The Devil's bounty

Sixteen

Hunkered down in the dust next to the body of the dead girl, Detective Rafaela Carcharon studied the glowing cell-phone display. Number withheld. She could make a good guess as to who it was, and now wasn’t the time to deal with another of those calls. She hit the red button to kill the call, powered down her phone so that he couldn’t call back, and returned to the task in hand — eager to be done.

She wanted to be quick for two reasons. The first and most obvious was that statistics and probability dictated that the next murder would be called in soon. The second was that, these days, crime scenes themselves were places of danger for certain police officers. The cartels, militias and death squads, the hundred and one fragmented groups, knew that a crime scene drew their adversaries. In the past weeks suspicion had risen that the innocent and the not-so-innocent were being targeted precisely to draw people like her into the open.

She swiped away the flies that had gathered to feast on the young woman’s face, and took a closer look. Dark skin, big brown eyes, pretty and young, just like all the others. Rafaela would have placed her in her late teens or perhaps early twenties. A woman, perhaps, rather than a girl, but barely.

Rafaela already knew her story, even though she had no idea of her name, because all the stories were the same. That was part of what made the procession of dead women so exhausting. She would have been from one of the poorer parts of town. She would have worked at a maquiladora, a factory. She would have been snatched on her way home from her shift. That part Rafaela could be sure of because no young woman went out alone after dark now. Not any more. Not here. Too much blood had flowed. Too many women hadn’t made it home. Too many families had been broken.

But people had to go to work. They had to come home when they were done. And some of the shifts in the factories ended and began in darkness. The buses supplied by the factory owners weren’t always reliable or perhaps they set people down close to home but not at their door. There was always some small distance between leaving the bus and sanctuary. And that was when the women were spirited away.

By the time Rafaela reached the edge of the colonia it was close to sunset. Up ahead, an old yellow American school bus disgorged its cargo of women who were returning home. Rafaela pulled her car over to the side of the road, watching as they broke up into little groups of two or three and began the last part of their journey home. They shuffled past her car, exhausted after their twelve-hour shift sewing clothes or assembling products for a fraction of the wage the companies would have had to pay an American.

The bus coughed its way past her car in a cloud of dirty fumes, and the women disappeared. Rafaela took a deep breath. She could see her destination a few hundred yards away — a wood and corrugated-iron shack, originally painted a gaudy yellow, which had faded over time to mustard.

Out of all the tasks that Rafaela Carcharon was called upon to perform in the course of her duties, this was the worst. Back at her office, a well-meaning uniformed officer — as far as Rafaela knew, he hadn’t yet taken the cartel’s money — had offered to escort her out here. He was tall and handsome, with a warm smile, and in a different time and different place, Rafaela might have welcomed his company. But she had declined. It was better that she did this by herself. She didn’t want to give him the wrong idea. A relationship of any kind was out of the question.

Before she got out of the car, Rafaela checked her weapon. She was a woman alone in the colonia near dark. Walking to the house, she passed a tiendita, a tiny convenience store crammed from floor to ceiling with the kind of junk food you found in poor neighbourhoods — lots of fat and sugar to fill an empty belly. This one, like many others, was simply a tiny spare room in a house, with a rectangular hole punched in the wall to create a storefront. An older man sat on a stool by the counter and watched her pass. She said good evening. He pretended not to hear and began sorting through a box of loose candy.

She stopped for a moment outside the house and took a deep breath. Then she knocked at the door and stepped back. A radio was playing somewhere nearby, a song by a band called Los Tigres del Norte. Rafaela liked them. They sang about regular life, and that included the narcos. Many of their songs celebrated the gangsters, and Rafaela understood their popularity. The old-time gangsters were patrons of their communities and of the people. The politicians were neither.

A woman’s voice called from inside: ‘Who is it?’

‘Senora Valdez?’

The door opened a few inches and a middle-aged woman peered out, her face lined with fatigue.

‘May I come in?’ Rafaela asked her. ‘I have news about your daughter.’

The door closed again, there was the rasp of a chain being removed and then it opened. Rafaela stepped into a low-ceilinged room. There was a sofa, a coffee-table and a television set, which was switched on with the volume turned down. Rafaela recognized a couple of popular soap-opera stars. Her eyes settled on a table behind the sofa. It was covered with framed photographs. Rafaela’s heart sank as she saw that every picture was of the same young girl; only the settings and the age varied. There was one of her as a toddler, dressed in white for her confirmation; the most recent showed her in her late teens. An only child.

Senora Valdez’s hands grasped Rafaela’s arms. ‘Tell me she’s safe.’

In such circumstances there was a procedure to follow, a series of steps, a liturgy of words to mouth. Rafaela believed in none of this. When she had to arrest someone, or interrogate someone, or shoot someone, she was a cop. But at moments like this she was a woman.

Rafaela touched Senora Valdez’s hands, feeling the calluses on her palms and the tips of her fingers, the result of all those hours in the factory. ‘She’s with the angels, Senora. I’m so sorry.’

The woman’s body slumped, her chin falling on to her chest as she began to sob. Rafaela put her arms around her. They stayed like that for a long time. Rafaela spoke to her gently, as she would to a child. She had never known what it meant to cry your heart out until she had made the first of these calls. Then she had been brittle, detached, professional. Afterwards she had realized that there was no harm in showing her humanity. If nothing else, she reasoned, it must comfort the bereaved a little to know that one other human being cared.

Slowly, the woman’s sobs ebbed away as, over her shoulder, the soap opera continued, with beautiful, wealthy people grieving over a missed promotion, perhaps, or an extra-marital affair. She peeled herself away from Rafaela, eyes puffy and glistening. She glanced at the photographs of her murdered daughter and something new came into her eyes, something far worse than the grief. Surrender. It disturbed Rafaela more than the blood and mayhem. Your daughter left the house. She never returned. And that was life in this city.

‘Shall I take you to see her?’ Rafaela asked.

The woman looked around the room, searching for her coat. Rafaela helped her put it on and then they walked out into the night.