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.