaping hole in the man’s chest. Before he’d been asphyxiated by the smoke, he had been shot.
‘ Senor! ’ A fireman waved at him to move back. A couple of local cops were eyeballing him. Lock filtered into the small crowd of bystanders.
Ten minutes later, Rafaela got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. She had spent several minutes talking to one of the fire crew as the bodies were loaded on to a truck for the short journey to the local morgue. ‘They were all men. One American, your friend, the bartender and two locals. They’re saying it was an electrical fire.’
‘What about the gunshot wounds?’ Lock asked.
She gave him the same sad smile as when he’d asked about arresting the bodyguard. ‘You must have a fertile imagination. They are saying no one was shot, even though I saw the same thing you did.’
‘Any sign of the girl?’ Ty asked.
Rafaela shook her head. ‘Did your friend tell you what she looked like?’
Lock detailed the thumbnail sketch he’d been given.
‘If she was American, we can check the hotels, see if anyone has been reported missing,’ Rafaela said, turning the key in the ignition and pulling away from the sickly sweet smell of charred flesh, which hung in the air. ‘If she’s missing, they may have taken her with them.’
‘And if they have?’ Lock asked. ‘What then?’
Rafaela stared straight ahead. ‘It might be better for her if she had died in the fire back there.’
They stayed in the car while Rafaela went inside each of the hotels that catered to American tourists. When she emerged from the third, they knew before she reached the car that it was bad news.
She got in, massaging her temple. ‘I spoke to the manager. They are trying to keep it quiet but an American girl went missing at the same time as your friend saw the girl in the bar with Mendez. Her parents are going crazy. They’ve contacted the American consulate.’
‘What about the local cops?’ Ty asked. ‘I mean, they have to make it look like they’re doing something, right?’
‘When they first went in to make the report, they told them that a person has to be missing for forty-eight hours before they can do anything,’ Rafaela said.
‘I take it that’s not procedure,’ Lock said.
‘No, it’s not. They have to start investigating as soon as a report is taken, but if they say they can’t take a report and the person doesn’t insist, they have forty-eight hours. They use it all the time to put off the families of the girls who go missing.’
‘I’m guessing these folks didn’t buy it,’ Ty asked.
‘No. They went straight to the American consulate so the cops are out looking for her,’ Rafaela said sombrely.
Lock leaned forward. ‘And after that?’
‘They’ll get to her,’ said Rafaela, her shoulders slumping. ‘But she won’t be alive when they do. Then they’ll find someone to take the blame. They’ll arrest them, plant evidence, torture a confession out of them, send them to prison, wait until things settle down, and then it will start all over again.’
Lock met her eye. ‘You know who’s doing this, don’t you?’
‘Knowing isn’t enough, Mr Lock.’
‘Listen, your hands are tied down here. But ours aren’t. Let us help you. If we can find the girl, find Mendez, then maybe we can get you the evidence you need.’
Thirty-eight
Rafaela’s home was a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a four-storey walk-up where the communal areas smelt of fetid garbage and even staler urine. Lock knew that he could be sure of one thing about her now: she wasn’t on the take.
Inside, the place was clean, tidy and ordered in the way you’d expect of someone who lived alone and spent most of their time at work. It was a look he recognized. As Rafaela made tea and coffee for her guests, he and Ty settled themselves on a couch in the tiny
open-plan living and kitchen area.
‘You can take a shower if you want,’ she said, dunking a teabag in a mug of hot water.
They thanked her. As the tea steeped, she disappeared into the bedroom. They heard her rummaging in a closet and then she reappeared with a large blue binder. She handed it to Lock.
‘These are my girls,’ she said.
Lock had a feeling he wasn’t about to flip through a family album full of cotton candy on sticks and visits to whatever passed for Disneyland down here. As he opened the binder, he wasn’t disappointed. Photographs of every murdered girl had been slipped into a clear plastic sleeve. Two for each victim, sometimes three or four where there had been some level of dismemberment. The first showed a girl alive — as an awkward teenager in a school uniform or a younger girl in a confirmation dress, all gangly limbs and big brown eyes and gappy teeth — and the second was of the dead body, either laid out on a stainless-steel mortuary platform, on waste-ground, or simply dumped at a roadside.
Rafaela plucked the teabag out of the mug and put it into the garbage pail. ‘That’s this year.’
Flicking through, Lock reckoned there had to be at least thirty victims. One year, he thought. Sweet Jesus. He reached the back, where the sleeves were empty, awaiting the next communion photograph, the next dead girl, and passed it to Ty. ‘When did the killings start?’ he asked.
Rafaela brought over two mugs of coffee, handing one to Lock and one to Ty. ‘Twelve years ago.’
Ty glanced up from a teenage girl with her hair in braids and a small silver cross at her throat. ‘And no one’s been caught?’
Rafaela blew on the hot tea in her mug. ‘Sure. Lots of people have been caught. Caught, convicted, sent to prison. One or two might even have had something to do with one or two of the killings.’ She caught Lock’s expression of surprise. ‘I’m sure there have been copycat murders as well.’
‘But you think you know who’s really behind it?’
She put her tea on the counter that separated the kitchen from the living area and went back into the bedroom. This time there was no binder, just a thin brown folder with half a dozen or so newspaper clippings. She handed them to Lock, who flicked through them. He had expected crime stories but instead found puff pieces about local dignitaries.
The first article concerned a local politician called Manuel Managua. He was in his early forties, and good-looking in a bland sort of way, with the horn-rimmed glasses and studious look of an accountant. The article talked about him as a rising star, who was almost certain to serve as city mayor, a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Managua was pictured with his wife and two cherubic little boys, every inch the family man. ‘What’s this guy’s story? You’re really saying he’s caught up in this?’
‘I know. A politician. Hard to believe,’ Rafaela said, her sarcastic tone not lost on him.
‘Feeling up a Congressional page or photocopying your wing-wang and sending it to your secretary, that I’d believe. But Lock’s got a point here. This is heavy stuff for a guy who wants people to vote for him,’ said Ty.
‘Getting elected in Mexico is about money. His friends,’ she said, gesturing at the clippings, ‘have all the money.’
That was certainly the case with the second person featured in the file. Lock already knew the name. Federico Tibialis was the alleged leader of one of the largest drug cartels in Mexico. This piece was an interview with him in which he volubly denied any involvement with drugs and complained about the endless rumours. He was, he said, merely a businessman. Lock guessed that indeed he was. It was just that his business was death and despair. Rafaela leaned over to jab at the clipping. ‘He is the one they all look to. The real leader. The boss of bosses. He funds Managua’s campaigns. He has money in most of the local businesses around here.’
‘Laundering?’ said Ty.
‘Of course,’ Rafaela agreed.
Lock passed the cutting to Ty and flipped to the last one. This one did shock him, although he wasn’t sure why. The man was also middle-aged and puffed up with his own importance. He had the same big-shark-in-a-small-pond look as his buddies. The only difference was that, rather than a suit, he was wearing a uniform or, to be more precise, a police uniform complete with stripes, epaulettes and service medals.
‘Gabriel Zapatero,’ said Rafaela. ‘The city’s chief of police. The boss of the man who’s looking after Mendez. My boss too.’ She looked evenly at Lock. ‘Now do you see why it might be difficult to just go arrest them?’
Thirty-nine
‘I don’t get it.’
Lock rose from the couch, walked five steps into the tiny kitchen and rinsed his coffee mug in the sink. ‘They take girls off the streets, then rape and kill them. Why?’
‘I’ll give you my answer, but you won’t like it,’ said Rafaela.
Lock dried the mug and placed it carefully on the counter. ‘Try me.’
‘They do it…’ she sighed ‘… because they can and because they believe that no one’s going to touch them. When the public outcry gets too much, they have one of Zapatero’s men in the department pick someone up. They threaten his family or torture a confession out of him, he’s convicted and everyone quietens down. In terms of why you’d want to rape and murder, I don’t think the attraction’s hard to grasp, if you think about a certain type of man.’
‘So where does Mendez fit in?’ Ty said, his long legs stretched out, fingers steepled under his chin. ‘He ain’t one of them.’
‘I don’t know,’ Rafaela confessed. ‘That part is strange. They can manipulate the courts here, but by protecting him, they’re inviting the Americans to look at them more closely.’
‘Well, there has to be a reason,’ said Lock. ‘And it’s got to be more than that they’ve found a kindred spirit.’
‘You think?’ said Ty. ‘Why couldn’t it be that? He’s as sick as they are. He comes down here, they work out who he is and offer him an invite into the club.’
Rafaela shook her head. ‘No, Ryan is correct,’ she said to Ty. ‘There’s more to this.’
Lock and Ty took turns to shower in her tiny bathroom and then Rafaela suggested they get some rest. Lock took the couch, Ty the living-room floor and they grabbed a meagre few hours’ sleep. Rafaela slept in her bedroom, or at least she tried to, but her mind was over-occupied. Part of her wanted to drive the Americans back over the border, but another part told her that finally she had people she could trust, whose interests were broadly aligned with hers and that this opportunity might never arise again. She could probe the killings but eventually the group of men, or those around her, would tire of her interference, or she might gather too much evidence and she, too, would be gone. If she was killed that would be one person fewer to protect the young women who were asleep in their beds tonight — with a bloody future awaiting them.
All the horror and despair of recent years had cemented rather than eroded her belief in God. She believed in Him and in the grace of the Holy Mother. Perhaps He had sent these two men to help her. Their arrival might be a sign that the Almighty had grown tired of the wickedness, that He wished Rafaela to call the killers to account.
She got out of bed, clicked on the lamp and began to make a list of places to check. Yesterday she had been one but now she was three. And Lock was right: if they had the American girl, she wouldn’t be kept alive for ever. Eventually, thought Rafaela, standing next to the window and looking out over the rooftops of the city she still loved, they would tire of her, as they had tired of the others.
Rafaela wasn’t the only one having difficulty getting to sleep. Despite his exhaustion, Lock’s mind wouldn’t rest. He lay in darkness in the tiny apartment and worried over one aspect of the American girl’s disappearance.
In the normal run of things, he could go to the American consul with what he knew. Or, if he wanted to remain in the shadows, he could share what Rafaela had told him with the parents and they could relay the information. He was in no doubt that if
they were believed, which was by no means certain, the consulate would call in other authorities and apply pressure on the Mexicans to do everything they could to find the girl. It would be more than an abduction: it would be a full-blown diplomatic incident. It would also, he was pretty certain, guarantee that, if she was still alive, whoever had her would get rid of her as quickly as they could and start covering their tracks.
If Rafaela’s belief in the previous pattern was true, Julia would turn up next to some railtracks and some dumb unfortunate would take the rap. Justice would be seen to be done. The parents might not buy it, but the American government would want to move on. After all, there was money to be made along the border and business deals to be completed. It was a cynical view but, in Lock’s experience, when the stakes were so high, and particularly when there was money in the mix, it was safer to err on the side of cynicism. Idealism was best saved for happier times.
They reconvened over more coffee and tea in the tiny apartment. Together they decided that the key to finding the girl was tracking down Charlie Mendez. If he was found first, though, Lock and Ty would be in a quandary. Mendez was still the reason they were there, and Lock didn’t want Melissa’s death to be lost in the midst of this. But Melissa would not have wanted another young life sacrificed in order to secure justice or revenge.
Rafaela was aware of three residences where Mendez might be found. One was an apartment in the centre of the city. The second was a house owned by Managua, the third a vast narco-mansion owned by Tibialis in an area that was as close to leafy suburb as any area got here. The house, according to Rafaela, was often used as a party location by the four men.
She would take the apartment and the boss’s house. She had been keeping an eye on the narco-mansion, when she could, and had an observation post nearby in the shape of a small apartment across the street. She would drop Lock and Ty there to keep watch.